The Nabob, Volume 1 | Page 4

the latest of them all, the freshest and
the most vigorous, the "Struggle for Life," with its sinister figure of
Paul Astier taken over from the "Immortal." Apparently, with all his
desire to write for the stage, Daudet must have been inadequately
endowed with the dramaturgic faculty, that special gift of playmaking
which many a poet lacks and many a novelist, but which the humblest
playwright must needs have and which all the great dramatists have
possessed abundantly in addition to their poetic power.
Perhaps it was the unfavorable reception of his successive dramas
which is responsible for the chief of Daudet's lapses from the kindliness

with which he treats the characters that people his stories. He seems to
have kept hot a grudge against the theatre: and he relieves his feelings
by taking it out of the stage-folk he introduces into his novels. To
actors and actresses he is intolerant and harsh. What is factitious and
self-overvaluing in the Provençal type, he understood and he found it
easy to pardon; but what was factitious and self-overvaluing in the
player type, he would not understand and he refused to pardon. And
here he shows in strong contrast with a successful dramatist, M.
Ludovic Halévy, whose knowledge of the histrionic temperament is at
least as wide as Daudet's and whose humor is as keen, but whose
judgment is softened by the grateful memory of many victories won by
the united effort of the author and the actor.
Through his brother's influence, Alphonse Daudet was appointed by the
Duke de Morny to a semi-sinecure; and he has recorded how he told his
benefactor before accepting the place that he was a Legitimist and how
the Duke smilingly retorted that the Empress was also. Although it was
as a poet that Daudet made his bow in the world of letters, his first
appearance as a dramatist was not long delayed thereafter; and he soon
came forward also as a journalist,--or rather as a contributor to the
papers. While many of the articles he prepared for the daily and weekly
press were of ephemeral interest only, as the necessity of journalism
demands, to be forgotten forty-eight hours after they were printed, not a
few of them were sketches having more than a temporary value.
Parisian newspapers are more hospitable to literature than are the
newspapers of New York or of London; and a goodly proportion of the
young Southerner's journalistic writing proved worthy of preservation.
It has been preserved for us in three volumes of short stories and
sketches, of fantasies and impressions. Not all the contents of the
"Letters from my Mill," of the "Monday Tales" and of "Artists' Wives,"
as we have these collections now, were written in these early years of
Daudet's Parisian career, but many of them saw the light before 1870,
and what has been added since conforms in method to the work of his
'prentice days. No doubt the war with Prussia enlarged his outlook on
life; and there is more depth in the satires this conflict suggested and
more pathos in the pictures it evoked. The "Last Lesson," for example,

that simple vision of the old French schoolmaster taking leave of his
Alsatian pupils, has a symbolic breath not easy to match in the livelier
tales written before the surrender at Sédan; and in the "Siege of Berlin"
there is a vibrant patriotism far more poignant than we can discover in
any of the playful apologues published before the war. He had had an
inside view of the Second Empire, he could not help seeing its
hollowness, and he revolted against the selfishness of its servants; no
single chapter of M. Zola's splendid and terrible "Downfall" contains a
more damning indictment of the leaders of the imperial army than is to
be read in Daudet's "Game of Billiards."
The short story, whether in prose or in verse, is a literary form in which
the French have ever displayed an easy mastery; and from Daudet's
three volumes it would not be difficult to select half-a-dozen little
masterpieces. The Provençal tales lack only rhymes to stand confessed
as poesy; and many a reader may prefer these first flights before
Daudet set his Pegasus to toil in the mill of realism. The "Pope's Mule,"
for instance, is not this a marvel of blended humor and fantasy? And
the "Elixir of Father Gaucher," what could be more naïvely ironic?
Like a true Southerner, Daudet delights in girding at the Church; and
these tales bristle with jibes at ecclesiastical dignitaries; but his stroke
is never malignant and there is no barb to his shaft nor poison on the
tip.
Scarcely inferior to the war-stories or to the Provençal sketches are
certain vignettes of the capital, swift silhouettes of Paris, glimpsed by
an unforgetting eye,