The Nabob, Volume 1 | Page 6

art was ready for a larger effort; it was ripe for a richer fruitage.
Already had he made more than one attempt at a long story, but this
was before his powers had matured, and before he had come to a full
knowledge of himself. "Little What's-his-name," as he himself has
confessed, lacks perspective; it was composed too soon after the
personal experiences out of which it was made,--before Time had put
the scenes in proper proportion and before his hand was firm in its
stroke. "Robert Helmont" is the journal of an observer who happens
also to be a poet and a patriot; but it has scarcely substance enough to
warrant calling it a story. Much of the material used in the making of
these books was very good indeed; but the handling was a little
uncertain, and the result is not quite satisfactory, charming as both of

them are, with the seductive grace which is Daudet's birthright and his
trademark. In his brief tales he had shown that he had the story-telling
faculty, the ability to project character, the gift of arousing interest; but
it remained for him to prove that he possessed also the main strength
requisite to carry him through the long labor of a full-grown novel. It is
not by gentle stories like "Robert Helmont" and "Little
What's-his-name" that a novelist is promoted to the front rank; and after
he had written these two books he remained where he was before, in
the position of a promising young author.
The promise was fulfilled by the publication of "Fromont and
Risler,"--not the best of his novels, but the earliest in which his full
force was displayed. Daudet has told us how this was planned
originally as a play, how the failure of the "Woman of Arles" led him to
relinquish the dramatic form, and how the supposed necessities of the
stage warped the logical structure of the story, turning upon the
intrigues of the young wife the interest which should have been
concentrated upon the partnership, the business rivalry, the mercantile
integrity, whence the novel derived its novelty. The falsifying habit of
thrusting marital infidelity into the foreground of fiction when the
theme itself seems almost to exclude any dwelling on amorous
misadventure, Daudet yielded to only this once; and this is one reason
why a truer view of Parisian life can be found in his pages than in those
of any of his competitors, and why his works are far less monotonous
than theirs.
He is not squeamish, as every reader of "Sapho" can bear witness; but
he does not wantonly choose a vulgar adultery as the staple of his
stories. French fiction, ever since the tale of "Tristan and Yseult" was
first told, has tended to be a poem of love triumphant over every
obstacle, even over honor; and Daudet is a Frenchman with French
ideas about woman and love and marriage; he is not without his share
of Gallic salt; but he is too keen an observer not to see that there are
other things in life than illicit wooings,--business, for example, and
politics, and religion,--important factors all of them in our complicated
modern existence. At the root of him Daudet had a steadfast desire to
see life as a whole and to tell the truth about it unhesitatingly; and this

is a characteristic he shares only with the great masters of
fiction,--essentially veracious, every one of them.
Probably Dickens, frequently as he wrenched the facts of life into
conformity with his rather primitive artistic code, believed that he also
was telling the truth. It is in Daudet's paper explaining how he came to
write "Fromont and Risler" that he discusses the accusation that he was
an imitator of Dickens,--an accusation which seems absurd enough now
that the careers of both writers are closed, and that we can compare
their complete works. Daudet records that the charge was brought
against him very early, long before he had read Dickens, and he
explains that any likeness that may exist is due not to copying but to
kinship of spirit. "I have deep in my heart," he says, "the same love
Dickens has for the maimed and the poor, for the children brought up in
all the deprivation of great cities." This pity for the disinherited, for
those that have had no chance in life, is not the only similarity between
the British novelist and the French; there is also the peculiar
combination of sentiment and humor. Daudet is not so bold as Dickens,
not so robust, not so over-mastering; but he is far more discreet, far
truer to nature, far finer in his art; he does not let his humor carry him
into caricature, nor his sentiment slop over into sentimentality.
Even the minor French novelists