The Nabob, Volume 1 | Page 8

these note-books
choke the life out of him. Every one of his novels was founded on
fact,--plot, incidents, characters and scenery.
He used his imagination to help him to see; he used it also to peer into
and behind the mere facts. All that he needed to invent was a
connecting link now and again; and it may as well be admitted at once
that these mere inventions are sometimes the least satisfactory part of
his stories. The two young men in "The Nabob," for instance, whom Mr.
Henry James found it difficult to tell apart, the sculptor-painter in the
"Immortal," the occasional other characters which we discover to be
made up, lack the individuality and the vitality of figures taken from
real life by a sympathetic effort of interpretative imagination. Delobelle,
Gardinois, "all the personages of 'Fromont' have lived," Daudet
declares; and he adds a regret that in depicting old Gardinois he gave
pain to one he loved, but he "could not suppress this type of egotist,
aged and terrible."
Since the beginning of the art of story-telling, the narrators must have

gone to actuality to get suggestions for their character-drawing; and
nothing is commoner than the accusation that this or that novelist has
stolen his characters ready-made,--filching them from nature's
shop-window, without so much as a by-your-leave. Daudet is bold in
committing these larcenies from life and frank in confessing them,--far
franker than Dickens, who tried to squirm out of the charge that he had
put Landor and Leigh Hunt unfairly into fiction. Perhaps Dickens was
bolder than Daudet, if it is true that he drew Micawber from his own
father, and Mrs. Nickleby from his own mother. Daudet was taxed with
ingratitude that he had used as the model of Mora, the Duke de Morny,
who had befriended him; and he defended himself by declaring that he
thought the duke would find no fault with the way Mora had been
presented. But a great artist has never copied his models slavishly; he
has utilized them in the effort to realize to his own satisfaction what he
has already imagined. Daudet maintained to his son that those who
were without imagination cannot even observe accurately. Invention
alone, mere invention, an inferior form of mental exercise, suffices to
provide a pretty fair romantic tale, remote from the facts of every-day
life, but only true imagination can sustain a realistic novel where every
reader's experience qualifies him to check off the author's progress, step
by step.
IV.
It would take too long--although the task would be amusing--to call the
roll of Daudet's novels written after "Fromont and Risler" had revealed
to him his own powers, and to discuss what fact of Parisian history had
been the starting point of each of them and what notabilities of Paris
had sat for each of the chief characters. Mr. Henry James, for instance,
has seen it suggested that Félicia Ruys is intended as a portrait of Mme.
Sarah-Bernhardt; M. Zola, on the other hand, denies that Félicia Ruys
is Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt and hints that she is rather Mme. Judith
Gautier. Daudet himself refers to the equally absurd report that
Gambetta was the original of Numa Roumestan,--a report over which
the alleged subject and the real author laughed together. Daudet's own
attitude toward his creations is a little ambiguous or at least a little
inconsistent; in one paper he asserts that every character of his has had

a living original, and in another he admits that Elysée Méraut, for
example, is only in part a certain Thérion.
The admission is more nearly exact than the assertion. Every novelist
whose work is to endure even for a generation must draw from life,
sometimes generalizing broadly and sometimes keeping close to the
single individual, but always free to modify the mere fact as he may
have observed it to conform with the larger truth of the fable he shall
devise. Most story-tellers tend to generalize, and their fictions lack the
sharpness of outline we find in nature. Daudet prefers to retain as much
of the actual individual as he dares without endangering the web of his
composition; and often the transformation is very slight,--Mora, for
instance, who is probably a close copy of Morny, but who stands on his
own feet in "The Nabob," and lives his own life as independently as
though he was a sheer imagination. More rarely the result is not so
satisfactory; J. Tom Lévis, for example, for whose authenticity the
author vouches, but who seems out of place in "Kings in Exile," like a
fantastic invention, such as Balzac sometimes permitted himself as a
relief from his rigorous realism.
For incident as well as for character Daudet goes to real life. The
escape of Colette from under the eyes of her father-in-law,--that
actually