The Nabob, Volume 1 | Page 9

happened; but none the less does it fit into "Kings in Exile."
And Colette's cutting off her hair in grief at her husband's death,--that
actually happened also; but it belongs artistically in the "Immortal." On
the other hand, the fact which served as the foundation of the
"Immortal"--the taking in of a savant by a lot of forged
manuscripts--has been falsified by changing the savant from a
mathematician (who might easily be deceived about a matter of
autographs) to a historian (whose duty it is to apply all known tests of
genuineness to papers purporting to shed new light on the past). This
borrowing from the newspaper has its evident advantages, but it has its
dangers also, even in the hands of a poet as adroit as Daudet and as
imaginative. Perhaps the story of his which is most artistic in its telling,
most shapely, most harmonious in its modulations of a single theme to
the inevitable end, developed without haste and without rest, is
"Sapho;" and "Sapho" is the novel of Daudet's in which there seems to

be the least of this stencilling of actual fact, in which the generalization
is the broadest, and in which the observation is least restricted to single
individuals.
But in "Sapho" the theme itself is narrow, narrower than in "Numa
Roumestan," and far narrower than in either "The Nabob" or "Kings in
Exile;" and this is why "Sapho," fine as it is, and subtle, is perhaps less
satisfactory. No other French novelist of the final half of the nineteenth
century, not Flaubert, not Goncourt, not M. Zola, not Maupassant, has
four novels as solid as these, as varied in incident, as full of life, as rich
in character, as true. They form the quadrilateral wherein Daudet's fame
is secure.
"Sapho" is a daughter of the "Lady of the Camellias," and a
grand-daughter of "Manon Lescaut,"--Frenchwomen, all of them, and
of a class French authors have greatly affected. But Daudet's book is
not a specimen of what Lowell called "that corps-de-ballet literature in
which the most animal of the passions is made more temptingly naked
by a veil of French gauze." It is at bottom a moral book, much as "Tom
Jones" is moral. Fielding's novel is English, robust, hearty, brutal in a
way, and its morality is none too lofty. Daudet's is French, softer, more
enervating, and with an almost complacent dwelling on the sins of the
flesh. But neither Fielding nor Daudet is guilty of sentimentality, the
one unforgivable crime in art. In his treatment of the relation of the
sexes Daudet was above all things truthful; his veracity is inexorable.
He shows how man is selfish in love and woman also, and how the
egotism of the one is not as the egotism of the other. He shows how
Fanny Legrand slangs her lover with the foul language of the gutter
whence she sprang, and how Jean when he strikes back, refrains from
foul blows. He shows how Jean, weak of will as he was, gets rid of the
millstone about his neck, only because of the weariness of the woman
to whom he has bound himself. He shows us the various aspects of the
love which is not founded on esteem, the Héttema couple, De Potter
and Rose, Déchelette and Alice Doré, all to set off the sorry idyl of
Fanny and Jean.
In "Numa Roumestan" there is a larger vision of life than in "Sapho,"

even if there is no deeper insight. The construction is almost as severe;
and the movement is unbroken from beginning to end, without
excursus or digression. The central figure is masterly,--the kindly and
selfish Southerner, easy-going and soft-spoken, an orator who is so
eloquent that he can even convince himself, a politician who thinks
only when he is talking, a husband who loves his wife as profoundly as
he can love anybody except himself, and who loves his wife more than
his temporary mistress, even during the days of his dalliance. Numa is a
native of the South of France, as was Daudet himself; and it is out of
the fulness of knowledge that the author evolves the character, brushing
in the portrait with bold strokes and unceasingly adding caressing
touches till the man actually lives and moves before our eyes. The
veracity of the picture is destroyed by no final inconsistency. What
Numa is, Numa will be. Daudet never descends at the end of his novels
like a god from the machine to change character in the twinkling of an
eye, and to convert bad men to good thoughts and good deeds.
He can give us goodness when he chooses, a human goodness, not
offensively perfect, not preaching, not mawkish, but high-minded and
engaging. There are two such types in "Kings in Exile," the Queen