The Nabob. Alphonse Daudet
are as unaffectedly charming as his style, and more of a piece than his elaborate works of fiction. A sunny Provencal childhood is clouded by family misfortunes; then comes a year of wretched slavery as usher in a provincial school; then the inevitable journey to Paris with a brain full of verses and dreams, and the beginning of a life of Bohemian nonchalance, to which we Anglo-Saxons have little that is comparable outside the career of Oliver Goldsmith. But poor Goldsmith had his pride wounded by the editorial tyranny of a Mrs. Griffiths. Daudet, by a merely pretty poem about a youth and maiden making love under a plum-tree, won the protection of the Empress Eugenie, and through her of the Duke de Morny, the prop of the Second Empire. His life now reads like a fairy-tale inserted by some jocular elf into that book of dolors entitled The Lives of Men of Genius. A protege of a potentate not usually lavish of his favours, and a valetudinarian, he is allowed to flit to Algiers and Corsica, to enjoy his beloved Provence in company with Mistral, to write for the theatres, and to continue to play the Bohemian. Then the death of Morny seems to turn the idyl into a tragedy, but only for a moment. Daudet’s delicate, nervous beauty made his friend Zola think of an Arabian horse, but the poet had also the spirit of such a high-bred steed. Years of conscientious literary labour followed, cheered by marriage with a woman of genius capable of supplementing him in his weakest points, and then the war with Prussia and its attendant horrors gave him the larger and deeper view of life and the intensified patriotism—in short, the final stimulus he needed. From the date of his first great success—Fromont, Jr., and Risler, Sr.—glory and wealth flowed in upon him, while envy scarcely touched him, so unspoiled was he and so continuously and eminently lovable. One seemed to see in his career a reflection of his luminous nature, a revised myth of the golden touch, a new version of the fairy-tale of the fair mouth dropping pearls. Then, as though grown weary of the idyllic romance she was composing, Fortune donned the tragic robes of Nemesis. Years of pain followed, which could not abate the spirits or disturb the geniality of the sufferer, but did somewhat abate the power and disturb the serenity of his work. Then came the inevitable end of all life dramas, whether comic or romantic or tragic, and friends who had known him stood round his grave and listened sadly to the touching words in which Emile Zola expressed not merely his own grief but that of many thousands throughout the civilized world. Here was a life more winsome, more appealing, more complete than any creation of the genius of the man that lived it—a life which, whether we know it in detail or not, explains in part the fascination Daudet exerts upon us and the conviction we cherish that, whatever ravages time may make among his books, the memory of their writer will not fade from the hearts of men. Many Frenchmen have conquered the world’s mind by the power or the subtlety of their genius; few have won its heart through the catholicity, the broad sympathy of their genius. Daudet is one of these few; indeed, he is almost if not quite the only European writer who has of late achieved such a triumph, for Tolstoi has stern critics as well as steadfast devotees, and has won most of his disciples as moralist and reformer. But we must turn from Daudet the man to Daudet the author of The Nabob and other memorable novels.
If this were a general essay and not an introduction, it would be proper to say something of Daudet’s early attempts as poet and dramatist. Here it need only be remarked that it is almost a commonplace to insist that even in his later novels he never entirely ceased to see the outer world with the eyes of a poet, to delight in colour and movement, to seize every opportunity to indulge in vivid description couched in a style more swift and brilliant than normal prose aspires to. This bent for description, together with the tendency to episodic rather than sustained composition and the comparative weakness of his character drawing—features of his work shortly to be discussed—partly explains his failure, save in one or two instances, to score a real triumph with his plays, but does not explain his singular lack of sympathy with actors. Nor was he able to win great success with his first book of importance, Le Petit Chose, delightful as that mixture of autobiography and romance must prove to any sympathetic reader. He was essentially a romanticist and a poet cast upon an age of naturalism and prose, and he needed years of training and such experience as the Prussian invasion gave him to adjust himself to his life-work. Such adjustment was not needed for Tartarin de Tarascon, begun shortly after Le Petit Chose, because subtle humour of the kind lavished in that inimitable creation and in its sequels, while implying observation, does not necessarily imply any marked departure from the romantic and poetic points of view.
The training Daudet required for his novels he got from the sketches and short stories that occupied him during the late sixties and early seventies. Here again little in the way of comment need be given, and that little can express the general verdict that the art displayed in these miniature productions is not far short of perfect. The two principal collections, Lettres de mon Moulin and Contes du Lundi, together with Artists’ Wives (Les Femmes d’Artistes) and parts at least of Robert Helmont, would almost of themselves suffice to put Daudet high in the ranks of the writers who charm without leaving upon one’s mind the slightest suspicion that they are weak. It is true that Daudet’s stories do not attain the tremendous impressiveness that Balzac’s occasionally do, as, for example, in La Grande Breteche, nor has his clear-cut art the almost disconcerting firmness, the surgeon-like quality of Maupassant’s; but the author of the ironical Elixir of Father Gaucher and of the pathetic Last Class, to name no others, could certainly claim with Musset that his glass was his own, and had no reason to concede its smallness.
As we have seen, the production of Fromont jeune et Risler aine marked the beginning of Daudet’s more than twenty years of successful novel-writing. His first elaborate study of Parisian life, while it indicated no advance of the art of fiction, deserved its popularity because, in spite of the many criticisms to which it was open, it was a thoroughly readable and often a moving book. One character, Delobelle, the played-out actor who is still a hero to his pathetic wife and daughter, was constructed on effective lines—was a personage worthy of Dickens. The vile heroine, Sidonie, was bad enough to excite disgusted interest, but, as Mr. Henry James pointed out later, she was not effective to the extent her creator doubtless hoped. She paled beside Valerie Marneffe, though, to be sure, Daudet knew better than to attempt to depict any such queen of vice. Yet, after all, it is mainly the compelling power of vile heroines that makes them tolerable, and neither Sidonie nor the web of intrigue she wove can fairly be said to be characterized by extraordinary strength. But the public was and is interested greatly by the novel, and Daudet deserved the fame and money it brought him. His next book, Jack, was not so popular. Still, it showed artistic improvement, although, as in its predecessor, that bias towards the sentimental, which was to be Daudet’s besetting weakness, was too plainly visible. Its author took to his heart a book which the general reader found too long and perhaps overpathetic. Some of us, while recognising its faults, will share in part Daudet’s predilection for it—not so much because of the strong and early study made of the artisan class, or of the mordantly satirical exposure of D’Argenton and his literary “dead-beats” (rates), or of any other of the special features of a story that is crowded with them, as because the ill-fated hero, the product of genuine emotions on Daudet’s part, excites cognate and equally genuine emotions in us. We cannot watch the throbbing engines of a great steamship without seeing Jack at work among them. But the fine, pathetic Jack brings us to the finer, more pathetic Nabob.
Whether The Nabob is Daudet’s greatest novel is a question that may be postponed, but it may be safely asserted that there are good reasons why it should have been chosen to represent Daudet in the present series. It has been immensely popular, and thus does not illustrate merely the taste of an inner circle of its author’s admirers. It is not so subtle a study of character as Numa Roumestan, nor is it a drama the scene of which is set somewhat in a corner removed from the world’s scrutiny and full comprehension, as is more or less the case with Kings in Exile. It is comparatively unamenable to the moral, or, if one will, the puritanical, objections so naturally brought against Sapho. It obviously represents Daudet’s powers better than any novel written after his health was permanently wrecked, and as obviously represents fiction more adequately than either of the Tartarin masterpieces, which belong rather to the literature of humour. Besides, it is probably the most broadly effective of all Daudet’s novels; it is fuller of striking scenes; and as a picture of life in the picturesque Second Empire it is of unique importance.
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