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Barr Smith that I got so many of the works of Alphonse Daudet in French, which enabled me to give a rejoinder to Marcus Clark's assertion that Balzac was a French Dickens. Indeed, looking through my shelves, I see so many books which suggested articles and criticisms which were her gifts that I always connect her with my journalistic career.
Tarascon, as is well known, never forgave Alphonse Daudet for his "Tartarin"; and in a like way M. Zola, who doubtless counts more enemies than any other literary man of the period, has none bitterer than the worthy citizens of Aix. They cannot forget or forgive the rascally Rougon-Macquarts.
But Daudet did not whisper; he spoke loudly, with animation, with a clear felicity of tone as a bird sings. He saw life around him with extreme clearness, and he felt it as it is thinner than air and more elusive than a flash of lightning.
The economy of means that it demands can be conserved only by rigid restriction of structure; and the necessary emphasis can be produced only by perfection of style. The great masters of the short-story, like Poe and Hawthorne, Daudet and de Maupassant, have all been careful artists: they have not, like Thackeray, been slovenly in structure; they have not, like Scott, been regardless of style.
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.
How numberless editions of this book were printed, and rights of translations sought from other countries, Daudet has told us with natural pride. The book must be read to be appreciated. "Risler, a self-made, honest man, raises himself socially into a society against the corruptness of which he has no defence and from which he escapes only by suicide.
"And Daudet he adores his wife and children," added the count, as if with a determination to find only goodness in the world. "I wonder how posterity will treat them? They'll judge their lives by their books, I presume." "Yes, as we judge Rabelais or Voltaire " "Or the English Shakespeare by his 'Hamlet." "Ah! what would not Voltaire have done with Hamlet!"
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE: "The White Old Maid." BRET HARTE: "Tennessee's Pardner." ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON: "Markheim." RUDYARD KIPLING: "Without Benefit of Clergy." KENNETH GRAHAME: "The Roman Road." F. J. STIMSON: "Mrs. Knollys." GUY DE MAUPASSANT: "The Necklace." ALPHONSE DAUDET: "The Last Class." H. C. BUNNER: "A Sisterly Scheme." O. HENRY: "A Municipal Report."
It is largely influenced by French fiction in form; but it is the realism of Daudet rather than the realism of Zola that prevails with it, and it has a soul of its own which is above the business of recording the rather brutish pursuit of a woman by a man, which seems to be the chief end of the French novelist.
She came back to him, drawing a low wicker chair near the couch and putting her music on the floor beside her. "I shall be glad to stay if you want me to. Shall we talk?" And here she took up the books he had put beside him for amusement. "Balzac, Daudet." She made a little disapproving gesture. "You do not care for them?" he asked. "They are not for me, those horrible realist folk.
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