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Updated: August 2, 2024
The theme is akin to that of Daudet's L'Evangéliste; but Kielland, as it appears to me, has in this instance outdone his French confrère as regards insight into the peculiar character and poetry of the pietistic movement. He has dealt with it as a psychological and not primarily as a pathological phenomenon. A comparison with Daudet suggests itself constantly in reading Kielland.
He was able, however, to the last, to enjoy the summer at his country-house, at Champrosay, and even to travel in an invalid's chair; in 1896 he visited for the first time London and Oxford, and saw Mr. George Meredith. In Paris he had long occupied rooms in the Rue de Bellechasse, where Madame Alphonse Daudet was accustomed to entertain a brilliant company.
He was a great grey giant, with the Russian winter in his hair and beard. His face in repose had an expression of infinite refinement, infinite gentleness, and infinite sorrow. When the little son of Alphonse Daudet saw Turgenev and Flaubert come into the room, arm in arm, the boy cried out, "Why, papa, they are giants!"
My new drama is no tragedy in the ancient acceptation; what I desired to depict were human beings, and therefore I would not let them talk "the language of the Gods." This revolt against dramatic verse was a feature of the epoch. In 1877 Alphonse Daudet was to write of a comedy, "Mais, hélas! cette pièce est en vers, et l'ennui s'y promène librement entre les rimes."
What is Daudet, and what will he be to posterity? Some admirers have already answered the first question, perhaps as satisfactorily as it can be answered, by saying, "Daudet is simply Daudet." As for the second question, a whole school of critics is inclined to answer it and all similar queries with the curt statement, "That concerns posterity, not us."
He had arranged the books himself, placing Zola and Daudet in prominent positions, and anticipating much entertainment from the observation of their effect upon her. He expected that she would end by making love to him; in which case he promised himself the pleasure of paying her off by acting for a time after the manner proposed by the Barber's Fifth Brother.
As to French literature, he thought Maupassant the man of greatest talent, by far, in recent days, but that he was depraved and centered all his fiction in women. For Balzac, Tolstoi evidently preserved admiration, but he cared little, apparently, for Daudet, Zola, and their compeers.
Musician and child, here is the head of one of those pious, irresponsible mendicants who walked dusty roads in the Middle Ages. It needed an unusual painter to interpret an unusual poet. The Daudet face is not alone full of surface character, but explains the racial affinities of the romancer. Here he is David, not Daudet.
The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens to them? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty and imaginative power. We don't want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders. M. Daudet is better. He has wit, a light touch and an amusing style. But he has lately committed literary suicide.
Balzac, Victor Hugo, and Daudet, are the natural successors of La Bruyere and Saint-Simon. The marriage of Louis XIV shattered one of the most brilliant illusions of the Grande Mademoiselle, and it was about this time that she wrote a characteristic letter to Mme. de Motteville, picturing an Arcadia in some beautiful forest, where people are free to do as they like.
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