throw themselves away, but Daudet is never intolerant. He is inexorable, but he is not insulting. I cannot but think that it is Provence whence Daudet derived the precious birthright of sympathy, and that it is Provence again which bestowed on him the rarer gift of sentiment. It is by his possession of sympathy and of sentiment that he has escaped the aridity which suffocates us in the works of so many other Parisian novelists. The South endowed him with warmth and heartiness and vivacity; and what he learnt from Paris was the power of self-restraint and the duty of finish.

He was born in Provence and he died in Paris; he began as a poet and he ended as a veritist; and in each case there was logical evolution and not contradiction. The Parisian did not cease to be a Provençal; and the novelist was a lyrist still. Poet though he was, he had an intense liking for the actual, the visible, the tangible. He so hungered after truth that he was ready sometimes to stay his stomach with facts in its stead,—mere fact being but the outward husk, whereas truth is the rich kernel concealed within. His son tells us that Daudet might have taken as a motto the title of Goethe's autobiography, "Dichtung und Wahrheit,"—Poetry and Truth. And this it is that has set Daudet apart and that has caused his vogue with readers of all sorts and conditions,—this unique combination of imagination and verity. "His originality," M. Jules Lemaitre has acutely remarked, "is closely to unite observation and fantasy, to extract from the truth all that it contains of the improbable and the surprising, to satisfy at the same time the readers of M. Cherbuliez and the readers of M. Zola, to write novels which are at the same time realistic and romantic, and which seem romantic only because they are very sincerely and very profoundly realistic."

II.

Alphonse Daudet was born in 1840, and it was at Nîmes that he first began to observe mankind; and he has described his birthplace and his boyhood in "Little What's-his-name," a novel even richer in autobiographical revelation than is "David Copperfield." His father was a manufacturer whose business was not prosperous and who was forced at last to remove with the whole family to Lyons in the vain hope of doing better in the larger town. After reading the account of this parent's peculiarities in M. Ernest Daudet's book, we are not surprised that the affairs of the family did not improve, but went from bad to worse. Alphonse Daudet suffered bitterly in these years of desperate struggle, but he gained an understanding of the conditions of mercantile life, to be serviceable later in the composition of "Fromont and Risler."

When he was sixteen he secured a place as pion in a boarding school in the Cévennes,—pion is a poor devil of a youth hired to keep watch on the boys. How painful this position was to the young poet can be read indirectly in "Little What's-his-name," but more explicitly in the history of that story, printed now in "Thirty Years of Paris." From this remote prison he was rescued by his elder brother, Ernest, who was trying to make his way in Paris and who sent for Alphonse as soon as he had been engaged to help an old gentleman in writing his memoirs. The younger brother has described his arrival in Paris, and his first dress-coat and his earliest literary acquaintances. Ernest's salary was seventy-five francs a month, and on this the two brothers managed to live; no doubt fifteen dollars went further in Paris in 1857 than they will in 1899.

In those days of privation and ambition Daudet's longing was to make himself famous as a poet; and when at last, not yet twenty years old, he began his career as a man of letters it was by the publication of a volume of verse, just as his fellow-novelists, M. Paul Bourget and Signor Gabriele d'Annunzio have severally done. Immature as juvenile lyrics are likely to be, these early rhymes of Daudet's have a flavor of their own, a faintly recognizable note of individuality. He is more naturally a poet than most modern literators who possess the accomplishment of verse as part of their equipment for the literary life, but who lack a spontaneous impulse toward rhythm. It may even be suggested that his little poems are less artificial than most French verse; they are the result of a less obvious effort. He lisped in numbers; and with him it was rather prose that had to be consciously acquired. His lyric note, although not keen and not deep, is heard again and again in his novels, and it sustains some of the most graceful and tender of his short stories,—"The Death of the Dauphin," for instance, and the "Sous-préfet in the Fields."

Daudet extended poetry to include playmaking; and alone or with a friend he attempted more than one little piece in rhyme—tiny plays of a type familiar enough at the Odéon. He has told us how the news of the production of one of these poetic dramas came to him afar in Algiers whither he had been sent because of a weakness of the lungs, threatening to become worse in the gray Parisian winter. Other plays of his, some of them far more important than this early effort, were produced in the next few years. The most ambitious of these was the "Woman of Arles," which he had elaborated from a touching short story and for which Bizet composed incidental music as beautiful and as overwhelming as that prepared by Mendelssohn for the "Midsummer Night's Dream."

No one of Daudet's dramatic attempts was really successful; not the "Woman of Arles," which is less moving in the theatre than in its briefer narrative form, not even the latest of them all, the freshest and the most vigorous, the "Struggle for Life," with its sinister figure of Paul Astier taken over from the "Immortal." Apparently, with all his desire to write for the stage, Daudet must have been inadequately endowed with the dramaturgic faculty, that special gift of playmaking which many a poet lacks and many a novelist, but which the humblest playwright must needs have and which all the great dramatists have possessed abundantly in addition to their poetic power.

Perhaps it was the unfavorable reception of his successive dramas which is responsible for the chief of Daudet's lapses from the kindliness with which he treats the characters that people his stories. He seems to have kept hot a grudge against the theatre: and he relieves his feelings by taking it out of the stage-folk he introduces into his novels. To actors and actresses he is intolerant and harsh. What is factitious and self-overvaluing in the Provençal type, he understood and he found it easy to pardon; but what was factitious and self-overvaluing in the player type, he would not understand and he refused to pardon. And here he shows in strong contrast with a successful dramatist, M. Ludovic Halévy, whose knowledge of the histrionic temperament is at least as wide as Daudet's and whose humor is as keen, but whose judgment is softened by the grateful memory of many victories won by the united effort of the author and the actor.

Through his brother's influence, Alphonse Daudet was appointed by the Duke de Morny to a semi-sinecure; and he has recorded how he told his benefactor before accepting the place that he was a Legitimist and how the Duke smilingly retorted that the Empress was also. Although it was as a poet that Daudet made his bow in the world of letters, his first appearance as a dramatist was not long delayed thereafter; and he soon came forward also as a journalist,—or rather as a contributor to the papers. While many of the articles he prepared for the daily and weekly press were of ephemeral interest only, as the necessity of journalism demands, to be forgotten forty-eight hours after they were printed, not a few of them were sketches having more than a temporary value. Parisian newspapers are more hospitable to literature than are the newspapers of New York or of London; and a goodly proportion of the young Southerner's journalistic writing proved worthy of preservation.

It has been preserved for us in three volumes of