M. DAUDET'S REMINISCENCES.*
THE Bohemia of which Balzac drew so sinister a picture in Un Grand Somme de Province a Paris, and of which Murger has left a strange and. touching record in his immortal Scenes, still existed—under some more vulgar guise, does it not yet exist ?- when a young fellow of sixteen, whose books were some twenty years later to go through scores upon scores of editions, tired out with the dog's life of a pion in the depths of Languedoc, came to Paris, with forty sons in his pocket, to tread the uncertain ways of literature, with no other aid than a brother could give him, whose whole means of existence consisted of a hardly earned wage of less than seventeen shillings a week. Short- sighted, awkward, shy, the youth was nevertheless full of ambition, and as full of hope. Of course, he set to work at once to write poetry, or at least to compose verses, and thus completed. his title to be enrolled as a citizen of that republic of art and letters in which Corot had learned to throw poetry into landscape, Gautier to marry romanticism with style, and Gerard de Norval to sing in tones too sweet for France, and that only a few now hear across the louder music of Hugo. Alphonse Daudet shared a garret with his brother in the Rue de Tonrnon, opposite the house of the celebrated surgeon, Ricord, and spent most of the hours snatched from rhyming in beating the pavement in the neighbourhood of the Odeon, beneath the colonnade of which he would often saunter, half-delighted half-afraid. at the idea of meeting such men of letters as Barbey d'Aurevilly, whose powerful but strange and sometimes repulsive novels, Le Pretre Marie, Le Chevalier des Touches, La Vieille Maitresse, are scarcely known out of Prance; or Valles, the future author of Les Refractaires, and. that singular book, Jacques "V ingtras, which has a special philological value, if no other, as a storehouse of contemporary Parisian slang, and member of the Commune, who, after a long obscurity, is said to have recently shown signs of activity. Gambetta, too, was a pro- minent figure in the quartier, already ruling the studenthood of the pays latin by his thundering eloquence—" Ce loquace Romain," as M. Daudet calls him, "grafted. on a Gallic stock "—and also by his full purse, into which a generous father poured monthly the sum, enormous for a student of those days, of three hundred francs.
The rhyming was more successful than is commonly the case with literary aspirants. M. Daudet had the good fortune to meet with a publisher, himself given to rhyming, who did. not disdain his muse, and. the Antoureuses appeared in 1858. Villemessant, who stood to writers very much in the relation of a picture- dealer to artists, detected ability in the book, some of the pieces in which, as "Los Prunes," "L'Oiseau Bleu," show considerable power, and offered the young author of seventeen an engage- ment on the Figaro. Of Villemessant a striking portrait is drawn, and. several amusing anecdotes told. exemplifying the curious mixture of kindness and. brutality, tact and insolence, which made up the man. It was not, however, until 1866, when the delightful Lettres de mon Moulin, likely to become a classic in French literature, appeared, that M. Daudet, although his Gueux de Province, describing the miseries of a pion as a pion alone could describe them, had already attracted considerable attention, felt his livehood assured. There is a Grub Street still in Paris, though it is not quite our Grab Street of the eighteenth century. A Bohemian life is still led on the banks of the Seine, and is a hard one enough without being, what Murger in a moment of bitterness called it, " la preface de rAcademie on de la Morgue." M. Daudet's experience of it was fortunately not too protracted. Some of the more salient aspects of literary life in Paris are graphically rendered in this charmingly written volume, and are worth attention, if only to note some of the differences between the world of letters in France and the world. of letters on this side of the Channel. In the first place, women-authors, in one great department of literature at least, are increasingly common with us and rare in France. and to women, one-half of life must be a sealed book, to un- married women much more than half. In France, the literary aspirant is usually a man of no family or fortune, who feels himself distinctly called. to literature, and definitely adopts it, almost from the outset, as a means of livelihood ; in England, he more commonly drifts into it, often after having tried commerce or a profession. No such story as M. Daudet tells of himself in the chapter headed "Premier Habit," could probably be narrated of any English novelist ; its good luck and its mis- • Treats Ans de Pavia. Par Alphonse Daudet. Paris : /tarpon at Flammarion. 1888,
chances are alike purely French. Such early success as that of Hugo is rare ; the rule is years of struggle, privation, and dis- appointment, followed by success in but a small number of in- stances ; in the immense majority, by a life of toilful and ill- remunerated hack-work. The romancier is almost always more or less of a pressman, a chroniqueur at least, and seldom fails to try his hand at a farce or melodrama. It would. be well, perhaps, if our own novelists paid more attention to dramatic composition ; the training would give their work a compactness and a brilliance it too often lacks, and eliminate the trivial and com- monplace incident and dialogue that so frequently destroy its interest. But French novels are written for a different public than ours, which is mainly a circulating-library—that is, a.
domestic—public. Lastly, there is more literary fellowship in Paris than in London, owing partly to the enormous size of Cobbett's "wen," a more marked distinction between writers and other men, a closer dependence on the Press, ampler ambi- tions, a much greater regard for style, more sobriety in the matter of incident—such stories as She, for instance, excite no attention in French literary circles—and an easier access to the public than is possible under the absurd conditions of the book- trade in this country.
The Third Republic, by developing the political spirit, has withdrawn some of the best intellects in France from literature, which, on the whole, has distinctly retrograded in quality since the fall of the Empire. M. Daudet is no philosopher, and. does not even notice the remarkable revolution that is effecting itself under his eyes in the mastery of letters. A. steady growth of seriousness, of Germanism almost, underlies the scum of brute realism that even the Empire would have shuddered at ; one proof of this that may be cited among many others, is the striking advance in Greek scholarship which France has made during the last decade. Some curious portrayals are given of odd figures in literature,—Boyer, the Shakespearian enrage; Henri Moonier, the some what pretentious creator of Joseph P malt a otme ; Desroches, a Bohemian of a very inferior order, but characteristic in his way. Of Rochefort, too, in his early days, a portrait is drawn more true than attractive, and a very sympathetic one of Turgueneff, although the Russian novelist, despite the friend- ship he professed for M. Daudet, seems to have characterised him in his correspondence " comme ecrivain, au-dessous de tout; comma homme, le dernier des hommes," adding that this was perfectly well known to all his friends.
Much of the book—some portions of which, as the sketch of Rochefort, have previously appeared—is taken up with a descrip- tion of M. Daudet's methods of work, in which he resembled Dickens and Charles Reade. Le Petit Chose and Jack seem to be his favourites among his novels, perhaps because they are largely autobiographical,—just as Dickens is said to have had a preference, on similar grounds, for David Coppmfield. In our opinion, however, the best of M. Daudet's novels is Fromont jeune et Rider nine, in relation to which he writes :—
" Je n'ens jamais d'antre methode de travail (quo d'apres nature). Comme lea peintres conservent avec soin des albums de croquis oit des silhouettes, des attitudes, un raccourci, on mouvement des bras, ont ete notes sur le vif, je collectionne depuis trente ans une multitude de petits cahiers sur lesquels lea remarques, lea peneees n'ont parfois qu'une ligne serree, de quoi se rappeler un geste, una intonation, developpes, agrandis plus tard pour l'harmonie de l'osavre importante. Je me setts an coma" [he adds' d propos of a comparison with Dickens, whose doll.dresser in Our Mutual Friend he had unconsciously imitated in the charming character of the daughter of Delobelle, the actor] l'amour de Dickens pour lea disgracies et lea pauvres, les enfances melees aux miseres des grandee villes ; j'ai en comme mi une entree de vie navrante, l'obligation de gagner mon pain avant seize ans ; c'est ik, j'imagine, notre plus grande ressemblance."
M. Daudet is probably right. He has far more literary power than Dickens, and his pathos is truer, but he is less profoundly human, less capable of investing dead things with life; his talent is greater, his genius inferior, and most of his novels, especially his later ones, are more or less odorous with the ill odour that clings like a curse to French fiction. These Reminiscences, how- ever, are altogether delightful, une bonne causerie, full of keen observation, necessarily egotistic, but in a simple, almost naive, way that the reader will find inexpressibly attractive. It is only just to the publishers to add that the volume before us is a marvel of excellence and cheapness. It is finely printed on good, thick paper, and profusely illustrated with " impressionist " woodcuts of high merit, into which many evidently lifelike portraits are introduced—that of Villemessant is among the best—and may be bought in London for half-a-crown.
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