fortunate than Daudet, in that the contemporary English stage did not
afford a model as worthy of imitation as the contemporary French stage.
Of course, the native genius of Dickens is indisputable, but his
artistic ideals are painfully unsatisfactory. His letters show him
forever straining after effects for their own sake only, and striving to
put just so much humor and just so much pathos into each one of the
successive monthly parts into which his stories were chopped up. Very
fond of the theater from his early youth, Dickens had come near going on
the stage as an actor; and, in his search for effects, he borrowed
inexpensive mysteries from contemporary melodrama, and he took from it
the implacable and inexplicable villain ever involved in dark plottings.
It is significant that 'No Thoroughfare,' the one play of his invention
which was actually produced, was performed at the Adelphi, and was
discovered then not to differ widely from the other robust and
high-colored melodramas ordinarily acted at that hopelessly unliterary
playhouse. Daudet, altho he was not gifted with the splendid creative
force of Dickens, inherited the Latin tradition of restraint and harmony
and proportion; and he had before his eyes on the French stage the
adroitly contrived comedies of Augier and of Dumas _fils_, models far
more profitable to a novelist than the violent crudities of the Adelphi.

Perhaps there is more than a hint of ingratitude in Daudet's later
disgust with the inherent limitations of the drama,--a disgust more
forcibly phrased by his friends, Zola and Goncourt and Flaubert,
realists all of them, eager to capture the theater also and to rule it
in their own way. In their hands, the novel was an invading conqueror;
and they had the arrogance that comes from an unforeseen success. They
were all eager to take possession of the playhouse, and to repeat in
that new field of art the profitable victories they had gained in the
library. But they declined to admit that the drama was a special art,
with a method of its own. They resented bitterly the failures that
followed when they refused to accept the conditions of the actual
theater; and they protested shrilly against these conditions when they
vainly essayed to fulfil them. "What a horrible manner of writing is
that which suits the stage!" Flaubert complained to George Sand. "The
ellipses, the suspensions, the interrogations must be lavished, if one
wishes to have liveliness; and