e can
compare their complete works. Daudet records that the charge was
brought against him very early, long before he had read Dickens, and he
explains that any likeness that may exist is due not to copying but to
kinship of spirit. "I have deep in my heart," he says, "the same love
Dickens has for the maimed and the poor, for the children brought up in
all the deprivation of great cities." This pity for the disinherited,
for those that have had no chance in life, is not the only similarity
between the British novelist and the French; there is also the peculiar
combination of sentiment and humor. Daudet is not so bold as Dickens,
not so robust, not so over-mastering; but he is far more discreet, far
truer to nature, far finer in his art; he does not let his humor carry
him into caricature, nor his sentiment slop over into sentimentality.

Even the minor French novelists strive for beauty of form, and would
be ashamed of the fortuitous scaffolding that satisfies the British
story-tellers. A eulogist of Dickens, Mr. George Gissing, has recently
remarked acutely that "Daudet has a great advantage in his mastery of
construction. Where, as in 'Fromont and Risler,' he constructs too
well, that is to say, on the stage model, we see what a gain it was
to him to have before his eyes the Paris stage of the Second Empire,
instead of that of London in the earlier Victorian time." Where Dickens
emulated the farces and the melodramas of forgotten British
playwrights, Daudet was influenced rather by the virile dramas of Dumas
_fils_ and Augier. But in "Fromont and Risler," not only is the plot a
trifle stagy, but the heroine herself seems almost a refugee of the
footlights; exquisitely presented as Sidonie is, she fails quite to
captivate or convince, perhaps because her sisters have been seen so
often before in this play and in that. And now and again even in his
later novels we discover that Daudet has needlessly achieved the adroit
arrangement of events so useful in the theatre and not requisite in the
library. In "The Nabob," for example, it is the "long arm of
coincidence" that brings Paul de Gery to the inn on the Riviera, and to
the very next room therein at the exact moment when Jenkins catches up
with the fleeing Felicia.

Yet these lapses into the arbitrary are infrequent after all; and as
"Fromont and Risler" was followed first by one and then by another
novel, the evil influence of theatrical conventionalism disappears.