rate with color and tingle
with emotion.

And just as a painter keeps filling his sketch-books with graphic hints
for elaboration later, so Daudet was indefatigable in note-taking. He
explains his method in his paper of "Fromont and Risler;" how he had
for a score of years made a practice of jotting down in little
note-books not only his remarks and his thoughts, but also a rapid
record of what he had heard with his ears ever on the alert, and what
he had seen with those tireless eyes of his. Yet he never let the dust
of these note-books choke the life out of him. Every one of his novels
was founded on fact,--plot, incidents, characters and scenery.

He used his imagination to help him to see; he used it also to peer
into and behind the mere facts. All that he needed to invent was a
connecting link now and again; and it may as well be admitted at once
that these mere inventions are sometimes the least satisfactory part of
his stories. The two young men in "The Nabob," for instance, whom Mr.
Henry James found it difficult to tell apart, the sculptor-painter in
the "Immortal," the occasional other characters which we discover to be
made up, lack the individuality and the vitality of figures taken from
real life by a sympathetic effort of interpretative imagination.
Delobelle, Gardinois, "all the personages of 'Fromont' have lived,"
Daudet declares; and he adds a regret that in depicting old Gardinois
he gave pain to one he loved, but he "could not suppress this type of
egotist, aged and terrible."

Since the beginning of the art of story-telling, the narrators must
have gone to actuality to get suggestions for their character-drawing;
and nothing is commoner than the accusation that this or that novelist
has stolen his characters ready-made,--filching them from nature's
shop-window, without so much as a by-your-leave. Daudet is bold in
committing these larcenies from life and frank in confessing them,--far
franker than Dickens, who tried to squirm out of the charge that he had
put Landor and Leigh Hunt unfairly into fiction. Perhaps Dickens was
bolder than Daudet, if it is true that he drew Micawber from his own
father, and Mrs. Nickleby from his own mother. Daudet was taxed with
ingratitude that he had used as the model of Mora, the Duke de Morny,
who had befriended him; and he defended himself by declaring that he
thought the duke would find no fault with the way Mora had been
presented. But a great artist has never