copied his models slavishly; he
has utilized them in the effort to realize to his own satisfaction what
he has already imagined. Daudet maintained to his son that those who
were without imagination cannot even observe accurately. Invention
alone, mere invention, an inferior form of mental exercise, suffices to
provide a pretty fair romantic tale, remote from the facts of every-day
life, but only true imagination can sustain a realistic novel where
every reader's experience qualifies him to check off the author's
progress, step by step.

IV.

It would take too long--although the task would be amusing--to call the
roll of Daudet's novels written after "Fromont and Risler" had revealed
to him his own powers, and to discuss what fact of Parisian history had
been the starting point of each of them and what notabilities of Paris
had sat for each of the chief characters. Mr. Henry James, for
instance, has seen it suggested that Felicia Ruys is intended as a
portrait of Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt; M. Zola, on the other hand, denies
that Felicia Ruys is Mme. Sarah-Bernhardt and hints that she is rather
Mme. Judith Gautier. Daudet himself refers to the equally absurd report
that Gambetta was the original of Numa Roumestan,--a report over which
the alleged subject and the real author laughed together. Daudet's own
attitude toward his creations is a little ambiguous or at least a
little inconsistent; in one paper he asserts that every character of
his has had a living original, and in another he admits that Elysee
Meraut, for example, is only in part a certain Therion.

The admission is more nearly exact than the assertion. Every novelist
whose work is to endure even for a generation must draw from life,
sometimes generalizing broadly and sometimes keeping close to the
single individual, but always free to modify the mere fact as he may
have observed it to conform with the larger truth of the fable he shall
devise. Most story-tellers tend to generalize, and their fictions lack
the sharpness of outline we find in nature. Daudet prefers to retain as
much of the actual individual as he dares without endangering the web
of his composition; and often the transformation is very slight,--Mora,
for instance, who is probably a close copy of Morny, but who stands on
his own feet in "The Nabob," and lives his own life as independently as
though he was a sheer imagination. More rarely the result is not so
satisfactory; J. Tom Levis, for example