or
ugly. Of a truth, Aline Joyeuse is as typically Parisian as Felicia
Ruys herself; both are needed if the census is to be complete; and the
omission of either is a source of error.

There is irony in Daudet's handling of these humbler figures, but it is
compassionate and almost affectionate. If he laughs at Father Joyeuse
there is no harshness and no hostility in his mirth. For the Joyeuse
daughters he has indulgence and pity; and his humor plays about them
and leaves them scart-free. It never stings them or scorches or sears,
as it does Astier-Rehu and Christian II. and the Prince of Axel, in
spite of his desire to be fair toward all the creatures of his brain.

Irony is only one of the manifestations of Daudet's humor. Wit he has
also, and satire. And he is doubly fortunate in that he has both humor
and the sense-of-humor--the positive and the negative. It is the
sense-of-humor, so called, that many humorists are without, a
deprivation which allows them to take themselves so seriously that they
become a laughing-stock for the world. It is the sense-of-humor that
makes the master of comedy, that helps him to see things in due
proportion and perspective, that keeps him from exaggeration and
emphasis, from sentimentality and melodrama and bathos. It is the
sense-of-humor that prevents our making fools of ourselves; it is humor
itself that softens our laughter at those who make themselves
ridiculous. In his serious stories Daudet employs this negative humor
chiefly, as though he had in memory La Bruyere's assertion that "he who
makes us laugh rarely is able to win esteem for himself." His positive
humor,--gay, exuberant, contagious,--finds its full field for display
in some of the short stories, and more especially in the Tartarin
series.

Has any book of our time caused more laughter than "Tartarin of
Tarascon"--unless it be "Tartarin on the Alps"? I can think only of one
rival pair, "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn,"--for Mark Twain and
Alphonse Daudet both achieved the almost impossible feat of writing a
successful sequel to a successful book, of forcing fortune to a
repetition of a happy accident. The abundant laughter the French
humorist excited is like that evoked by the American humorist,--clean,
hearty, healthy, self-respecting; it is in both cases what George Eliot
in one of her letters called "the exquisite laughter that comes from a
gratification of the reasoning faculty." Daudet and Mark Twain are
imag