inative realists; their most amusing extravagance is but an
exaggeration of the real thing; and they never let factitious fantasy
sweep their feet off the ground. Tartarin is as typical of Provence as
Colonel Sellers--to take that figure of Mark Twain's which is most
like--is typical of the Mississippi Valley.

Tartarin is as true as Numa Roumestan; in fact they may almost be said
to be sketched from the same model but in a very different temper. In
"Numa Roumestan" we are shown the sober side of the Southern
temperament, the sorrow it brings in the house though it displays joy
in the street; and in "Tartarin" we behold only the immense comicality
of the incessant incongruity between the word and the deed. Tartarin is
Southern, it is true, and French; but he is very human also. There is a
boaster and a liar in most of us, lying in wait for a chance to rush
out and put us to shame. It is this universality of Daudet's satire
that has given Tartarin its vogue on both sides of the Atlantic. The
ingenuity of Tartarin's misadventures, the variety of them in Algiers
and in Switzerland, the obvious reasonableness of them all, the
delightful probability of these impossibilities, the frank gaiety and
the unflagging high spirits,--these are precious qualities, all of
them; but it is rather the essential humanness of Tartarin himself that
has given him a reputation throughout the world. Very rarely indeed now
or in the past has an author been lucky enough to add a single figure
to the cosmopolitan gallery of fiction. Cervantes, De Foe, Swift, Le
Sage, Dumas, have done it; Fielding and Hawthorne and Turgenef have
not.

It is no wonder that Daudet takes pride in this. The real joy of the
novelist, he declares, is to create human beings, to put on their feet
types of humanity who thereafter circulate through the world with the
name, the gesture, the grimace he has given them and who are cited and
talked about without reference to their creator and without even any
mention of him. And whenever Daudet heard some puppet of politics or
literature called a Tartarin, a shiver ran through him--"the shiver of
pride of a father, hidden in the crowd that is applauding his son and
wanting all the time to cry out 'That's my boy!'"

V.

The time has not yet come for a final estimate of Daudet's
position,--if a time ever arrives when any estimate can be final. But
already has a selection been made of the masterpieces which survive,
and from