d Daudet had
the Southern expansiveness and abundance, just as Maupassant had the
Northern reserve and caution. If an author is ever to bring forth fruit
after his kind he must have roots in the soil of his nativity. Daudet
was no orchid, beautiful and scentless; his writings have always the
full flavor of the southern soil. He was able to set Tartarin before us
so sympathetically and to make Numa Roumestan so convincing because he
recognized in himself the possibility of a like exuberance. He could
never take the rigorously impassive attitude which Flaubert taught
Maupassant to assume. Daudet not only feels for his characters, but he
is quite willing that we should be aware of his compassion.

He is not only incapable of the girding enmity which Taine detected and
detested in Thackeray's treatment of Becky Sharp, but he is also devoid
of the callous detachment with which Flaubert dissected Emma Bovary
under the microscope. Daudet is never flagrantly hostile toward one of
his creatures; and, however contemptible or despicable the characters
he has called into being, he is scrupulously fair to them. Sidonie and
Felicia Ruys severally throw themselves away, but Daudet is never
intolerant. He is inexorable, but he is not insulting. I cannot but
think that it is Provence whence Daudet derived the precious birthright
of sympathy, and that it is Provence again which bestowed on him the
rarer gift of sentiment. It is by his possession of sympathy and of
sentiment that he has escaped the aridity which suffocates us in the
works of so many other Parisian novelists. The South endowed him with
warmth and heartiness and vivacity; and what he learnt from Paris was
the power of self-restraint and the duty of finish.

He was born in Provence and he died in Paris; he began as a poet and he
ended as a veritist; and in each case there was logical evolution and
not contradiction. The Parisian did not cease to be a Provencal; and
the novelist was a lyrist still. Poet though he was, he had an intense
liking for the actual, the visible, the tangible. He so hungered after
truth that he was ready sometimes to stay his stomach with facts in its
stead,--mere fact being but the outward husk, whereas truth is the rich
kernel concealed within. His son tells us that Daudet might have taken
as a motto the title of Goethe's autobiography, "Dichtung und
Wahrheit,"--Poetry and Truth. And this it is that has set Daudet apart
and that has caused his vogu