the spirits or disturb the geniality of the sufferer, but did somewhat
abate the power and disturb the serenity of his work. Then came the
inevitable end of all life dramas, whether comic or romantic or tragic,
and friends who had known him stood round his grave and listened sadly
to the touching words in which Emile Zola expressed not merely his own
grief but that of many thousands throughout the civilized world. Here
was a life more winsome, more appealing, more complete than any creation
of the genius of the man that lived it--a life which, whether we know it
in detail or not, explains in part the fascination Daudet exerts upon us
and the conviction we cherish that, whatever ravages time may make among
his books, the memory of their writer will not fade from the hearts of
men. Many Frenchmen have conquered the world's mind by the power or
the subtlety of their genius; few have won its heart through the
catholicity, the broad sympathy of their genius. Daudet is one of these
few; indeed, he is almost if not quite the only European writer who has
of late achieved such a triumph, for Tolstoi has stern critics as well
as steadfast devotees, and has won most of his disciples as moralist and
reformer. But we must turn from Daudet the man to Daudet the author of
_The Nabob_ and other memorable novels.

If this were a general essay and not an introduction, it would be proper
to say something of Daudet's early attempts as poet and dramatist. Here
it need only be remarked that it is almost a commonplace to insist that
even in his later novels he never entirely ceased to see the outer world
with the eyes of a poet, to delight in colour and movement, to seize
every opportunity to indulge in vivid description couched in a style
more swift and brilliant than normal prose aspires to. This bent
for description, together with the tendency to episodic rather than
sustained composition and the comparative weakness of his character
drawing--features of his work shortly to be discussed--partly explains