his failure, save in one or two instances, to score a real triumph
with his plays, but does not explain his singular lack of sympathy with
actors. Nor was he able to win great success with his first book
of importance, _Le Petit Chose_, delightful as that mixture of
autobiography and romance must prove to any sympathetic reader. He was
essentially a romanticist and a poet cast upon an age of naturalism
and prose, and he needed years of training and such experience as the
Prussian invasion gave him to adjust himself to his life-work. Such
adjustment was not needed for _Tartarin de Tarascon_, begun shortly
after _Le Petit Chose_, because subtle humour of the kind lavished in
that inimitable creation and in its sequels, while implying observation,
does not necessarily imply any marked departure from the romantic and
poetic points of view.

The training Daudet required for his novels he got from the sketches
and short stories that occupied him during the late sixties and early
seventies. Here again little in the way of comment need be given, and
that little can express the general verdict that the art displayed
in these miniature productions is not far short of perfect. The two
principal collections, _Lettres de mon Moulin_ and _Contes du Lundi_,
together with _Artists' Wives (Les Femmes d'Artistes)_ and parts at
least of _Robert Helmont_, would almost of themselves suffice to put
Daudet high in the ranks of the writers who charm without leaving upon
one's mind the slightest suspicion that they are weak. It is true
that Daudet's stories do not attain the tremendous impressiveness that
Balzac's occasionally do, as, for example, in _La Grande Breteche_,
nor has his clear-cut art the almost disconcerting firmness, the
surgeon-like quality of Maupassant's; but the author of the ironical
_Elixir of Father Gaucher_ and of the pathetic _Last Class_, to name no
others, could certainly claim with Musset that his glass was his own,