betrays himself in every page that chronicles the life of his hero. These interpolations are so much a part of the narrative that they hardly interrupt it, though they do not aid it. He does not, like one of his English brothers, interpolate a page of dissertation upon the vanity of human life, nor, like another of our English novelists, pause in the narrative to preach a sermon. It is never as preacher or moralist that Daudet peers over your shoulder. But the quality that reveals itself in his work is none the less a purely personal one; he loves this humble being, whose biographer he is, so intensely that he must identify himself with each mood of the boy. He follows him everywhere, penetrating every experience of Jack's, every phase of feeling, with that subtle clairvoyance which makes the very soul of things transparent to him at times. He identifies himself with the life of childhood, all its miracle and mystery; no real or imaginary terror that exists in a child's mind but Daudet seeks to fathom it. A child's homesickness and loneliness and dread of the darkness its fancy peoples with vague shapes, how real they are! That journey by night from Paris to Étiolles, is it Jack's or his own? Hard to say, so completely Daudet merges his own personality in that of the child. This personal quality, often accompanied by an almost feminine sensibility, is a dangerous gift, but here it produced pictures most vivid and real.

Daudet's theories were widely at variance

with those of the writer to whom he dedicated Jack; the doctrine of "impersonality" had no charm for him, was foreign to his temperament, and he wisely realized this. Yet, however he differed from his friends in theory, his own method of work led him to be as ardent a realist as any one of these. But what realism! Realism that has filtered through the imagination, leaving the dregs behind so that the bright, limpid resultant is a far different thing from the realism of Zola — not of the earth earthy - rather, a jewel darting lambent fires, the very crystallization of Daudet's thought and feeling.

With painful persistence he follows Jack to the final scene of his martyrdom, the slave of a sort of obsession that will not permit him to rest so long as there remains the least small island of Jack's personality unexplored. His life in the forge, aboard the "Cydnus," in the Eyssendeck factory, his degradation and effacement, the final enfranchisement and new birth of his soul, Daudet's "double" has seen it all, and is not less assiduous than Zola himself in his pilgrimages to every remote nook that may throw light upon the subject, yet his narrative never becomes the mere itinerary of scenes and events.

"Un livre de pitié, de colère, et d'ironie," says Daudet of Jack in this dedication to Gustave Flaubert, and that Flaubert found somewhat too much of these qualities in Jack is gathered from his laconic criticism, hardly the words of one who

stands sponsor for the work of a contemporary, a criticism we should never have known, perhaps, save for the confession of Daudet himself, given with that naïve candor which is one of the many delightful qualities of Trente Ans de Paris. Neither can the author of Jack resist telling us that George Sand was so moved upon ending the book that for three days she was unable to resume work, or write a single line!

What has been the popular verdict? The longest, the most rapidly written of Daudet's novels, a labor of love, had no such reception as that which greeted Fromont and Risler, The Nabob, Tartarin, and other of Daudet's works. He inferred that its length was the cause of this colder reception. May there not be other reasons? Too much truth, like too little learning, may sometimes prove a dangerous gift for its possessor. To strip the mask from cant and vice and pretentious folly, to show these things in their least alluring light is hardly the way to achieve an overwhelming popular success; a "book of pity, of anger, and of irony," is an uncertain power with which to conjure the multitudes. Jack can never appeal to the lovers of pleasing fiction. It is a serious, perhaps too sombre, study of the life and morals of a great modern Cosmopolis where vice and virtue jostle each other, flourish side by side. It probes social wounds and evils, unveils shams, punctures with the fine pen-pricks of its irony foibles and painted bubbles of folly. Its satire is juster, more far

reaching and impersonal than that of the Immortal. The Academic few could never have been greatly disturbed by the attack upon their venerable Academy, but Philistinism, dilettanteism, and indeed the whole tedious, dismal and deadly tribe of isms may well take umbrage at Jack, for Tartarin's creator has here a more Herculean labor than that of helping Tartarin to hunt lions; he is hunting down the ass in the lion's skin, ever a thankless task, more quixotic even than that of pummelling windmills. Yet he does it in good faith, strikes again and again at vacancy, like Cyrano crying to Hypocrisy and Compromise and Prejudice, to "bloated and pompous silliness"-to platitudes of every sort: "Take this! and this!"

Jack is scarcely a novel in the strict sense of the word, rather a biography around which is woven a series of social and satiric studies, of pictures from life. Invention plays but a minor part in the work; Daudet did not have to go in search of types or of scenes or of events. He had merely to remember, to draw upon those mental notebooks filled to overflowing with observations and suggestions, notes jotted down without attempt at classification, hid away in compartments whose labels even were undecipherable to any but himself, but of which he had the key, entering at will, appropriating, never at random, just what he needed at the right moment.

But woe to the lesser writer who should attempt to imitate Daudet's method! The most curious

archives are of value only in the hands of the few. Facts have no real significance of themselves, though the least detail has a value for the romancer who knows how to use it rightly. The finer the tool, the greater must be the skill of the workman who handles it. Though Daudet's notes were copious, he instinctively fixed upon those details that were of real significance, and the slightest detail in his hands sometimes becomes the flashlight in which a whole personality stands revealed.

The characters he has painted in Jack, however familiar or commonplace, however grotesque, are never mere caricatures. They exist. They have always existed; in a certain sense they are typical. Since Jack is a failure, it is natural that the Failures themselves should play no small part in the history. This is conspicuously the Book of Failures, and they bear the same relation to the main theme that the Greek Chorus sustains to the Tragedy. What a formidable array of them! Failures of art, of science, of literature! (We have in English no word quite flexible, ironic, delicate enough to suggest to our ears all that is conveyed to a Frenchman's sense in the term un Raté. It quivers with suppressed irony. It may characterize anything spoilt, lost, abortive, any of Life's numerous miscarriages or misfits.) What a host of these Ratés wander through the pages of Jack! - all Bohemia is for a time depopulated. Here are the Chauvins, the Delobelles, the Micawbers of destiny,