A Novelist on Novels by Walter Lionel George

Author:Walter Lionel George [George, Walter Lionel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

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Three Comic Giants

1. TARTARIN

It is not every country and every period gives birth to a comic giant. Tragic and sentimental heroes are common, and make upon the history of literature a mark of sorts; we have Achilles and Werther, William Tell, d'Artagnan, Tristan, Sir Galahad, others, too, with equal claims to fame: but comic giants are few. The literature of the world is full of comic pigmies; it is fairly rich in half-growns such as Eulenspiegel, Mr Dooley, Tchitchikoff, and Mr Pickwick, but it does not easily produce the comic character who stands alone and massive among his fellows, like Balzac among novelists. There are not half a dozen competitors for the position, for Pantagruel and Gargantua are too philosophic, while Don Quixote does not move every reader to laughter; he is too romantic, too noble; he is hardly comic. Baron von Münchausen, Falstaff, and Tartarin alone remain face to face, all of them simple, all of them adventurous, but adventurous without literary inflation, as a kitten is adventurous when it explores a work-basket. There is no gigantic quality where there is self-consciousness or cynicism; the slightest strain causes the gigantic to vanish, the creature becomes human. The comic giant must be obvious, he must be, to himself, rebellious to analysis; he must also be obvious to the beholder, indeed transparent. That is not a paradox, it is a restatement of the fact that the comic giant's simplicity must be so great that everybody but he will realise it.

All this Tartarin fulfils. He is the creature of Alphonse Daudet, a second-rate writer who has earned for him a title maybe to immortality. There is no doubt that Daudet was a second-rate writer, and that Mr George Moore was right when he summed him up as de la bouillabaisse; his novels are sentimental, his reminiscences turgid, his verses suitable for crackers, but Daudet had an asset—his vivid feeling for the South. It was not knowledge or observation made Tartarin; it was instinct. Neither in Tartarin de Tarascon nor in Tartarin sur les Alpes was Daudet for a moment inconsistent or obscure; for him, Tartarin and his followers stood all the time in violent light. He knew not only what they had to say in given circumstances, but also what they would say in any circumstances that might arise.

It is not wonderful then, that Tartarin appears as a large character. You will figure him throughout as a French bourgeois, aged about forty in the first novel, fifty in the second, and sixty in the third. Daudet's dates being unreliable, you must assume his adventures as happening between 1861 and 1881, and bridge the gaps that exist between them with a vision of Tartarin's stormily peaceful life in the sleepy town of Tarascon. For Tartarin was too adventurous to live without dangers and storms. When he was not shooting lions in Algeria, or climbing the Alps, or colonising in Polynesia, Tartarin was still a hero: he lived in his little white

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