But if any one feels a little shaken, let him try it
another way. There is a character in M. Alphonse Daudet's "Froment
Jeune et Rissler Aine"--a character who, people say, is taken bodily
from Dickens. This is Desiree Delobelle, the deformed girl, the
daughter of un rate, a pretentious imbecile actor. She is poor,
stunted, laborious, toiling at a small industry; she is in love, is
rejected, she tries to drown herself, she dies. The sequence of
ideas is in Dickens's vein; but read the tale, and I think you will
see how little the thing is overdone, how simple and unforced it is,
compared with analogous persons and scenes in the work of the
English master. The idiotic yell of "plagiarism" has been raised,
of course, by critical cretins. M. Daudet, as I understand what he
says in "Trente Ans de Paris," had not read Dickens at all, when he
wrote "Froment Jeune"--certainly had not read "Our Mutual Friend."
But there is something of Dickens's genius in M. Daudet's, and that
something is kept much better in hand by the Frenchman, is more
subordinated to the principles of taste and of truth.
On the other hand, to be done with this point, look at Delobelle,
the father of Desiree, and compare him with Dickens's splendid
strollers, with Mr. Vincent Crummles, and Mr. Lenville, and the
rest. As in Desiree so in Delobelle, M. Daudet's picture is much
the more truthful. But it is truthful with a bitter kind of truth.
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