t as his fellow-novelists, M. Paul Bourget and
Signor Gabriele d'Annunzio have severally done. Immature as juvenile
lyrics are likely to be, these early rhymes of Daudet's have a flavor
of their own, a faintly recognizable note of individuality. He is more
naturally a poet than most modern literators who possess the
accomplishment of verse as part of their equipment for the literary
life, but who lack a spontaneous impulse toward rhythm. It may even be
suggested that his little poems are less artificial than most French
verse; they are the result of a less obvious effort. He lisped in
numbers; and with him it was rather prose that had to be consciously
acquired. His lyric note, although not keen and not deep, is heard
again and again in his novels, and it sustains some of the most
graceful and tender of his short stories,--"The Death of the Dauphin,"
for instance, and the "Sous-prefet in the Fields."

Daudet extended poetry to include playmaking; and alone or with a
friend he attempted more than one little piece in rhyme--tiny plays of
a type familiar enough at the Odeon. He has told us how the news of the
production of one of these poetic dramas came to him afar in Algiers
whither he had been sent because of a weakness of the lungs,
threatening to become worse in the gray Parisian winter. Other plays of
his, some of them far more important than this early effort, were
produced in the next few years. The most ambitious of these was the
"Woman of Arles," which he had elaborated from a touching short story
and for which Bizet composed incidental music as beautiful and as
overwhelming as that prepared by Mendelssohn for the "Midsummer Night's
Dream."

No one of Daudet's dramatic attempts was really successful; not the
"Woman of Arles," which is less moving in the theatre than in its
briefer narrative form, not even the latest of them all, the freshest
and the most vigorous, the "Struggle for Life," with its sinister
figure of Paul Astier taken over from the "Immortal." Apparently, with
all his desire to write for the stage, Daudet must have been
inadequately endowed with the dramaturgic faculty, that special gift of
playmaking which many a poet lacks and many a novelist, but which the
humblest playwright must needs have and which all the great dramatists
have possessed abundantly in addition to their poetic power.

Perhaps it was the unfavorable reception of his successive dramas which
is responsible for the chief of Da