The British novelist with whom this French novelist is often compared, and with whom he had much in common, was also impressed profoundly by the theater of his own time and of his own country.  But Dickens was less fortunate than Daudet, in that the contemporary English stage did not afford a model as worthy of imitation as the contemporary French stage.  Of course, the native genius of Dickens is indisputable, but his artistic ideals are painfully unsatisfactory.  His letters show him forever straining after effects for their own sake only, and striving to put just so much humor and just so much pathos into each one of the successive monthly parts into which his stories were chopped up.  Very fond of the theater from his early youth, Dickens had come near going on the stage as an actor; and, in his search for effects, he borrowed inexpensive mysteries from contemporary melodrama, and he took from it the implacable and inexplicable villain ever involved in dark plottings.  It is significant that ‘No Thoroughfare,’ the one play of his invention which was actually produced, was performed at the Adelphi, and was discovered then not to differ widely from the other robust and high-colored melodramas ordinarily acted at that hopelessly unliterary playhouse.  Daudet, altho he was not gifted with the splendid creative force of Dickens, inherited the Latin tradition of restraint and harmony and proportion; and he had before his eyes on the French stage the adroitly contrived comedies of Augier and of Dumas fils, models far more profitable to a novelist than the violent crudities of the Adelphi.

Perhaps there is more than a hint of ingratitude in Daudet’s later disgust with the inherent limitations of the drama,—­a disgust more forcibly phrased by his friends, Zola and Goncourt and Flaubert, realists all of them, eager to capture the theater also and to rule it in their own way.  In their hands, the novel was an invading conqueror; and they had the arrogance that comes from an unforeseen success.  They were all eager to take possession of the playhouse, and to repeat in that new field of art the profitable victories they had gained in the library.  But they declined to admit that the drama was a special art, with a method of its own.  They resented bitterly the failures that followed when they refused to accept the conditions of the actual theater; and they protested shrilly against these conditions when they vainly essayed to fulfil them.  “What a horrible manner of writing is that which suits the stage!” Flaubert complained to George Sand.  “The ellipses, the suspensions, the interrogations must be lavished, if one wishes to have liveliness; and all these things, in themselves, are very ugly.”  In other words, Flaubert was concerned with the rhetoric of the written word, and he had no relish for the rhythm of spoken dialog.