There is irony in Daudet's handling of these humbler figures, but it is compassionate and almost affectionate. If he laughs at Father Joyeuse there is no harshness and no hostility in his mirth. For the Joyeuse daughters he has indulgence and pity; and his humor plays about them and leaves them scart-free. It never stings them or scorches or sears, as it does Astier-Rehu and Christian II. and the Prince of Axel, in spite of his desire to be fair toward all the creatures of his brain. Irony is only one of the manifestations of Daudet's humor. Wit he has also, and satire. And he is doubly fortunate in that he has both humor and the sense-of-humor--the positive and the negative. It is the sense-of-humor, so called, that many humorists are without, a deprivation which allows them to take themselves so seriously that they become a laughing-stock for the world. It is the sense-of-humor that makes the master of comedy, that helps him to see things in due proportion and perspective, that keeps him from exaggeration and emphasis, from sentimentality and melodrama and bathos. It is the sense-of-humor that prevents our making fools of ourselves; it is humor itself that softens our laughter at those who make themselves ridiculous. In his serious stories Daudet employs this negative humor chiefly, as though he had in memory La Bruyere's assertion that "he who makes us laugh rarely is able to win esteem for himself." His positive humor,--gay, exuberant, contagious,--finds its full field for display in some of the short stories, and more especially in the Tartarin series. Has any book of our time caused more laughter than "Tartarin of Tarascon"--unless it be "Tartarin on the Alps"? I can think only of one rival pair, "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn,"--for Mark Twain and Alphonse Daudet both achieved the almost impossible feat of writing a successful sequel to a successful book, of forcing fortune to a repetition of a happy accident. The abundant laughter the French humorist excited is like that evoked by the American humorist,--clean, hearty, healthy, self-respecting; it is in both cases what George Eliot in one of her letters called "the exquisite laughter that comes from a gratification of the reasoning faculty." Daudet and Mark Twain are imaginative realists; their most amusing extravagance is but an exaggeration of the real thing; and they never let factitious fantasy sweep their feet off the ground. Tartarin is as typical of Provence as Colonel Sellers--to take that figure of Mark Twain's which is most like--is typical of the Mississippi Valley.