A paper on Alexandre Dumas
Originally published in Scribner's Magazine
Rewritten as Chapter 1 of Essays in Little, by Andrew Lang
(today, Lang is most known for editing the Blue Fairy Book)
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Alexandre Dumas is a writer, and his life is a topic, of which his
devotees never weary. Indeed, one lifetime is not long enough
wherein to tire of them. The long days and years of Hilpa and
Shalum, in Addison--the antediluvian age, when a picnic lasted for
half a century and a courtship for two hundred years, might have
sufficed for an exhaustive study of Dumas. No such study have I to
offer, in the brief seasons of our perishable days. I own that I
have not read, and do not, in the circumstances, expect to read, all
of Dumas, nor even the greater part of his thousand volumes. We
only dip a cup in that sparkling spring, and drink, and go on,--we
cannot hope to exhaust the fountain, nor to carry away with us the
well itself. It is but a word of gratitude and delight that we can
say to the heroic and indomitable master, only an ave of friendship
that we can call across the bourne to the shade of the Porthos of
fiction. That his works (his best works) should be even still more
widely circulated than they are; that the young should read them,
and learn frankness, kindness, generosity--should esteem the tender
heart, and the gay, invincible wit; that the old should read them
again, and find forgetfulness of trouble, and taste the anodyne of
dreams, that is what we desire.
Dumas said of himself ("Memoires," v. 13) that when he was young he
tried several times to read forbidden books--books that are sold
sous le manteau. But he never got farther than the tenth page, in
the
"scrofulous French novel
On gray paper with blunt type;"
he never made his way so far as
"the woful sixteenth print."
"I had, thank God, a natural sentiment of delicacy; and thus, out of
my six hundred volumes (in 1852) there are not four which the most
scrupulous mother may not give to her daughter." Much later, in
1864, when the Censure threatened one of his plays, he wrote to the
Emperor: "Of my twelve hundred volumes there is not one which a
girl in our most modest quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, may not
be allowed to read." The mothers of the Faubourg, and mothers in
general, may not take Dumas exactly at his word. There is a
passage, for example, in the story of Miladi ("Les Trois
Mousquetaires") which a parent or guardian may well think
undesirable reading for youth. But compare it with the original
passage in the "Memoires" of D'Artagnan! It has passed through a
medium, as Dumas himself declared, of natural delicacy and good
taste. His enormous popularity, the widest in the world of letters,
owes absolutely nothing to prurience or curiosity. The air which he
breathes is a healthy air, is the open air; and that by his own
choice, for he had every temptation to seek another kind of vogue,
and every opportunity.
Two anecdotes are told of Dumas' books, one by M. Edmond About, the
other by his own son, which show, in brief space, why this novelist
is so beloved, and why he deserves our affection and esteem. M.
Villaud, a railway engineer who had lived much in Italy, Russia, and
Spain, was the person whose enthusiasm finally secured a statue for
Dumas. He felt so much gratitude to the unknown friend of lonely
nights in long exiles, that he could not be happy till his gratitude
found a permanent expression. On returning to France he went to
consult M. Victor Borie, who told him this tale about George Sand.
M. Borie chanced to visit the famous novelist just before her death,
and found Dumas' novel, "Les Quarante Cinq" (one of the cycle about
the Valois kings) lying on her table. He expressed his wonder that
she was reading it for the first time.
"For the first time!--why, this is the fifth or sixth time I have
read 'Les Quarante Cinq,' and the others. When I am ill, anxious,
melancholy, tired, discouraged, nothing helps me against moral or
physical troubles like a book of Dumas." Again, M. About says that
M. Sarcey was in the same class at school with a little Spanish boy.
The child was homesick; he could not eat, he could not sleep; he was
almost in a decline.
"You want to see your mother?" said young Sarcey.
"No: she is dead."
"Your father, then?"
" No: he used to beat me."
"Your brothers and sisters?"
"I have none."
"Then why are you so eager to be back in Spain?"
"To finish a book I began in the holidays."
"And what was its name?"
"'Los Tres Mosqueteros'!"
He was homesick for "The Three Musketeers," and they cured him
easily.
That is what Dumas does. He gives courage and life to old age, he
charms away the half-conscious nostalgie, the Heimweh, of childhood.
We are all homesick, in the dark days and black towns, for the land
of blue skies and brave adventures in forests, and in lonely inns,
on the battle-field, in the prison, on the desert isle. And then
Dumas comes, and, like Argive Helen, in Homer, he casts a drug into
the wine, the drug nepenthe, "that puts all evil out of mind." Does
any one suppose that when George Sand was old and tired, and near
her death, she would have found this anodyne, and this stimulant, in
the novels of M. Tolstoi, M. Dostoiefsky, M. Zola, or any of the
"scientific" observers whom we are actually requested to hail as the
masters of a new art, the art of the future? Would they make her
laugh, as Chicot does? make her forget, as Porthos, Athos, and
Aramis do? take her away from the heavy, familiar time, as the
enchanter Dumas takes us? No; let it be enough for these new
authors to be industrious, keen, accurate, precieux, pitiful,
charitable, veracious; but give us high spirits now and then, a
light heart, a sharp sword, a fair wench, a good horse, or even that
old Gascon rouncy of D'Artagnan's. Like the good Lord James
Douglas, we had liefer hear the lark sing over moor and down, with
Chicot, than listen to the starved-mouse squeak in the bouge of
Therese Raquin, with M. Zola. Not that there is not a place and an
hour for him, and others like him; but they are not, if you please,
to have the whole world to themselves, and all the time, and all the
praise; they are not to turn the world into a dissecting-room, time
into tedium, and the laurels of Scott and Dumas into crowns of
nettles.
There is no complete life of Alexandre Dumas. The age has not
produced the intellectual athlete who can gird himself up for that
labour. One of the worst books that ever was written, if it can be
said to be written, is, I think, the English attempt at a biography
of Dumas. Style, grammar, taste, feeling, are all bad. The author
does not so much write a life as draw up an indictment. The spirit
of his work is grudging, sneering, contemptuous, and pitifully
peddling. The great charge is that Dumas was a humbug, that he was
not the author of his own books, that his books were written by
"collaborators"--above all, by M. Maquet. There is no doubt that
Dumas had a regular system of collaboration, which he never
concealed. But whereas Dumas could turn out books that live,
whoever his assistants were, could any of his assistants write books
that live, without Dumas? One might as well call any barrister in
good practice a thief and an impostor because he has juniors to
"devil" for him, as make charges of this kind against Dumas. He
once asked his son to help him; the younger Alexandre declined. "It
is worth a thousand a year, and you have only to make objections,"
the sire urged; but the son was not to be tempted. Some excellent
novelists of to-day would be much better if they employed a friend
to make objections. But, as a rule, the collaborator did much more.
Dumas' method, apparently, was first to talk the subject over with
his aide-de-camp. This is an excellent practice, as ideas are
knocked out, like sparks (an elderly illustration!), by the contact
of minds. Then the young man probably made researches, put a rough
sketch on paper, and supplied Dumas, as it were, with his "brief."
Then Dumas took the "brief" and wrote the novel. He gave it life,
he gave it the spark (l'etincelle); and the story lived and moved.
It is true that he "took his own where he found it," like Molere and
that he took a good deal. In the gallery of an old country-house,
on a wet day, I came once on the "Memoires" of D'Artagnan, where
they had lain since the family bought them in Queen Anne's time.
There were our old friends the Musketeers, and there were many of
their adventures, told at great length and breadth. But how much
more vivacious they are in Dumas! M. About repeats a story of
Dumas and his ways of work. He met the great man at Marseilles,
where, indeed, Alexandre chanced to be "on with the new love" before
being completely "off with the old." Dumas picked up M. About,
literally lifted him in his embrace, and carried him off to see a
play which he had written in three days. The play was a success;
the supper was prolonged till three in the morning; M. About was
almost asleep as he walked home, but Dumas was as fresh as if he had
just got out of bed. "Go to sleep, old man," he said: "I, who am
only fifty-five, have three feuilletons to write, which must be
posted to-morrow. If I have time I shall knock up a little piece
for Montigny--the idea is running in my head." So next morning M.
About saw the three feuilletons made up for the post, and another
packet addressed to M. Montigny: it was the play L'Invitation e la
Valse, a chef-d'oeuvre! Well, the material had been prepared for
Dumas. M. About saw one of his novels at Marseilles in the
chrysalis. It was a stout copy-book full of paper, composed by a
practised hand, on the master's design. Dumas copied out each
little leaf on a big leaf of paper, en y semant l'esprit e pleines
mains. This was his method. As a rule, in collaboration, one man
does the work while the other looks on. Is it likely that Dumas
looked on? That was not the manner of Dumas. "Mirecourt and
others," M. About says, "have wept crocodile tears for the
collaborators, the victims of his glory and his talent. But it is
difficult to lament over the survivors (1884). The master neither
took their money--for they are rich, nor their fame--for they are
celebrated, nor their merit--for they had and still have plenty.
And they never bewailed their fate: the reverse! The proudest
congratulate themselves on having been at so good a school; and M.
Auguste Maquet, the chief of them, speaks with real reverence and
affection of his great friend." And M. About writes "as one who had
taken the master red-handed, and in the act of collaboration."
Dumas has a curious note on collaboration in his "Souvenirs
Dramatiques." Of the two men at work together, "one is always the
dupe, and HE is the man of talent."
There is no biography of Dumas, but the small change of a biography
exists in abundance. There are the many volumes of his "Memoires,"
there are all the tomes he wrote on his travels and adventures in
Africa, Spain, Italy, Russia; the book he wrote on his beasts; the
romance of Ange Pitou, partly autobiographical; and there are plenty
of little studies by people who knew him. As to his "Memoires," as
to all he wrote about himself, of course his imagination entered
into the narrative. Like Scott, when he had a good story he liked
to dress it up with a cocked hat and a sword. Did he perform all
those astonishing and innumerable feats of strength, skill, courage,
address, in revolutions, in voyages, in love, in war, in cookery?
The narrative need not be taken "at the foot of the letter"; great
as was his force and his courage, his fancy was greater still.
There is no room for a biography of him here. His descent was noble
on one side, with or without the bend sinister, which he said he
would never have disclaimed, had it been his, but which he did not
happen to inherit. On the other side he MAY have descended from
kings; but, as in the case of "The Fair Cuban," he must have added,
"African, unfortunately." Did his father perform these mythical
feats of strength? did he lift up a horse between his legs while
clutching a rafter with his hands? did he throw his regiment before
him over a wall, as Guy Heavistone threw the mare which refused the
leap ("Memoires," i. 122)? No doubt Dumas believed what he heard
about this ancestor--in whom, perhaps, one may see a hint of the
giant Porthos. In the Revolution and in the wars his father won the
name of Monsieur de l'Humanite, because he made a bonfire of a
guillotine; and of Horatius Cocles, because he held a pass as
bravely as the Roman "in the brave days of old."
This was a father to be proud of; and pluck, tenderness, generosity,
strength, remained the favourite virtues of Dumas. These he
preached and practised. They say he was generous before he was
just; it is to be feared this was true, but he gave even more freely
than he received. A regiment of seedy people sponged on him always;
he could not listen to a tale of misery but he gave what he had, and
sometimes left himself short of a dinner. He could not even turn a
dog out of doors. At his Abbotsford, "Monte Cristo," the gates were
open to everybody but bailiffs. His dog asked other dogs to come
and stay: twelve came, making thirteen in all. The old butler
wanted to turn them adrift, and Dumas consented, and repented.
"Michel," he said, "there are some expenses which a man's social
position and the character which he has had the ill-luck to receive
from heaven force upon him. I don't believe these dogs ruin me.
Let them bide! But, in the interests of their own good luck, see
they are not thirteen, an unfortunate number!"
"Monsieur, I'll drive one of them away."
"No, no, Michel; let a fourteenth come. These dogs cost me some
three pounds a month," said Dumas. "A dinner to five or six friends
would cost thrice as much, and, when they went home, they would say
my wine was good, but certainly that my books were bad." In this
fashion Dumas fared royally "to the dogs," and his Abbotsford ruined
him as certainly as that other unhappy palace ruined Sir Walter.
He, too, had his miscellaneous kennel; he, too, gave while he had
anything to give, and, when he had nothing else, gave the work of
his pen. Dumas tells how his big dog, Mouton once flew at him and
bit one of his hands, while the other held the throat of the brute.
"Luckily my hand, though small, is powerful; what it once holds it
holds long--money excepted." He could not "haud a guid grip o' the
gear." Neither Scott nor Dumas could shut his ears to a prayer or
his pockets to a beggar, or his doors on whoever knocked at them.
"I might at least have asked him to dinner," Scott was heard
murmuring, when some insufferable bore at last left Abbotsford,
after wasting his time and nearly wearing out his patience. Neither
man PREACHED socialism; both practised it on the Aristotelian
principle: the goods of friends are common, and men are our
friends.
The death of Dumas' father, while the son was a child, left Madame
Dumas in great poverty at Villers Cotterets. Dumas' education was
sadly to seek. Like most children destined to be bookish, he taught
himself to read very young: in Buffon, the Bible, and books of
mythology. He knew all about Jupiter--like David Copperfield's Tom
Jones, "a child's Jupiter, an innocent creature"--all about every
god, goddess, fawn, dryad, nymph--and he never forgot this useful
information. Dear Lempriere, thou art superseded; but how much more
delightful thou art than the fastidious Smith or the learned
Preller! Dumas had one volume of the "Arabian Nights," with
Aladdin's lamp therein, the sacred lamp which he was to keep burning
with a flame so brilliant and so steady. It is pleasant to know
that, in his boyhood, this great romancer loved Virgil. "Little as
is my Latin, I have ever adored Virgil: his tenderness for exiles,
his melancholy vision of death, his foreboding of an unknown God,
have always moved me; the melody of his verses charmed me most, and
they lull me still between asleep and awake." School days did not
last long: Madame Dumas got a little post--a licence to sell
tobacco--and at fifteen Dumas entered a notary's office, like his
great Scotch forerunner. He was ignorant of his vocation for the
stage--Racine and Corneille fatigued him prodigiously--till he saw
Hamlet: Hamlet diluted by Ducis. He had never heard of
Shakespeare, but here was something he could appreciate. Here was
"a profound impression, full of inexplicable emotion, vague desires,
fleeting lights, that, so far, lit up only a chaos."
Oddly enough, his earliest literary essay was the translation of
Burger's "Lenore." Here, again, he encounters Scott; but Scott
translated the ballad, and Dumas failed. Les mortes vont vite! the
same refrain woke poetry in both the Frenchman and the Scotchman.
"Ha! ha! the Dead can ride with speed:
Dost fear to ride with me?"
So Dumas' literary career began with a defeat, but it was always a
beginning. He had just failed with "Lenore," when Leuven asked him
to collaborate in a play. He was utterly ignorant, he says; he had
not succeeded in gallant efforts to read through "Gil Blas" and "Don
Quixote." "To my shame," he writes, "the man has not been more
fortunate with those masterpieces than the boy." He had not yet
heard of Scott, Cooper, Goethe; he had heard of Shakespeare only as
a barbarian. Other plays the boy wrote--failures, of course--and
then Dumas poached his way to Paris, shooting partridges on the
road, and paying the hotel expenses by his success in the chase. He
was introduced to the great Talma: what a moment for Talma, had he
known it! He saw the theatres. He went home, but returned to
Paris, drew a small prize in a lottery, and sat next a gentleman at
the play, a gentleman who read the rarest of Elzevirs, "Le
Pastissier Francais," and gave him a little lecture on Elzevirs in
general. Soon this gentleman began to hiss the piece, and was
turned out. He was Charles Nodier, and one of the anonymous authors
of the play he was hissing! I own that this amusing chapter lacks
verisimilitude. It reads as if Dumas had chanced to "get up" the
subject of Elzevirs, and had fashioned his new knowledge into a
little story. He could make a story out of anything--he "turned all
to favour and to prettiness." Could I translate the whole passage,
and print it here, it would be longer than this article; but, ah,
how much more entertaining! For whatever Dumas did he did with such
life, spirit, wit, he told it with such vivacity, that his whole
career is one long romance of the highest quality. Lassagne told
him he must read--must read Goethe, Scott, Cooper, Froissart,
Joinville, Brantome. He read them to some purpose. He entered the
service of the Duc d'Orleans as a clerk, for he wrote a clear hand,
and, happily, wrote at astonishing speed. He is said to have
written a short play in a cottage where he went to rest for an hour
or two after shooting all the morning. The practice in a notary's
office stood him, as it stood Scott, in good stead. When a dog bit
his hand he managed to write a volume without using his thumb. I
have tried it, but forbear--in mercy to the printers. He performed
wild feats of rapid caligraphy when a clerk under the Duc d'Orleans,
and he wrote his plays in one "hand," his novels in another. The
"hand" used in his dramas he acquired when, in days of poverty, he
used to write in bed. To this habit he also attributed the
brutalite of his earlier pieces, but there seems to be no good
reason why a man should write like a brute because it is in bed that
he writes.
In those days of small things he fought his first duel, and made a
study of Fear and Courage. His earliest impulse was to rush at
danger; if he had to wait, he felt his courage oozing out at the
tips of his fingers, like Bob Acres, but in the moment of peril he
was himself again. In dreams he was a coward, because, as he
argues, the natural man IS a poltroon, and conscience, honour, all
the spiritual and commanding part of our nature, goes to sleep in
dreams. The animal terror asserts itself unchecked. It is a theory
not without exceptions. In dreams one has plenty of conscience (at
least that is my experience), though it usually takes the form of
remorse. And in dreams one often affronts dangers which, in waking
hours, one might probably avoid if one could.
Dumas' first play, an unimportant vaudeville, was acted in 1825.
His first novels were also published then; he took part of the risk,
and only four copies were sold. He afterward used the ideas in more
mature works, as Mr. Sheridan Le Fanu employed three or four times
(with perfect candour and fairness) the most curious incident in
"Uncle Silas." Like Mr. Arthur Pendennis, Dumas at this time wrote
poetry "up to" pictures and illustrations. It is easy, but seldom
lucrative work. He translated a play of Schiller's into French
verse, chiefly to gain command of that vehicle, for his heart was
fixed on dramatic success. Then came the visit of Kean and other
English actors to Paris. He saw the true Hamlet, and, for the first
time on any stage, "the play of real passions." Emulation woke in
him: a casual work of art led him to the story of Christina of
Sweden, he wrote his play Christine (afterward reconstructed); he
read it to Baron Taylor, who applauded; the Comedie Francaise
accepted it, but a series of intrigues disappointed him, after all.
His energy at this moment was extraordinary, for he was very poor,
his mother had a stroke of paralysis, his bureau was always bullying
and interfering with him. But nothing could snub this "force of
nature," and he immediately produced his Henri Trois, the first
romantic drama of France. This had an instant and noisy success,
and the first night of the play he spent at the theatre, and at the
bedside of his unconscious mother. The poor lady could not even
understand whence the flowers came that he laid on her couch, the
flowers thrown to the young man--yesterday unknown, and to-day the
most famous of contemporary names. All this tale of triumph,
checkered by enmities and diversified by duels, Dumas tells with the
vigour and wit of his novels. He is his own hero, and loses nothing
in the process; but the other characters--Taylor, Nodier, the Duc
d'Orleans, the spiteful press-men, the crabbed old officials--all
live like the best of the persons in his tales. They call Dumas
vain: he had reason to be vain, and no candid or generous reader
will be shocked by his pleasant, frank, and artless enjoyment of
himself and of his adventures. Oddly enough, they are small-minded
and small-hearted people who are most shocked by what they call
"vanity" in the great. Dumas' delight in himself and his doings is
only the flower of his vigorous existence, and in his "Memoires," at
least, it is as happy and encouraging as his laugh, or the laugh of
Porthos; it is a kind of radiance, in which others, too, may bask
and enjoy themselves. And yet it is resented by tiny scribblers,
frozen in their own chill self-conceit.
There is nothing incredible (if modern researches are accurate) in
the stories he tells of his own success in Hypnotism, as it is
called now, Mesmerism or Magnetism as it was called then. Who was
likely to possess these powers, if not this good-humoured natural
force? "I believe that, by aid of magnetism, a bad man might do
much mischief. I doubt whether, by help of magnetism, a good man
can do the slightest good," he says, probably with perfect justice.
His dramatic success fired Victor Hugo, and very pleasant it is to
read Dumas' warm-hearted praise of that great poet. Dumas had no
jealousy--no more than Scott. As he believed in no success without
talent, so he disbelieved in genius which wins no success. "Je ne
crois pas au talent ignore, au genie inconnu, moi." Genius he
saluted wherever he met it, but was incredulous about invisible and
inaudible genius; and I own to sharing his scepticism. People who
complain of Dumas' vanity may be requested to observe that he seems
just as "vain" of Hugo's successes, or of Scribe's, as of his own,
and just as much delighted by them.
He was now struck, as he walked on the boulevard one day, by the
first idea of Antony--an idea which, to be fair, seems rather absurd
than tragic, to some tastes. "A lover, caught with a married woman,
kills her to save her character, and dies on the scaffold." Here is
indeed a part to tear a cat in!
The performances of M. Dumas during the Revolution of 1830, are they
not written in the Book of the Chronicles of Alexandre the Great?
But they were not literary excellences which he then displayed, and
we may leave this king-maker to hover, "like an eagle, above the
storms of anarchy."
Even to sketch his later biography is beyond our province. In 1830
he had forty years to run, and he filled the cup of the Hours to the
brim with activity and adventure. His career was one of
unparalleled production, punctuated by revolutions, voyages, exiles,
and other intervals of repose. The tales he tells of his prowess in
1830, and with Garibaldi, seem credible to me, and are borne out, so
far, by the narrative of M. Maxime Ducamp, who met him at Naples, in
the Garibaldian camp. Like Mr. Jingle, in "Pickwick," he "banged
the field-piece, twanged the lyre," and was potting at the foes of
the republic with a double-barrelled gun, when he was not composing
plays, romances, memoirs, criticisms. He has told the tale of his
adventures with the Comedie Francaise, where the actors laughed at
his Antony, and where Madame Mars and he quarrelled and made it up
again. His plays often won an extravagant success; his novels--his
great novels, that is--made all Europe his friend. He gained large
sums of money, which flowed out of his fingers, though it is said by
some that his Abbotsford, Monte Cristo, was no more a palace than
the villa which a retired tradesman builds to shelter his old age.
But the money disappeared as fast as if Monte Cristo had really been
palatial, and worthy of the fantasy of a Nero. He got into debt,
fled to Belgium, returned, founded the Mousquetaire, a literary
paper of the strangest and most shiftless kind. In "Alexandre Dumas
e la Maison d'Or," M. Philibert Audebrand tells the tale of this
Micawber of newspapers. Everything went into it, good or bad, and
the name of Dumas was expected to make all current coin. For Dumas,
unluckily, was as prodigal of his name as of his gold, and no
reputation could bear the drafts he made on his celebrity. His son
says, in the preface to Le Fils Naturel: "Tragedy, dramas, history,
romance, comedy, travel, you cast all of them in the furnace and the
mould of your brain, and you peopled the world of fiction with new
creations. The newspaper, the book, the theatre, burst asunder, too
narrow for your puissant shoulders; you fed France, Europe, America
with your works; you made the wealth of publishers, translators,
plagiarists; printers and copyists toiled after you in vain. In the
fever of production you did not always try and prove the metal which
you employed, and sometimes you tossed into the furnace whatever
came to your hand. The fire made the selection: what was your own
is bronze, what was not yours vanished in smoke."
The simile is noble and worthy of the Cyclopean craftsman, Dumas.
His great works endured; the plays which renewed the youth of the
French stage, the novels which Thackeray loved to praise, these
remain, and we trust they may always remain, to the delight of
mankind and for the sorrow of prigs.
So much has been written of Dumas' novels that criticism can hardly
hope to say more that is both new and true about them. It is
acknowledged that, in such a character as Henri III., Dumas made
history live, as magically as Scott revived the past in his Louis
XI., or Balfour of Burley. It is admitted that Dumas' good tales
are told with a vigour and life which rejoice the heart; that his
narrative is never dull, never stands still, but moves with a
freedom of adventure which perhaps has no parallel. He may fall
short of the humour, the kindly wisdom, the genial greatness of Sir
Walter at his best, and he has not that supernatural touch, that
tragic grandeur, which Scott inherits from Homer and from
Shakespeare. In another Homeric quality, [Greek text], as Homer
himself calls it, in the "delight of battle" and the spirit of the
fray, Scott and Dumas are alike masters. Their fights and the
fights in the Icelandic sagas are the best that have ever been drawn
by mortal man. When swords are aloft, in siege or on the
greensward, or in the midnight chamber where an ambush is laid,
Scott and Dumas are indeed themselves. The steel rings, the
bucklers clash, the parry and lunge pass and answer too swift for
the sight. If Dumas has not, as he certainly has not, the noble
philosophy and kindly knowledge of the heart which are Scott's, he
is far more swift, more witty, more diverting. He is not prolix,
his style is not involved, his dialogue is as rapid and keen as an
assault at arms. His favourite virtues and graces, we repeat it,
are loyalty, friendship, gaiety, generosity, courage, beauty, and
strength. He is himself the friend of the big, stupid, excellent
Porthos; of Athos, the noble and melancholy swordsman of sorrow; of
D'Artagnan, the indomitable, the trusty, the inexhaustible in
resource; but his heart is never on the side of the shifty Aramis,
with all his beauty, dexterity, bravery, and brilliance. The brave
Bussy, and the chivalrous, the doomed La Mole, are more dear to him;
and if he embellishes their characters, giving them charms and
virtues that never were theirs, history loses nothing, and romance
and we are the gainers. In all he does, at his best, as in the
"Chevalier d'Harmenthal," he has movement, kindness, courage, and
gaiety. His philosophy of life is that old philosophy of the sagas
and of Homer. Let us enjoy the movement of the fray, the faces of
fair women, the taste of good wine; let us welcome life like a
mistress, let us welcome death like a friend, and with a jest--if
death comes with honour.
Dumas is no pessimist. "Heaven has made but one drama for man--the
world," he writes, "and during these three thousand years mankind
has been hissing it." It is certain that, if a moral censorship
could have prevented it, this great drama of mortal passions would
never have been licensed, at all, never performed. But Dumas, for
one, will not hiss it, but applauds with all his might--a charmed
spectator, a fortunate actor in the eternal piece, where all the men
and women are only players. You hear his manly laughter, you hear
his mighty hands approving, you see the tears he sheds when he had
"slain Porthos"--great tears like those of Pantagruel.
His may not be the best, nor the ultimate philosophy, but it IS a
philosophy, and one of which we may some day feel the want. I read
the stilted criticisms, the pedantic carpings of some modern men who
cannot write their own language, and I gather that Dumas is out of
date. There is a new philosophy of doubts and delicacies, of
dallyings and refinements, of half-hearted lookers-on, desiring and
fearing some new order of the world. Dumas does not dally nor
doubt: he takes his side, he rushes into the smoke, he strikes his
foe; but there is never an unkind word on his lip, nor a grudging
thought in his heart.
It may be said that Dumas is not a master of words and phrases, that
he is not a raffine of expression, nor a jeweller of style. When I
read the maunderings, the stilted and staggering sentences, the
hesitating phrases, the far-sought and dear-bought and worthless
word-juggles; the sham scientific verbiage, the native pedantries of
many modern so-called "stylists," I rejoice that Dumas was not one
of these. He told a plain tale, in the language suited to a plain
tale, with abundance of wit and gaiety, as in the reflections of his
Chicot, as in all his dialogues. But he did not gnaw the end of his
pen in search of some word that nobody had ever used in this or that
connection before. The right word came to him, the simple
straightforward phrase. Epithet-hunting may be a pretty sport, and
the bag of the epithet-hunter may contain some agreeable epigrams
and rare specimens of style; but a plain tale of adventure, of love
and war, needs none of this industry, and is even spoiled by
inopportune diligence. Speed, directness, lucidity are the
characteristics of Dumas' style, and they are exactly the
characteristics which his novels required. Scott often failed, his
most loyal admirers may admit, in these essentials; but it is rarely
that Dumas fails, when he is himself and at his best.
In spite of his heedless education, Dumas had true critical
qualities, and most admired the best things. We have already seen
how he writes about Shakespeare, Virgil, Goethe, Scott. But it may
be less familiarly known that this burly man-of-all-work, ignorant
as he was of Greek, had a true and keen appreciation of Homer.
Dumas declares that he only thrice criticised his contemporaries in
an unfavourable sense, and as one wishful to find fault. The
victims were Casimir Delavigne, Scribe, and Ponsard. On each
occasion Dumas declares that, after reflecting, he saw that he was
moved by a little personal pique, not by a disinterested love of
art. He makes his confession with a rare nobility of candour; and
yet his review of Ponsard is worthy of him. M. Ponsard, who, like
Dumas, was no scholar, wrote a play styled Ulysse, and borrowed from
the Odyssey. Dumas follows Ponsard, Odyssey in hand, and while he
proves that the dramatist failed to understand Homer, proves that he
himself was, in essentials, a capable Homeric critic. Dumas
understands that far-off heroic age. He lives in its life and
sympathises with its temper. Homer and he are congenial; across the
great gulf of time they exchange smiles and a salute.
"Oh! ancient Homer, dear and good and noble, I am minded now and
again to leave all and translate thee--I, who have never a word of
Greek--so empty and so dismal are the versions men make of thee, in
verse or in prose."
How Dumas came to divine Homer, as it were, through a language he
knew not, who shall say? He DID divine him by a natural sympathy of
excellence, and his chapters on the "Ulysse" of Ponsard are worth a
wilderness of notes by learned and most un-Homeric men. For,
indeed, who can be less like the heroic minstrel than the academic
philologist?
This universality deserves note. The Homeric student who takes up a
volume of Dumas at random finds that he is not only Homeric
naturally, but that he really knows his Homer. What did he nor
know? His rapidity in reading must have been as remarkable as his
pace with the pen. As M. Blaze de Bury says: "Instinct,
experience, memory were all his; he sees at a glance, he compares in
a flash, he understands without conscious effort, he forgets nothing
that he has read." The past and present are photographed
imperishably on his brain, he knows the manners of all ages and all
countries, the names of all the arms that men have used, all the
garments they have worn, all the dishes they have tasted, all the
terms of all professions, from swordsmanship to coach-building.
Other authors have to wait, and hunt for facts; nothing stops Dumas:
he knows and remembers everything. Hence his rapidity, his
facility, his positive delight in labour: hence it came that he
might be heard, like Dickens, laughing while he worked.
This is rather a eulogy than a criticism of Dumas. His faults are
on the surface, visible to all men. He was not only rapid, he was
hasty, he was inconsistent; his need of money as well as his love of
work made him put his hand to dozens of perishable things. A
beginner, entering the forest of Dumas' books, may fail to see the
trees for the wood. He may be counselled to select first the cycle
of d'Artagnan--the "Musketeers," "Twenty Years After," and the
"Vicomte de Bragelonne." Mr. Stevenson's delightful essay on the
last may have sent many readers to it; I confess to preferring the
youth of the "Musketeers" to their old age. Then there is the cycle
of the Valois, whereof the "Dame de Monsereau" is the best--perhaps
the best thing Dumas ever wrote. The "Tulipe Noire" is a novel
girls may read, as Thackeray said, with confidence. The "Chevalier
d'Harmenthal" is nearly (not quite) as good as "Quentin Durward."
"Monte Cristo" has the best beginning--and loses itself in the
sands. The novels on the Revolution are not among the most
alluring: the famed device "L. P. D." (lilia pedibus destrue) has
the bad luck to suggest "London Parcels Delivery." That is an
accident, but the Revolution is in itself too terrible and pitiful,
and too near us (on both sides!) for fiction.
On Dumas' faults it has been no pleasure to dwell. In a recent work
I find the Jesuit Le Moyne quoted, saying about Charles V.: "What
need that future ages should be made acquainted so religious an
Emperor was not always chaste!" The same reticence allures one in
regard to so delightful an author as Dumas. He who had enriched so
many died poor; he who had told of conquering France, died during
the Terrible Year. But he could forgive, could appreciate, the
valour of an enemy. Of the Scotch at Waterloo he writes: "It was
not enough to kill them: we had to push them down." Dead, they
still stood "shoulder to shoulder." In the same generous temper an
English cavalry officer wrote home, after Waterloo, that he would
gladly have given the rest of his life to have served, on that day,
in our infantry or in the French cavalry. These are the spirits
that warm the heart, that make us all friends; and to the great, the
brave, the generous Dumas we cry, across the years and across the
tomb, our Ave atque vale!
