A Dumas of the Hour

LATE in the life of the elder Dumas, his son found him poring over the Three Guardsmen. He had promised himself, it seems, that when old he would test the real worth of his earlier vintage. “ Eh bien, où en est-tu ? ” asked the son. “ À la fin.” “ Qu’y-est-ce que tu en penses ? ” “ C’est bien.” Some days after this simple expression of approval, he was again noticed reading with extraordinary diligence, — this time the Count of Monte Cristo. A similar conversation took place. “ Qu’en penses-tu ? ” “ Peuh! Ҫa ne vaut pas les Mousquetaires.” The anecdote, so characteristic of Dumas, expresses not only the master’s final judgment as to the relative merit of his two typical works, but that of posterity. Absorbing as the Count of Monte Cristo is in intricacy of plot, superb as it is in its assertion of the enormous power, for good or evil, of the centred human will, its overwrought motive and its prevailing sombreness of tone restrict its appeal to humanity, and eventually condemn it to a lower grade of fiction than that of the Three Guardsmen. Indeed, for the people at large — the last court of resort in criticism — it is not literature of the Monte Cristo type that holds its own longest, not fiction that portrays the everlasting triumph over the world of one man or one idea, or even that which attempts, like Dante’s great tale, to mould the world according to God’s ideal judgment of it, but the human comedy, where man jostles with man, where tears and laughter mingle, where life shows as it is, not crushed into set and philosophic shapes, however plausible.

It is but carrying the same thought a step further to notice the great power and popularity of fiction based not merely on seemingly natural forms and conditions of life, but on such events, whether real or legendary, of history itself as have become, or may become, typical of the fortunes of humanity. If we would not forego the opportunity which the novel offers of extending our sympathetic interest in human nature beyond the borders of the actual present, we must not, then, despise, as it is sometimes the fashion to do, the historical novel as a form of literature. The present is good, the real is good; imagination working on the past is unreal, in that it necessarily swerves away from the actual fact of the past. But it is not to be doubted that the historical romance — the comédie historique as distinguished from the comédie humaine or divine — has in almost all ages held man’s interest and roused his imagination. The Iliad and the Æneid, the Chanson de Roland and Shakespeare’s historical plays, owe much of their greatness and success to the skill of their authors in allowing the results of their own individual experience or fancy to be supplemented by the rich and accumulated associations that cluster in the popular imagination around great historic epochs.

Each of onr great English masters of historical romance, Shakespeare and Scott, had a strong influence on Dumas, who was quick to follow Victor Hugo in a course for which the popular taste was ripe, and for which his inexhaustible vitality and his double race inheritance of sensations rendered him peculiarly fitted. Since Dumas’s time, two new species of literature have gained, to a greater or less degree, the favor of the multitude, — the naturalistic or realistic novel, and the novel with a purpose, the novel of religion or of demonstration. We may fairly question, however, and rely for corroboration on publishers’ records, whether the historical romance has been, or is, in any danger of dying completely out. Long life to the race, says the present writer, at least ; for, good history or bad, true archæology or false, philology to the pro or the con, the type which Les Trois Mousquetaires and La Reine Margot represent, the historical novel of adventure, is second only to sleep for the unraveling of care and the rejuvenation of the tired human spirit. Unlucky he whose bedside is ever unblessed by one of that great family, or who measures dreary journeys save in terms of their crisp chapters or their fat volumes. The bare present may appall us, the romance of the present or the future seem fallacious or absurd ; in the romance of the past we may lose ourselves without fear.

Luckily, the wheel of fortune brings us now and then, as if to save us, in pity, from the death of boredom at the hands of the realistic or the religious novel, an author who, like Scott or Dumas, satisfies the popular and natural craving for historical romance. The Dumas of the hour is Mr. Stanley J. Weyman, an Englishman, whose first fiction fell in with the school of Trollope, but who has now given us five novels¹ smacking of Dumas in plot, in place, and in time, and with not a little of the master’s force and vitality in them. It may be worth while, then, to compare Mr. Weyman’s work, in a general way, with that of Dumas, bringing out the modifications of his method, which the somewhat altered tastes and ambitions of our day have resulted in.

The Man in Black is a trivial, inconsequential tale, but the others deserve at least a slight analysis. The Gentleman of France was a Huguenot of Brittany, who had seen service under the great Condé, but who, poor courtier and poverty-stricken gentleman, was at the last gasp of his fortune when he was entrusted with a perilous mission by Henry of Navarre. The thankless task was none other than to seem to kidnap a kinswoman of the great Vicomte de Turenne, a girl well disposed toward the king, and with a secret of state in her possession. It was the time when the League had, for the moment, the upper hand, and on Mademoiselle de la Vire’s meeting Henry of Valois and convincing him of Turenne’s duplicity hung, or seemed to hang, Henry of Navarre’s fate. But acknowledge the plot the royal schemer could not without turning Turenne’s secret ambition into open enmity. The scapegoat, Gaston, out at the elbows as he was, by his very grim straightforwardness managed to make off in safety with the gay court demoiselle, rather against her will ; and after many vicissitudes of fortune, still flouted by her, and still bravely defending her against perils of sword and plague, to bring her into the presence of Valois and back again to security. By this time the proud lady was deep in love with her sombre but trusty guardian, who, however, as an unacknowledged political agent and the author of violent deeds, was under the ban of both parties. In the nick of time, nevertheless, recognition came, as the assassin’s knife made Henry of Navarre Henry IV., and the shamefaced Sieur de Marsac became the governor of Armagnac, and the husband of the damsel who had once despised his poverty and his awkwardness.

The House of the Wolf deals with the massacre of St. Bartholomew. The Wolf is a certain grim, gigantic, and ruthless Raoul de Mar, Vidume de Bezers. He wooes the young Catherine de Caylus, and, learning that she has a Huguenot lover, rides off to Paris with a cruel threat against him. Her three country cousins, mere boys, spur hotly after him to warn her betrothed, but, falling into the Wolf’s hands, accomplish little besides being tossed to and fro in the tumult of the massacre, and being dragged back, with the captured fiancé, in the midst of the Wolf’s guard. But the beast relents, Catherine gets her lover again, and the boys come trotting home in useless triumph.

In Under the Red Robe and Francis Cludde the plot is scarcely less superficial. In the first, Gil de Berault, gambler, duelist, and bully, has forfeited his life to the law. Richelieu spares him on condition that he do for him a dirty piece of work in Béarn, — the spying out and capturing in his own house of M. de Cocheforêt, a Gascon rebel. Disguised as a Huguenot and a friend, Berault finds and seizes his man, but only by winning and betraying the confidence of Cocheforêt’s sister, whom he had meantime learned to love and reverence as a more pure and noble woman than any his dissolute life had ever led him to imagine. At the last the rascal redeems himself by giving the prisoner his freedom, and returning alone to Paris as a man of honor, to pay the price of his life to the cardinal. Thither, of course, the heroine comes also to beg for his pardon. The time is propitious, the Red Robe is generous, and the tale ends with rejoicings over the repentant sinner and the sound of wedding bells. In the second, perhaps the most pleasing of all Mr. Weyman’s novels, Francis Cludde, a sturdy young Englishman of old stock, and a Protestant, uncomfortable at home in Queen Mary’s time, sets out to build up name and fame for himself; succeeding by good luck and brave deeds, as a young adventurer should.

Such are plots, by no means intricate, with which Mr. Weyman delights his readers. Each novel can be read at a sitting. The action is rapid, the outcome rarely long in doubt. The English is pure and unaffected, only by exception artificially literary, and, as a rule, delightfully free from labored archaisms. With means so simple the author produces effects which arrest the attention by their picturesqueness and force. The English boy, slow to speak and prompt to act, growing cooler as his excitement increases, and fairly blundering his way into honor and fortune; the French stripling, proud of his house, and risking his foolish neck for a noble whim ; the sombre and desperate Huguenot, wresting victory from defeat by his grim courage; the hard-hearted adventurer, shedding his leopard’s spots under a good woman’s gaze, — characters such as these are to our Anglo-Saxon liking, and do not easily leave the memory. Rare, too, as striking words and phrases are in Mr. Weyman’s work, which impresses one rather as a whole than by details, we find here and there scenes that strike the imagination freshly and picturesquely. The landscape of Béarn as described in Under the Red Robe, for instance, is charming, and it is not easy to forget the stirring passage, in A Gentleman of France, where Marsac defends at Blois, one against many, the stairway before the battered door of his scornful lady’s prison-chamber : —

“ ‘ Bonne Foi ! France et Bonne Foi! ’ It seemed to me that I had not spoken, that I had plied steel in grimmest silence ; and yet the cry still rang and echoed in the roof as I lowered my point and stood looking down on them, — ‘France et Bonne Foi! ’

“ ‘ Bonne Foi and good sword ! ’ cried a voice behind me. And looking swiftly round, I saw mademoiselle’s face thrust through the hole in the door. Her eyes Sparkled with a fierce light, her lips were red beyond the ordinary, and her hair, loosened and thrown into disordered tresses by her exertions, fell in thick masses about her white cheeks, and gave her the aspect of a war-witch, such as they tell of in my country of Brittany. ‘ Good sword ! ’ she cried again, and clapped her hands.”

Rich in promise as this group of novels is, there are, on the other hand, marked characteristics of Mr. Weyman’s work that must strike the lover of Dumas as faults or limitations. It fails, in the first place, in what we may call emotional depth and breadth. These romances hold our attention, and mayhap cling to our memory. I doubt if by any chance they move us to laughter or to tears. In Dumas’s best work we run the whole gamut of the emotions. There we have wit, gentle humor, broad fun, no less than the horrible, the thrilling, the touching, or the deeply sorrowful. But Mr. Weyman’s work is all of a single tone and color. One adventure follows rapidly another of the same sort, in such a way that it is only the total impression upon which the reader’s emotions can be based. In no full sense of the words can we say that his characters live. Worse than that: we read almost every chapter with a sense of shame. Not a single one of his heroes, unless it be Francis Cludde, has anything like a genuine Gascon self-satisfaction in his own words or deeds, nor can we be thoroughly proud of one of them. The boy Caylus is hoodwinked and outwitted at every turn of his petty plans; Berault is a spy and a sharper, hovering at best between the noble and the vile; Marsac, in spite of his good sword, is almost despicable in his tatters and gaucherie.

In the second place, Mr. Weyman seems to fail in the intellectual part of his task, the grouping, the modulation of his characters, the proper subordination one to another of the creatures of his own imagination. The simple plot, the single motive, the bareness of the modern short story, possess him entirely, and spoil the breadth and compass of his work. A curious sign of this is his predilection for the narrative in the first person. It lends naïveté of phrase, but it produces effects too subtle for constant use, too one-sided, too monotonous. We miss everywhere contrast, refreshing alternation of standpoint. Imagine the broad and noble world of La Reine Margot portrayed from the point of view of La Mole or Coconas, or any of the ten chief characters of the novel. How distorted, how lacking in perspective, would such a single point of view justly appear ! Our modern methods, with their morbid craving for individuality, smack too much of the experimental psychologist. The genuine memoir, the actual record of experience, is valuable, indeed, for the constructive historian ; but to reverse the process, to force a great epoch, infinite in its rich suggestiveness of varying men and moods, of warring ambitions, diverging hopes and fears and loves and hates, into the strait-jacket of a single pseudo - memoir, is the height of folly. To amuse or interest one’s readers by a single fictitious episode of the past is one matter, and a trifling one; to refresh and reinvigorate them by spreading before them a whole broad world of the past, peopled with great and small figures, of diverse characters and diverse aims, to give to the dead facts of encyclopædic quartos and stout octavos the reality of life and the glamour of romantic adventure, to quicken the pulses, to loose the bonds of tears and smiles and laughter, to construct a veritable simulacrum of throbbing existence and action in ages lost to actual human memory, — that is another matter, and one not trifling.