Alexandre Dumas

IN 1891 Mr. Davidson published two small volumes of extracts from Dumas’s Memoirs; but the complete work now appears in English for the first time.¹ Mrs. Waller, the translator, her publishers, and Mr. Andrew Lang, in his graceful introduction, have unquestionably rendered a considerable service to English literature. Certain persons may be annoyed, or may profess to be annoyed, because a few passages more suited to French than to English taste have not been omitted; but there are strong arguments in these matters for the policy of all or none.

Those who are curious in translation will compare Mrs. Waller’s work and Mr. Davidson’s with much interest. Sometimes one catches the author’s spirit better, sometimes the other. Quite often neither catches it at all. In literal accuracy Air. Davidson has distinctly the advantage. Indeed, Mrs. Waller’s slips are rather too frequent. Some of them may perhaps be explained by the extensive collation to which she refers in her preface, and in which I have been unable to follow her. But no difference of text can justify the omission of the pretty touch, comme les trois Curiaces, which Mr. Davidson justly notes as most Dumas-like. Deux mille becomes in the translation “ten thousand.” Comme je l’ai fait remarquer does not mean “as I had noticed;” and cette œuvre de perfection que l’art atteint parfois en depassant la nature is not adequately rendered by “that perfect standard to which art everywhere attains when it surpasses nature.” Nevertheless, in spite of these and similar lapses, Mrs. Waller contrives to catch a considerable amount of the grace and ease and lightness of her elusive original; and the book i.s thoroughly readable, —surely the first essential with Dumas, who is always readable, if nothing else.

Air. Davidson, whose excellent volume on Dumas must be the foundation of any careful study of the subject, dismisses his author with the remark: “Except for increasing the already ample means of relaxation, he did nothing to benefit humanity at large.” But is not this a rather grudging epitaph for the creator of Monte Cristo ? Are the means of relaxation so ample that we can afford to treat La Tour de Nesle and La Reine Margot as alms for oblivion ? Would Stevenson have read Le Vicomte de Bragelonne six times, would you or I have read Les Trois Mousquetaires more times than we can count, if other relaxation of an equally delightful order were indeed so easily obtainable ? In spite of the flood of historical novels and all other kinds of novels that overwhelmed the nineteenth century, story-tellers like Dumas are not born every day, nor yet every other day.

For he was a story-teller by nature, one who could make a story of anything, one who did make a story of everything, for the joy of his own childlike imagination. “I am not like other people. Everything interests me.” The round oath of a man, the smile of a woman, a dog asleep in the sun, a bird singing in a bush, even a feather floating in the breeze, was enough. Fancy seized it and wove an airy, sunbright web about it, glittering with wit, touched with just a hint of pathos; and as we read, we forget the slightness of the substance in the grace and delicacy of the texture.

It is an odd thing, this national French gift of story-telling, of seeking by instinct the group-effect, as it were, of a set of characters, their composite relations to one another and the development of these relations in dramatic climax. English writers, from Chaucer down, dwell by preference on the individual character, force it only with labor and difficulty into the general framework, from which it constantly escapes in delightful but wholly undramatic human eccentricity. To the French habit of mind, such individuality is excrescent and distasteful. Let the characters develop as fully and freely as the action requires, no more. They are there for the action, not the action for them. Hence, as the English defect is dull diffusion and a chaos of disorder, so the French is loss of human truth in a mad eagerness for forcible situations, that is to say, melodrama.

Even in Hugo, in Balzac, in Flaubert, in Zola, one has an uneasy feeling that melodrama is not too far away. In Dumas it is frankly present always. The situation — something that shall tear the nerves, make the heart leap and the breath stop — for Dumas there lies the true art of dramatist and novelist. And what situations! No one ever had more than he the two great dramatic gifts, which perhaps are only one, the gift of preparation and the gift of climax. “Of all dénonoûments, past, present, and I will say even to come,” writes Sarcey, “that of Antony is the most brilliant, the most startling, the most logical, the most rapid; a stroke of genius.” Henri III, Richard Darlington, La Tour de Nesle are full of effects scarcely inferior. If one thinks first of the plays, it is only because in them the action is more concentrated than in the novels. But in novel after novel also, there is the same sure instinct of arrangement, the same master’s hand, masterly for obtaining the sort of effect which the author has chiefly in view.

And perhaps the melodrama is not quite all. The creatures are not always mere puppets, wire-pulled, stirring the pulse when they clash together, then forgotten. We hate them sometimes, sometimes love them, sometimes even remember them. Marguerite and Buridan are not wholly unreal in their wild passion. The scene of reconciliation between the Musketeers on Place Royale has something deeper than mere effect. And these are only two among many. Under all his gift of technique, his love of startling and amazing, the man was not without an eye, a grip on life, above all, a heart that beat widely, with many sorrows and many joys.

Then the style is the style of melodrama, but it is also far more. No one knew better how and when to let loose sharp, stinging, burning shafts of phrase, like the final speech of Antony, “Elle m’a résisté ; je l’ai assassinée,” — shafts which flew over the footlights straight to the heart of every auditor. But these effects would be nothing without the varied movement of narration, the ease, the lightness, the grace,—above all, the perpetual wit, the play of delicate irony, which saves sentiment from being sentimental and erudition from being dull.

Dumas’s style has been much abused, and in some ways deserves it. Mr. Saintsbury considers that the plays have “but little value as literature properly socalled,” and that “the style of the novels is not more remarkable as such than that of the dramas.” But how far more discerning and sympathetic is Stevenson’s characterization of it: “Light as a whipped trifle, strong as silk; wordy like a village tale; pat like a general’s dispatch; with every fault, yet never tedious; with no merit, yet inimitably right.” As for dialogue, — that subtlest test of the novelist’s genius, — which neither Balzac, nor Flaubert, nor Zola could manage with flexibility or ease, Dumas may have used it to excess, but who has ever carried it to greater perfection ? In M. Lemaître’s excellent, if somewhat cynical, phrase. Dumas’s dialogue has “the wonderful quality of stringing out the narrative to the crack of doom and at the same time making it appear to move with headlong rapidity.” But let it string out, so it moves. And surely Dumas’s conversations do move, as no others ever have.

In the hurry of modern reading, few people have time to get at Dumas in any but his best-known works. Yet to form a complete idea of his powers, one must take a much wider survey. All periods, all nations, all regions of the earth came at one time or another under his pen. Of course this means an inevitable superficiality and inaccuracy. But one overlooks these defects, is hardly aware of them, in the ease, the spirit, the unfailing humanness of the narrative. Take a minor story like L’Isle de Feu, dealing with the Dutch in Java and with the habits and superstitions of the natives, snake - charming, spirit - haunting, etc. Everywhere there is movement, life, character, the wit of the Impressions de Voy-age, the passion of La Reine Margot. And if Dumas does not quite anticipate the seductive melancholy of Loti’s tropics, he gives hints of it which are really wonderful for a man who had never been south of latitude thirty.

Perhaps, outside of the historical novels, we may select four very different books as most typical of Dumas’s great variety of production. First, in Conscience l’Innocent, we have a simple idyllic subject, recalling George Sand’s country stories: peasant life, rural scenes, sweet pictures of Dumas’s own village home at Villers-Cotterets, which he introduced into so many of his writings. Second, in the immense canvas of Salvator, too little appreciated, we have a picture of contemporary conditions, the Paris of Sue and Hugo, treated with a vividness far beyond Sue and a dramatic power which Hugo never could command. Third, comes the incomplete Isaac Laquedem, the vast Odyssey of the Wandering Jew, in which the author planned to develop epically the whole history of the world, though the censorship allowed him to get no further than the small Biblical portion of it. Few of Dumas’s books illustrate better the really soaring sweep of his imagination, and not many have a larger share of his esprit. Lastly, there is Monte Cristo, which, on the whole, remains, doubtless, the best example of what Dumas could do without history to support him. “Pure melodrama,” some will say; in a sense, truly. Yet, as compared with the melodrama of, for instance, Armadale and The Woman in White, there is a certain largeness, a sombre grandeur, about the vengeance of Dantès, which goes almost far enough to lift the book out of the realm of melodrama, and into that of tragedy. And then there is the wit!

But it is on historical romance, whether in drama or fiction, that Dumas’s popularity must chiefly rest. He himself felt it would be so,hoped it would be so; and his numerous references to the matter, if amusing, are also extremely interesting. He speaks of his series of historical novels as “the immense picture we have undertaken to unroll before the eyes of our readers, in which, if our genius equaled our good will, we would introduce all classes of men from the beggar to the king, from Caliban to Ariel.” And again : “Balzac has written a great work entitled The Human Comedy. Our work, begun at the same time, may be entitled The Drama of France.” He hopes that his labors will be profitable as well as amusing: “We intentionally say ‘instruct’ first, for amusement with us is only a mask for instruction. . . . Concerning the last five centuries and a half we have taught France more history than any historian.” And when some one gently insinuates that from a purely historical point of view his work cannot stand with the highest, he replies with his usual charming humor, “It is the unreadable histories that make a stir; they are like dinners you can’t digest; digestible dinners give you no cause to think about them on the next day.”

After all, humor apart, we must recognize the justice of Dumas’s claim; and the enduring life and perpetual revival of the historical novel go far to support it. Mankind in general do not love indigestible histories; but they do love to hear about Henry IV, Richelieu, and the Stuarts, about Washington and Lincoln and Napoleon, and in hearing they do learn, even against their will. Pedants shake their heads. This birth-date is incorrect. That victory was not a victory at alt. When Dr. Dryasdust has given the slow labor of a lifetime to disentangling fact from fiction, how wicked to mislead the ignorant by wantonly developing fiction out of fact! As if Dr. Dryasdust really knew fact from fiction! As if the higher spiritual facts were not altogether beyond his ken and his researches! As if any two pedants agreed! Take the central fact of history, the point from which everything of importance and interest emanates, — human character, the human soul. What pedant can reach it, can analyze it with his finest microscope? Napoleon was born on such a day, died on such a day, this he did, that he did. But was he in any sense patriotic, an idealist, a lover of France ? Was he a suspicious, jealous, lascivious tyrant ? Was he sometimes one, sometimes the other ? State documents and gossiping memoirs give no final answer to these questions, only hints and cloudy indications bearing upon them, from which the genius of the historian must sketch a figure for itself. Therefore, as many historians, so many Napoleons, and in the end my Napoleon, your Napoleon. If so, why not Alexandre Dumas’s Napoleon, said Dumas, having in the end perhaps as much faculty of imaginative divination as you or I, or even as several historians whom we will not mention.

In fact, Dumas has undoubtedly taught the history of France to thousands who would otherwise have had little concern with it. And his characters live. Catherine de’ Medici and her sons, Louis XIV, Mazarin, the Duc de Richelieu, Marie Antoinette — we know them as we know people whom we meet every day: in one sense, perhaps not at all; but in another sense, intimately. Great actions call for a large background, which should be handled with the wide sweep of the scene-painter, not with the curious minuteness of the artist in miniatures. The very abundance of these characters, the vastness of the canvas, helps the reality, and in this matter of amplitude Dumas and Scott show their genius, and triumph over the petty concentration of later imitators. Nor are the characters wholly or mainly of Dumas’s own invention less vivid than those historical; for Dumas learned from Scott the cardinal secret of historical romance, which Shakespeare did not grasp, that the action of the story should turn, not on real personages, but on fictitious heroes and heroines, whose fortunes can be moulded freely for a dramatic purpose. Dumas himself says somewhere that people complain of the length of his novels, yet that the longest have been the most popular and the most successful. It is so. We can wander for days in the vast galleries of the Reine Margot series, charmed with the gallantry of La Mole, the vivacity of Coconnas, the bravado of Bussy, above all, the inimitable wit and shrewdness of Chicot, who surely comes next to d’Artagnan among all Dumas’s literary children. And d’Artagnan — what a broad country he inhabits! How lovely to lose one’s self there in long winter evenings, meeting at every turn a saucy face or a gay gesture or a keen flash of sword that makes one forget the passage of time. “I never had a care that a half-hour’s reading would not dissipate,” said Montesquieu. Fortunate man! How few of us resemble him! But if a half-hour’s reading of anything would work such a miracle, surely a novel of Dumas would do it.

As for the man himself, he happily created such characters as d’Artagnan and Chicot because he resembled them, and was in his own person as picturesque a figure as any that talks passion in his plays, or wit in the endless pages of his novels. I do not know that he had ever read Milton’s oracular saying that he who would be a great poet should make his life a true poem; but, in any case, he pointed it aptly by showing that the best way to write romantic novels is to make a romantic novel of your own career. Born in 1802, in the most stirring period of French history, one-quarter African by blood, he worked his way upward from bitter poverty and insignificance to sudden glory and considerable wealth. Ambitious for political as well as literary success, he took a more or less active part in the various commotions of the second quarter of the century, so that he was able to say of himself with some truth and immense satisfaction, “I have touched the left hand of princes, the right hand of artists and literary celebrities, and have come in contact with all phases of life.”

A great traveler, a great hunter, he had innumerable adventures by flood and field. Quick in emotion and quicker in speech, he made friends everywhere and some enemies. Peculiarly sensitive to the charms and caresses of women, he had no end of love-affairs, all more or less discreditable. Thoughtless, careless, full of wit, full of laughter, he traveled the primrose way, plucking kisses like spring blossoms, wrapping his cloak more tightly round him when he ran into winter storms of envy, jealousy, and mocking. What wealth he had he squandered, what glory, he frittered away. And as he was born in a whirlwind of French triumph, so he died, in 1870, in a wilder whirlwind of French ruin and despair.

The man’s life was, indeed, a novel; and in writing his memoirs he dressed it out as such, heightening, coloring, enriching the golden web of memory, as only he knew how to do; so that I am almost ready to call these same memoirs the best of his works, even with Les Trois Mousquetaires and La Tour de Nesle in fresh remembrance. Such variety and vivacity of anecdote, such vivid, shifting portraiture of characters, such quick reality of incident, such wit always. But the best of it, unquestionably, is not Talma, nor Dorval, nor Hugo, nor the Duke of Orleans, but just Alexandre Dumas. It is said that once, when a friend asked him how he had enjoyed a party, Dumas replied, “I should have been horribly bored, if it had n’t been for myself.” Readers of the memoirs will easily understand how other society might have seemed dull in comparison.

From all the tangled mass of anecdote and laughter, let us try to gather one or two definite lines of portraiture for the better understanding of this singular personage, “one of the forces of nature,” as Michelel called him in a phrase which Dumas loved to repeat.

And to begin with the beginning. Did the creator of Buridan and Chicot have a religion, did he trouble himself with abstract ideas ? You smile; and certainly he did not trouble his readers very much with these things. Yet in his own opinion he was a thinker, and a rather deep one. Read, in the preface to Caligula, how the public received with awe “this rushing torrent of thought, which appeared to it perhaps new and daring, but solemn and chaste; and then withdrew, with bowed head, like a man who has at last found the solution of a problem which has vexed him during many sleepless nights.”

In his turbulent youth, the author of Antony was a disbeliever, as became a brother of Byron and Musset; ‘ ‘ there are moments when I would give thee up my soul, if I believed I had one.” But in later years he settled down to the soberer view which appears in the dedication of La Conscience to Hugo; “in testimony of a friendship which has survived exile and will, I hope, survive death. I believe in the immortality of the soul.” And again and again he testified to the power of his early religious training, which “left upon all my beliefs, upon all my opinions, so profound an impression that even to-day I cannot enter a church without taking the holy water, cannot pass a crucifix without making the sign of the cross.” Nor do these emotions spring from mere religiosity, but from an astonishingly, not to say crudely, definite form of belief: “I know not what my merit has been, whether in this world or in the other worlds I may have inhabited before; but God has shown me special favors and in all the critical situations in which I have found myself, he has come visibly to my assistance. Therefore, O God, I confess thy name openly and humbly before all sceptics and before all believers.” What revivalist of to-day could speak with more fervor ? If only one did not suspect a bit of the irony, which shows more clearly in the conversation with his old teacher, whose prayers Dumas had requested. “My prayers?” said the abbé. “You don’t believe in them.”— “No, I don’t always believe in them. That is very true; but don’t worry: when I need them, I will believe in them.” On the strength of that remark we might almost call Dumas the inventor of pragmatism before Professor James.

And the irony is rooted in a truth of character. Dumas was a man of this world. He might dream of the other at odd moments, in vague curiosity; but by temperament he was a frank pagan, an eater, a laugher, a lover, a fighter, gorgeously in words, not wholly ineffectively in deeds, even after we have made the necessary discount from his own version of his exploits. He had inherited something of his father’s magnificent physique and something of his father’s courage. When he tells us that “since I have arrived at manhood, whenever danger has presented itself, by night or by day, I have always walked straight up to danger,” we believe him — with the discount aforesaid; and we believe him all the more, because, like every brave man, he does not hesitate to confess fear. “It was the first time I had heard the noise of grapeshot, and I say frankly that I will not believe any one who tells me that he heard that noise for the first time without perturbation.”

In truth, the religion, the courage, the fear — all, and everything else in the man, were a matter of impulse, of immediate emotion. He was quite aware of this himself. When he proposed his Vendée mission to Lafayette, the latter said to him, “Have you reflected on what this means ?” — “As much as I am capable of reflecting about anything: I am a man of instinct, not of reflection.” The extraordinary vanity of which he was justly accused, of which he accuses himself, — “everybody knows the vain side of my character,” — was only one phase of this natural impulsiveness. He spoke out what others think — and keep to themselves. Mr. Davidson has admirably noted that in Dumas’s case vanity was perfectly compatible with humility. He had no absurdly exaggerated idea of his own powers. But he liked to talk about himself, to be conspicuous, to be the central figure on every stage. The African blood, of which he was not ashamed, — “I am a mulatto,” he says repeatedly,— told in him; the negro childlikeness. He was a child always, above all childlike in this matter of vanity. Readers of Tom Sawyer will remember that that delightful youth, on hearing the beatific vision of Isaiah, which pictures such a varied menagerie dwelling in harmony, with a little child to lead them, had one absorbing wish, that he might be that little child. Dumas was precisely like Tom Sawyer; witness this delightful prayer of his youth: “ Make me great and glorious, O Lord, that I may come nearer unto thee. And the more glorious thou makest me, the more humbly will I confess thy name, thy majesty, thy splendor.”

The same childlike temper, the fresh, animal instincts of a great boy, explain, if they do not excuse, the disorders of Dumas’s life.

In this connection it is hardly necessary to do more than to point out his hopeless aberration from all Anglo-Saxon standards of propriety and decency. It would be easy to lash such aberration; but it is perhaps better to consider it in connection with the man’s character as a whole, and to remember that his life was as far as possible from being a generally idle or dissipated one. He never smoked, cherishing, in fact, a grudge against tobacco, which he regarded as an enemy to true sociability. He was moderate in eating and drinking. Above all, he was an enormous worker. No man essentially vicious, no man who had not a large fund of temperance and self-control, could have produced a tithe of Dumas’s legacy to posterity. But what is most interesting of all in this matter of morals is Dumas’s entire satisfaction with himself. I doubt if any other human being would deliberately have ventured on a statement so remarkable as the following: “When the hand of the Lord closes the two horizons of my life, letting fall the veil of his love between the nothingness that precedes and the nothingness that follows the life of man, he may examine the intermediate space with his most rigorous scrutiny, he will not find there one single evil thought or one action for which I feel that I should reproach myself.” Comment on this would only dim its splendor. Yet people say that the memoirs of Dumas lack interest as human documents! He was an atrocious hypocrite, then, you think ? Not the least in the world. Simply a child, always a child.

A child in money matters also. No one could accuse him of deliberate financial dishonesty; but to beg and borrow and never to pay was the normal condition of things. To promise right and left when cash was needed, then to find one’s self entirely unable to fulfill one’s promises, — still childlike. Only, persons of that childlike temper, who have not genius, are apt to end badly. And then, after all, to write in cold blood that one has never had a single action to reproach one’s self with! I trust the reader appreciates that passage as I do.

And if the child lacked a sense of money property, how should he be likely to have a sense of property in literature ? Shakespeare, Schiller, dozens of others had had ideas which were useful. Why not use them ? A few persons had previously written on the history of France. Distinguished historical characters had left memoirs describing their own achievements. It would have been almost disrespectful to neglect the valuable material thus afforded. Let us quote the histories and borrow from the memoirs. As for mentioning any little indebtedness, life is not long enough for that. We make bold to think that what we invent is quite as good as what we take from others. So it is — far better, A careful comparison of Les Trois Mousquetaires with the original d’Artagnan memoirs increases rather than diminishes one’s admiration for the author of the novel.

But it will be said that, even after borrowing his material, Dumas could not write this same novel without the assistance of a certain Maquet. Again the same childlike looseness in the sense of property. Could a genius be expected to write three hundred ² volumes without helpers for the rough work ? He must have hodmen to fetch bricks and mortar. And perhaps the builder, hurried and over-driven, may set the hodmen to lay a bit of wall here and there, may come to leave altogether too much to hodmen, so that the work suffers for it. What matter ? Had ever any Maquet or Gaillardet or Meurice, writing by himself, the Dumas touch? As Mr. Lang justly points out, no collaborator has been suggested for the Memoirs, and I have already said that the Memoirs belong, in many respects, to Dumas’s best, most characteristic work.

Then, a child is as ready to give as to take. So was Dumas. In money matters it goes without saying. He was always ready to give, to give to everybody everything he had, and even everything he had not and some one else had. " Nature had already put in my heart,” he says of his childhood, “that fountain of general kindliness through which flows away and will flow away, everything I had, everything I have, and everything I ever shall have.”But it was not only money, it was time and thought, labor and many steps. This same fountain of general kindliness was always at the service even of strangers. For instance, Dumas himself tells us that, happening once to be in a seaport town, he found a young couple just sailing for the islands and very desolate. He set himself to cheer them up, and his efforts were so well received that he could not find it in his heart to leave them, though pressing business called him away. He went on board ship with them, and only returned on the pilot boat, in the midst of a gale and at the peril of his life, so says the story. Even in the matter of literary collaboration, Mr. Davidson justly points out that Dumas gave as well as took, and that the list of his debtors is longer than that of his creditors.

And in the highest generosity, that of sympathy and appreciation for fellowworkers, the absence of envy and meanness in rivalry, Dumas is nobly abundant. He tells us so himself, not having the habit of concealing his virtues: “Having arrived at the summit which every man finds in the middle of life’s journey, I ask nothing, I desire nothing, I envy nothing, I have many friendships and not one single hatred.” More reliable evidence lies in the general tone of enthusiasm and admiration with which he speaks of all his contemporaries. Musset avoided him, Balzac insulted him; yet he refers to both with hearty praise very different from the damning commendations of the envious Sainte-Beuve. Lamartine and Hugo he eulogizes with lavish freedom, not only in the often-quoted remark, “Hugo is a thinker, Lamartine a dreamer, and I am a popularizer,” — a remark more generous than discriminating,— but in innumerable passages which leave no possible doubt of his humility and sincerity. “ Style was what I lacked above everything else. If you had asked me for ten years of my life, promising in exchange that one day I should attain the expression of Hugo’s Marion Delorme, I would not have hesitated, I would have given them instantly.”

These things make Dumas attractive, lovable even, as few French writers are lovable. With all his faults he has something of the personal charm of Scott. Only something, however; for Scott, no whit less generous, less kindly, had the sanity, the stability, why avoid the word, the moral character, which Dumas had not. And in comparing their works — a comparison which suggests itself almost inevitably; “ Scott, the grandfather of us all,” said Dumas himself — this difference of morals strikes us even more than the important differences of style and handling of character. It is the immortal merit of Scott that he wrote novels of love and adventure as manly, as virile, as heart can wish, yet absolutely pure.

Now, Dumas has the grave disadvantage of not knowing what morals — sexual morals — are. Listen to him: “Of the six hundred volumes (1848) that I have written, there are not four which the hand of the most scrupulous mother need conceal from her daughter.”The reader who knows Dumas only in Les Trois Mousquetaires will wonder by what fortunate chance he has happened on two volumes out of those “not four.”But he may reassure himself. There are others of the six hundred which, to use the modern French perversion, more effective untranslated, the daughter will not recommend to her mother. The truth is, Dumas’s innocence is worse than, say, Maupassant’s sophistication. To the author of La Reine Margot, love, so called, is all, the excuse, the justification, for everything. Marriage — ça n’existe pas; Dumas knew all about it. He was married himself for a few months — at the King’s urgent suggestion. Then he recommended the lady to the ambassador at Florence with a most polite note, and she disappeared from his too flowery career. Therefore Dumas begins his love-stories where Scott’s end, and the delicate refinement, the pure womanly freedom of Jeanie Deans and Diana Vernon, is missing in the Frenchman’s young ladies, who all either wish to be in a nunnery or ought to be.

The comparison wdth Scott suggests another with a greater than Scott; and like Scott, Dumas did not object to being compared with Shakespeare, who, by the way, has never been more nobly praised in a brief sentence than in Dumas’s saying that “he was the greatest of all creators after God.” There are striking resemblances between the two writers. Shakespeare began in poverty, lived among theatrical people, made a fortune by the theatre. Only, being a thrifty English bourgeois, he put the fortune into his own pocket instead of into others’. Shakespeare made a continuous show of English history and bade the world attend it. Shakespeare begged, borrowed, and stole from dead and living, so that his contemporaries spoke of his

Tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide. Doubtless Maquet and Gaillardet would have been willing to apply the phrase to their celebrated collaborator. Thus far the comparison works well enough. But Shakespeare had a style which was beyond even that of Marion Delorme. And then, Shakespeare felt and thought as a man, not as a child; his brain and his heart carried the weight of the world.

What will be the future of Dumas ? Will his work pass, as other novels of romantic adventure have passed ? Three hundred years ago idle women — and men — read Amadis de Gaul and the like, with passion. Says the waiting-woman in Massinger’s Guardian: —

In all the books of Amadis de Gaul The Palmerins and that true Spanish story, The Mirror of Knighthood, which I have read often, Read feelingly, nay, more, I do believe in’t, My lady has no parallel.

Where are Amadis and the Palmerins now? Two hundred years ago the same persons read with the same passion the novels of Scudéry and La .Calprenede. “ At noon home,”says Mr. Pepys, “ where I find my wife troubled still at my checking her last night in the coach in her long stories out of Grand Cyrus, which she would tell, though nothing to the purpose, nor in any good manner.”And hear Madame de Sévigné on Cléopâtre: “The style of La Calprenède is abominable in a thousand places: long sentences in the full-blown, romantic fashion, ill-chosen words — I am perfectly aware of it. Yet it holds me like glue. The beauty of the sentiments, the violent passions, the great scale on which everything takes place, and the miraculous success of the hero’s redoubtable sword — it carries me away, as if I were a young girl.” Le sucrès miraculeux deleur redoutable épée; if one tried a thousand times, could one express more precisely and concisely one’s feelings about Les Trois Mousquetaires ? Yet Grand Cyrus is dead, and Cléopâtre utterly forgotten. No bright-eyed girl asks for them in any circulating library any more. Shall d’Artagnan, “ dear d’Artagnan.” as Stevenson justly calls him, — “I do not say that there is no character so well-drawn in Shakespeare; I do say that there is none that I love so wholly,” — d’Artagnan, whose redoutable épéee makes such delightful havoc among the nameless canaille, whose more redoubtable wit sets kings and queens and dukes and cardinals at odds and brings them to peace again, — shall d’Artagnan, too, die and be forgotten ? The thought is enough to make one close Le Vicomte de Bragelonne in the middle and fall a-dreaming on the flight of time and the changes of the world. And one says to one’s self that one would like to live two or three centuries for many reasons, but not least, to read stories so absorbing that they will make one indifferent to the adventures of d’Artagnan.