Harry A. Spurr

“ In the higher strata of society Dickens and Dumas are as dead as last year's novels; amongst the people, untroubled by ultra-intellectual qualms, those despised authors flourish shamelessly. As the stress of daily life grows more acute, as the great primitive instincts of our natures become more and more obscured in the complex duties of civilised society, the more likely shall we be to turn with relief and gratitude to the welcome optimism, the refreshing simplicity, the engrossing charm of the two great writers, and the books which they devised for our delight. ”

“ For once Dumas had lost that magnificent confidence in himself which aided him so powerfully in his career.
But if the moment for producing the play was inopportune—appearing as it did in the midst of distracting political ferment—the social atmosphere was charged with a feverish electricity, which the story of "Antony" attracted irresistibly to itself. How is a social outlaw like Antony to win for himself the lovely wife of a man in high society—how is he to break through, and persuade her to break through, all the bars to self-abandonment which society has erected? ”

“ The light-hearted gaiety of the father and the sardonic gravity of the son, offered a contrast too marked to be missed by the wits. Alexandre is Dumas fils, but you—you are not Dumas père—you never will be!" said "the Lady of the Camélias" to the great man. "He is a big child of mine, born when I was quite young," said the son. Each seemed to provoke wit in the other. The elder was one day dining with his son, who had taken a house where the trees in the garden quite blocked up the light. "Open your windows," said old Dumas, "and let your garden have a little fresh air!" ”

“ Now we live in an era of "suggestion"; something is left to one's imagination, and the old "steel-plate-engraving" style is dying out in fiction as in art.
It would be foolish to carry the comparison any further. Scott possessed powers beyond the reach of Dumas, and each writer must be judged according to his aims and nature, and the materials at his command. Few can appreciate both writers, their styles are so opposite. To those who love the Scot Dumas is frivolous and outré; to those who are in sympathy with the French spirit, Scott is dull and sluggish. ”

“ As he believed in no success without talent, so he disbelieved in genius which wins no success. 'Je ne crois pas au talent ignoré, au genie inconnu, moi'. Genius he saluted wherever he met it, but was incredulous about invisible and inaudible genius." So little gall had Dumas in his disposition that he found ability everywhere—he praised heartily, gladly. His good-nature often led him to fancy that there was talent in people who possessed none.
"I can't make out what Mallefille lacks, in order to be a man of talent," he said one day. ”

“ 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 to prove the metal you employed, and sometimes you tossed into the furnace whatever came to your hand. ”

“ Did Dumas in his ardour go too far? Goëthe uttered a warning note when, two years before his death, he addressed the young poct after the success of "Christine":
"Friend," he wrote, "don't go further than your masters, Delavigne and Béranger, Schiller and Scott. Beware of forcing your activity; production without respite ends in bankruptcy of one's talent. Whatever frees the fancy, without retaining it within the control of reason, is pernicious. Art must be at the command of the imagination, if it is to have an outcome in poetry. Nothing is more terrible than imagination deprived of taste." ”

“ He is sincere to imprudence, kind without discernment, forgetful even to thoughtlessness, a wanderer body and soul, cosmopolitan by taste, patriotic in opinion, rich in illusions and caprices, poor in prudence and experience; light in spirit, cutting in speech, witty in season, a Don Juan by night, an Alcibiades by day, a veritable Proteus, escaping from everybody and from himself; as lovable for his defects as for his good qualities; more seductive for his vices than for his virtues that is M. Dumas as we love him, as he is! ”

“ We venture to add that these are the qualities which the ideal story should possess. Further on we read: "It is admitted that Dumas's 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.... 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." ”

“ Athos, with the coming of years, has declined too much into the preacher, and the preacher of a sapless creed; but D'Artagnan has mellowed into a man so witty, rough, kind and upright, that he takes the heart by storm. There is nothing of the copybook about his virtues, nothing of the drawing-room in his fine, natural civility; he will sail near the wind; he is no district visitor—no Wesley or Robespierre; his conscience is void of all refinement whether for good or evil; but the whole man rings true like a good sovereign. I do not say there is no character as well-drawn in Shakespeare ”

“ Here were actors forgetting that they were acting—here was mock life become real life, by the power of art; here was truth of speech and action, which transformed the players into human beings, with their virtues, passions, and weaknesses, instead of into cold-blooded posers, unnatural, declamatory, sententious.... I read—nay, devoured—not only the repertory of Shakespeare but that of every other foreign dramatic poet, and I came to recognise that in the world of the theatre everything emanates from Shakespeare, as in the real world all emanates from the sun.... ”

“ Oddly enough, they are small-minded and small-hearted people who are most shocked by what they call 'vanity' in the great. Dumas's delight in himself and his doings is only the flower of his vigorous existence, and in his 'Mémoires,' 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. ”

“ Madame Dumas had never possessed the buoyant spirits, the hopeful temperament, the love of daring which characterised her quadroon son. She would probably have borne the anxieties which his ambitions caused her—for she loved him and believed in him—if her friends and neighbours had not aggravated her trouble with their croaking, spiteful tongues. On the eve of the production of her son's play, the poor widow, coming away after a more or less trying interview of this nature, fell down in an apoplectic fit. ”

“ The great personages of history here are drawn boldly, and with seeming carelessness, but how human they are—how full of character and life! The Charles IX. of history, as Parigot testifies, is not "betrayed" by the Charles of romance; the portrait of Catherine de Medici, if somewhat overdrawn, is full of that Italian guile with which the records credit her, and the frank, ingenuous, supple-minded Béarnais, Henri of Navarre, is one of the triumphs of Dumas's vivifying genius. The intrigue of the romance is full of absorbing interest: Will Henri of Navarre become King of France? ”

“ From the famous great ones who treated him as their equal, to the servants who strove to save him from his generosity, to the very dogs he rescued, Dumas earned love from all, by giving it, generously and without thought of return. A heart such as his will outlive many a cleverer brain. ”

“ That, we believe, was the secret of Dumas's success, of his lasting popularity, and of his greatness. He was, like Fielding and Goldsmith, a man who won affection without effort. "If any man could be loveable, in the true sense of the word,—that is, made to be loved,—he was that man," so wrote one who knew him well and intimately; and indeed all who knew him seem to speak of him with full hearts, almost with tears in their eyes, so fond and affectionate is their remembrance of the man. ”

“ If he has shown us humanity more generous than it is, do not reproach him for that: he has painted it in his own image." "Old folk blessed him," wrote Jules Janin, "for he made easy the path to the grave; the women called upon him to aid them against their sadness, and the young men swore by the romances of their poet." "All our hospital patients recover or die with one of your father's books under their pillow," said a surgeon to Alexandre Dumas fils. ”

“ But it would be truer to say of him that his was so transparent a nature that the sun of life shone through it, and that like a precious stone, its rays were reflected in myriad sparkling flashes of joy, gaiety, kindliness and generosity. The flaws were there; but there is no doubt this was a genuine diamond.
"J'aime qui m'aime." It was his motto, that line from the Proverbs: "I love them that love me." ”

“ Two years later, when the Prussians had departed, Alexandre Dumas was able to take his father home to Villers-Cotterets, where he had wished to lie. A host of distinguished authors and actors came to bid their old confrère farewell, but the simple reverence and affection shown by the dead man's old village friends was a far truer token of the love that he had won. When the train arrived with the coffin, the people were quietly waiting in the streets to greet it, and young and old pressed forward to contend with the bearers for the honour of carrying the body of their lost, dear friend. ”

“ Unable as we are to prove Dumas's merits as a playwright by instance and reminder, to readers unacquainted with his stage triumphs, we must again have recourse to "expert opinion," and show indirectly, and as concisely as possible, the high position which Dumas occupies in the ranks of the world's dramatists.
He possessed the "dramatic instinct" to the full. "He is not a dramatic author; he is the drama incarnate!" cried Fiorentino. Dumas has told us, with a pride which is justifiable, that all he needed was the bare apparatus of a stage, "two actors, and a passion." ”

“ He found the great man deserted—all the servants had gone a-holidaying—but the host hurried into the kitchen, and prepared with his own hands a feast for the gods, for this stranger. It is a pleasant picture that the poet sets before us—the penniless beggar eating, and making witty remarks on the dishes as he attacked them, and Dumas beaming with delight and roaring with laughter, as he heaped the strange guest's plate with good things. ”

“ The "Comtesse Dash," an intimate friend of Dumas and his wife, has given us, if not the real excuse for his "immorality," at least the true explanation of it:
"A woman who would have loved him enough to love him as he wished to be loved (she writes in her "Mémoires d'Autres") , a woman who would have had the tact to close her eyes to his pranks, and make home comfortable, so that he could invite his friends there; and above all, who would not have disturbed him in his work—that woman would have been perfectly and eternally happy with him." ”

“ The Athos, the Porthos, the Aramis, and the D'Artagnan of 'Le Vicomte de Bragelonne' are not those of 'Les Trois Mousquetaires,' or even of 'Vingt Ans Après.' But the author does not inform us of it, except in a single case, and then he is evidently as surprised as we are. They grow, and if they are honest men they grow better, on stepping-stones of their own baser selves.... These novels show more than the growth of man. They represent the slow development of a race and nation. Like Gibbon or Michelet, Dumas had a genius for history. ”

“ With the change consequent on his achievement of fame and (in a less degree) of fortune, Dumas closed a chapter in his life which had an important influence on his future. When he first took lodgings in Paris, he was not quite twenty-one. He lived in a garret, dreamed of fame, and was happy, like Béranger's hero—
"Dans une grenier, qu'on est bien à vingt ans!" ”

“ Dumas laughed, went away, and—called again. Marie was much taken with the gay, goodlooking young fellow, and Nodier at last grumblingly consented to see him, preparing as he spoke to part with a score or two of francs. He received Dumas, first with distrust, then with surprise, chatted with him animatedly, and parted with him as unwillingly as he had greeted him. Needless to say, money was not mentioned!
Nodier gave the young writer more than money: he gave him a social life, and a literary encouragement and education which was invaluable. ”

“ What novel has more good sense, and gaiety, and wit, and unflagging, admirable literary skill? And once more, to make an end of commendations, what novel is inspired with a more unstrained or a more wholesome morality? There is no quite good book without a good morality; but the world is wide, and so are morals.... ”

“ He was born into the atmosphere of fiery light and fierce heat which the Revolution had left behind it. He was destined to possess a good share of blue and of black blood, for his grandfather was no other than the Marquis Antoine-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, a French nobleman, self-exiled to San Domingo, and his grandmother was a negro-woman, Louise-Cessette Dumas. ”