Duma

“ 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’Orléans, 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. ”

“ The young and ambitious author always found a kind, genial, helpful friend in Dumas. One day a novice came to ask the great man a favour. Would he listen to a play in verse? Dumas, whose time was golden, nevertheless good-naturedly agreed. ”

“ Now in this vivid book we have our fill of color and animation and gallant strangenesses, and a stir of characters who impress us as living with a poignancy unmastered as yet by anybody’s associates in flesh and blood. We have, in brief, all that Dumas could ever offer, here utilised not to make drama but background, all being woven into a bright undulating tapestry behind an erudite and battered figure,—a figure of odd medleys, in which the erudition is combined with much of Autolycus, and the unkemptness with something of à Kempis. ”

“ Like a giant who knows his strength and fears to take advantage of it, he was gentle. I have never seen in him—I will not say a sign of anger—but not even a movement of impatience. If ever a man was lovable, in the original sense of the word, that is 'made to be loved,' Dumas was that man.... He had so much wit himself that every one who was with him believed they had it too. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As a moralist Dumas fils took himself very seriously indeed. As a dramatist, didacticism apart, he had great gifts. He knew his business thoroughly, possessed the art of situation, interest, crisis—could create characters that were real and alive. ”

“ Dumas lives and will never die as long as men love strength and daring, loyalty and generosity, good love-making and good fighting. He has put his own tenderness and frankness and vivacity into the real personages, whom he has reanimated and refined ”

“ 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!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even in the little stories which we have adapted there are manifested many of the characteristics in which Dumas never had a superior—the never-flagging spirit of the narrative, the dramatic situations, the air of nature, and the colour of romance. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dumas was one of the few men whose greatness can not be estimated from a single point of view. He was not only eminent as an investigator of nature, but even more eminent as a teacher and an administrator. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ How does it happen that these marks and merits appear constantly and brilliantly in all the best work assigned to Dumas, and more fitfully in almost all its vast extent? There may be a good deal of apple in some plum-jam and perhaps some vegetable-marrow. But plumminess is plumminess still, and it is the plumminess of "Dumasity" which we are here to talk of, and that only—the quality, not the man. And whether Dumas or Diabolus conceived and brought it about matters, in the view of the present historian, not a centime. ”

“ Assisted by numerous collaborators, all much inferior to himself, Dumas peopled the stages, crowded the booksellers' shelves, filled the feuilleton columns of the newspapers with the creations of his brain; the printing-presses creaked and groaned in their efforts to keep pace with his incessant production. What one cannot but regret is the easy-going worldliness which prevented any real process of development taking place. Dumas was an artist only in his first period. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ A score of Dumas's contemporaries have left us their impressions of the great impressionist, and they have one and all laid emphasis on his gaiety—a naïve heartiness and healthiness of temperament, springing from a semi-tropical nature, a magnificent constitution, an unclouded self-confidence, a kind, generous heart, and brilliant social, dramatic, and literary successes. ”

“ The most striking, most intuitive intellectual quality which Dumas possessed was what is known as the "dramatic instinct." He seems from the first to have seen life from the vivid, picturesque point of view. ”

“ Dumas, according to his custom, introduces a vast array of characters, for the most part historical, all spiritedly drawn and well sustained. In various respects the author may be held up as an example to our own history-spoilers, and self-styled writers of historical romance. One does not find him profaning public edifices by causing all sorts of absurdities to pass, and of twaddle to be spoken, within their precincts; neither does he make his king and beggar, high-born dame and private soldier use [Pg 258] the very same language, all equally tame, colourless, and devoid of character. ”

“ Mr Lang does not agree with him, nor, we may add our testimony, do we. To read the "Mémoires" and then the romance is to undergo a revelation. Mingled with this sordid story of closet-intrigue and kitchen-amours, Dumas, with his keen scent for the picturesque, found excellent material for a splendid story; and his admirable taste is shown not only in what has been utilised, but in what has been omitted. Only one questionable incident has been employed, and that because it has an important bearing on the plot of the romance and its sequel. ”

“ Dumas never wore his historical, botanical, geographical and ethnographical knowledge more like a flower than in this brave but breathless story. In Boxtel’s envy we may perhaps believe; in Gryphon’s savagery; and in the craft and duplicity of the Stadtholder; but if ever a French philosopher and a French grisette masqueraded as a Dutch horticulturist and a Frisian waiting-maid they are Cornelius van Baerle and his Rosa; and if ever a tulip grew by magic rather than by the laws of nature it was the tulipe noire. No matter; there is but one Dumas. ”

“ Of Dumas, Charles Reade said: “He has never been properly appreciated; he is the prince of dramatists, the king of romancists, and the emperor of good fellows.”
Dumas fils he thought a “vinegar-blooded iconoclast—shrewd, clever, audacious, introspective, and mathematically logical.”
The Cimetière du Père La Chaise has a contemporary interest with the names of many who were contemporaries of Dumas in the life and letters of his day. ”

“ On the morning of December 5th, 1870, a priest was sent for. He found son and daughter on their knees by the side of the dying man. The good curé called his penitent by name, and Dumas slowly opened his eyes. ”

“ Dumas, the noted dramatic author and novelist, was a colored man, and a most prolific popular author, poet, dramatist, novelist and essayist. That great production “Camille” is familiar to all theater-goers in the world, and when a man rises and says: “The world is mine,” he uses the language of Dumas’ Monte Christo, a world-wide novel that has been translated in all languages and performed on every stage. ”

“ We find a third "reason for the faith that is in us" in the fact that so many great writers have proclaimed Dumas great, if not in so many words, still, unmistakably. It is not simply the ordinary reader who is astounded at the romancer's charm and resource, wit and skill ”

“ Dumas has the faculty, as no other novelist has, of presenting rapid and brilliant dioramas of the picturesque aspects of history, animating them with really human if not very intricately analysed passion, and connecting them with dialogue matchless of its kind. ”

“ From that moment the story developed: Dumas seized the idea, took for his text three cities—Marseilles, Rome, Paris—and the romance was made.
"Monte Cristo" owed part of its enormous success to its verisimilitude. The details were most convincing, and had, indeed, been studied on the spot.
"There is one thing I cannot do," Dumas tells us, in his preface to the "Compagnons de Jehu," "I cannot write a book or a drama about localities I have never seen. ”

“ 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 ”

“ History became a passion with him, and the days of that tremendous historic-romance-cycle grew nearer and nearer. In 1832 the cholera swept over Paris, emptying the theatres, filling the cemeteries, and carrying terror everywhere. Nevertheless it could not daunt our author's new-found gaiety: he wrote the dialogue of one of his wittiest plays—"Le Mari de la Veuve"—for an actress who was about to take a benefit, and who begged from Dumas some novelty to put on the bills. Every night a group of friends forgathered in Dumas's rooms. ”

“ The second is a portrait of Dumas in his thirties, by a confrère and a contemporary, M. Hippolyte Romand, who looks upon the author from a more human point of view:
"Passionate by temperament, subtle by instinct, and courageous by vanity, he has a good heart and bad judgment, and is a spendthrift by nature. He is a veritable 'Antony' for love, almost a 'Darlington' for ambition: he never will be a 'Sentinelli' [6] for vengeance. Superstitious [7] when he thinks, religious when he writes, sceptical when he speaks, light even in his most fiery passions, his blood is a lava, his thought a spark. ”

“ These contradictory instincts will have an effect on our writer, a subtle inward effect, which is more apparent to Dumas himself than to any of his friends, however well they know him.
"He feels the need of love, of loving and being loved: this need is elemental in him, and is felt perhaps the more strongly by the sensuous than by the spiritual side of his nature. ”

“ The life of Dumas is not only a monument of endeavour and success, it is a sort of labyrinth as well. It abounds in pseudonyms and disguises, in sudden and unexpected appearances and retreats as unexpected and sudden, in scandals and in rumours, in mysteries and traps and ambuscades of every kind. ”