Essays in Little | Page 7

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