Essays in Little | Page 8

affronts dangers
which, in waking hours, one might probably avoid if one could.
Dumas' first play, an unimportant vaudeville, was acted in 1825. His
first novels were also published then; he took part of the risk, and only
four copies were sold. He afterward used the ideas in more mature
works, as Mr. Sheridan Le Fanu employed three or four times (with
perfect candour and fairness) the most curious incident in "Uncle
Silas." Like Mr. Arthur Pendennis, Dumas at this time wrote poetry "up
to" pictures and illustrations. It is easy, but seldom lucrative work. He
translated a play of Schiller's into French verse, chiefly to gain
command of that vehicle, for his heart was fixed on dramatic success.
Then came the visit of Kean and other English actors to Paris. He saw
the true Hamlet, and, for the first time on any stage, "the play of real
passions." Emulation woke in him: a casual work of art led him to the

story of Christina of Sweden, he wrote his play Christine (afterward
reconstructed); he read it to Baron Taylor, who applauded; the Comedie
Francaise accepted it, but a series of intrigues disappointed him, after
all. His energy at this moment was extraordinary, for he was very poor,
his mother had a stroke of paralysis, his bureau was always bullying
and interfering with him. But nothing could snub this "force of nature,"
and he immediately produced his Henri Trois, the first romantic drama
of France. This had an instant and noisy success, and the first night of
the play he spent at the theatre, and at the bedside of his unconscious
mother. The poor lady could not even understand whence the flowers
came that he laid on her couch, the flowers thrown to the young
man--yesterday unknown, and to-day the most famous of contemporary
names. 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'Orleans, 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. Oddly enough, they are
small-minded and small-hearted people who are most shocked by what
they call "vanity" in the great. Dumas' delight in himself and his doings
is only the flower of his vigorous existence, and in his "Memoires," 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. And yet it is resented by tiny scribblers, frozen in
their own chill self-conceit.
There is nothing incredible (if modern researches are accurate) in the
stories he tells of his own success in Hypnotism, as it is called now,
Mesmerism or Magnetism as it was called then. Who was likely to
possess these powers, if not this good-humoured natural force? "I
believe that, by aid of magnetism, a bad man might do much mischief. I
doubt whether, by help of magnetism, a good man can do the slightest
good," he says, probably with perfect justice. His dramatic success
fired Victor Hugo, and very pleasant it is to read Dumas' warm-hearted
praise of that great poet. Dumas had no jealousy--no more than Scott.
As he believed in no success without talent, so he disbelieved in genius

which wins no success. "Je ne crois pas au talent ignore, au genie
inconnu, moi." Genius he saluted wherever he met it, but was
incredulous about invisible and inaudible genius; and I own to sharing
his scepticism. People who complain of Dumas' vanity may be
requested to observe that he seems just as "vain" of Hugo's successes,
or of Scribe's, as of his own, and just as much delighted by them.
He was now struck, as he walked on the boulevard one day, by the first
idea of Antony--an idea which, to be fair, seems rather absurd than
tragic, to some tastes. "A lover, caught with a married woman, kills her
to save her character, and dies on the scaffold." Here is indeed a part to
tear a cat in!
The performances of M. Dumas during the Revolution of 1830, are
they not written in the Book of the Chronicles of Alexandre the Great?
But they were not literary excellences which he then displayed, and we
may leave this king-maker to hover, "like an eagle, above the storms of
anarchy."
Even to sketch his later biography is beyond our province. In 1830 he
had forty years to run, and he filled the