Essays in Little | Page 9

cup of the Hours to the brim
with activity and adventure. His career was one of unparalleled
production, punctuated by revolutions, voyages, exiles, and other
intervals of repose. The tales he tells of his prowess in 1830, and with
Garibaldi, seem credible to me, and are borne out, so far, by the
narrative of M. Maxime Ducamp, who met him at Naples, in the
Garibaldian camp. Like Mr. Jingle, in "Pickwick," he "banged the
field-piece, twanged the lyre," and was potting at the foes of the
republic with a double-barrelled gun, when he was not composing
plays, romances, memoirs, criticisms. He has told the tale of his
adventures with the Comedie Francaise, where the actors laughed at his
Antony, and where Madame Mars and he quarrelled and made it up
again. His plays often won an extravagant success; his novels--his great
novels, that is--made all Europe his friend. He gained large sums of
money, which flowed out of his fingers, though it is said by some that
his Abbotsford, Monte Cristo, was no more a palace than the villa
which a retired tradesman builds to shelter his old age. But the money
disappeared as fast as if Monte Cristo had really been palatial, and
worthy of the fantasy of a Nero. He got into debt, fled to Belgium,
returned, founded the Mousquetaire, a literary paper of the strangest

and most shiftless kind. In "Alexandre Dumas e la Maison d'Or," M.
Philibert Audebrand tells the tale of this Micawber of newspapers.
Everything went into it, good or bad, and the name of Dumas was
expected to make all current coin. For Dumas, unluckily, was as
prodigal of his name as of his gold, and no reputation could bear the
drafts he made on his celebrity. His son says, in the preface to Le Fils
Naturel: "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 and prove the
metal which you employed, and sometimes you tossed into the furnace
whatever came to your hand. The fire made the selection: what was
your own is bronze, what was not yours vanished in smoke."
The simile is noble and worthy of the Cyclopean craftsman, Dumas.
His great works endured; the plays which renewed the youth of the
French stage, the novels which Thackeray loved to praise, these remain,
and we trust they may always remain, to the delight of mankind and for
the sorrow of prigs.
So much has been written of Dumas' novels that criticism can hardly
hope to say more that is both new and true about them. It is
acknowledged that, in such a character as Henri III., Dumas made
history live, as magically as Scott revived the past in his Louis XI., or
Balfour of Burley. It is admitted that Dumas' 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. He may fall short of the humour, the kindly
wisdom, the genial greatness of Sir Walter at his best, and he has not
that supernatural touch, that tragic grandeur, which Scott inherits from
Homer and from Shakespeare. In another Homeric quality, [Greek text],
as Homer himself calls it, in the "delight of battle" and the spirit of the
fray, Scott and Dumas are alike masters. Their fights and the fights in
the Icelandic sagas are the best that have ever been drawn by mortal
man. When swords are aloft, in siege or on the greensward, or in the
midnight chamber where an ambush is laid, Scott and Dumas are

indeed themselves. The steel rings, the bucklers clash, the parry and
lunge pass and answer too swift for the sight. 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. His favourite virtues and graces, we repeat it,
are loyalty, friendship, gaiety, generosity, courage, beauty, and strength.
He is himself the friend of the big, stupid, excellent Porthos; of Athos,
the noble and melancholy swordsman of sorrow; of D'Artagnan, the
indomitable, the trusty, the inexhaustible in resource; but his heart is
never on the side of the shifty