The Queen Pedauque | Page 2

of
Dumas' economic unwillingness ever to despatch any character who
was "good for" a sequel.
And one thinks rather kindlily of The Queen Pedauque as Dumas
would have equipped it... Yes, in reading here, it is the most facile and
least avoidable of mental exercises to prefigure how excellently Dumas
would have contrived this book,--somewhat as in the reading of Mr.
Joseph Conrad's novels a many of us are haunted by the sense that the
Conrad "story" is, in its essential beams and stanchions, the sort of
thing which W. Clark Russell used to put together, in a rather different
way, for our illicit perusal. Whereby I only mean that such seafaring
was illicit in those aureate days when, Cleveland being consul for the
second time, your geography figured as the screen of fictive
reading-matter during school-hours.
One need not say that there is no question, in either case, of "imitation,"
far less of "plagiarism"; nor need one, surely, point out the
impossibility of anybody's ever mistaking the present book for a novel
by Alexandre Dumas. Ere Homer's eyesight began not to be what it had
been, the fact was noted by the observant Chian, that very few sane
architects commence an edifice by planting and rearing the oaks which
are to compose its beams and stanchions. You take over all such
supplies ready hewn, and choose by preference time- seasoned timber.
Since Homer's prime a host of other great creative writers have
recognised this axiom when they too began to build: and "originality"
has by ordinary been, like chess and democracy, a Mecca for little
minds.
Besides, there is the vast difference that M. Anatole France has
introduced into the Dumas theatre some preeminently un-Dumas-like
stage-business: the characters, between assignations and combats, toy

amorously with ideas. That is the difference which at a stroke dissevers
them from any helter-skelter character in Dumas as utterly as from any
of our clearest thinkers in office.
It is this toying, this series of mental amourettes, which
incommunicably "makes the difference" in almost all the volumes of M.
France familiar to me, but our affair is with this one story. 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. For what one
remembers of _The Queen Pédauque_ is l'Abbé Jérôme Coignard; and
what one remembers, ultimately, about Coignard is not his crowded
career, however opulent in larcenous and lectual escapades and
fisticuffs and broached wineflasks; but his religious meditations,
wherein a merry heart does, quite actually, go all the way.
Coignard I take to be a peculiarly rare type of man (there is no female
of this species), the type that is genuinely interested in religion. He
stands apart. He halves little with the staid majority of us, who sociably
contract our sacred tenets from our neighbors like a sort of theological
measles. He halves nothing whatever with our more earnest-minded
juniors who--perennially discovering that all religions thus far put to
the test of nominal practice have, whatever their paradisial _entrée_,
resulted in a deplorable earthly hash--perennially run yelping into the
shrill agnosticism which believes only that one's neighbors should not
be permitted to believe in anything.
The creed of Coignard is more urbane. "Always bear in mind that a
sound intelligence rejects everything that is contrary to reason, except
in matters of faith, where it is necessary to believe blindly." Your
opinions are thus all-important, your physical conduct is largely a
matter of taste, in a philosophy which ranks affairs of the mind
immeasurably above the gross accidents of matter. Indeed, man can
win to heaven only through repentance, and the initial step toward
repentance is to do something to repent of. There is no flaw in this

logic, and in its clear lighting such abrogations of parochial and
transitory human laws as may be suggested by reason and the
consciousness that nobody is looking, take on the aspect of divinely
appointed duties.
Some dullard may here object that M. France--attestedly, indeed, since
he remains unjailed-cannot himself believe all this, and that it is with
an ironic glitter in his ink he has recorded these dicta. To which the
obvious answer would be that M. France (again like all great creative
writers) is an ephemeral and negligible person beside his durable
puppets; and that, moreover, to reason thus is,