Essays in Little | Page 4

passed
through a medium, as Dumas himself declared, of natural delicacy and
good taste. His enormous popularity, the widest in the world of letters,
owes absolutely nothing to prurience or curiosity. The air which he
breathes is a healthy air, is the open air; and that by his own choice, for
he had every temptation to seek another kind of vogue, and every
opportunity.
Two anecdotes are told of Dumas' books, one by M. Edmond About,
the other by his own son, which show, in brief space, why this novelist
is so beloved, and why he deserves our affection and esteem. M.
Villaud, a railway engineer who had lived much in Italy, Russia, and
Spain, was the person whose enthusiasm finally secured a statue for
Dumas. He felt so much gratitude to the unknown friend of lonely
nights in long exiles, that he could not be happy till his gratitude found
a permanent expression. On returning to France he went to consult M.
Victor Borie, who told him this tale about George Sand. M. Borie
chanced to visit the famous novelist just before her death, and found
Dumas' novel, "Les Quarante Cinq" (one of the cycle about the Valois
kings) lying on her table. He expressed his wonder that she was reading
it for the first time.
"For the first time!--why, this is the fifth or sixth time I have read 'Les
Quarante Cinq,' and the others. When I am ill, anxious, melancholy,
tired, discouraged, nothing helps me against moral or physical troubles
like a book of Dumas." Again, M. About says that M. Sarcey was in the

same class at school with a little Spanish boy. The child was homesick;
he could not eat, he could not sleep; he was almost in a decline.
"You want to see your mother?" said young Sarcey.
"No: she is dead."
"Your father, then?"
" No: he used to beat me."
"Your brothers and sisters?"
"I have none."
"Then why are you so eager to be back in Spain?"
"To finish a book I began in the holidays."
"And what was its name?"
"'Los Tres Mosqueteros'!"
He was homesick for "The Three Musketeers," and they cured him
easily.
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. And then Dumas comes,
and, like Argive Helen, in Homer, he casts a drug into the wine, the
drug nepenthe, "that puts all evil out of mind." Does any one suppose
that when George Sand was old and tired, and near her death, she
would have found this anodyne, and this stimulant, in the novels of M.
Tolstoi, M. Dostoiefsky, M. Zola, or any of the "scientific" observers
whom we are actually requested to hail as the masters of a new art, the
art of the future? Would they make her laugh, as Chicot does? make her
forget, as Porthos, Athos, and Aramis do? take her away from the
heavy, familiar time, as the enchanter Dumas takes us? No; let it be
enough for these new authors to be industrious, keen, accurate,
precieux, pitiful, charitable, veracious; but give us high spirits now and
then, a light heart, a sharp sword, a fair wench, a good horse, or even
that old Gascon rouncy of D'Artagnan's. Like the good Lord James
Douglas, we had liefer hear the lark sing over moor and down, with
Chicot, than listen to the starved-mouse squeak in the bouge of Therese
Raquin, with M. Zola. Not that there is not a place and an hour for him,
and others like him; but they are not, if you please, to have the whole
world to themselves, and all the time, and all the praise; they are not to

turn the world into a dissecting-room, time into tedium, and the laurels
of Scott and Dumas into crowns of nettles.
There is no complete life of Alexandre Dumas. The age has not
produced the intellectual athlete who can gird himself up for that labour.
One of the worst books that ever was written, if it can be said to be
written, is, I think, the English attempt at a biography of Dumas. Style,
grammar, taste, feeling, are all bad. The author does not so much write
a life as draw up an indictment. The spirit of his work is grudging,
sneering, contemptuous, and pitifully peddling. The great charge is that
Dumas was a humbug, that he was not the author of his own books, that
his books were written by "collaborators"--above all, by M. Maquet.
There is no