DUMAS THE ELDER
[Sidenote: The case of Dumas.]
With Dumas[311] _père_ the same difficulties (or nearly the same) of
general and particular nature present themselves as those which occurred
with Balzac. There is, again, the task--not so arduous and by no means
so hopeless as some may think, but still not of the easiest--of writing
pretty fully without repetition on subjects on which you have written
fully already. There is the enormous bulk, far greater than in the other
case, of the work: which makes any complete survey of its individual
components impossible. And there is the wide if not universal knowledge
of this or that--if not of this _and_ that--part of it; which makes such
survey unnecessary and probably unwelcome. But here, as there, in
whatever contrast of degree and kind, there is the importance in
relation to the general subject, which needs pretty abundant notice, and
the particular character of that importance, which demands special
examination.
There are probably not quite so many readers as there might have been a
generation ago who would express indignation at the idea that the two
novelists can be held in any degree[312] comparable. Between the two
periods a pretty strong and almost concerted effort was made by persons
of no small literary position, such as Mr. Lang, Mr. Stevenson, and Mr.
Henley, who are dead, and others, some of whom are alive, to follow the
lead of Thackeray many years earlier still. They denounced, supporting
the denunciation with all the literary skill and vigour of which they
were capable, the notion, common in France as well as in England, that
Dumas was a mere _amuseur_, whether they did or did not extend their
battery to the other notion (common then in England, if not in France)
that he was an amuser whose amusements were pernicious. These efforts
were perhaps not entirely ineffectual: let us hope that actual reading,
by not unintelligent or prejudiced readers, had more effect still.
[Sidenote: Charge and discharge.]
But let us also go back a little and, adding one, repeat what the
charges against Dumas are. There is the moral charge just mentioned;
there is the not yet mentioned charge of plagiarism and "devilling"; and
there is the again already mentioned complaint that he is a mere
"pastimer"; that he has no literary quality; that he deserves at best to
take his chance with the novelists from Sue to Gaboriau who have been or
will be dismissed with rather short shrift elsewhere. Let us, as best
seems to suit history, treat these in order, though with very unequal
degrees of attention.
[Sidenote: Morality.]
The moral part of the matter needs but a few lines. The objection here
was one of the still fewer things that did to some extent justify and
"_sens_ify" the nonsense and injustice since talked about Victorian
criticism. In fact this nonsense may (there is always, or nearly
always, some use to be made even of nonsense) be used against its
earlier brother. It is customary to objurgate Thackeray as too moral.
Thackeray never hints the slightest objection on this score against
these novels, whatever he may do as to the plays. For myself, I do not
pretend to have read everything that Dumas published. There may be among
the crowd something indefensible, though it is rather odd that if there
is, I should not merely never have read it but never have heard of it.
If, on the other hand, any one brings forward Mrs. Grundy's opinion on
the Ketty and Milady passages in the _Mousquetaires_; on the story of
the origin of the Vicomte de Bragelonne; on the way in which the divine
Margot was consoled for her almost tragic abandonment in a few hours by
lover and husband--I must own that as Judge on the present occasion I
shall not call on any counsel of Alexander's to reply. "Bah! it is
bosh," as the greatest of Dumas' admirers remarks of another matter.
[Sidenote: Plagiarism and devilling.]
The plagiarism (or rather devilling + plagiarism) article of the
indictment, tedious as it may be, requires a little longer notice. The
facts, though perhaps never to be completely established, are
sufficiently clear as far as history needs, on the face of them. Dumas'
works, as published in complete edition, run to rather over three
hundred volumes. (I have counted them often on the end-papers of the
beloved tomes, and though they have rather a knack, like the windows of
other enchanted houses, of "coming out" different, this is near enough.)
Excluding theatre (twenty-five volumes), travels, memoirs, and so-called
history, they must run to about two hundred and fifty. Most if not all
of these volumes are of some three hundred pages each, very closely
printed, even allowing for the abundantly "spaced" conversation. I
should say, without pretending to an accurate "cast-off," that any
_three_ of these volumes would be longer even than the great
"part"-published works of Dickens, Thackeray, or Trollope; that any
_two_ would exceed in length our own old average "three-decker"; and
that any _one_ contains at least twice the contents of the average
six-shilling masterpiece of the present day.
Now it stands to reason that a man who spent only the later part of his
working life in novel-production, who travelled a great deal, and who,
according to his enemies, devoted a great deal of time to relaxation,[313]
is not likely to have written all this enormous bulk himself, even
if it were physically possible for him to have done so. One may go
farther, and say that pure internal evidence shows that the whole was
_not_ written by the same person.
[Sidenote: The Collaborators?]
As for the actual collaborators--the "young men," as Thackeray
obligingly called them, who carried out the works in a less funereal
sense than that in which the other "young men" carried out Ananias and
Sapphira--that is a question on which I do not feel called upon to enter
at any length. Anybody who cannot resist curiosity on the point may
consult Alphonse Karr (who really might have found something fitter on
which to expend his energies); Quérard, an ill-tempered bibliographer,
for whom there is the excuse that, except ill-temper, idleness, with a
particularly malevolent Satan to find work for its hands to do, or mere
hunger, hardly anything would make a man a bibliographer of his sort;
and the person whom the law called Jacquot, and he himself by the
handsomer title of Eugène de Mirecourt. Whether Octave Feuillet
exercised himself in this other kind before he took to his true line of
novels of society; whether that ingenious journalist M. Fiorentino also
played a part, are matters which who so lists may investigate. The most
dangerous competitor seems to be Auguste Maquet--the "Augustus MacKeat"
of the Romantic dawn--to whom some have even assigned the
_Mousquetaires_[314] bodily, as far as the novel adds to the Courtils de
Sandras "memoirs." But even with him, and still more with the others,
the good old battle-horse, which never fails one in this kind of
_chevauchée_, will be found to be effective in carrying the banner of
Alexander the Greatest safe through. How does it happen that in the
independent work of none of these, nor of any others, do the _special_
marks and merits of Dumas appear? How does it happen that these marks
and merits appear constantly and brilliantly in all the best work
assigned to Dumas, and more fitfully in almost all its vast extent?
There may be a good deal of apple in some plum-jam and perhaps some
vegetable-marrow. But plumminess is plumminess still, and it is the
plumminess of "Dumasity" which we are here to talk of, and that
only--the quality, not the man. And whether Dumas or Diabolus conceived
and brought it about matters, in the view of the present historian, not
a _centime_. By "Dumas" is here and elsewhere--throughout this chapter
and throughout this book--meant Dumasity, which is something by itself,
and different from all other "-nesses and -tudes and -ties."
[Sidenote: The positive value as fiction and as literature of the books:
the less worthy works.]
We can therefore, if we choose, betake ourselves with a joyful and quiet
mind to the real things--the actual characteristics of that Dumasity,
Diabolicity, or _Dieu-sait-quoi_, which distinguishes (in measures and
degrees varying, perhaps essentially, certainly according to the
differing castes of readers) the great Mousquetaire trilogy; the hardly
less great collection of _La Reine Margot_ and its continuations; the
long eighteenth-century set which, in a general way, may be said to be
two-centred, having now Richelieu (the Duke, not the Cardinal) and now
Cagliostro for pivot; and _Monte Cristo_--with power to add to their
number. In what will be said, attention will chiefly be paid to the
books just mentioned, and perhaps a few more, such as _La_ _Tulipe
Noire_; nor is even this list so closed that anybody may not consider
any special favourites of his own admissible as subjects for the almost
wholly unmitigated appreciation which will follow. I do not think that
Dumas was ever at his best before the late sixteenth century or after
the not quite latest eighteenth. _Isabel de Bavière_ and the _Bâtard de
Mauléon_, with others, are indeed more readable than most minor
historical novels; but their wheels drive somewhat heavily. As for the
revolutionary set, after the _Cagliostro_ interest is disposed of, some
people, I believe, rate _Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge_ higher than I do.
It is certainly better than _Les Blancs et les Bleus_ or _Les Louves de
Machecoul_, in the latter of which Dumas has calmly "lifted" (or allowed
a lazy "young man" to lift) the whole adventure of Rob Roy at the Fords
of Frew, pretty nearly if not quite _verbatim_.[315] Of more avowed
translations such as _Ivanhoe_ and _Jacques Ortis_ (the latter about as
much out of his way as anything could be), it were obviously superfluous
to take detailed notice. In others the very titles, such as, for
instance, _Les Mohicans de Paris_, show at once that he is merely
imitating popular styles. Yet others, such as _Madame de Chamblay_[316]
(in which I cannot help thinking that the "young man" was Octave
Feuillet not yet come to his prime), have something of the ordinary
nineteenth-century novel--not of the best kind.
But in all these and many more it is simply a case of "Not here!" though
in the historical examples, before Saint Bartholomew and after
Sainte-Guillotine, the sentence may be mitigated to "Not here
_consummately_." And it may be just, though only just, necessary to say
that this examination of Dumas' qualities should itself, with very
little application or moral, settle the question whether he is a mere
circulating-library caterer or a producer of real literature.
[Sidenote: The worthier--treatment of them not so much individually as
under heads.]
To give brief specifications of books and passages in the novels
mentioned above, in groups or individually, may seem open to the
objections often made to a mere catalogue of likes and dislikes. But,
after all, in the estimation of aesthetic matters, it _is_ likes and
dislikes that count. Nowhere, and perhaps in this case less than
anywhere else, can the critic or the historian pretend to dispense his
readers from actual perusal; it is sufficient, but it is at the same
time necessary, that he should prepare those who have not read and
remind those who have. For champion specimen-pieces, satisfying, not
merely in parts but as wholes, the claim that Dumas shall be regarded as
an absolute master in his own craft and in his own particular division
of it, the present writer must still select, after fifty years' reading
and re-reading, _Vingt Ans Après_ and _La Reine Margot_. Parts of _Les
Trois Mousquetaires_ are unsurpassed and unsurpassable; but the
Bonacieux love-affair is inadequate and intruded, and I have never
thought Milady's seduction of Felton quite "brought off." In _Le Vicomte
de Bragelonne_ this inequality becomes much more manifest. Nothing,
again, can surpass the single-handed achievement of D'Artagnan at the
beginning in his kidnapping of General Monk, and few things his failure
at the end to save Porthos, with the death of the latter--a thing which
has hardly a superior throughout the whole range of the novel in
whatever language (so far as I know) it has been written. But the "young
men" were allowed their heads, by far too frequently and for too long
periods, in the middle;[317] and these heads were by no means always
equal to the occasion. There is no such declension in the immediate
followers of _La Reine Margot_, _La Dame de Monsoreau_, and _Les
Quarante-Cinq_. Chicot is supreme, but the personal interest is less
distributed than in the first book and in the _Mousquetaire_ trilogy.
This lack of distribution, and the inequalities of the actual
adventures, are, naturally enough, more noticeable still in the longer
and later series dealing with the eighteenth century, while, almost of
necessity, the purely "romantic" interest is at a lower strength. I can,
however, find very little fault with _Le Chevalier d'Harmental_--an
excellent blend of lightness and excitement. _Olympe de Clèves_ has had
very important partisans;[318] but though I like Olympe herself almost
better than any other of Dumas' heroines, except Marguerite, she does
not seem to me altogether well "backed up"; and there is here, as there
had been in the _Vicomte de Bragelonne_, and was to be in others, too
much insignificant court-intrigue. The Cagliostro cycle again appeals
very strongly to some good critics, and I own that in reading it a
second time I liked it better than I had done before. But I doubt
whether the supernatural of any kind was a circle in which Dumas could
walk with perfect freedom and complete command of his own magic. There
remains, as among the novels selected as pieces, not of conviction, but
of diploma, _Monte Cristo_, perhaps the most popular of all, certainly
one of the most famous, and still holding its popularity with good wits.
Here, again. I have to confess a certain "correction of impression." As
to the _Château d'If_, which is practically an independent book, there
can hardly be two opinions among competent and unprejudiced persons. But
I used to find the rest--the voluminous rest--rather heavy reading.
Recently I got on better with them; but I can hardly say that they even
now stand, with me, that supreme test of a novel, "Do you want to read
it again?" I once, as an experiment, read "Wandering Willie's Tale"
through, every night for a week, having read it I don't know how many
times before; and I found it no more staled at the seventh enjoyment
than I should have found the charm of Helen or of Cleopatra herself. I
do not know how many times I have read Scott's longer novels (with one
or two exceptions), or Dickens', or Thackeray's, or not a few others in
French and English, including Dumas himself. And I hope to read them all
once, twice, or as many times more as those other Times which are in
Some One's hand will let me. But I do not want to read _Monte Cristo_
again.
It will be clear from these remarks that, whether rightly or wrongly, I
think Dumas happiest in his dealings with historical or quasi-historical
matters, these dealings being subject to the general law, given more
than once elsewhere, that the historical personages shall not, in their
historically registered and detailed character, occupy the chief
positions in the story. In other words, he seems to me to have preferred
an historical canvas and a few prominent figures outlined thereon--in
which respect he does not greatly differ from other historical novelists
so far as they are historical novelists merely. But Dumas, as a novelist
of French history, had at his disposal sources and resources, for
filling up his pictures, which were lacking elsewhere, and which, in
particular, English novelists possessed hardly at all, as regards
anything earlier than the eighteenth century. I dare say it has often
occurred to other people, as it has to me, how vastly different _Peveril
of the Peak_--one of the least satisfactory of Scott's novels--would
have been if Pepys's Diary had been published twenty years earlier
instead of two years later. Evelyn was available, but far less suitable
to the purpose, and was only published when Scott had begun to write
rather than to read.[319] For almost every year, certainly for every
decade and every notable person's life with which and with whom he
wished to deal, Dumas had "Memoirs" on to which, if he did not care to
take the trouble himself, he had only to turn one of the "young men" to
get facts, touches, ornaments, suggestions enough for twenty times his
own huge production. Of course other people had these same stores open
to them, and that other people did not make the same use thereof[320] is
one of the chief glories of Alexander the Great in fiction. But in any
real critical-historical estimate of him, the fact has to take its
place, and its very great place.
But there is the other fact, or collection of facts, of greater
importance still, implied in the question, "What did he do with these
stores?" and "How did he, as it seems to Alexandrians at least, do so
much better than those other people, to whom they were open quite as
freely?"
It is, however, before answering these questions at large, perhaps once
more necessary to touch on what may be called the historical-_accuracy_
objection. If anybody says, "The man represents Charles I. as having
been taken, after he had been sold by the Scotch, direct from Newcastle
to London, tried at once, and executed in a day or two. This was not the
way things happened"--you are bound to acknowledge his profound and
recondite historical learning. But if he goes on to say that he cannot
enjoy _Vingt Ans Après_ as a novel because of this, you are equally
bound to pity his still more profound aesthetic ignorance and impotence.
The facts, in regard to the criticism of historical novels as such,
illustrate the wisdom of Scott in keeping his historical characters for
the most part in the background, and the _un_wisdom of Vigny in
preferring the opposite course. But they do nothing more. If Dumas had
chosen, he might have separated the dramatic meeting of the Four at
Newcastle itself--and the intenser tale of their effort to save Charles,
with its sequel of their own narrow escape from the _Éclair_ felucca--by
chapters, or a book, of adventures in France. But he did not choose; and
the liberty of juxtaposition which he took is more apparently than
really different from that which Shakespeare takes, when he jumps ten
years in _Antony and Cleopatra_. What Dumas _really_ borrows from
history--the tragic interest of the King's fate--is in each case
historically true, though it is eked and adapted and manipulated to suit
the fictitious interest of the Quadrilateral. You certainly could not,
then or now, _ride_ from Windsor to London in twenty minutes, though you
could now motor the distance in the time, at the risk of considerable
fines. And an Englishman, jealous of his country's honour, might urge
that, while the "Vin _de Porto_" itself came in rather later, there were
few places in the England of the seventeenth century where that "Vin
_d'Espagne_," so dear to Athos, was not more common than it was in
France, though one would not venture to deny that the shortly-to-become
Baron de Bracieux _had_ some genuine Xérès (as we are told) in his
cellar. But these things are--no more and no less than the greater
ones--utter trifles as far as the actual novel interest is concerned.
They are, indeed, less than trifles: they can hardly be said to exist.
[Sidenote: His attitude to Plot.]
The "four wheels of the novel" have been sometimes, and perhaps rightly,
said to be Plot, Character, Description, and Dialogue--Style[321] being
a sort of fifth. Of the first there is some difficulty in speaking,
because the word "plot" is by no means used, as the text-books say,
"univocally," and its synonyms or quasi-synonyms, in the different
usages, are themselves things "kittle" to deal with. "Action" is
sometimes taken as one of these synonyms--certainly in some senses of
action no novelist has ever had more; very few have had so much. But of
concerted, planned, or strictly co-ordinated action, of more than
episode character, he can hardly be said to have been anything like a
master. His best novels are chronicle-plays undramatised--large numbers
of his scenes could be cut out with as little real loss as foolish
"classical" critics used to think to be the case with Shakespeare; and
his connections, when he takes the trouble to make any, are often his
very weakest points. Take, for instance, the things that bring about
D'Artagnan's great quest for the diamonds--one of the most excellent
episodes in this department of fiction, and something more than an
episode in itself. The author actually cannot think of any better way
than to make Constance Bonacieux--who is represented as a rather
unusually intelligent woman, well acquainted with her husband's
character, and certainly not likely to overestimate him through any
superabundance of wifely affection or admiration--propose that he, a
middle-aged mercer of sedentary and _bourgeois_ habits, shall undertake
an expedition which, on the face of it, requires youth, strength,
audacity, presence of mind, and other exceptional qualities in no
ordinary measure, and which, if betrayed to an ever vigilant, extremely
powerful, and quite unscrupulous enemy, is almost certain to be
frustrated.
Still the "chronicle"-action dispenses a man, to a large extent, in the
eyes of some readers at any rate, from even attempting exact and tight
_liaisons_ of scene in this fashion, though of course if he does attempt
them he submits himself to the perils of his attempt just as his heroes
submit themselves to theirs. But other readers--and perhaps all those
predestined to be Alexandrians--do not care to exact the penalties for
such a failure. They are quite content to find themselves launched on
the next reach of the stream, without asking too narrowly whether they
have been ushered decorously through a lock or have tumbled somehow over
a lasher. Such troubles never drown or damage _them_. And indeed there
are some of them sufficiently depraved by nature, and hardened by
indulgence in sin, to disregard _general_ action altogether, and to look
mainly if not wholly to the way in which the individual stories are
told, not at that in which they come to have to be told. Of Dumas' power
of telling a story there surely can be no two opinions. The very
reproach of _amuseur_ confesses it. Of the means--or some of them--by
which he does and does not exercise this power, more may be said under
the heads which follow. We are here chiefly concerned with the power as
it has been achieved and stands--in, for instance, such a thing, already
glanced at, as the "Vin de Porto" episode or division of _Vingt Ans
Après_, which, though there are scores of others nearly as good, seems
to me on the whole the very finest thing Dumas ever did in his own
peculiar kind. There are just two dozen pages of it--pages very well
filled--from the moment when Blaisois and Mousqueton express their ideas
on the subject of the unsuitableness of beer, as a fortifier against
sea-sickness, to that when the corpse of Mordaunt, after floating in the
moonlight with the gold-hilted dagger flashing from its breast, sinks
for the last time. The interest grows constantly; it is never, as it
sometimes is elsewhere, watered out by too much talk, though there is
enough of this to carry out the author's usual system (_v. inf._).
Nothing happens sufficiently extravagant or improbable to excite disgust
or laughter, though what does happen is sufficiently "palpitating." If
this is melodrama, it is melodrama free from most of the objections made
elsewhere to the kind. And also if it is melodrama, it seems to me to be
melodrama infinitely superior, not merely in degree, but in kind, to
that of Sue and Soulié.
[Sidenote: To Character.]
It is in this "enfisting" power of narrative, constantly renewed if not
always logically sustained and connected, that Dumas' excellence, if not
his actual supremacy, lies; and the fact may dispense us from saying any
more about his plots. As to Character, we must still keep the
offensive-defensive line. Dumas' most formidable enemies--persons like
the late M. Brunetière--would probably say that he has no character at
all. Some of his champions would content themselves with ejaculating
the two names "D'Artagnan!" and "Chicot!" shrugging their shoulders, and
abstaining from further argument as likely to be useless, there being no
common ground to argue upon. In actual life this might not be the most
irrational manner of proceeding; but it could hardly suffice here. As is
usually, if not invariably, the case, the difference of estimate _is_
traceable, in the long run, to the fact that the disputants or
adversaries are not using words in the same sense--working in
conjunction with the other fact that they do not like and want the same
things. Almost all words are ambiguous, owing to the length of time
during which they have been used and the variety of parts they have been
made to play. But there are probably few which--without being absolutely
equivocal like "box" and our other "foreigners' horrors"--require the
use of the _distinguo_ more than "character." As applied to novels, it
may mean (1) a human personality more or less deeply analysed; (2) one
vividly distinguished from others; (3) one which is made essentially
_alive_ and almost recognised as a real person; (4) a "personage"
ticketed with some marks of distinction and furnished with a dramatic
"part"; (5) an eccentric. The fourth and fifth may be neglected here. It
is in relation to the other three that we have to consider Dumas as a
character-monger.
In the competition for representation of character which depends upon
analysis, "psychology," "problem-projection," Dumas is of course
nowhere, though, to the disgust of some and the amusement of others,
_Jacques Ortis_ figures in the list of his works. _René_, _Adolphe_, the
works of Madame de Staël (if they are to be admitted) and those of Beyle
(which no doubt must be) found nothing corresponding in his nature; and
there was not the slightest reason why they should. The cellar of the
novel contains even more than the "thousand dozen of wine" enshrined by
that of Crotchet Castle, but no intelligent possessor of it, any more
than Mr. Crotchet himself, would dream of restricting it to one kind of
vintage. Nor, probably, would any really intelligent possessor arrange
his largest bins for this kind, which at its best is a very exquisite
_vin de liqueur_, but which few people wish to drink constantly; and
which at its worst, or even in mediocre condition, is very poor
tipple--"shilpit," as Peter Peebles most unjustly characterises sherry
in _Redgauntlet_. Skipping (2) for the moment, I do not know that under
head (3) one can make much fight for Alexander. D'Artagnan and Chicot
are doubtless great, and many others fall not far short of them. I am
always glad to meet these two in literature, and should be glad to meet
them in real life, particularly if they were on my side, though their
being on the other would add considerably to the excitement of one's
existence--so long as it continued. But I am not sure that I _know_ them
as I know Marianne and Des Grieux, Tom Jones and My Uncle Toby, the
Baron of Bradwardine and Elizabeth Bennet. Athos I know or should know
if I met him, which I am sorry to say I have not yet done; and La Reine
Margot, and possibly Olympe de Clèves; but there is more guess-work
about the knowledge with her than in the other cases. Porthos (or
somebody very like him) I did know, and he was most agreeable; but he
died too soon to go into the army, as he ought to have done, after
leaving Oxford. And though I never met a complete Aramis, I think I have
met him in parts. There are not many more of this class. On the other
hand, there is almost an entire absence in Dumas of those mere
lay-figures which are so common in other novelists. There is great
plenty of something more than toy-theatre characters cut out well and
brightly painted, fit to push across the stage and justify their "words"
and vanish; but that is a different thing.
And this leads us partly back and partly up to the second head, the
provision of characters sufficiently distinguished from others, and so
capable of playing their parts effectually and interestingly. It is in
this that he is so good, and it is this which distinguishes himself from
all his fellows but the very greatest. D'Artagnan and Chicot are again
the best; but how good, at least in the better books, are almost all the
others! D'Artagnan would be a frightful loss, but suppose he were not
there and you knew nothing about him, would you not think Planchet
something of a prize? Without Chicot there would be a blank horrible to
think of. But do we not still "share"? Have we not Dom Gorenflot?
It is in this provision of vivid and sufficiently, if not absolutely,
vivified characters and personages--"company" for his narrative
dramas--that Dumas is so admirable under this particular head. If they
are rarely detachable or independent, they work out the business
consummately. Lackeys and ladies' maids, inn-keepers and casual guests
at inns, courtiers and lawyers, noblemen and "lower classes," they all
do what they ought to do; they all "answer the ends of their being
created,"--which is to carry out and on, through two or three or half a
dozen volumes, a blissful suspension from the base realities of
existence. And if anybody asks of them more than this, it is his own
fault, and a very great fault too.[322]
[Sidenote: To Description (and "style").]
Of Description, as of the "fifth wheel" style, there is little to say
about Dumas, though the littleness is in neither respect damaging. They
are both adequate to the situation and the composition. Can you say much
more of him or of anybody? If it were worth while to go into detail at
all, this adequacy could be made out, I think, a good deal more than
sufficiently. Take one of his greatest things, the "Bastion
Saint-Gervais" in the _Mousquetaires_. If he has not made you see the
heroic hopeless town, and the French leaguer and the shattered redoubt
between, and the forlorn hope of the Four foolhardy yet forethoughtful
and for ever delightful heroes, with their not so cheerful followers,
eating, drinking, firing, consulting, and flaunting the immortal
napkin-pennant in the enemy's face--you would not be made to see it,
though the authors of _Inès de las Sierras_ or of _Le Château de la
Misère_ had given you a cast of their office. And, what is more, the
method of _Inès de las Sierras_ and of _Le Château de la Misère_ would
have been actually out of place. It would have got in the way of the
business, the engrossing business, of the manual fight against the
Rochellois, and the spiritual fight against Richelieu and Rochefort and
Milady. So, again--so almost tautologically--with "style" in the more
complicated and elaborate sense of the word. One may here once more
thank Émile de Girardin for the phrase that he used of Gautier's own
style in _feuilleton_ attempts. It _would_ be _gênant pour
l'abonné_--even for an _abonné_ who was not the first comer. It is not
the beautiful phrase, over which you can linger, that is required, but
the straightforward competent word-vehicle that carries you on through
the business, that you want in such work. The essence of Dumas' quality
is to find or make his readers thirsty, and to supply their thirst. You
can't quench thirst with _liqueurs_; if you are not a Philistine you
will not quench it with vintage port or claret, with Château Yquem, or
even with fifteen-year-old Clicquot. A "long" whisky and potash, a
bottle of sound Medoc, or, best of all, a pewter quart of not too small
or too strong beer--these are the modest but sufficient quenchers that
suit the case. And Dumas gives you just the equivalents of these.
[Sidenote: To Conversation.]
But it may seem that, for the last head or two, the defence has been a
little "let down"--the pass, if not "sold," somewhat weakly held.[323]
No such half-heartedness shall be chargeable on what is going to be said
under the last category, which, in a way, allies itself to the first. It
is, to a very large extent, by his marvellous use of conversation that
Dumas attains his actual mastery of story-telling; and so this
characteristic of his is of double importance and requires a Benjamin's
allowance of treatment. The name just used is indeed specially
appropriate, because Conversation is actually the youngest of the
novelist's family or staff of work-fellows. We have seen, throughout or
nearly throughout the last volume, how very long it was before its
powers and advantages were properly appreciated; how mere _récit_
dominated fiction; and how, when the personages were allowed to speak,
they were for the most part furnished only or mainly with
harangues--like those with which the "unmixed" historian used to endow
his characters. That conversation is not merely a grand set-off to a
story, but that it is an actual means of telling the story itself, seems
to have been unconscionably and almost unintelligibly slow in occurring
to men's minds; though in the actual story-telling of ordinary life by
word of mouth it is, and always must have been, frequent enough.[324] It
is not impossible that the derivation of prose from verse fiction may
have had something to do with this, for gossippy talk and epic or
romance in verse do not go well together. Nor is it probable that the
old, the respectable, but the too often mischievous disinclination to
"mix kinds" may have had its way, telling men that talk was the
dramatist's not the novelist's business. But whatever was the cause,
there can be no dispute about the fact.
It was, it should be hardly necessary to say, Scott who first discovered
the secret[325] to an effectual extent, though he was not always true to
his own discovery. And it is not superfluous to note that it was a
specially valuable and important discovery in regard to the novel of
historical adventure. It had, of course, and almost necessarily, forced
itself, in regard to the novel of ordinary life, upon our own great
explorers in that line earlier. Richardson has it abundantly. But when
you are borrowing the _subjects_ of the historian, what can be more
natural than to succumb to the _methods_ of the historian--the long
continuous narrative and the intercalated harangue? It must be done
sometimes; there is a danger of its being done too often. Before he had
found out the true secret, Scott blunted the opening of _Waverley_ with
_récit_; after he had discovered it he relapsed in divers places, of
which the opening of _The Monastery_ may suffice for mention here. Dumas
himself (and it will be at once evident that this is a main danger of
"turning on your young man") has done it often--to take once more a
single example, there is too much of it in the account of the great
_émeute_, by which Gondy started the Fronde. But it is the facility
which he has of dispensing with it--of making the story speak itself,
with only barely necessary additions of the pointer and reciter at the
side of the stage--which constitutes his power. Instances can hardly be
required, for any one who knows him knows them, and every one who goes
to him, not knowing, will find them. Just to touch the _apices_ once
more, the two scenes following the actual overtures of the
_Mousquetaires_ and of _La Reine Margot_--that where the impossible
triple duel of D'Artagnan against the Three is turned into triumphant
battle with the Cardinalists, blood-cementing the friendship of the
Four; and that where Margot, after losing both husband and lover, is
supplied with a substitute for both; adding the later passage where La
Mole is saved from the noose at the door--may suffice.
Of course this device of conversation, like the other best things--the
beauty of woman, the strength of wine, the sharpness of steel, and red
ink--is "open to abuse."[326] It has been admitted that even the
fervency of the present writer's Alexandrianism cools at the "wall-game"
of Montalais and Malicorne. There may be some who are not even prepared
to like it in places where I do. They are like Porthos, in the great
initial interchange of compliments, and "would still be _doing_." But
surely they cannot complain of any lack of incident in this latest and
not least _Alexandreid_?
It may seem that the length of this chapter is not proportionate to the
magnitude of the claims advanced for Dumas. But, as in other cases, I
think it may not be impertinent to put in a reference to what I have
previously written elsewhere. Moreover, as, but much more than, in the
cases of Sandeau, Bernard, and Murger, there is an argument, paradoxical
in appearance merely, for the absence of prolixity.
His claim to greatness consists, perhaps primarily, in the simplicity,
straightforwardness, and general human interest of his appeal. He wants
no commentaries, no introductions, no keys, no dismal Transactions of
Dumas Societies and the like. Every one that thirsteth may come to his
fountain and drink, without mysteries of initiation, or formalities of
licence, or concomitant nuisances of superintendence and regulation. In
the _Camp of Refuge_ of Charles Macfarlane (who has recently, in an odd
way, been recalled to passing knowledge)--a full and gallant private in
the corps of which Dumas himself was then colonel _vice_ Sir Walter
deceased--there is a sentence which applies admirably to Dumas himself.
After a success over the other half of our ancestors, and during a
supper on the conquered provant, one of the Anglo-Saxon-half observes,
"Let us leave off talking, and be jolly." Nothing could please me better
than that some reader should be instigated to leave off my book at this
point, and take up _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ or _Les Quarante-Cinq_, or
if he prefers it, _Olympe de Clèves_--"and be jolly".[327]
FOOTNOTES:
[311] The postponement of him, to this last chapter of the first
division of the book, was determined on chiefly because his _novels_
were not begun at all till years after the other greater novelists,
already dealt with, had made their reputation, while the greatest of
them--the "Mousquetaire" and "Henri Trois" cycles--did not appear till
the very last _lustrum_ of the half-century. But another--it may seem to
some a childish--consideration had some weight with me. I wished to
range father and son on either side of the dividing summary; for though
the elder wrote long after 1850 and the younger some time before it, in
hardly any pair is the opposition of the earlier and later times more
clearly exposed; and the identity of name emphasises the difference of
nature.
[312] In using this phrase I remembered the very neat "score" made off
the great Alexander himself by a French judge, in some case at Rouen
where Dumas was a witness. Asked as usual his occupation, he replied
somewhat grandiloquently: "Monsieur, si je n'étais pas dans la ville de
Corneille, je dirais 'Auteur dramatique.'" "Mais, Monsieur," replied the
official with the sweetest indulgence, "il y a des degrés." (This story
is told, like most such, with variants; and sometimes, as in the
particular case was sure to happen, not of Alexander the father, but of
Alexander the son. But I tell it, as I read or heard it, long years
ago.)
[313] You may possibly do as an English novelist of the privileged sex
is said to have done, and write novels while people are calling on you
and you are talking to them (though I should myself consider it bad
manners, and the novels would certainly bear traces of the exploit). But
you can hardly do it while, as a famous caricature represents the scene,
persons of that same sex, in various dress or undress, are frolicking
about your chair and bestowing on you their obliging caresses. Nor are
corricolos and speronares, though they may be good things to write on in
one sense, good in another to write in.
[314] As far as I know Maquet, his line seems to me to have been drama
rather than fiction.
[315] I seem to remember somebody (I rather think it was Henley, and it
was very likely to be) attempting a defence of this. But, except _pour
rire_, such a thing is hopeless.
[316] I think (but it is a long time since I read the book) that it is
the heroine of this who, supposed to be a dead, escapes from "that
grewsome thing, premature interment" (as Sandy Mackay justly calls it),
because of the remarkable odour of _violettes de Parme_ which her
unspotted flesh evolves from the actual grave.
[317] I do not mind Montalais, but I object to Malicozne both in himself
and as her lover. Mlle. de la Vallière and the plots against her virtue
give us "pious Selinda" at unconscionable length, and, but that it would
have annoyed Athos, I rather wish M. le Vicomte de la Bragelonne himself
had come to an end sooner.
[318] My friend Mr. Henley, I believe, ranked it very high, and so did a
common friend of his and mine, the late universally regretted Mr. George
Wyndham. It so happened that, by accident, I never read the book till a
few years ago; and Mr. Wyndham saw it, fresh from the bookseller's and
uncut (or technically, "unopened") in my study. I told him the
circumstances, and he said, in his enthusiastic way, "I _do_ envy you!"
[319] I do not need to be reminded of the conditions of health that also
affected _Peveril_.
[320] I need not repeat, but merely refer to, what I have said of
_Cinq-Mars_ and of _Notre-Dame de Paris_.
[321] On the very day on which I was going over the rough draft of this
passage I saw, in a newspaper of repute, some words which perhaps throw
light on the objection to Dumas as having no literary merit. In them
"incident, coherence, humour, and dramatic power" were all excluded from
this merit, "style" alone remaining. Now I have been almost as often
reproved for attaching too much value to style in others as for
attending too little to it myself. But I certainly could not give it
such a right to "reign alone." It will indeed "do" almost by itself; but
other things can "do" almost without it.
[322] To be absolutely candid, Dumas himself did sometimes ask more of
them than they could do; and then he failed. There can, I think, be
little doubt that this is the secret of the inadequacy (as at least it
seems to me) of the Felton episode. As a friend (whose thousand merits
strive to cover his one crime of not admiring Dumas quite enough), not
knowing that I had yet written a line of this chapter, but as it
happened just as I had reached the present point, wrote to me: "Think
what Sir Walter would have made of Felton!"
[323] I could myself be perfectly content to adapt George III. on a
certain _Apology_, and substitute for all this a simple "I do not think
Dumas needs any defence." But where there has been so much obloquy,
there should, perhaps, be some refutation.
[324] "And then he says, says he...."
[325] In modern novels, of course. You have some good talk in Homer and
also in the Sagas, but I am not thinking or speaking of them.
[326]
"Red ink for ornament and black for use--
The best of things are open to abuse."
(_The Good Clerk_ as vouched for by Charles Lamb.)
[327] Yet, being nothing if not critical, I can hardly agree with those
who talk of Dumas' "_wild_ imagination"! As the great Mr. Wordsworth was
more often made to mourn by the gratitude of men than by its opposite,
so I, in my humbler sphere, am more cast down sometimes by inapposite
praise than by ignorant blame.