Letters To Dead Authors LETTER--To Alexandre Dumas byLang, Andrew
Sir,--There are moments when the wheels of life, even of such a life
as yours, run slow, and when mistrust and doubt overshadow even the
most intrepid disposition. In such a moment, towards the ending of
your days, you said to your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, "I seem to see
myself set on a pedestal which trembles as if it were founded on the
sands." These sands, your uncounted volumes, are all of gold, and
make a foundation more solid than the rock. As well might the
singer of Odysseus, or the authors of the "Arabian Nights," or the
first inventors of the stories of Boccaccio, believe that their
works were perishable (their names, indeed, have perished), as the
creator of "Les Trois Mousquetaires" alarm himself with the thought
that the world could ever forget Alexandre Dumas.
Than yours there has been no greater nor more kindly and beneficent
force in modern letters. To Scott, indeed, you owed the first
impulse of your genius; but, once set in motion, what miracles could
it not accomplish? Our dear Porthos was overcome, at last, by a
super-human burden; but your imaginative strength never found a task
too great for it. What an extraordinary vigour, what health, what
an overflow of force was yours! It is good, in a day of small and
laborious ingenuities, to breathe the free air of your books, and
dwell in the company of Dumas's men--so gallant, so frank, so
indomitable, such swordsmen, and such trenchermen. Like M. de
Rochefort in "Vingt Ans Apres," like that prisoner of the Bastille,
your genius "n'est que d'un parti, c'est du parti du grand air."
There seems to radiate from you a still persistent energy and
enjoyment; in that current of strength not only your characters
live, frolic, kindly, and sane, but even your very collaborators
were animated by the virtue which went out of you. How else can we
explain it, the dreary charge which feeble and envious tongues have
brought against you, in England and at home? They say you employed
in your novels and dramas that vicarious aid which, in the slang of
the studio, the "sculptor's ghost" is fabled to afford.
Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint
and impotent as "the strengthless tribes of the dead" in Homer's
Hades, before Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a
momentary valour. It was from you and your inexhaustible vitality
that these collaborating spectres drew what life they possessed; and
when they parted from you they shuddered back into their
nothingness. Where are the plays, where the romances which Maquet
and the rest wrote in their own strength? They are forgotten with
last year's snows; they have passed into the wide waste-paper basket
of the world. You say of D'Artagnan, when severed from his three
friends--from Porthos, Athos, and Aramis--"he felt that he could do
nothing, save on the condition that each of these companions yielded
to him, if one may so speak, a share of that electric fluid which
was his gift from heaven."
No man of letters ever had so great a measure of that gift as you;
none gave of it more freely to all who came--to the chance associate
of the hour, as to the characters, all so burly and full-blooded,
who flocked from your brain. Thus it was that you failed when you
approached the supernatural. Your ghosts had too much flesh and
blood, more than the living persons of feebler fancies. A writer so
fertile, so rapid, so masterly in the ease with which he worked,
could not escape the reproaches of barren envy. Because you
overflowed with wit, you could not be "serious;" because you created
with a word, you were said to scamp your work; because you were
never dull, never pedantic, incapable of greed, you were to be
censured as desultory, inaccurate, and prodigal.
A generation suffering from mental and physical anaemia--a
generation devoted to the "chiselled phrase," to accumulated
"documents," to microscopic porings over human baseness, to minute
and disgustful records of what in humanity is least human--may
readily bring these unregarded and railing accusations. Like one of
the great and good-humoured Giants of Rabelais, you may hear the
murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain. To you, who can amuse
the world--to you who offer it the fresh air of the highway, the
battlefield, and the sea--the world must always return: escaping
gladly from the boudoirs and the bouges, from the surgeries and
hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and M. Zola and of the
wearisome De Goncourt.
With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp
which, if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a
gnat, how healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances!
You never gloat over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the
corruptions of sense. The passions in your tales are honourable and
brave, the motives are clearly human. Honour, Love, Friendship make
the threefold cord, the clue your knights and dames follow through
how delightful a labyrinth of adventures! Your greatest books, I
take the liberty to maintain, are the Cycle of the Valois ("La Reine
Margot," "La Dame de Montsoreau," "Les Quarante-cinq"), and the
Cycle of Louis Treize and Louis Quatorze ("Les Trois Mousquetaires,"
"Vingt Ans Apres," "Le Vicomte de Bragelonne"); and, beside these
two trilogies--a lonely monument, like the sphinx hard by the three
pyramids--"Monte Cristo."
In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn
incense to that great goddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your
people worship. You had Brantome, you had Tallemant, you had Retif,
and a dozen others, to furnish materials for scenes of
voluptuousness and of blood that would have outdone even the present
naturalistes. From these alcoves of "Les Dames Galantes," and from
the torture chambers (M. Zola would not have spared us one starting
sinew of brave La Mole on the rack) you turned, as Scott would have
turned, without a thought of their profitable literary uses. You
had other metal to work on: you gave us that superstitious and
tragical true love of La Mole's, that devotion--how tender and how
pure!--of Bussy for the Dame de Montsoreau. You gave us the valour
of D'Artagnan, the strength of Porthos, the melancholy nobility of
Athos: Honour, Chivalry, and Friendship. I declare your characters
are real people to me and old friends. I cannot bear to read the
end of "Bragelonne," and to part with them for ever. "Suppose
Porthos, Athos, and Aramis should enter with a noiseless swagger,
curling their moustaches." How we would welcome them, forgiving
D'Artagnan even his hateful fourberie in the case of Milady. The
brilliance of your dialogue has never been approached: there is wit
everywhere; repartees glitter and ring like the flash and clink of
small-swords. Then what duels are yours! and what inimitable
battle-pieces! I know four good fights of one against a multitude,
in literature. These are the Death of Gretir the Strong, the Death
of Gunnar of Lithend, the Death of Hereward the Wake, the Death of
Bussy d'Amboise. We can compare the strokes of the heroic fighting-
times with those described in later days; and, upon my word, I do
not know that the short sword of Gretir, or the bill of Skarphedin,
or the bow of Gunnar was better wielded than the rapier of your
Bussy or the sword and shield of Kingsley's Hereward.
They say your fencing is unhistorical; no doubt it is so, and you
knew it. La Mole could not have lunged on Coconnas "after deceiving
circle;" for the parry was not invented except by your immortal
Chicot, a genius in advance of his time. Even so Hamlet and Laertes
would have fought with shields and axes, not with small swords. But
what matters this pedantry? In your works we hear the Homeric Muse
again, rejoicing in the clash of steel; and even, at times, your
very phrases are unconsciously Homeric.
Look at these men of murder, on the Eve of St. Bartholomew, who flee
in terror from the Queen's chamber, and "find the door too narrow
for their flight:" the very words were anticipated in a line of the
"Odyssey" concerning the massacre of the Wooers. And the picture of
Catherine de Medicis, prowling "like a wolf among the bodies and the
blood," in a passage of the Louvre--the picture is taken unwittingly
from the "Iliad." There was in you that reserve of primitive force,
that epic grandeur and simplicity of diction. This is the force
that animates "Monte Cristo," the earlier chapters, the prison, and
the escape. In later volumes of that romance, methinks, you stoop
your wing. Of your dramas I have little room, and less skill, to
speak. "Antony," they tell me, was "the greatest literary event of
its time," was a restoration of the stage. "While Victor Hugo needs
the cast-off clothes of history, the wardrobe and costume, the
sepulchre of Charlemagne, the ghost of Barbarossa, the coffins of
Lucretia Borgia, Alexandre Dumas requires no more than a room in an
inn, where people meet in riding cloaks, to move the soul with the
last degree of terror and of pity."
The reproach of being amusing has somewhat dimmed your fame--for a
moment. The shadow of this tyranny will soon be overpast; and when
"La Curee" and "Pot-Bouille" are more forgotten than "Le Grand
Cyrus," men and women--and, above all, boys--will laugh and weep
over the page of Alexandre Dumas. Like Scott himself, you take us
captive in our childhood. I remember a very idle little boy who was
busy with the "Three Musketeers" when he should have been occupied
with "Wilkins's Latin Prose." "Twenty years after" (alas! and more)
he is still constant to that gallant company; and, at this very
moment, is breathlessly wondering whether Grimaud will steal M. de
Beaufort out of the Cardinal's prison.