Larger than Life
Alexandre Dumas: A Biography and Study. By A. Craig Bell, (Cassell. 3os.) THE phenomenal life of Alexandre Dumas requires a biographer of comparable appetite, industry and exuberance : someone who will enjoy the reading of three-hundred-odd books listed at the end of this study under the heading " authentic," and some forty more of doubtful origin someone who will explore the noisy and predatory world in which Dumas lived and wrote, and who will allow himself to be carried away by the great Alexandre's tremen- dous bluff, though not to the extent of surrendering all critical standards before his subject's huge, unself-critical output. All these virtues Mr. Craig Bell possesses. Mit only does he guide us through novels and plays which, if we have not read them before our sixteenth birthdays, we are unlikely ever to begin ' • not only does he guide us through the get- rich-quick world of Louis Philippe and the Second Empire : not only does he present Durnas's imposing and boisterous figure without so much as a hint at the base and Freudian motives that may have swayed this money-making and money-wasting colossus, but after a patient reassessment of the work itself, by unfashionable standards of comparison with Scott, Dickens and Charles Reade, he faces us with his remarkable conclusions. Dumas, in his opinion, reached the height of his powers only after he abandoned the writing of historical novels : Monte Cristo he finds. for all its speed and mastery, lacking in " characterisation, descrif)* tion and repose," and The Black Tulip he dismisses as a tour de force. He places Twenty-Years After above The Three Musketeers for the greater maturity of d'Artagnan's presentation in the sequel, 'and even goes so far in his enthusiasm for that fourth Musketeer as to rate him, in agreement with-R. L. Stevenson, as the finest- drawn masculine. character outside Shakespeare. But in such books as Catherine Blum and Le Meneur de Loups, which Dumas set among the scenes of his childhood, the wooded country around Villers-Cotteret, and in which he drew portraits of the farmers, ranger's and poachers who had been his earliest friends, Mr. Craig Bell finds a higher general level of achievement; while the later novels of middle-class life, Black Tulip for instance, and Une Aventure d'Amour, have for him a small-scale charm which makes him prefer them to the great Musketeer and Walois cycles. Dumas was sensi- tive to currents of fashion, and these little-known excursions, made as romanticism ebbed, on to the territory of Georges Sand and the Naturalists are perhaps undeservedly neglected. The enthusiasm of this book may well be sufficientfy contagious to send out new readers to check Mr. Craig Bell's findings ; at present they can only be accepted with reserve.
Merely by dipping into the ten volumes of memoirs or into En Suisse. however, one quickly discovers how splendidly Dumas could record the contemporary world of theatrical enterprises and journalistic ventures, and the feuds and generosities of Bohemian life. If any of his little-known writings will quickly reward the reader, it is these. For here one-meets the writer himself, who set up such standards of quantitative output-34,000 words, the third of a modern novel, in less than three days ; the traveller who presented the Alps and the Mediterranean afresh to a public little given to wild scenery ; the young man from the.country who made three fortunes and lost them all to the last penny.
Mr. Craig Bell's study is a work of scholarship, enthusiasm and individuality. It is often untidy in its presentation and idiosyncratic in its language ; nor is -it in any sense contemporary in its outlook. But it is a first book of very considerable powers and encouraging independence of viewpoint, and it carries its reader along with some- thing of the headlong force of the great Alexandre himself.
J. M. COHEN.
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