THE MEMOIRS OF ALE XANDRE D,PIAS.*
IT might have been as well if Mr. Davidson could have contrived to compress into his two volumes—perhaps mado a little larger for the purpose—the whole of the Meanoires. We can quite believe that, as it is, he has found it difficult to make the necessary omissions ; nor, indeed, have we any complaint to make of dullness or tediousness in these w The Memoirs of Alexandre Dams (PAM. Extracts Mini the Firs Five Volume of "Moe libmoires." &ducted and Transie,to. by A. F. Davidson M.A. 2 vole. Lotolon and Calontta; W. H. Allen and Co. 1.801. pages,—Dumas never could be dull. But this is an age of scanty leisure and many books, and the subject is a little passed. Nine out of ten English readers that know anything of Dumas know him as a novelist. But these volumes do not bring us down as far as the period to which Monte Cristo and Les Trois Moneguetaires belong. So far as they relate his literary career, they are concerned with his struggles and 811COPEises as a dramatist. The subject is interesting, but it belongs to "ancient history." One would have to search far and wide among readers of the present generation before find- ing one who had ever heard of Dumas' once famous play of Henry III.
Dumas' father, who had quarrelled with his family, enlisted as a private soldier in 1786. Seven years later he was General- in-Chief of the Army of the Western Pyrenees. This, indeed, is to understate the rapidity of his promotion. He was still a private soldier in January, 1792, and on September 8th, 1793, he was a General-in-Chief. Among his first acts was to tell the truth to the Committee of Public Safety in Paris. He had been sent to the war in La Vendee, and he frankly told them that their soldiers were a set of brigands and robbers. Still, he received further promotion, being made General-in-Chief of the Army of the Alps. But he was sus- pected. He had earned the nickname of "Monsieur de l'Humanite," and when he proceeded to the audacity of breaking up a guillotine for firewood, he was summoned to Paris to answer for his misdeeds. He did not go, and the offence was overlooked. Summoned again shortly afterwards —this time to defend the Convention—he arrived a little too late. Bonaparte had taken the tide at the flood, and it was leading him on to fortune. General Dumas won high distinction in the Tyrol, and, after various other services, went with Bonaparte to Egypt. The campaign in that country did not please him. It was "worse," he wrote in a letter, "than La Vendee." Finally, he quarrelled with Bonaparte, an incident that, as may be supposed, was fatal to his career. In March, 1799, he contrived to get away from Egypt, escaped the Eng- lish cruisers, but was very nearly shipwrecked, only just managing to reach the port of Tarentum. The Neapolitan Government threw him into prison, where an attempt was made to poison him. He escaped with his life ; but his health was shattered, the arsenic administered to him ultimately bringing on—as his son says, we know not with what truth— cancer in the stomach, Of this he died seven years later. In 1802 Alexandre was born. He tells the story of his childhood in a very lively and picturesque narrative, which has only one drawback, that we are never quite sure whether he-is romancing or not. Surely Boudoux, whom he vaguely describes as " type," must owe at least something to Dumas' imagination. He was a servant in the Prince of Oonde's kennels, and it was found that the doge grew thin under his care. Inquiry was made, and "it appeared that Boudoux used to eat by himself the portion of forty dogs, which came to one-third of the whole supply." The problem of the lad's education was a serious one. The Emperor had not forgiven his old comrade-in- arms, and no help was forthcoming in the shape of free admission to a lyege for the orphan. When a cousin founded a bursary in a seminary with preference to his rela- tives, it seemed too good a chance to be lost, and the future author of Monte Cristo bad a chance of becoming a priest. The raillery of a cousin, who declared that she would make him her director, set him against the idea, and he pro- tested by running away. His mother gave way, and gave him instead the best secular education that she could procure for him. At this point conic in three chapters of personal recol- lections of the final struggle of Napoleon, the campaign of 1814, the return from Elba, and the Hundred Days. The young Dumas saw the Emperor on his way to Waterloo : "He was seated far back on the right-hand side [of the carriage], dressed in his green uniform with white facings, and wearing the Star of the Legion of Honour. His pale, sickly face, which seemed ntassively set in a block of ivory, leant slightly forward over his breast." And he saw him again as he returned, "exactly the same man, exactly the same face, pale, sickly, impassible ; only the head droops rather more over the chest." Dumas emphasises, we see, the fact of the physical weakness of the Emperor. It hampered, he thinks, his genius, and even changed the fortune of the campaign.
At fifteen, the young Dumas found a place in a notary's office. To this occupation he remained tolerably faithful for some years,—that is, he gave to it what time his two passions, for sport and for the play, allowed him. When he was twenty, these conflicting interests brought on a crisis. He was then with a lawyer of the name of Lefevre at Crepy. M. LeVvro paid occasional visits to Paris, and his clerk thought that he could not do better than imitate him. He went, paying his way by the game that he poached en route, saw Tahna act • Sylla, in De Jouy's play, penetrated to the great actor's dressing-room and kissed his hand, and returned to Crepy, to find that his employer had got back before him. M. Lefevre lectured him, but said that the warning was only provisional. Dumas thought it better to take it as final. The lawyer answered, with a politeness of which an Englishman would hardly be capable : "From the moment that you cease to be here as third clerk, you are here as a friend ; and, in that capacity, the longer you stay, the more pleasure it will give me."
Dumas then went to seek his fortune in Paris. He frankly owns that he had no qualifications but that of writing a good hand. This, and the interest of an old friend of his father's, procured him a clerkship in the establishment of the Duke of Orleans (afterwards Louis Philippe) at a salary of 1,200 francs. This was not much, but at least he was near to the Thatre Francais, and so to the object on which his heart was set, the career of a dramatist. Here comes in a very amusing account of Napoleon's efforts to patronise literature. He had him- , self a sufficiently wide taste, admiring equally Corneille and Ossian, a name, by-the-way, which, in making a list of authors, he spelt "Ocean." But he could not find writers, though, as Dumas says, "he kept demanding poets from his Grand Master of the University just as he demanded soldiers from his Minister of War." The conscripts Caine at the rate of 300,000 a year, but at the end of four years "he had only M. Baour-Lornisan and M. Raynanard," no very great acquisi- tions after all. Dumas' own career began, of course, much later. He prepared himself for it by reading Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, and Lord Byron. Byron's death he felt • in much the same way as Tennyson felt it. Hie first piece was played in 1825. It was but a trifle, but it succeeded, having a ruu of a month, and bringing in to its author the grand sum of 27 3s. 6d. A first book of tales, on the other hand, was a failure. Rejected by ten publishers, "who refused it," says M. Dumas, "straight off, and—let me do them this justice—without the slightest hesitation," it was brought out by a M. Marie, who seems to have been a French precursor of the founder of the " Fonetic Nuz." M. Marie received 212 from the author, sold four copies for 78., and lost 212 more, minus the 10 fr. which he received by the sale of four copies. (Publishing must have been a good business, if a book did sell. A thousand copies for 224, at a publishing price of 2 fr. 50 c., leaves the handsome profit of 296. Can the figures be right ?) A second dramatic piece, taken from the "Travels of Sinbad," ran for forty nights, and brought in more than 212, part of which, however, went to repay the unlucky speculation of the tales. When he was twenty-five, Dumas saw Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Othello, and other of Shakespeare's plays, acted by Kemble and Mies Smithson. "The English actors," he says, "left my heart throbbing with new impressions, my mind illumined with new lights." A tragedy was the result, Christine, the subject having been suggested by a picture that Dumas saw, "The Assassination of Monaldeschi by order of the Swedish Queen." He had never heard of either of them before. Meanwhile, the author, though not turned out of his clerkship, had been docked of his pay. Christine was accepted at the Theatre Francais, but never produced. There were "wheels within wheels," and the young dramatist's career was checked by a very discreditable intrigue. But he was irrepressible. He wrote another tragedy, this time taking a sub- ject from French history. This was Henry III. This too was accepted, and actually produced. The Duke of Orleans, with a brilliant party of guests, came to the first night, having con- sented to put his dinner forward by an: hour, while the theatre met him by postponing the play for the same space of time. It was an immense success. The next day the manuscript was sold for 2240. But the ship was not yet in harbour. The Government interdicted the play ! The dramatist had an interview with the Minister (at 7 a.m., we are told), removed, we presume, though he does not say so, the objectionable passages, and got permission for the play to proceed. His fortune was made, as far as the fortune of such a man as Alexandre Dumas, pke, could be made by any success. The story of Henry III. is succeeded by a scarcely less interesting chapter on Victor Hugo and his early career, including the composition of Marion Delorme, and when that was forbidden, of Hernani. But we must bring our notice of these very readable volumes to an end by complimenting the translator on the ease of his style. Now and then he is too literal. For " this phenomenon, which I have never had occasion to see re- produced since" should certainly be "never had the opportunity of seeing."
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