ALEXANDRE DUNI A S
To write the Life of le pen Dumas is a difficult undertaking.
There never was a man or a writer so various, so many-sided, so hard to characterise without meeting with contradiction ; so that opposite impressions seem to be equally well justified. This is so well known in France that nobody, we believe, has yet tried to make a complete biography of Dumas, either on the personal or the literary side. It was left for an English- man to venture on this great ocean with its varying soundings and opposing currents. The French, as a rule, do not care for a literature or a character which is not clear-cut, definite, lending itself easily to analysis. Their point of view is both more scientific and more artistic than ours : the French literary mind is before all things logical. Dumas pre does not satisfy them in these ways, which may partly account for his absence from the Academy ; he is and was an extravagant phenomenon, a bête du bon .Dieu which could not be under- stood or classified without more trouble than the result made worth while. Therefore they have generally confined them- selves to the study of special points cdncerning Dumas, and Mr. Davidson had a field open to him on which he has built a good piece of work.
It is safe to say that everything known about Dumas finds a place in this large and handsome volume. Dumas has been fortunate in his biographer, who approaches his subject in the true spirit—without extenuation or malice—and with most painstaking industry has hunted up every source of informa- tion and consulted every possible authority. The result of steering one's way through masses of contradictory detail is a , airly clear idea of Dumas himself and an excellent view of us work. Mr. Davidson adds to the value of his book by a most interesting bibliographical appendix. The style of the boa itself might be better ; it is somewhat journalistic and lacking in simplicity, and some of the chapters are spun out unnecessarily, but on the whole it may be truly said that there is not a dull page in the volume. Indeed, with such a subject, it would be wonderful if there were.
The chief facts in the life of Dumas pare are commonly, but not always accurately, known. It was a mistake to call him a negro or a mulatto, as so many of his contemporaries did, the strain of dark blood accounting for the aberrations of his tropical nature, as well as for his singular appearance. He was in a quadroon, in whom the fourth part predominated to a perhaps unusual extent. His grandfather was of noble French blood, Seigneur or Marquis—the title has been die- puted--de la Pailleterie. He bought an estate in San Domingo about the year 1760, and had a son by a negro woman named Marie Dumas. He brought this son back to France when he was eighteen, and afterwards quarrelled with him and allowed him to enlist, as Alexandre Dumas, in a regiment of dragoons. .This Alexandre married a Mlle. Labouret, of Ville's- Catterets, and his son Alexandre was born in 1802. The soldier, the distinguished General Dumas who was too honest and manly for Napoleon, and who has been immortalised in the Memoirs of his son, seems to have been a true hero, and from him the novelist inherited those • fine qualities which redeemed his strange character. The mother, too, the hotel- . keeper's daughter at Villers-Cotterets, seems to have possessed a natural nobility, and Alexandre Dumas was devoted to her from his father's death in 1806 till her own in 1838.
• The story of the young man's hardly earned education, his early struggles, the resolution with which, in the intervals of his work as a clerk in Paris, he followed out the passion of his life, romantic drama, the fate of the early plays, from failure and discouragement to brilliant success, so that Puma% in his infinite variety, inventiveness, width of range, takes his place among the chief forerunners of the modern French theatre,—all this is told with great liveliness and much • Alexandre Du (*re): his Life and Works. By Arthur P. Davidson, M.A.
London - A. Constable and Co. [128. net•3 detail by Mr. Davidson. Then we go on to those excursions into politics which made Dumas notorious, and a hero in his own eyes, during the rather absurd Revolution of 1330.
But of course, to Dumaa's great English public, to that section of his world for which this book is written, and which appreciates him nowadays more highly than his own countrymen do, neither plays nor politics, nor astonishing goodness of heart united with a private life anything but admirable, matter anything at all in comparison with the novels, where history is "elevated to the dignity of romance," which will live as long as man retains an imagination. It is true that we mostly read Dumas in "the blackguard travesty of a translation," whereas, as Stevenson adds, and it cannot be better said, "there is no style so untranslatable ; light as a whipped trifle, strong as silk ; wordy like a village tale ; pat like a general's despatch ; with every fault., yet never tedious ; with no merit, yet inimitably right." But after all, no number of translations can destroy the vitality of d'Artagnan and Porthoa, or make their adventures ordinary.
Mr. Davidson gives a good and clear account of the series of novels, and makes some remarks on the relation of Dumas to history which appear to us very just. He thinks that the impression of French history left on a reader who knows- it chiefly through Dumas will on the whole be right. As the world goes on, old popular tradition is in many directions proving its right to exist and be respected. Dumas had no power of deep study or taste for philosophical analysis;- but he had "the true historical instinct." He took history as the people knew it, passed it through the fire of his genius, and behold ! a Catherine, a Charles IX., a Mazarin, a Fouquet; a Louis XIV., hundreds more, who will live for posterity as Dumas painted them : and in most cases it would be hard to prove him wrong. As to the great question of collaboration— how much Dumas, how much Maquet, Bocage, Lacroix, and so on—there is a good deal in this book to clear up our ideas on the subject, and everything positively known as to the manufacture of the different plays and romances is to be found in the appendix.
Dumas reached his zenith in the years between 1843 and 1851, during which he built his chateau of Monte Cristo, to be inhabited by parasites of every description, encouraged by his utter carelessness and unbounded generosity. The way. to ruin was not far. For nearly twenty years, till his death: in 1870, life was a struggle and a disappointment; though still. with his wonderful vitality, it meant more to him, both in private and in public, than to any other living Frenchman. The extraordinary richness and variety of his nature accounts, no doubt, for the endless misrepresentations with which Mr. Davidson deals in his last chapter. The conclusion is that one can hardly be absolutely wrong about Dumas, so did extremes and contraries meet in him. It seems not too much to say that he had no moral sense, no "sense of obligation in the daily affairs of life his life swung from sentiment to sensation, from sensation to sentiment." This means a life thoroughly disrespectable, and no one, we suppose, will claim any other kind of existence for le pere Dumas, though those critics are mistaken who picture him smoking cigars and drinking absinthe, for he did neither,—simply, of course, because he liked neither. And yet he was the least selfish of men. Listen to Maxime du Camp, a distinguished =dine- proachable witness. He met Dumas at Naples in 1860, and in his Souvenirs Litteraires writes many pages on " ce charmeur " :- "Si un homme fut aimable, an sena original du mot, c'est-i- dire fait pour @tre aime, c'est Malgre son esprit etin- celant et sa prodigieuse intelligence, ii avait an fond de nalvet6 dont le charme seduisait lee plus rebelles. II croyait en lui, c'est vrai et eltait legitime, male ii croyait aussi aux autres et s'edoicait de faire valoir ceux-1e. mimes qui souvent se riaient de ' qui done a frapp6 sa ports, a fouille dans sa bourse, a redefine son aide et a eta repousse J'ai beaucoup Rime Alexandre Dumas."
Enough of his character : be lives in his romances, and we should not be surprised if a fresh demand for them were to arise out of the publication of this book And if Dumas him- self is not more than a name to English readers in future-, it will not be the fault of Mr. Davidson. We ought to add that the book is illustrated with several portraits and a good many caricatures, for which his countrymen always comri Duniap *re an irresistible subject.
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