he has had the ill-luck to receive from heaven force upon him. I don’t believe these dogs ruin me. Let them bide! But, in the interests of their own good luck, see they are not thirteen, an unfortunate number!”
“Monsieur, I’ll drive one of them away.”
“No, no, Michel; let a fourteenth come. These dogs cost me some three pounds a month,” said Dumas. “A dinner to five or six friends would cost thrice as much, and, when they went home, they would say my wine was good, but certainly that my books were bad.” In this fashion Dumas fared royally “to the dogs,” and his Abbotsford ruined him as certainly as that other unhappy palace ruined Sir Walter. He, too, had his miscellaneous kennel; he, too, gave while he had anything to give, and, when he had nothing else, gave the work of his pen. Dumas tells how his big dog, Mouton once flew at him and bit one of his hands, while the other held the throat of the brute. “Luckily my hand, though small, is powerful; what it once holds it holds long—money excepted.” He could not “haud a guid grip o’ the gear.” Neither Scott nor Dumas could shut his ears to a prayer or his pockets to a beggar, or his doors on whoever knocked at them.
“I might at least have asked him to dinner,” Scott was heard murmuring, when some insufferable bore at last left Abbotsford, after wasting his time and nearly wearing out his patience. Neither man preached socialism; both practised it on the Aristotelian principle: the goods of friends are common, and men are our friends.
* * * * *
The death of Dumas’ father, while the son was a child, left Madame Dumas in great poverty at Villers Cotterets. Dumas’ education was sadly to seek. Like most children destined to be bookish, he taught himself to read very young: in Buffon, the Bible, and books of mythology. He knew all about Jupiter—like David Copperfield’s Tom Jones, “a child’s Jupiter, an innocent creature”—all about every god, goddess, fawn, dryad, nymph—and he never forgot this useful information. Dear Lemprière, thou art superseded; but how much more delightful thou art than the fastidious Smith or the learned Preller! Dumas had one volume of the “Arabian Nights,” with Aladdin’s lamp therein, the sacred lamp which he was to keep burning with a flame so brilliant and so steady. It is pleasant to know that, in his boyhood, this great romancer loved Virgil. “Little as is my Latin, I have ever adored Virgil: his tenderness for exiles, his melancholy vision of death, his foreboding of an unknown God, have always moved me; the melody of his verses charmed me most, and they lull me still between asleep and awake.” School days did not last long: Madame Dumas got a little post—a licence to sell tobacco—and at fifteen Dumas entered a notary’s office, like his great Scotch forerunner. He was ignorant of his vocation for the stage—Racine and Corneille fatigued him prodigiously—till he saw Hamlet: Hamlet diluted by Ducis. He had never heard of Shakespeare, but here was something he could appreciate. Here was “a profound impression, full of inexplicable emotion, vague desires, fleeting lights, that, so far, lit up only a chaos.”
Oddly enough, his earliest literary essay was the translation of Bürger’s “Lenore.” Here, again, he encounters Scott; but Scott translated the ballad, and Dumas failed. Les mortes vont vite! the same refrain woke poetry in both the Frenchman and the Scotchman.
“Ha! ha! the Dead can ride with speed:
Dost fear to ride with me?”
So Dumas’ literary career began with a defeat, but it was always a beginning. He had just failed with “Lenore,” when Leuven asked him to collaborate in a play. He was utterly ignorant, he says; he had not succeeded in gallant efforts to read through “Gil Blas” and “Don Quixote.” “To my shame,” he writes, “the man has not been more fortunate with those masterpieces than the boy.” He had not yet heard of Scott, Cooper, Goethe; he had heard of Shakespeare only as a barbarian. Other plays the boy wrote—failures, of course—and then Dumas poached his way to Paris, shooting partridges on the road, and paying the hotel expenses by his success in the chase. He was introduced to the great Talma: what a moment for Talma, had he known it! He saw the theatres. He went home, but returned to Paris, drew a small prize in a lottery, and sat next a gentleman at the play, a gentleman who read the rarest of Elzevirs, “Le Pastissier Français,” and gave him a little lecture on Elzevirs in general. Soon this gentleman began to hiss the piece, and was turned out. He was Charles Nodier, and one of the anonymous authors of the play he was hissing! I own that this amusing chapter lacks verisimilitude. It reads as if Dumas had chanced to “get up” the subject of Elzevirs, and had fashioned his new knowledge into a little story. He could make a story out of anything—he “turned all to favour and to prettiness.” Could I translate the whole passage, and print it here, it would be longer than this article; but, ah, how much more entertaining! For whatever Dumas did he did with such life, spirit, wit, he told it with such vivacity, that his whole career is one long romance of the highest quality. Lassagne told him he must read—must read Goethe, Scott, Cooper, Froissart, Joinville, Brantôme. He read them to some purpose. He entered the service of the Duc d’Orléans as a clerk, for he wrote a clear hand, and, happily, wrote at astonishing speed. He is said to have written a short play in a cottage where he went to rest for an hour or two after shooting all the morning. The practice in a notary’s office stood him, as it stood Scott, in good stead. When a dog bit his hand he managed to write a volume without using his thumb. I have tried it, but forbear—in mercy to the printers. He performed wild feats of rapid caligraphy when a clerk under the Duc d’Orléans, and he wrote his plays in one “hand,” his novels in another. The “hand” used in his dramas he acquired when, in days of poverty, he used to write in bed. To this habit he also attributed the brutalité of his earlier pieces, but there seems to be no good reason why a man should write like a brute because it is in bed that he writes.
In those days of small things he fought his first duel, and made a study of Fear and Courage. His earliest impulse was to rush at danger; if he had to wait, he felt his courage oozing out at the tips of his fingers, like Bob Acres, but in the moment of peril he was himself again. In dreams he was a coward, because, as he argues, the natural man is a poltroon, and conscience, honour, all the spiritual and commanding part of our nature, goes to sleep in dreams. The animal terror asserts itself unchecked. It is a theory not without exceptions. In dreams one has plenty of conscience (at least that is my experience), though it usually takes the form of remorse. And in dreams one often affronts dangers which, in waking hours, one might probably avoid if one could.
* * * * *
Dumas’ first play, an unimportant vaudeville, was acted in 1825. His first novels were also published then; he took part of the risk, and only four copies were sold. He afterward used the ideas in more mature works, as Mr. Sheridan Le Fanu employed three or four times (with perfect candour and fairness) the most curious incident in “Uncle Silas.” Like Mr. Arthur Pendennis, Dumas at this time wrote poetry “up to” pictures and illustrations. It is easy, but seldom lucrative work. He translated a play of Schiller’s into French verse, chiefly to gain command of that vehicle, for his heart was fixed on dramatic success. Then came the visit of Kean and other English actors to Paris. He saw the true Hamlet, and, for the first time on any stage, “the play of real passions.” Emulation woke in him: a casual work of art led him to the story of Christina of Sweden, he wrote his play Christine (afterward reconstructed); he read it to Baron Taylor, who applauded; the Comédie Française accepted it, but a series of intrigues disappointed him, after all. His energy at this moment was extraordinary, for he was very poor, his mother had a stroke of paralysis, his bureau was always bullying and interfering with him. But nothing could snub this “force of nature,” and he immediately produced his Henri Trois, the first romantic drama of France. This had an instant and noisy success, and the first night of the play he spent at the theatre, and at the bedside of his unconscious mother. The poor lady could not even understand whence the flowers came that he laid on her couch, the flowers thrown to the young man—yesterday unknown, and to-day the most famous of contemporary names. All this tale of triumph, checkered by enmities and diversified by duels, Dumas tells with the vigour and wit of his novels. He is his own hero, and loses nothing in the process; but the other characters—Taylor, Nodier, the Duc d’Orléans, the spiteful press-men, the crabbed old officials—all live like the best of the persons in his tales. They call Dumas vain: