Part 1 (1/2)
Essays in Little.
by Andrew Lang.
PREFACE
Of the following essays, five are new, and were written for this volume.
They are the paper on Mr. R. L. Stevenson, the ”Letter to a Young Journalist,” the study of Mr. Kipling, the note on Homer, and ”The Last Fas.h.i.+onable Novel.” The article on the author of ”Oh, no! we never mention Her,” appeared in the New York _Sun_, and was suggested by Mr.
Dana, the editor of that journal. The papers on Thackeray and d.i.c.kens were published in _Good Words_, that on Dumas appeared in _Scribner's Magazine_, that on M. Theodore de Banville in _The New Quarterly Review_.
The other essays were originally written for a newspaper ”Syndicate.”
They have been re-cast, augmented, and, to a great extent, re-written.
A. L.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
Alexandre Dumas is a writer, and his life is a topic, of which his devotees never weary. Indeed, one lifetime is not long enough wherein to tire of them. The long days and years of Hilpa and Shalum, in Addison--the antediluvian age, when a picnic lasted for half a century and a courts.h.i.+p for two hundred years, might have sufficed for an exhaustive study of Dumas. No such study have I to offer, in the brief seasons of our perishable days. I own that I have not read, and do not, in the circ.u.mstances, expect to read, all of Dumas, nor even the greater part of his thousand volumes. We only dip a cup in that sparkling spring, and drink, and go on,--we cannot hope to exhaust the fountain, nor to carry away with us the well itself. It is but a word of grat.i.tude and delight that we can say to the heroic and indomitable master, only an _ave_ of friends.h.i.+p that we can call across the bourne to the shade of the Porthos of fiction. That his works (his best works) should be even still more widely circulated than they are; that the young should read them, and learn frankness, kindness, generosity--should esteem the tender heart, and the gay, invincible wit; that the old should read them again, and find forgetfulness of trouble, and taste the anodyne of dreams, that is what we desire.
Dumas said of himself (”Memoires,” v. 13) that when he was young he tried several times to read forbidden books--books that are sold _sous le manteau_. But he never got farther than the tenth page, in the
”scrofulous French novel On gray paper with blunt type;”
he never made his way so far as
”the woful sixteenth print.”
”I had, thank G.o.d, a natural sentiment of delicacy; and thus, out of my six hundred volumes (in 1852) there are not four which the most scrupulous mother may not give to her daughter.” Much later, in 1864, when the _Censure_ threatened one of his plays, he wrote to the Emperor: ”Of my twelve hundred volumes there is not one which a girl in our most modest quarter, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, may not be allowed to read.”
The mothers of the Faubourg, and mothers in general, may not take Dumas exactly at his word. There is a pa.s.sage, for example, in the story of Miladi (”Les Trois Mousquetaires”) which a parent or guardian may well think undesirable reading for youth. But compare it with the original pa.s.sage in the ”Memoires” of D'Artagnan! It has pa.s.sed through a medium, as Dumas himself declared, of natural delicacy and good taste. His enormous popularity, the widest in the world of letters, owes absolutely nothing to prurience or curiosity. The air which he breathes is a healthy air, is the open air; and that by his own choice, for he had every temptation to seek another kind of vogue, and every opportunity.
Two anecdotes are told of Dumas' books, one by M. Edmond About, the other by his own son, which show, in brief s.p.a.ce, why this novelist is so beloved, and why he deserves our affection and esteem. M. Villaud, a railway engineer who had lived much in Italy, Russia, and Spain, was the person whose enthusiasm finally secured a statue for Dumas. He felt so much grat.i.tude to the unknown friend of lonely nights in long exiles, that he could not be happy till his grat.i.tude found a permanent expression. On returning to France he went to consult M. Victor Borie, who told him this tale about George Sand. M. Borie chanced to visit the famous novelist just before her death, and found Dumas' novel, ”Les Quarante Cinq” (one of the cycle about the Valois kings) lying on her table. He expressed his wonder that she was reading it for the first time.
”For the first time!--why, this is the fifth or sixth time I have read 'Les Quarante Cinq,' and the others. When I am ill, anxious, melancholy, tired, discouraged, nothing helps me against moral or physical troubles like a book of Dumas.” Again, M. About says that M. Sarcey was in the same cla.s.s at school with a little Spanish boy. The child was homesick; he could not eat, he could not sleep; he was almost in a decline.
”You want to see your mother?” said young Sarcey.
”No: she is dead.”
”Your father, then?”
”No: he used to beat me.”
”Your brothers and sisters?”
”I have none.”
”Then why are you so eager to be back in Spain?”
”To finish a book I began in the holidays.”