Himself.

40

VIEWS AND REVIEWS

immense achievement the most exist but as fractions of the larger sum, and the others have utterly disappeared. Combien,' says his son in that excellent page which serves to preface le Fils Naturel-combien parmi ceux qui devaient rester obscurs se sont éclairés et chauffés à ta forge, et si l'heure des restitutions sonnait, quel gain pour toi, rien qu'à reprendre ce que tu as donné et ce qu'on t'a pris!' That is the true verdict of posterity, and he does well who abides by it.

H'

worst now.

E is one of the heroes of modern art. Envy and scandal have done their The libeller has said his say; the detectives who make a specialty of literary forgeries have proved their cases. one and all; the judges of matter have spoken, and so have the critics of style; the distinguished author of Nana has taken us into his confidence on the subject; we have heard from the lamented Granier and others as much as was to be heard on the question of plagiarism in general and the plagiarisms of Dumas in particular; and Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has done what he is

pleased to designate the 'nightman's work' of analysing Antony and Kean, and of collecting everything that spite has said about their author's life, their author's habits, their author's manners and customs and character of whose vanity, mendacity, immorality, a score of improper qualities besides, enough has been written to furnish a good-sized library. And the result of it all is that Dumas is recognised for a force in modern art and for one of the greatest inventors and amusers the century has produced. Whole crowds of men were

named as the real authors of his books and plays; but they were only readable when he signed for them. His ideas were traced to a hundred originals; but they had all seemed worthless till he took them in hand and developed them according to their innate capacity. The French he wrote was popular, and the style at his command was none of the loftiest, as his critics have often been at pains to show; but he was for all that an artist at once original and exemplary, with an incomparable instinct of selection, a constructive faculty not equalled among the men of this century, an understanding of what is right and what is wrong in art

and a mastery of his materials which in their way are not to be paralleled in the work of Sir Walter himself. Like Napoleon, he was 'a natural force let loose'; and if he had done no more than achieve universal renown as the prince of raconteurs and a commanding position as a novelist wherever novels are read he would still have done much. But he did a vast deal more. A natural force, he wrought in the right direction, as natural forces must and do. He amused the world for forty years and more; but he also contributed something to the general sum of the world's artistic experience and capacity, and his contribution is of permanent worth and charm. He has left us stories which are models of the enchanting art of narrative; and, with a definition good and comprehensive enough to include all the best work which has been produced for the theatre from Eschylus down to Augier, from the Choephora on to le Gendre de M. Poirier, he has given us types of the romantic and the domestic drama, which, new when he produced them, are even now not old, and which as regards essentials, have yet to be improved upon. The form and aim of the modern drama, as we know

it, have been often enough ascribed to the ingenious author of une Chaîne and the Verre d'Eau; but they might with much greater truth be ascribed to the author of Antony and la Tour de Nesle. Scribe invents and eludes where Dumas invents and dares. The theory of Scribe is one of mere dexterity: his drama is a perpetual chassécroisé at the edge of a precipice, a dance of puppets among swords that might but will not cut and eggs that might but will not break; to him a situation is a kind of tightrope to be crossed with ever so much agility and an endless affectation of peril by all his characters in turn: in fact, as M. Dumas fils has said of him, he is 'le Shakespeare des ombres chinoises.' The theory of Dumas is the very antipodes of this. All I want,' he said in a memorable comparison between himself and Victor Hugo, 'is four trestles, four boards, two actors, and a passion'; and his good plays are a proof that in this he spoke no more than the truth. Drama to him was so much emotion in action. If he invented a situation he accepted its issues in their entirety, and did his utmost to express from it all the passion it contained. That he fails to reach the highest

peaks of emotional effect is no fault of his : to do that something more is needed than a perfect method, something other than a great ambition and an absolute certainy of touch; and Dumas was neither a Shakespeare nor an Eschylus-he was not even an Augier. All the same, he has produced in la Tour de Nesle a romantic play which M. Zola himself pronounces the ideal of the genre and in Antony an achievement in drawing-room tragedy which is out of all questioning the first, and in the opinion of a critic so competent and so keen as the master's son is probably the strongest, thing of its kind in modern literature. On this latter play it were difficult, I think, to bestow too much attention. It is touched, even tainted, with the manner and the affectation of its epoch. But it is admirably imagined and contrived; it is very daring, and it is very new; it deals with the men and women of 1830, and-with due allowance for differences of manners, ideal, and personal genius-it is in its essentials a play in the same sense as Othello and the Trachinia are plays in theirs. It is the beginning, as I believe, not only of les Lionnes Pauvres but of Thérèse Raquin