rt, and the bag of the epithet-hunter may contain some agreeable
epigrams and rare specimens of style; but a plain tale of adventure, of
love and war, needs none of this industry, and is even spoiled by
inopportune diligence. Speed, directness, lucidity are the
characteristics of Dumas' style, and they are exactly the characteristics
which his novels required. Scott often failed, his most loyal admirers
may admit, in these essentials; but it is rarely that Dumas fails, when
he is himself and at his best.

* * * * *

In spite of his heedless education, Dumas had true critical qualities,
and most admired the best things. We have already seen how he writes
about Shakespeare, Virgil, Goethe, Scott. But it may be less familiarly
known that this burly man-of-all-work, ignorant as he was of Greek, had a
true and keen appreciation of Homer. Dumas declares that he only thrice
criticised his contemporaries in an unfavourable sense, and as one
wishful to find fault. The victims were Casimir Delavigne, Scribe, and
Ponsard. On each occasion Dumas declares that, after reflecting, he saw
that he was moved by a little personal pique, not by a disinterested love
of art. He makes his confession with a rare nobility of candour; and yet
his review of Ponsard is worthy of him. M. Ponsard, who, like Dumas, was
no scholar, wrote a play styled _Ulysse_, and borrowed from the Odyssey.
Dumas follows Ponsard, Odyssey in hand, and while he proves that the
dramatist failed to understand Homer, proves that he himself was, in
essentials, a capable Homeric critic. Dumas understands that far-off
heroic age. He lives in its life and sympathises with its temper. Homer
and he are congenial; across the great gulf of time they exchange smiles
and a salute.

"Oh! ancient Homer, dear and good and noble, I am minded now and again to
leave all and translate thee--I, who have never a word of Greek--so empty
and so dismal are the versions men make of thee, in verse or in prose."

How Dumas came to divine Homer, as it were, through a language he knew
not, who shall say? He _did_ divine him by a natural sympathy of
excellence, and his chapters on the "Ulysse" of Ponsard are worth a
wilderness of notes by learned and most un-Homeric men. For, indeed, who
can be less like the heroic minstrel than the academic philologist?

This universality deserves note. The Homeric student who takes up a
volume of Dumas at random finds that he is not only Homeric