but still not of the easiest--of writing
pretty fully without repetition on subjects on which you have written
fully already. There is the enormous bulk, far greater than in the other
case, of the work: which makes any complete survey of its individual
components impossible. And there is the wide if not universal knowledge
of this or that--if not of this _and_ that--part of it; which makes such
survey unnecessary and probably unwelcome. But here, as there, in
whatever contrast of degree and kind, there is the importance in
relation to the general subject, which needs pretty abundant notice, and
the particular character of that importance, which demands special
examination.

There are probably not quite so many readers as there might have been a
generation ago who would express indignation at the idea that the two
novelists can be held in any degree[312] comparable. Between the two
periods a pretty strong and almost concerted effort was made by persons
of no small literary position, such as Mr. Lang, Mr. Stevenson, and Mr.
Henley, who are dead, and others, some of whom are alive, to follow the
lead of Thackeray many years earlier still. They denounced, supporting
the denunciation with all the literary skill and vigour of which they
were capable, the notion, common in France as well as in England, that
Dumas was a mere _amuseur_, whether they did or did not extend their
battery to the other notion (common then in England, if not in France)
that he was an amuser whose amusements were pernicious. These efforts
were perhaps not entirely ineffectual: let us hope that actual reading,
by not unintelligent or prejudiced readers, had more effect still.

[Sidenote: Charge and discharge.]

But let us also go back a little and, adding one, repeat what the
charges against Dumas are. There is the moral charge just mentioned;
there is the not yet mentioned charge of plagiarism and "devilling"; and
there is the again already mentioned complaint that he is a mere
"pastimer"; that he has no literary quality; that he deserves at best to
take his chance with the novelists from Sue to Gaboriau who have been or
will be dismissed with rather short shrift elsewhere. Let us, as best
seems to suit history, treat these in order, though with very unequal
degrees of attention.

[Sidenote: Morality.]

The moral part of the matter needs but a few lines. The objection here
was one of the still fewer things that did to some extent justify and
"_s