Drama, but for other reasons which we may hope to set forth presently.

[Sidenote: A confession.]

Before sitting down comfortably to deal with him in my critical jacket,
I have to put on, for ceremonial purposes, something of a white sheet,
and to hold a candle of repentance in my hand. I have never said very
much about the younger Dumas anywhere, and I am not conscious of any
positive injustice in what I _have_ said;[349] but I do suspect a
certain imperfection of justice. This arose, as nearly all positive and
comparative injustices do, from insufficient knowledge and study. What
it was exactly in him that "put me off" of old I could not now say; but
I think it was because I did come across some of his numerous and famous
fisticuffs of Preface and Dissertation and controversy. I thought then,
and I still think, that the artist has something better to do than to
"fight prizes": he has to do things worthy of the prize. "They say. What
say they? Let them say" should be his motto. And later, when I might
have condoned this (in the proper sense of that appallingly misused
word) in virtue of his positive achievements, he had left off
novel-writing and had taken to drama, for which, in its modern forms, I
have never cared. But I fear I must make a further confession. The
extravagant praise which was lavished on him by other critics, even
though they were, in some cases at least, [Greek: philoi andres], once
more proved a stumbling-block.[350] I have endeavoured to set matters
right here by serious study of his novel work and some reference to the
rest; so I hope that I may discard the sheet, and give the rest of the
candle to the poor, now much requiring it.

[Sidenote: His general character.]

One thing about him is clear from his first famous, though not his
first, book[351]--a book which, as has been said, actually preceded the
Second Empire, but which has been thought to cast something of a
prophetic shadow over that period of revel and rottenness--that is to
say, from _La Dame aux Camelias_--that he was even then a very clever
man.[352]

[Sidenote: _La Dame aux Camelias._]

"The Lady with the Camellias" is not now the widely known book that once
it was; and the causes of its loss of vogue might serve as a text for
some "Meditations among the Tombs," though in respect of rather
different cemeteries from those which Addison or Hervey frequented. As a
mere audacity it has long faded before the flowers, themselves "