ord. What became of
this brave man, who at the risk of his life saved the property of a
man whose speech had touched him? Perhaps he perished. Perhaps he
received his due reward. Perhaps he drags out a wretched life in some
workshop of a penitentiary. I know not his fate, nor even his name.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS, SENIOR

(1803?-1870)

BY ANDREW LANG

No author is less capable of being illustrated by extracts than
Alexandre Dumas. Writers like Prosper Merimee or Mr. Robert Louis
Stevenson can be not inadequately represented by a short story or a
brief scene. Even from Scott's work we can detach 'Wandering Willie's
Tale,' or 'The Tapestried Chamber,' or the study of Effie Deans in
prison, or of Jeanie Deans before the Queen. But Dumas is invariably
diffuse; though, unlike other diffuse talkers and writers, he is
seldom tedious. He is long without _longueurs_. A single example will
explain this better than a page of disquisition. The present selector
had meant to extract Dumas's first meeting with Charles Nodier at the
theatre. In memory, that amusing scene appeared to occupy some six
pages. In fact, it covers nearly a hundred and thirty pages of the
Brussels edition of the 'Memoirs' of Dumas. One reads it with such
pleasure that looked back upon, it seems short, while it is infinitely
too long to be extracted. In dialogue Dumas is both excellent and
copious, so that he cannot well be abbreviated. He is the Porthos of
novelists, gigantic, yet (at his best) muscular and not overgrown. For
these reasons, extracts out of his romances do no justice to Dumas. To
read one of his novels, say 'The Three Musketeers,' even in a slovenly
translation, is to know more of him than a world of critics and
essayists can teach. It is also to forget the world, and to dwell in a
careless Paradise. Our object therefore is not to give an "essence of
Dumas," but to make readers peruse him in his own books, and to save
them trouble by indicating, among these books, the best.

It is notorious that Dumas was at the head of a "Company" like that
which Scott laughingly proposed to form "for writing and publishing
the class of books called Waverley Novels." In legal phrase, Dumas
"deviled" his work; he had assistants, "researchers," collaborators.
He would briefly sketch a plot, indicate the authorities to be
consulted, hand his notes to Maquet or Fiorentino, receive their
draught, and expand that into a romance. Work thus executed cannot be