and guided. Some one has said that there was in Dumas something of the
Catholic priest. It is true. He was to women a lay director of
conscience.

He was a great connoisseur of pictures and a great art lover. Music, I
think, is the only art that did not affect him much. He was a dazzling
talker; his plays teem with bright sayings; his conversation sparkled
with them. I did not know him in his prime, when he delighted his
friends and companions by his unceasing flow of spirits. I became
intimate with him only later. If you knew how to start him, he simply
coruscated. I never knew any one, save Edmond About, who was as witty,
and who, like About, always paid you back in good sounding coin.

Dumas was a member of the French Academy. He had not wished for that
honor, because it had been denied to his father. He desired, in his
reception speech, to call up the great spirit of this illustrious
father and make it share his academician's chair. He had this joy; the
two Dumas were received on the same day. Their two names will never
perish.

[Illustration: Signature (Francisque Sarcey)]

[The editors have been compelled, for lack of space, to leave out that
part of M. Sarcey's valuable essay which is a professional analysis of
several of Dumas's plays, and which would be of interest, chiefly, to
special students of the French drama and stage.]

THE PLAYWRIGHT IS BORN--AND MADE

From the Preface to 'A Prodigal Father'

Of all the various forms of thought, the stage is that which nearest
approaches the plastic arts--inasmuch as we cannot work in it unless
we know its material processes; but with this difference: that in the
other arts one learns these processes, while in play-writing one
guesses them; or to speak more accurately, they are in us to begin
with.

One can become a painter, a sculptor, a musician, by sheer study: one
does not become a dramatic author in this fashion. A caprice of
nature makes your eye in such a way that you can see a thing after a
particular manner, not absolutely correct, but which must nevertheless
appear, to any other persons that you wish to have so think, the only
correct point of view. The man really called to write for the stage
reveals what is an extremely rare faculty, in his very first
attempts,--say in a farce in school, or a drawing-room charade. There
is a sort of science of optics and of perspective that enables one to
draw a personage, a character, a passion, an impulse