class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg xxxi]"/> ambition," he acquires a heart as he goes on: and, indeed, never lacked one—for friends of his own sex.

Dumas was at the opposite pole from a Galahad or a Joseph. His life, as regards women, was much like that of Burns or Byron. His morality on this point is that of the camp or of the theatre in which he lived so much. This must be granted as an undeniable fact. But there are other departments of conduct, and in the virtues of courage, devotion, fortitude, friendship, and loyalty, the Musketeers are rich enough. Their vices, happily, are not those of our age but of one much less sensitive on certain points of honour, as Dumas remarks, and as history proves. But the virtues of the Musketeers are, in any age, no bad example.

Dumas never writes to inflame the passions, to corrupt, or to instruct a prurient curiosity. The standard of his work is far higher than that of his model or of the age about which he writes. His motto is sursum corda; he has not a word to encourage pessimism, or a taste for the squalid. He and his men face Fortune boldly, bearing what mortals must endure, and bearing it well and gaily. His ethics are saved by his humour, generosity, and sound-hearted humanity. These qualities increase and become more manifest as this great cycle rolls on to its heroic culmination in the death of d'Artagnan, the death of Porthos, the unwonted tears of Aramis.

For many years "high sniffing" French critics have sneered at Dumas as a scene-painter, a dauber, a babe in psychological lore, and so forth. But of late we have seen in the success of M. Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, that France looks lovingly back on her old ideals of a frank and healthy life in the open air—a life of gallant swordsmen, kind friends, and true lovers. In Major Marchand, of the Fashoda affair, we may recognise a gentleman and soldier of the school of Dumas, not of Maupassant, or Flaubert, or Zola. To know his task and to do it despite the most cruel obstacles; to face every form of peril with gaiety; to accept disappointment with a manly courtesy, winning the heartiest admiration from his political opponents, these are accomplishments after Dumas's own heart; and this is a morality which the study of Dumas encourages, and which our time requires.

The authors who relax, and discourage, and deprave may be thought better artists (an opinion which I do not share), but they are less of men than the author of The Three Musketeers. Who reads it, but wants to go on reading the sequel, and the sequel to that, and, were it possible, yet another sequel? But Aramis alone of the four is left on the stage, and we pine for another sequel—with Aramis as Pope.

I have dwelt on the Musketeers and their historical sources as a type of the powers and methods of Dumas. As much might be said in detail as to the sources of the other great novels, especially those of the Valois circle. History gives little more than the name of Chicot, and his ferocity in the St. Bartholomew massacres. La Mole, Coconnas, and le brave Bussy, were really "rather beasts than otherwise," as the lad in Mr. Eden Philpotts's Human Boy says about pirates. Catherine de Medici is the Catherine of the Mémoires, which are probably truthful on the whole, whatever criticism may say. Dumas fills with gaiety these old times of perfidy and cruelty; he adds Gorenflot and Chicot; he humanises Coconnas; he even inspires regret for Henri III.; he has a Shakespearean love and tolerance for his characters. The critics may and do sniff, but Dumas pleased George Sand, Thackeray, and Mr. Stevenson, who have praised him so well that feebler plaudits are impertinent, Thackeray especially chooses La Tulipe Noire as a complement and contrast to the Musketeers. Monte Cristo, rich and revengeful, has never been my favourite; I leave him when his treasure hunt is ended, and the Cagliostro cycle deals with matters too cruel for fiction.

In brief, though the rest of the life of Dumas was full of labour, the anni mirabiles of 1844-1850 are the prime of his harvests. In 1844, on a tour with the son of Jérôme Napoleon (who certainly had a strange bear-leader), Dumas saw the actual isle of Monte Cristo; it dwelt in his boyish[Pg xxxiii] fancy, and became the earliest of all Treasure Islands; but its use as the first part of a tale in the manner of Eugène Sue was an afterthought—like the American scenes and Mrs. Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit. In 1843-44, Dumas, being rich, built his Abbotsford, Monte Cristo, between Saint Germain and Marly le Roi. Thenceforth it was the farce of which the real Abbotsford is the tragedy. It was open house and endless guests, very unlike the guests who visited the villa on the Tweed. At both houses many dogs were kept, at Monte Cristo only were piles of gold left lying about for everyone to help himself. The Théâtre Historique was also founded, that road to ruin Dumas could not leave untrodden, and he abandoned all his schemes to visit Spain and Algiers with the Duc de Montpensier, like Buckingham with Prince Charles. The celebrated vulture, Jugurtha, was now acquired and brought home, to fill his niche in the gallery of Mes Bêtes, one of the most delightful books in the world.

On returning Dumas found, like Odysseus, "troubles in his house," angry editors clamorous for belated "copy." Then came the parasites, and then the Revolution of 1848, exciting but expensive to a political man of letters. The Théâtre Historique was ruined, and Dumas chose another path to financial collapse, the ownership of a newspaper. In 1851 Dumas went to Brussels, quarrelled with Maquet (one creditor among many), wrote his Mémoires, tried to retrench, but embarked on a new newspaper, Le Mousquetaire. He was the reverse of a man of business; Le Mousquetaire was not profitable like Household Words. The office was a bear garden. More plays were written, more of every kind of thing was written, a weekly paper was attempted, and as the star of Alexandre fils was rising, the star of Alexandre père descended through shady spaces of the sky. Dumas travelled in Russia, and wrote about that; he joined Garibaldi in 1860, and obtained in Italy an archæological appointment! The populace of Naples did not take Dumas seriously, any more than the staff of the British Museum would have done. For reasons known or unknown to the mob they hooted and threatened the Director of Excavations: the editor of a Garibaldian newspaper, the father of the god-daughter of Garibaldi, a child whose mother had accompanied Dumas in the costume of a sailor. At this time the hero was fifty-eight, and perhaps the Neapolitans detected some incongruity between the age and the proceedings of the Director of Excavations. Perhaps la vertu va se nicher in the hearts of the lower classes of "the great sinful streets" of the city of Neapolis.

In 1864 Dumas and the new Italian Government were not on harmonious terms. He left his Liberal newspaper and his meritorious excavations in Pompeii; he returned to Paris accompanied by a lady bearing the pleasing name of Fanny Gordosa. The gordosiousness, if I may use the term, of Fanny far exceeded her capacities as a housekeeper and domestic manager, and the undefeated veteran had to pursue that hunt for the pièce de cent sous whereof we have spoken. La jeunesse n'a qu'un temps, but Dumas was determined "to be boy for ever." Stories are told about him which, whether they be true or untrue, are better unrepeated. Senile boyishness, where the sex is concerned, cannot be seemly. Money became more scarce as work ceased to be genuine work. Dumas fell to giving public lectures. A daughter came to attend him, as the Duchess of Albany presided over and more or less reformed the last years of her royal