1880.] oji Dumas Pcre. " 385 



of liis life he produced rather more than three hundred romances and 

 eighty dramas, besides ephemeral articles. One of his detractors went 

 through an elaborate calculation to prove that no one man could have 

 written every word that appeared with Dumas' name attached to it. 

 It would be absurd to argue that he did write every such word, and 

 his admirers would perhaps be sorry to think, from a literary point of 

 view, that he was guilty of all the stulF that was put forth under his 

 name. The third volume of ' Les Quarante Cinq,' for instance, is 

 most obviously from an alien hand. From a moral point of view it is 

 not perhaps desirable to defend the practice of adopting other people's 

 work as one's own. Only let it be observed that the work whicli 

 Dumas did so adopt is never equal to his own, and can be recognized 

 as not being his own, just as the pupil's work in what are called the 

 studio-pictures of the old masters can be recognized. 



" As to his being merely an arranger of other j)eople's ideas, that is 

 a charge which might as easily and as justly be brought against many 

 writers of greater genius and fame. He never concealed the sources 

 of his inspirations. He has recorded how his first successful drama 

 was founded on a 2)assage in an old French chronicler, and on a 

 chapter in Walter Scott. Is there anything more disgraceful in thus 

 putting two and two together than in Shakespeare's going for his 

 plots to Holinshcd ? If taking suggestions from history and fiction 

 is criminal, then almost every writer of mark is worthy of the hulks. 

 But the fact is that the meanest reptile, if it has a sting, is capable 

 of doing damage out of all pro2)ortion to its apparent power. The 

 artfully concocted slanders of Jacquot, self-styled De Mirecourt, 

 have left their mark. They have been eagerly seized on by all the 

 tribe of writers to whose nature the key-note is envy ; and they 

 have spread so far that unhappily one cannot say of them, what Pierre 

 Clement said of a libellous pamphlet on Colbert, published just after 

 the great Minister's death, ' History takes no notice of these anony- 

 mous insults.' All one can do is to lift up one's voice against them. 



" To sum up, Dumas was born, as has been said, in 1802, and died 

 in 1870. When as a very young man he occupied a somewhat dreary 

 position as -a clerk in a public office, he was fired by a noble ambition 

 which first assumed a definite shape under the influence of Shakespeare. 

 He rose, and quickly, to the very height of success. It was his fault 

 that he bore himself with less dignity after than before he had at- 

 tained his success, for, amongst other things, it certainly was some- 

 what undignified to adopt the system of unacknowledged collaboration. 

 But even if the greater part of the charges brought against him in 

 this respect were admitted, it would still be seen that his industry 

 was no less extraordinary than his imagination. He acquired and 

 kept a position in the first rank as a play-writer, as a novelist, and 

 as a writer of that kind of discursive essay of which Mr. Sala is in 

 England the master. He had immense wit, not a little poetical feeling, 

 a perfect command of dramatic resource, and unflagging gaiety. If 

 he wrote much that one would not put into the hands of boys and 

 Vol. IX. (No. 72.) 2 d 



