XII. To Alexandre Dumas

Sir,--There are moments when the wheels of life, even of such a life as yours,
run slow, and when mistrust and doubt overshadow even the most intrepid
disposition. In such a moment, towards the ending of your days, you said to
your son, M. Alexandre Dumas, 'I seem to see myself set on a pedestal which
trembles as if it were founded on the sands.' These sands, your uncounted
volumes, are all of gold, and make a foundation more solid than the rock. As
well might the singer of Odysseus, or the authors of the 'Arabian Nights', or
the first inventors of the stories of Boccaccio, believe that their works were
perishable (their names, indeed, have perished), as the creator of 'Les Trois
Mousquetaires' alarm himself with the thought that the world could ever forget
Alexandre Dumas.

Than yours there has been no greater nor more kindly and beneficent force in
modern letters. To Scott, indeed, you owed the first impulse of your genius;
but, once set in motion, what miracles could it not accomplish? Our dear
Porthos was overcome, at last, by a superhuman burden; but your imaginative
strength never found a task too great for it. What an extraordinary vigour,
what health, what an overflow of force was yours! It is good, in a day of
small and laborious ingenuities, to breathe the free air of your books, and
dwell in the company of Dumas's men --so gallant, so frank, so indomitable,
such swordsmen, and such trenchermen. Like M. de Rochefort in 'Vingt Ans
Apre's,' like that prisoner of the Bastille, your genius 'n'est que d'un
parti, c'est du parti du grand air.'

There seems to radiate from you a still persistent energy and enjoyment; in
that current of strength not only your ~characters live, frolic, kindly, and
sane, but even your very collaborators were animated by the virtue which went
out of you. How else can we explain it, the dreary charge which feeble and
envious tongues have brought against you, in England and at home? They say you
employed in your novels and dramas that vicarious aid which, in the slang of
the studio, the 'sculptor's ghost' is fabled to afford.

Well, let it be so; these ghosts, when uninspired by you, were faint and
impotent as 'the strengthless tribes of the dead' in Homer's Hades, before
Odysseus had poured forth the blood that gave them a momentary valour. It was
from you and your inexhaustible vitality that these collaborating spectres
drew what life they possessed; and when they parted from you they shuddered
back into their nothingness. Where are the plays, where the romances which
Maquet and the rest wrote in their own strength? They are forgotten with last
year's snows; they have passed into the wide waste-paper basket of the world.
You say of D'Artagnan, when severed from his three