XII. To Alexandre Dumas - Page 2

friends--from Porthos,
Athos, and Aramis--'he felt that he could do nothing, save on the condition
that each of these companions yielded to him, if one may so speak, a share of
that electric fluid which was his gift from heaven.'

No man of letters ever had so great a measure of that gift as you; none gave
of it more freely to all who came--to the chance associate of the hour, as to
the characters, all so burly and full-blooded, who flocked from your brain.
Thus it was that you failed when you approached the supernatural. Your ghosts
had too much flesh and blood, more than the living persons of feebler fancies.
A writer so fertile, so rapid, so masterly in the ease with which he worked,
could not escape the reproaches of barren envy. Because you overflowed with
wit, you could not be 'serious;' Because you created with a word, you were
said to scamp your work; because you were never dull, never pedantic,
incapable of greed, you were to be censured as desultory, inaccurate, and
prodigal.

A generation suffering from mental and physical anaemia--a generation devoted
to the 'chiselled phrase,' to accumulated 'documents,' to microscopic porings
over human baseness, to minute and disgustful records of what in humanity is
least human--may readily bring these unregarded and railing accusations. Like
one of the great and good-humoured Giants of Rabelais, you may hear the
murmurs from afar, and smile with disdain. To you, who can amuse the world--to
you who offer it the fresh air of the highway, the battle-field, and the sea--
the world must always return, escaping gladly from the boudoirs and the
_bouges_, from the surgeries and hospitals, and dead rooms, of M. Daudet and
M. Zola and of the wearisome De Goncourt.

With all your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp which, if it
swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, how healthy and
wholesome, and even pure, are your romances! You never gloat over sin, nor
dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions of sense. The passions in
your tales are honourable and brave, the motives are clearly human. Honour,
Love, Friendship make the threefold cord, the clue your knights and dames
follow through how delightful a labyrinth of adventures! Your greatest books,
I take the liberty to maintain, are the Cycle of the Valois ('La Reine Margot,
'La Dame de Montsoreau,' 'Les Quarante-cinq'), and the Cycle of Louis Treize
and Louis Quatorze ('Les Trois Mousquetaires,' 'Vingt Ans Apre's,' 'Le Vicomte
de Bragelonne'); and, beside these two trilogies--a lonely monument, like the
sphinx hard by the three pyramids--'Monte Cristo.'

In these romances how easy it would have been for you to burn incense to that
great goddess, Lubricity, whom our critic says your people