France, though it represents nothing but the weakness, misery, and shame of that much-tried countrylet him learn to make acquaintance with spirit infinitely better, brighter, and more genial, the old Dumas, faultiest of men and authors, most extravagant spendthrift of brain and purse alike, the brilliant, headlong, vain, friendly, and foolish man of letters, who was the parable of his time-to whom, perhaps, we can give but little respectful homage, but to whom we owe more innocent amusement than to almost any other writer of his generation.

We would not, however, have it supposed that in saying this we are setting up Alexandre Dumas as a model writer, or recommending his works as a moral regimen for the young. Nothing could be further from our intention. All that we venture to assert is, that he is purity itself and good taste itself in comparison with the more recent and much more pretentious school of fiction which has openly dedicated itself to the study and elucidation of vice, and which is generally meant when the contemptuous phrase "French novel" drops from British lips. Barring a few pages, or a few chapters, the story of the 'Trois Mousquetaires,' with its many sequels, conveys as little harm as any outspoken mále novel, written with no moral purpose, can do; and its peculiar force and attraction, the real charm it has for its readers, turns upon no equivocal sentiment, nor excitement of passion, but on the charming sweep of adventure, the unfailing flow of incident, the incredible valour, the manly enthusiasm of friendship, and the endless drolleries of its band of heroes. It is a story made up of sensation, but of sensations well-nigh as innocent as those of 'Robinson Crusoe.' We confess that it is with difficulty that we can imagine the char

acter of mind which would be harmed by the society of Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. Messrs Pendennis and Warrington would scarcely be safe company for so delicate an intelligence. Neither is there anything in the wonderful complications of Monte Christo' which need alarm the moralist. The difference of atmosphere between these productions of thirty years since and those of the Dumas of this day is indeed as remarkable as anything we know in literature. The one all hearty, joyous, and outspoken; the other serious, sentimental, vile: the one with no purpose in the world but that of amusing his readers—and himself—for it is evident Dumas enjoyed his own headlong career, his own fun and endless fancy, as much as any one of his audience; the other solemnly seated upon a throne of self-assumed wisdom, instructing and reforming

heaven save the mark !—his unfortunate country, by perpetual illustration of her vices. But though it would be unjust to the elder Dumas not to indicate most strongly this fundamental difference, and though we should be rejoiced to see the French novel come back even so far as to his level, and accept it as a sign of returning health and amendment, yet we do not take upon us the dangerous responsibility of answering for Dumas as a moral teacher. He was not a teacher of any description. He was a teller of stories-the very laureate of action and adventure; but in his choice of a subject, he never, so far as we are aware, showed the moral perversity of preferring one which necessitated discussion of vice. When it came in his way he recorded it carelessly as he would have recorded any other accidental circumstance, without protest, but without enjoyment. We will not undertake to say more.

it does not matter which). We confess, for our own parts, that, whether in the solemn columns of our leading journal, or in the triflingest of broadsheets, this easy and universal topic has become intensely tiresome to us; and that out of pure opposition to the tedious reiteration of the crowd, we are ready to protest (as indeed some closer observers have already done), that our neighbours in France are in reality the most serious, steady, and matterof-fact population in the world. France may have fallen very low; certainly she has descended in material fame and prestige; but to see every miserable scribbler exercise his small wit upon her national characteristics, and stick his cowardly little shaft into her in her downfall, is more than our equanimity can bear. A few things are said of ourselves by other nations, which our self-complacency either refuses to believe, or comfortably laughs at as a specimen of the delusions of foreigners; but nothing can make the English mind conscious that it too is human, and may possibly partake on its own side those delusions so common to the superficially informed. It is the fashion of the day to abuse France and her character, and all her actions of every description; to conclude that she does not know her own business in the least; that we are infinitely better informed than she is as to her most intimate concerns; and that because she has fallen upon that period of national illluck which comes to all countries now and then, therefore we are all free to sermonise and to sneer, and to assure the whole world that we always knew how it would be, that "it is just like her," and that so it will be to the end of time. Mr Percy Fitzgerald is one of the many accomplished Englishmen who sees through France, and is prepared at

any moment to point out her imbecilities; and besides this general fitness for the task of writing a Frenchman's life, he has besides a thorough contempt for that individual Frenchman, and the liveliest satisfaction in "showing up" his imperfections to the world. Thus prepared for his work he carries it out manfully, without hesitation or discouragement. It is a new way, we confess, of writing biography-which art, up to this time, has perhaps been too apt to call forth a warm feeling of par tisanship, a general siding with one's hero, and inclination to explain away his faults and account for his weaknesses when those faults and weaknesses could not be altogether denied. The other mode of treatment possesses novelty at least, if no other attraction; but it has this disadvantage in the present case, that the world has heard a great deal of Dumas, and but little of his biographer; and that, consequently, Mr Percy Fitzgerald's easy superiority and sense that he is in a position to pull his subject to pieces, is more apt to fill the reader with a mixture of indignation and amusement than with more admiring feelings. Had the positions been reversed-had any chance wind of fame wafted Mr Percy Fitzgerald into regions of notability, where Alexandre Dumas could have caught sight of him, and made him into a book, we might have accepted the tone of it as natural. In the actual circumstances, the book is a simple impertinence, and unworthy, on its own merits, of any literary notice whatever. We accept it merely as an occasion for recalling the strange, wild, energetic, amusing figure of the old romancer, before all personal recollection of it has vanished from the world.

We cannot pretend to any per

sonal knowledge of Dumas. Once, and once only, the present writer remembers to have assisted at one of the "Conferences" with which, in his old age, he amused the Parisian public. Age had paled his swarthy countenance, and made his negro shock of hair white-a change which took away, we presume, much of the peculiarity of his appearance. We forget what was his subject it was, no doubt, a chapter of recollections from his own eventful and stirring life-but the chief point in his lively talk was an incident in the history of his father, the revolutionary General Dumas, a story which probably would be somewhat gross for an English audience, but which in Paris everybody laughed at frankly. With the broad fun of a schoolboy, his round face twinkling with laughter, the raconteur narrated the arrest of a spy, who, as a last resource, to escape the vigilance of the Republican soldiers, swallowed his despatches! We will not attempt to recall any details of a story scarcely suitable for these pages, but the reader will divine the boldness yet the lightness with which Dumas skirted the borders of permissible licence, and told his laughable but coarse tale without any actual grossièreté. His pride in his parentage is one of the many faults laid to his charge; but it is one for which at least in the case of his father-most English readers will forgive him. He was descended from a gentleman whom Louis XIV. had made a marquis, and did even at one period of his life assume, or make a pretence at assuming, the title, to which, barring a doubt as to his father's legitimacy, never proved one way or the other, he would seem to have had a perfect right. The father himself, however, was more interesting than any Marquis de la Pailleterie. He was one of the boldest and best soldiers of the Re

public-a hero as daring as any in his son's romances, but unfortunate -and died neglected in the village where he had married a woman of the people, under the ban of Napoleon's displeasure; embittered and broken-hearted by the scorns of office and the desertion of friends, as, unhappily, other brave but unfriended soldiers of fortune have been known to do before him. He died while his son was still a child, and the boy had to struggle into notice unassisted, his mother's family being poor and undistinguished. How he did this may be seen in his own memoirs, or, by those to whom the memoirs are not handy, or, who distrust the romancist's own account of his successes, in the very unflattering and contemptuous narrative of Mr Percy Fitzgerald. Dumas leaped into notoriety by means of his dramas, the first literary vein he struck, which brought him much applause and some money, and launched him wildly into that prodigal and heedless life of Paris, which shows in stronger colours perhaps in the midst of the frugal and thrifty national life of France than it would do on our more general level of lavish expenditure and self-indulgence. All the follies Dumas did-his shiftiness, his unbounded expenditure, his reckless confidence in his public, his feats of travel and diplomacy, his vanity, his splendour, the palace he built and lived in like a true Monte Christo, his insatiable thirst for money and continual need of it even at his climax of wealth, are all to be found, set down in malice, in the volumes we have referred to. There is not much in this meteoric existence, perhaps, which the world need care to remember. He had some of the virtues of the prodigal along with all the unsatisfactoriness of that character, and came to be a kind of literary Jeremy Diddler towards the

close of his life, as is unfortunately too common. Extreme ease of production (his detractors say the extremest ease-since it was not he who worked but others for him) and a constant market for all the wares he could produce, demoralised the fertilest of romancers. His brain became the true Monte Christo, the reservoir of most saleable jewels, which was more inexhaustible than any pirate's hoard. That he should in his reckless sense of power have embroiled himself with competing editors, and pledged himself for feuilletons innumerable, sometimes in the face of other contracts, sometimes to the injury of personal honour, and beyond all hope of keeping his word, seems natural enough. For nothing can tell more strongly against all intellectual economy or thrift of power than this sense of the capacity to be always doing, along with the certainty of ready and immediate pecuniary recompense for all one does. Dumas's immense popularity might have overcome the restraints of freedom even in a mind more sober and moderate; and in one inaccessible to all the arguments of prudence, moderation, and sobriety, it may be understood what a career of intellectual (to say nothing of external) riot, the triumphant writer was tempted to plunge into; and he resisted no temptation which came to him in this form.

It was not, however, until he was over forty, and had reached the full force and maturity of middle age, that he hit upon that vein of fiction which produced for him his greatest reputation and reward. We can only use words which express the utmost caprice of chance when we tell the story of Dumas's triumphs. There is no ground for supposing that it was by solid plan or preparation that he began his wonderful succession of romances.

6

Pure hazard guiding him, as (to speak lightly) it guided the first man who "struck ile," or he who found the first scrap of gold at the diggings, he lighted upon the inexhaustible fountain of fiction from which such a flood was to come. Even in its very first beginnings this stream seems to have had the force of a torrent. The Trois Mousquetaires,' we are told, and Monte Christo,' both appeared in one year-1844 and took the world absolutely by storm, by surprise, driving the public into wild interest and excitement before it had time to think or inquire why. The chance was in every respect a happy one; for amid all the wealth of French fiction, the place of the improvisatore, the headlong, breathless story-teller, had never, we think, been filled before since the day of the jongleurs and wandering troubadours. Nowhere has fiction occupied a more important place than in modern France, or drawn to its development so many powerful intellects. No Englishman that we know of has drawn with pencil so keen and diamond-pointed the mysteries of human motive and thought, the terrible gulf of human weakness, as Balzac has done, with a pitiless power and clear-sightedness which make us hate while we admire; and it would be impossible to give to the philosophical romance, the dramatic representation of sentiment and emotion, a more splendid development than it has attained in the hands of Victor Hugo and Georges Sand. None of these great masters of art can be called moral writers. The first is, at the best, historically impartial, setting forth good and evil the two different sides of the picture-with the calm of a spectator as little affected by the contrast between vice and virtue as by that which exists between black hair and blond, blue eyes or brown