Dumas Davy de la Paillerie, ALEXANDRE (1803-70), was the grandson of a certain Count (or Marquis) Alexandre Davy de la Paillerie and Marie-Cessette Dumas, a pure-bred Haytian negress, and the son of General Alexandre Davy-Dumas—a brilliant and daring cavalry officer, 'the Horatius Cocius of the Tyrol'—and Marie-Louise-Elizabeth Labouret, daughter of a tavern-keeper and small landowner at Villers-Cotterêts, and was technically, therefore, a quadroon. He was born and reared at Villers-Cotterêts. The general, who had been put on half-pay by Napoleon, died when his son was four years old; and as the Emperor continued to behave as meanly to his widow and children as the First Consul to himself, the first years of a most prodigal life were years of decent penury and thrift. Dumas, who was afterwards an omnivorous reader, was an idle and unscholarly lad, and the local teachers could make nothing of him; but he had the run of the great forest about his native hamlet, he became an expert woodman, he developed a magnificent constitution, a turn for letters, and a very pretty talent at billiards, and when, at twenty or so, he got at last to Paris, he was physically as fit for the struggle for existence as any of the strong and ardent generation to which he belonged.
He began, through the influence of General Foy, as a clerk in the bureau of the Due d'Orléans (afterwards Louis-Philippe); but his mind still ran on literature, and he spent some years in reading and in trying to learn to write. He had only published a volume of short stories, and collaborated—with Ph. Rousseau and young Adolphe de Leuven—in a couple of farces, when at seven-and-twenty he forced the door of the Théâtre Français with his first five-act play, Henri Trois et sa Cour (1829), and at one stroke operated that revolution in the theory and practice of historical drama which the Hugolater is fond of ascribing to the poet of Hernani (1830). In 1831 he did the same for domestic tragedy—the pièce of MM. Augier and Sardou—with Antony, perhaps the boldest, adroitest, and completest achievement in plan, construction, and effect in the literature of the modern theatre; failed in verse with Charles VII. chez ses Grand Vassaux—an excellent play; and scored a tremendous success (in collaboration with Goubaux and Dinant) with Richard Darlington; and in 1832 he carried the romantic 'history' to what seems to be its culmination in La Tour de Nesle (in collaboration with Gaillardet). He was, indeed, the very genius of the stage. He broke ground with the ease, the assurance, the insight into essentials, and the technical accomplishment of a master, and he retained these qualities until the days of Mme. de Chamblay (1868) and Les Blanes et les Bleus (1869). His dialogue is bright, appropriate, vivid, eminently constructive and explanatory; he never eludes or tampers with his situation, but faces his problem boldly, and wrings his interest from the clash of character and the presentation of emotion in action; his plots are made and conducted with admirable adroitness and lucidity; his expositions are models of clarity; his effects are brought off with surprising certainty and vigour. 'All I needed,' he said of himself, 'was'—not scenery, nor choruses of monks, nor Hernani's horn, nor any merely decorative stuff of that sort—but 'four trestles, four boards, two actors, and a passion;' and the vaunt was absolutely justified. Dumas is the soundest influence in drama of the century, and to his example is owing not a little of the best of Barrière and Augier and the dramatist of Monsieur Alphonse and Denise.
The romantiques were a Byronic set, and Dumas, whose good temper was exuberant, and whose sense of the liveableness of life remained unalterable, was at first as Byronic as the rest. In 1832, however, he fell ill of cholera, went to Switzerland to recuperate, and wrote for the Revue des Deux Mondes the first of his famous and delightful Impressions de Voyage. He was fond of adventure and change; his capacity of producing agreeable and brilliant 'copy' was amazing; and these traveller's notes of his—in which a good deal of history and romance is worked in with abounding vivacity and wit—were among the best liked of his many benefactions to the public. He kept them going almost to the end. A prodigious worker (he would write for weeks on end, at the rate of sixteen or eighteen hours a day), he was wont, after months of production, to renew himself with a round of hundreds, or thousands, of miles; and he never failed to put the experience into print. Thus, En Suisse (1832) was followed by Le Midi de la France (1840), by Les Bords du Rhin and Une Année à Florence (1841), by Le Speronare and Le Capitaine Arena (1842), by Le Corrieolo (1843)—it was of the last two it was said that Dumas had discovered the Mediterranean—by De
Paris à Cadix and Le Vêtoce (1845), and, finally, after years of work on other lines, by Le Caucase (1859), De Paris à Astrakhan (1860), and En Russie (1865). All these are certainly his own. Of those that he redacted from the MSS. of other men it is unnecessary here to speak.
But it was as a story-teller pure and simple that Dumas was destined to gain the better and larger part of his abounding and enduring success. And this is perhaps the place to discuss the question of what is his own share in his own work. He exhausted, it appears, some ninety several collaborators, and his debates with certain among them—with Gaillardet and Maquet, for example—by no means redounded to his credit. But it is none the less a fact that apart from him his assistants were mostly unreadable, while in conjunction with him they were Alexandre Dumas—that is to say, perhaps the most popular among modern novelists, and assuredly one of the greatest masters of the art of narrative in all literature. The truth, as stated by Edmond About, appears to be that Dumas took whatever he could get from whomsoever he could get it; that, the thing being carefully devised in consultation, the collaborator of the period was told off to prepare a first draft; and that Dumas re-wrote the result—'En y sémant l'esprit à pleines mains,' says About—thus minting it in his own die, and informing it with his own immense and radiant personality. 'What, a gainer you would be,' exclaims his son of him: 'rien qu'à reprendre ce que tu as donné!' and there is no doubt—for the present writer at least—that Dumas gave a vast deal more than he took. At the same time it is undeniable that his thefts were many and flagrant. Trelawney's Adventures of a Younger Son—to take but a single instance—appears in his collected works; and it is even told of him that he was with difficulty restrained from signing a book of the Iliad, which somebody else had run into prose to fill a gap in the columns of Le Mousquetaire.
He has told us that from the first it was a purpose of his life to put the history of France into novels; and his earliest essay was the Isabelle de Bavière of 1836. It was followed by Pauline, Le Capitaine Paul, and Paseal Bruno in 1838; by Acté in 1839; and by Othon l'Areher, Le Capitaine Pamphile, and Maître Adam le Calabrais in 1840—all on other lines; and then the historical vein cropped up anew in Le Chevalier d'Harmental and Aseanio, both produced in 1843. For the amazing decade that was next to come there is no parallel in the story of literature except the first ten years of the author of Waverley. In 1844, with a number of digressions and excursions into new provinces—as Cécile, Fernande, Amaury, Sylvandire, Monte Cristo—appeared Les Trois Mousquetaires; in 1845 Vingt Ans après, La Fille du Régent, and La Reine Margot; in 1846 La Guerre des Femmes, Maison-Rouge, Le Bâtard de Mauléon, La Dame de Monsoreau, and Les Mémoires d'un Médecin; in 1848—the Théâtre-Historique and a run through Spain, Algiers, and a part of Morocco having absorbed the greater part of 1847—Les Quarante-Cinq and the beginnings of Bragelonne, which was finished in 1850; and in 1849 Le Collier de la Reine. The next two years witnessed the production of work so varied as La Tulipe Noire and Le Trou de l'Enfer (1850), and La Femme au Collier de Velours (1851); but in 1852 the historical inspiration was again turned on, and the result was the masterpiece called Olympe de Clèves. Between that year and 1854 were produced the ten delightful volumes of Mes Mémoires, with Ange Pitou and La Comtesse de Charny, which were the work of 1853. Other achievements in the romance of French history were Ingénue (1854), Les Compagnons de Jéhu (1857), Les Louves de
Machecoul (1859), and Les Blanes et les Bleus (1867-68), in which last the sequence at length found end. Other works of the same period, but done on other lines, were Isaac Laquedem (1858), which promised to be one of Dumas's best works; Catherine Blum (1854); Les Mohicans de Paris and Salvator (1854-59), in which is formulated the type of the French detective as he appeared to Gaboriau, Féval, and Ponson du Terrail; Le Meneur de Loups (1857); Black and Le Capitaine Richard (1858); Le Père Gigogne and Le Père la Ruine (1860); Jane, Mme. de Chamblay and La Princesse Flora (1861); La San-Felice (1864); and La Terreur Prussienne (1867). In most of these there are touches of good Dumas; but the best period is that which begins with the Mousquetaires and ends with Isaac Laquedem and Les Mohicans de Paris.
The list is nothing like complete, nor have we space to do more than refer in passing and in general terms to the cloud of drama (all the great historical novels were cut out into great historical plays: the Mousquetaires cycle supplied at least three: as also were Monte Cristo, which was played in four parts, Gabriel Lambert, Mme. de Chamblay, and so forth), history, causerie, journalism, redaction, in whose midst this enormous production went on. In the same way and for the same reason we can only note that Dumas took active and conspicuous part in the Days of July; that in 1837 he received the red ribbon; that in 1842 he married Mlle. Ida Ferrier, from whom he promptly separated; that in 1855 he went into exile at Brussels, and stayed there two years; that from 1860 to 1864 he was in Italy, helping Garibaldi (whose life he wrote and who made him Directeur des Fouilles at Pompeii) and conducting and writing a journal; and that in 1868 he founded the D'Artagnan, published the Histoire de mes Bêtes, which of its kind is as good narrative as the first volume of Monte Cristo itself, and produced the last but one of his plays. By this time the end was near. Procurabit humi bos, says his son of the way in which he sank under his work. He had got rid of a series of fortunes (three-fourths of them were given away), and he quitted Paris for the last time with only a couple of napoleons in his pocket. He went to his son's villa at Dieppe, and there, on 5th December 1870, he simply faded out of being.
In life he was very much of a scapegrace and a madcap, and even more of a prodigal. His morals were loose, he was vain as only a man of colour can be, his literary conscience was (to say the least) imperfect, his veracity was that of Hugo and Berlioz and the romantiques in general; he could—and did—commit astonishing offences in taste; but his humanity was boundless in degree and incorruptible in quality, he was generous to a fault, he is not known to have dealt a single foul blow. 'I love and admire you,' said Michelet, 'for you are a force of nature.' 'Foncièrement bon,' was George Sand's verdict, 'mais . . . trop souvent ivre de puissance;' and the fact is that he was a prodigy of gaiety, kindness, and charm ('Il respirait la bonté,' M. Rodin told the present writer), and a prodigy of temperament and power and the capacity of life and invention and achievement. He talked still better than he wrote; and he wrote without any of those affections of style which were the daily bread of many of the men of 1830, and with an ease, a gusto, a sincerity of mind, a completeness of method that are irresistible. And the lesson of his greater books—of the Valois cycle, for instance, and the long sequence of the Mousquetaires—is one by which the world may well have profited. Love, honour, friendship, loyalty, valour, the old chivalric virtues—these were his darling themes; and he treated them with a combination of energy and insight, of good sense and good feeling, of manliness of mind and beauty of heart, that has ranked him with the great benefactors of the race.
ALEXANDRE DUMAS (born 1824), son of the preceding, was born in Paris when his father was but twenty-one years old. He was soon legitimised, and at sixteen, after a thorough course of training at the Institution Goubaux, and the Collège Bourbon, he left school for the world and letters and the society to which his father, then almost at his apogee, belonged. He was essentially respectable, however, and having sown a certain quantity of wild oats, and made a few experiments in literature, he settled down to serious work, and began to take life in earnest. He started in fiction; he went on to drama; he took to theorising about art, morals, politics, religion even, and succeeded in all. He was made a member of the Institute in 1874, and at his death, 27th November 1895, was acknowledged to be the best playwright, and one of the greatest artists in words of latter-day France.
His novels—from La Dame aux Camélias (1848) to L'Affaire Clémenceau (1867)—are all readable, and more often than not are worth reading. His essays, letters, speeches, prefaces, and prelections generally are brilliant and admirable in form, and in matter daring, paradoxical, suggestive in a very high degree. Of his sixteen plays, there is scarce one that is not literature, while five or six of them, as Le Demi-Monde (1855), Le Fils Naturel (1856), Les Idées de Mme. Aubray (1867), Une Visite de Noées (1871), Monsieur Alphonse (1873), Denise (1885), are masterpieces of construction, characterisation, and writing. Other famous dramas in which he had a share (and a very large one) are Le Supplice d'une Femme (1865), the chaotic original of which is due to Emile de Girardin; Héloïse Paranquet (1866), in collaboration with M. Durantin; and Les Danieff (1876). He is also believed to have assisted George Sand in preparing several of her novels for the stage—Le Marquis de Villemer among them—and known to have completed and produced his father's Joseph Balsamo (1878).
He is a brilliant yet dubious combination of African and French. At bottom he is fantastic, mystical, violent, with a passion for abnormal problems and desperate solutions. But it is not for nothing that his mother was a Parisian: his method is logical to a fault, he builds as for all time, he is an artificer even in theory, and his paradoxes are developed with scientific exactness and precision. A bitter and dazzling wit; an intelligence of uncommon energy, daring, and intensity; a morality that is so genuine as to be sometimes offensive; an incorruptible honesty; a style hard, polished, chaste, flexible as a perfect sword blade; and a dramatic gift as real as his father's—these are his qualities, and they have made him not only remarkable but distinguished.
DUMAS, JEAN BAPTISTE ANDRÉ, a great French chemist, was born at Alais, Gard, 14th July 1800. He studied at Geneva, and coming to Paris in 1821, was first a lecturer in the École Polytechnique, then professor of Chemistry in the Athénée, the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures (founded by himself), and finally, the Sorbonne. He now wholly devoted himself to chemical studies; and his views on chemical equivalents, and especially his memoir on the atomic theory, soon attracted attention over all Europe. His views on the laws of substitutions involved him in a long discussion with the great Berzelius. His researches in organic Chemistry (q.v.), especially his masterly papers on the ethers, ethereal oils, indigo, and the alkaloids, placed him in the first rank of chemists. In 1849-51 he was minister of agriculture and commerce, and also held offices under the Second Empire. In 1875 he was called to fill Guizot's chair in the Academy; and he died at Cannes, 11th April 1884. His chief works are Traité de Chimie appliquée aux Arts, and Leçons sur la Philosophie Chimique. See a forty-page memoir by Prof. A. W. Hofmann in Nature for 1880; and Maindron, L'Œuvre de J. B. Dumas (1886).