Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 06.djvu/589

DUMAS. in 1823, with 20 francs and hope for all his patrimony. He found a temporary livelihood as secretary in the household of the future King, Louis Philippe, and in 1829 was among the first to begin the romantic revolt on the stage in his ''Henri III. et sa cour''. A stream of dramas followed that brought him notoriety and wealth, spent as soon as won. He appears to have been active in the Revolution of 1830; but proved a too ebullient republican to find favor in the royal household, and resigned his post. He now turned to fiction, and contributed to the newly founded and since famous Revue des Deux Mondes the first of his historical novels, Isabelle de Bavière, out of which there grew in his fertile brain a scheme for turning the whole history of France into a sort of human comedy that should "exalt history to the height of fiction," and let a romantic fancy play around the evidences of the past. The Chroniques de France that resulted from this idea are Dumas's best work. They have, indeed, no historic insight and no grasp of character; but they have a wonderful dramatic instinct to fuse and recast historic materials into chaplets of episodes that are by turns frolicsome and wild, extravagant, breathless, and impetuous, subordinating description to dialogue and everything to action, never failing to absorb the reader and to excite an intense curiosity. In their historical order these chronicles are: Le bâtard de Mauléon; Duguesclin; Isabelle de Bavière; La reine Margot; La dame de Montsoreau; Les quarante-cinq; Les trois mousquetaires (the best); Vingt ans après; Le vicomte de Bragelonne; Le chevalier d'Harmental; Une fille du régent; Joseph Balsamo; Le collier de la reine; Ange-Pitou; La comtesse de Charny: Le chevalier de Maison-Rouge; Les blancs et les bleus; Les compagnons de Jéhu; and La rose rouge—the whole forming a series of well-nigh a hundred volumes.

Like the writers of the sixteenth century, Dumas took his material where he found it, having barbaric ideas of literary property. Already in 1832 a well-founded accusation of plagiarism had forced him to travels, of which he has left a lively series of Impressions (consult Wormeley. Journeys with Dumas, Boston. 1902). It did not lead him to mend his ways, however. Volumes have been written about his 'novel factory,' of his purchase of work by unknown authors or translators, and of publishing under his name what he had not so much as read (consult Quérard's Les supercheries littéraires dévoilées. 1859). He was always ready to buy ideas; he was willing to buy novels and rewrite them; he also supplied ideas and let others do the mechanical work of composition; and in later life he may have been even less scrupulous: but none who claimed to share his honor as well as his profits ever did under their own names work like that which they claimed to have done for him, and we know that Dumas was as rapid and industrious a penman as he was a facile composer. No doubt he squandered his genius under the urgent demands of the press.

His best work was almost all done between 1843 and 1850—the inimitable Comte de Monte-Cristo; Les trois mousquetaires; Vingt ans après; La reine Margot; Les mémoires d'un médecin; Les quarante-cinq; Le vicomte de Bragelonne; and La tulipe noire. After that we catch only an occasional flash of genius, as in Les blancs et les bleus (1868). In one way or another Dumas is responsible for 208 somewhat closely printed volumes. For a generation he was the world's Scheherazade, doing more than all others together to give French fiction a cosmopolitan audience in the great middle class. His work brought enormous returns, but he was a phenomenon of thriftlessness. He became involved in many lawsuits over contracts signed with thoughtless levity. He built a palace, Monte Cristo, for 500,000 francs, in 1847, then sold it in 1851, and fled from his creditors in 1853. Then for nineteen years he became a pathetic wanderer in search of 'copy.' He visited England (1857), Russia and the Caucasus (1S58), and Italy (1860 and 1866). Last came four years of senile poverty, relieved by the son whose boyhood he had neglected and whose youth he had misguided. By him he was taken from the excitements and dangers of Paris in war time to Puys, near Dieppe, where he died on the day of its occupation by the Prussians, December 5, 1870. He was buried in 1872 at his boyhood's home in Villers-Cotterets. A uniform and nearly complete translation of Dumas's novels is published in Boston. Consult: Blaze de Bury, Alexandre Dumas sa vie, son temps, ses oeuvres (Paris, 1885); Wells, A Century of French Fiction (New York, 1898); Parigot, Le drame d’Alexandre Dumas (Paris, 1898); id., Alexandre Dumas père (ib., 1902); Spurr, The Life and Writings of Alexandre Dumas (New York. 1902).  DUMAS,, called (1824-95). One of the most distinguished of modern French dramatists. He was born in Paris, July 27, 1824, the son of the great romantic novelist of like name, but of a genius strangely contrasted. In him the father's rich but riotous fancy yielded to close observation and realistic earnestness that made of him an unbending and almost a Puritan moralist. Like his grandfather, an illegitimate child, he has drawn, in L'affaire Clémenceau (novel, 1867; dramatized, 1887), a moving picture of the torments caused by his origin during his school life. Later he became the companion and associate of his bohemian father, and after a brief carnival found himself, in 1848, with 50,000 francs of debt and a pen for his assets. It proved more than sufficient. He left old associations forever behind, sold his experience to the world in a novel, La dame aux camélias (1848; dramatized, 1852), and became a serious, hard-working author and soon an independent and wealthy one. His other early novels and a first dramatic essay (1845) are romantic commonplace, and have no significance. But the dramatization of La dame aux camélias marks a date (February 2. 1852) in the history of the French stage, and inaugurates the realistic study of social problems that has changed the face of the modern drama. Dumas joined Balzac's insight into character to Scribe's technical aptitude, and to an instinct that truth, to be dramatically effective, must be logical and conventional in its exhibition. In so far Dumas is not a 'naturalist,' though he is eminently a dramatic realist. His other plays, in their order, are: Diane de Lys (1853); Le demi-monde (1855); La question d'argent (1857); Le fils naturel (1858); Un père prodigue (1859); L’ami des femmes (1864); Les idées de madame Aubray (1867); Une visite de noces (1871); La princesse Georges (1871); La femme de Claude 