Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/309



was once asked for a subscription towards a monument to a man whom everyone had reviled in the beginning of his career.

"You had better be content," he replied, "with the stones that people threw at him during his lifetime. No monument you can raise will be so eloquent of their imbecility, and his genius." There was a savour of bitterness in this speech which was only too natural.

"There never was a popular writer," declared Hayward thirty years ago, "who had better reason than Alexandre Dumas to protest against the contemporary judgment of his countrymen, or to appeal, like Bacon, to the foreign nations and the next ages." Charles Reade, writing in the French novelist's lifetime, implies the existence of the same attitude towards our author's genius in this forcible comment: "Poor Dumas! He has not only produced immortal stories and immortal plays, each by the dozen, but also a son who has shown himself master of the story and the drama. But what avails that treble fertility? If five generations of Dumas, novelist and dramatist, were now on earth together,