Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/331

 of their nation, and the history of France, social and political, is full of improperly-behaved personages. We can quite understand the attitude of those people who wish to ignore great facts, such as the sensual as well as the ethereal side of love between the sexes, the passionate love which laughs at priests and lawyers, and other objectionable traits of human nature. We advise these readers to avoid Dumas,—and all the other great writers. "If," says Mr. W. H. Pollock, "his writing is not intended for boys and maidens, that is one quality which he has in common with such playwriters as for instance, Shakespeare, Racine, and Molière, and such novelists as Goethe, Fielding, and Le Sage. His method was at any rate 'an honest method'; he did not palter, as the modern French school of playwriting does, with vice and virtue, keeping one foot in the domain of each, and casting a false glamour of splendour around corruption."

But hear the defendant in his own cause.

"I had, thank God, a natural sentiment of delicacy (as a boy), and thus, out of my six hundred volumes there are not four which the most scrupulous mother may not give to her daughter." Dumas repeated this assertion in a letter to Napoleon III in 1864, twelve years later, adding, "I am as fatherly as Sir Walter Scott." We are afraid that