Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/332

 Dumas gave mothers credit for too much breadth and independence of mind. When Stevenson, in defence of our romancer, wrote that "the world is wide and so are morals," he did not hope to win Mrs. Grundy's approval of the sentiment. Mr. Lang, dealing more directly with Dumas's reply, adds: "his enormous popularity, the widest in the world of letters, owes absolutely nothing to prurience or curiosity. The air which he breathes is a healthy air, is the open air, and that by his own choice, for he had every temptation to seek another kind of vogue, and every opportunity." Hayward, again, notices the difference between Dumas and so many other of the French writers with whom he is ignorantly and indiscriminately classed. "His best romances," says the author of "Biographical Essays," rarely trangress propriety, and are entirely free from that hard, cold, sceptical, materialist, illusion-destroying tone which is so repelling in Balzac and many others of the most popular French novelists."

Professor Carpenter lifts the subject to a higher plane of thought.

"I find it impossible," he writes, "to admit that Dumas's ideals were low, unfit for common use. It is of honour that he tells most willingly—of man's honour and the constancy of men to men; of man's striving against the powders of the world