Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/342

 before scholars as models of French composition, we may rest assured that there is some suspicion of "style" about our author's writing, after all.

We may return to the point touched upon by Mr Lang, that Dumas's style—we use the word in its uncanonical sense—was fitted to its author's purpose. "Of art, of careful choice, of laborious adaptation of words and phrases and paragraphs there is none," says Professor Saintsbury. "It is even capable of being argued whether, consistently with his peculiar plan and object, there could, or ought to be, any. A novel of incident, if it be good, must be read as rapidly the seventh time as it is the first." Quite so; the romancer's desire was to tell you a story in a way that would enthral you from beginning to end; if you stopped to admire the exquisiteness of a phrase, or to ponder over the possibilities which a thought suggested, you would lose the thread of the story, the charm that its narrator had wove about you would be broken, and his aim would be defeated.

Even when Dumas seems wordy there is, as another great story-teller saw clearly, an artistic reason for it. Stevenson, writing to one of his friends, touched on this point, and declared "if there is anywhere a thing said in two scntences that could have been as clearly and as engagingly and as forcibly said in one, then it's amateur work."