Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/345

 wrote unworthily, or below his own level. The greed of money, for money's sake, for anything that money could give him, was foreign to the man's generous, insouciant nature. Before and after the writing of a story, the man of business was keenly alive in Dumas, as in all shrewd authors; once plunged into the story the man became the artist; he had no thought but for the story and the best way of telling it. If he had been miserly, if his work had not been the great enjoyment of his life, the whole story of Dumas's career would have left him open to base suspicion; but the more one learns of the man's nature and life-story, the more clearly one sees in him the artist, not the artisan.



In the hope that we have extenuated or disproved the charges against Dumas, and shown him guilty of literary faults rather than vices, we shall modify our metaphor and treat the case more lightly. Believing it only just to look upon the matter rather as a question for the civil courts of literature, we close our defence and proceed to put in a counterclaim of as modest a nature as our convictions respecting the true worth of our client's cause will allow.

It is noteworthy that whereas we in England look