Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/353

 Rossetti has kindly confirmed this record with his own testimony.

"It is perfectly truc," he writes, "that my brother took the greatest delight in reading Dumas, and I think it may be said that, if he had been asked 'whom do you regard as the greatest novelist that ever existed—in those qualities which are most essential for novel-writing?' he would have replied 'Dumas.' Of course he would at the same time have been conscious that Walter Scott, as a precursor of Dumas, had to some extent served him as a pattern."

Henley strikes the same note of praise. "Dumas is assuredly one of the greatest masters of the art of narrative in all literature," he says, and amplifies his assertion thus: "He was an artist at once original and exemplary, with an incomparable instinct of selection, a constructive faculty not equalled among the men of this century, an understanding of what is right and what is wrong in art, and a mastery of his materials which in their way are not to be paralleled in the work of Sir Walter himself."

The frequent references to Scott force us without