Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/363

 fully affected him. "The grandeur of effect, the simplicity of the means, the absence of all apparent effort, caused me an unspeakable joy." In after years he gratefully took the opportunity of proclaiming how much he owed to Dumas. The spirit of our author lives to this day, if Mr A. E. W. Mason's recently published story, "Clementina," be any criterion; and a more recent and more striking example is that of Maxime Gorki, who, though a sombre realist in temperament, was led on to read Gogol and Dumas when all other literature was distasteful to him. Forthwith the Russian was seized with an ambition to write. The fact that the optimistic romancer could awaken emulation in a nature so widely different is a strong proof of the vital power of his talents.

But the modern writer whom Dumas most strongly impressed was Robert Louis Stevenson. This Sidney Colvin acknowledges, in his preface to his friend's "Letters."

"The debate, before his place in literature is settled, must rather turn on other points, as whether the genial essayist and egoist or the romantic inventor and narrator was the stronger in him—whether the Montaigne and Pepys elements prevailed in his literary composition, or the Scott and Dumas elements—a question, indeed, which among