Page:The life and writings of Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) (IA lifewritingsofal00spurrich).pdf/372

 and possibly the reader has smiled to himself, or registered an inward protest at the time. And yet a threefold proof can be presented in support of the tremendous adjective.

To our thinking, the very reason advanced by many critics for refusing greatness to Dumas offers one of the strongest presumptions in favour of that claim. "There is perhaps hardly such another instance," says Dr Garnett, "of a man with so little moral or intellectual claim to rank among the élite of letters, taking so high a place upon the literary Olympus." (We have neither time nor space to do more than register a strong protest respecting the "immorality" of Dumas's claim to literary rank, and pass on.) "Inferior in intellectual power to his principal contemporaries, his instinct is often truer than their reason."

Roughly speaking, great writers may be divided into two classes—those whose work is based on reason and process of thought, and those whose utterances are prompted by instinct and inspiration. We refrain from suggesting instances of what we may call the "intellectual" writers and the "spiritual" writers; neither quality can claim to be higher in itself than the other, and some great men, like Shakespeare, possess both. The one type of mind tends to produce logicians, political economists, problem-novelists and playwrights, poli-