Page:The three musketeers (IA threemusketeers1800duma).pdf/13

 ALEXANDRE DUMAS.

T is certain that the great contemporary popularity of an author does not prove his greatness. In verse, as in the cases of Tupper and Montgomery, in the fustian of some contemporary novelists from which the Muse averts her eyes, we have proof that what is adored to-day by the multitude is burned to-morrow. Alexandre Dumas is, so to speak, burned to-day by the contempt of very superior persons, French and English. They want a different kind of fiction, and make no allowance for tastes that are not their own, or for historical conditions. Nobody says that there should be no novels but novels like those of Dumas. His age produced Balzac, Thackeray, Mérimée, Dickens, all very unlike him, and all excellent. One star varieth from another in glory, but all are bright. Dumas is as widely read as ever, all the world over he was appreciated by George Sand and by Thackeray. "I have read about our friend Monseigneur Athos, Count de la Fère, from sunrise to sunset with the utmost contentment of mind. He has passed through how many volumes? Forty? Fifty? I wish for my part there were a hundred more," says Thackeray. So do I.

Stevenson abounded in Thackeray's sense. Of the last and longest of the cycle of the Three Musketeers, The Vicomte de Bragelonne, R. L. S. wrote:—

"What other novel has such epic variety and nobility of incident? Often, if you will, impossible; often of the order of an Arabian story; and yet all based in