Les Trois Mousquetaires.
Dumas' novels are novels of the theatre. His first piece of work was an attempt to make a melodrama out of Ivanhoe, and his best books exhibit the art of Walter Scott modified by the rules of the stage. The curtain rises on people moving about. It falls on a climax. The action of all its scenes is in crescendo. Alter Scott to fit these rules, and you have something like the form that Dumas for more than half a century has imposed on non-psychological fiction. How admirably he filled it himself. Those splendid fellows of his, whose cavalier way fairly takes us off our feet, are not dead puppets made to wield toy swords at the pulling of a string. There is something exuberant and infectious even in the restraint of Athos. They are all alive, not with an independent, almost hostile existence like that of the characters of Balzac, but with a vitality they owe to their creator and to us, the free coursing blood of boyish dreams. They are the things that at one time or another we have set our hearts on being, the things that Dumas actually was. Where they ride a jolly spirit goes with them, and we know that Dumas had only to settle in a quiet village to turn it into a place of gay and prosperous festivity. 'Madeleine,' says D'Artagnan at the end of Vingt Ans Après, 'give me the room on the first floor. I must keep up my dignity now that I am captain of the musketeers. But always keep my room on the fifth floor; one never knows what may happen.' Is not that just the attitude of Dumas, who remarked upon his deathbed, 'I took twenty francs with me to Paris. Well, I have kept them. There they are,' and pointed to his last louis on the mantelpiece. In the flamboyant youthfulness of Dumas, who died a boy at sixty-seven, and called Mazarin 'still young, for he was only fifty-six,' is perhaps that characteristic that made Romanticism in France so complete and satisfactory a Renaissance. When such men as he were writing books the world had won its youth again.
BALZAC
BALZAC
His vitality.
Balzac used to tell a story of his father, who, when asked to carve a partridge, not knowing how to set about it, rolled up his sleeves, gripped his knife and fork, and cut it in four with such energy as to cleave the plate at the same time and embed the knife in the table. That was the manner of setting about things natural to Balzac himself. He was a 'joyous wild boar' of a man, with the build and strength of a navvy. He was never ill. Gautier tells us that the habitual expression of that powerful face was a kind of Rabelaisian glee. Now a man who could write the Comédie Humaine and look aside from it with a Rabelaisian glee was perhaps the only kind of man who could have attempted such a task without being turned, willy nilly, into a pedant.
The conception of the Comédie Humaine.