Like the good Lord James
Douglas, we had liefer hear the lark sing over moor and down, with
Chicot, than listen to the starved-mouse squeak in the bouge of
Therese Raquin, with M. Zola. Not that there is not a place and an
hour for him, and others like him; but they are not, if you please,
to have the whole world to themselves, and all the time, and all the
praise; they are not to turn the world into a dissecting-room, time
into tedium, and the laurels of Scott and Dumas into crowns of
nettles.
There is no complete life of Alexandre Dumas. The age has not
produced the intellectual athlete who can gird himself up for that
labour. One of the worst books that ever was written, if it can be
said to be written, is, I think, the English attempt at a biography
of Dumas. Style, grammar, taste, feeling, are all bad. The author
does not so much write a life as draw up an indictment. The spirit
of his work is grudging, sneering, contemptuous, and pitifully
peddling. The great charge is that Dumas was a humbug, that he was
not the author of his own books, that his books were written by
"collaborators"--above all, by M. Maquet. There is no doubt that
Dumas had a regular system of collaboration, which he never
concealed. But whereas Dumas could turn out books that live,
whoever his assistants were, could any of his assistants write books
that live, without Dumas? One might as well call any barrister in
good practice a thief and an impostor because he has juniors to
"devil" for him, as make charges of this kind against Dumas.
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