" School days did not
last long: Madame Dumas got a little post--a licence to sell
tobacco--and at fifteen Dumas entered a notary's office, like his
great Scotch forerunner. He was ignorant of his vocation for the
stage--Racine and Corneille fatigued him prodigiously--till he saw
Hamlet: Hamlet diluted by Ducis. He had never heard of
Shakespeare, but here was something he could appreciate. Here was
"a profound impression, full of inexplicable emotion, vague desires,
fleeting lights, that, so far, lit up only a chaos."
Oddly enough, his earliest literary essay was the translation of
Burger's "Lenore." Here, again, he encounters Scott; but Scott
translated the ballad, and Dumas failed. Les mortes vont vite! the
same refrain woke poetry in both the Frenchman and the Scotchman.
"Ha! ha! the Dead can ride with speed:
Dost fear to ride with me?"
So Dumas' literary career began with a defeat, but it was always a
beginning. He had just failed with "Lenore," when Leuven asked him
to collaborate in a play. He was utterly ignorant, he says; he had
not succeeded in gallant efforts to read through "Gil Blas" and "Don
Quixote." "To my shame," he writes, "the man has not been more
fortunate with those masterpieces than the boy." He had not yet
heard of Scott, Cooper, Goethe; he had heard of Shakespeare only as
a barbarian. Other plays the boy wrote--failures, of course--and
then Dumas poached his way to Paris, shooting partridges on the
road, and paying the hotel expenses by his success in the chase.
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