The poor lady could not even
understand whence the flowers came that he laid on her couch, the
flowers thrown to the young man--yesterday unknown, and to-day the
most famous of contemporary names. All this tale of triumph,
checkered by enmities and diversified by duels, Dumas tells with the
vigour and wit of his novels. He is his own hero, and loses nothing
in the process; but the other characters--Taylor, Nodier, the Duc
d'Orleans, the spiteful press-men, the crabbed old officials--all
live like the best of the persons in his tales. They call Dumas
vain: he had reason to be vain, and no candid or generous reader
will be shocked by his pleasant, frank, and artless enjoyment of
himself and of his adventures. Oddly enough, they are small-minded
and small-hearted people who are most shocked by what they call
"vanity" in the great. Dumas' delight in himself and his doings is
only the flower of his vigorous existence, and in his "Memoires," at
least, it is as happy and encouraging as his laugh, or the laugh of
Porthos; it is a kind of radiance, in which others, too, may bask
and enjoy themselves. And yet it is resented by tiny scribblers,
frozen in their own chill self-conceit.
There is nothing incredible (if modern researches are accurate) in
the stories he tells of his own success in Hypnotism, as it is
called now, Mesmerism or Magnetism as it was called then. Who was
likely to possess these powers, if not this good-humoured natural
force? "I believe that, by aid of magnetism, a bad man might do
much mischief.
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