I doubt whether, by help of magnetism, a good man
can do the slightest good," he says, probably with perfect justice.
His dramatic success fired Victor Hugo, and very pleasant it is to
read Dumas' warm-hearted praise of that great poet. Dumas had no
jealousy--no more than Scott. As he believed in no success without
talent, so he disbelieved in genius which wins no success. "Je ne
crois pas au talent ignore, au genie inconnu, moi." Genius he
saluted wherever he met it, but was incredulous about invisible and
inaudible genius; and I own to sharing his scepticism. People who
complain of Dumas' vanity may be requested to observe that he seems
just as "vain" of Hugo's successes, or of Scribe's, as of his own,
and just as much delighted by them.
He was now struck, as he walked on the boulevard one day, by the
first idea of Antony--an idea which, to be fair, seems rather absurd
than tragic, to some tastes. "A lover, caught with a married woman,
kills her to save her character, and dies on the scaffold." Here is
indeed a part to tear a cat in!
The performances of M. Dumas during the Revolution of 1830, are they
not written in the Book of the Chronicles of Alexandre the Great?
But they were not literary excellences which he then displayed, and
we may leave this king-maker to hover, "like an eagle, above the
storms of anarchy."
Even to sketch his later biography is beyond our province.
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