It is an odd thing, this national French gift of story-telling, of seeking by instinct the group-effect, as it were, of a set of characters, their composite relations to one another and the development of these relations in dramatic climax. Fancy seized it and wove an airy, sunbright web about it, glittering with wit, touched with just a hint of pathos and as we read, we forget the slightness of the substance in the grace and delicacy of the texture. Everything interests me.” The round oath of a man, the smile of a woman, a dog asleep in the sun, a bird singing in a bush, even a feather floating in the breeze, was enough. Davidson, whose excellent volume on Dumas must be the foundation of any careful study of the subject, dismisses his author with the remark: “Except for increasing the already ample means of relaxation, he did nothing to benefit humanity at large.” But is not this a rather grudging epitaph for the creator of Monte Cristo ? Are the means of relaxation so ample that we can afford to treat La Tour de Nesle and La Reine Margot as alms for oblivion ? Would Stevenson have read Le Vicomte de Bragelonne six times, would you or I have read Les Trois Mousquetaires more times than we can count, if other relaxation of an equally delightful order were indeed so easily obtainable ? In spite of the flood of historical novels and all other kinds of novels that overwhelmed the nineteenth century, story-tellers like Dumas are not born every day, nor yet every other day.įor he was a story-teller by nature, one who could make a story of anything, one who did make a story of everything, for the joy of his own childlike imagination. Waller contrives to catch a considerable amount of the grace and ease and lightness of her elusive original and the book i.s thoroughly readable, -surely the first essential with Dumas, who is always readable, if nothing else.Īir. Deux mille becomes in the translation “ten thousand.” Comme je l’ai fait remarquer does not mean “as I had noticed ” and cette œuvre de perfection que l’art atteint parfois en depassant la nature is not adequately rendered by “that perfect standard to which art everywhere attains when it surpasses nature.” Nevertheless, in spite of these and similar lapses, Mrs. Davidson justly notes as most Dumas-like. But no difference of text can justify the omission of the pretty touch, comme les trois Curiaces, which Mr. Some of them may perhaps be explained by the extensive collation to which she refers in her preface, and in which I have been unable to follow her. Sometimes one catches the author’s spirit better, sometimes the other. Those who are curious in translation will compare Mrs. Certain persons may be annoyed, or may profess to be annoyed, because a few passages more suited to French than to English taste have not been omitted but there are strong arguments in these matters for the policy of all or none. Andrew Lang, in his graceful introduction, have unquestionably rendered a considerable service to English literature. Waller, the translator, her publishers, and Mr. Davidson published two small volumes of extracts from Dumas’s Memoirs but the complete work now appears in English for the first time.