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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Dumas Biography DUMAS, Alexandre, called Dumas Père (1802–70). The greatest French romantic novelist and the most universally read story-teller of the world, born at Villers-Cotterets, July 24, 1802. As a writer, he is remarkable for great creative rather than for artistic genius. Dumas was the grandson of the Marquis Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie and a negress, both of Haiti; his father, Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie Dumas, was for a time general under Napoleon. Dumas was a strange embodiment of the contrast and combination of the mental and physical characteristics of his grandparents. His awkward age and calf love are painted ingenuously in his Mémoires and in Ange-Pitou. He inclined at first to law and was apprenticed to a notary of Soissons, where he saw, in 1819, a play of Ducis (q.v.) that determined him to seek his fortune on the stage. He reached Paris in 1823, with 20 francs and hope for all his patrimony. He found a temporary livelihood as secretary in the household of the future king, Louis Philippe, and in 1829 was among the first to begin the romantic revolt on the stage in his Henri III et sa cour, the first real triumph of the Romanticist school. Actively engaged in the revolution of 1830, he proved a too ebullient Republican to find favor in the royal household and resigned his post. He now produced the first of his historical novels, Isabelle de Bavière, out of which there grew in his fertile brain a scheme for turning the whole history of France into a sort of human comedy that should "exalt history to the height of fiction" and let a romantic fancy play around the evidences of the past. The Chroniques de France that resulted from this idea are Dumas's best work. They exhibit, indeed, no historic insight and no grasp of character; but they show a wonderful dramatic instinct to fuse and recast historic materials into chaplets of episodes that are by turns frolicsome and wild, extravagant, breathless, and impetuous, subordinating description to dialogue and everything to action, never failing to absorb the reader and to excite an intense curiosity. In their historical order these chronicles are: Le bâtard de Mauléon; Duguesclin; Isabelle de Bavière; La reine Margot; La dame de Montsoreau; Les quarante-cinq; Les trois mousquetaires (the best); Vingt ans après; Le vicomte de Bragelonne; La chevalier d'Hermantal; Une fille du régent; Joseph Balsamo; Le collier de la reine; Ange-Pitou; La comtesse de Charny; Le chevalier de Maison-Rouge; Les blancs et les bleus; Les compagnons de Jéhu; and La rose rouge—the whole forming a series of well-nigh 100 volumes, which have served as models for the present-day cheaper novels of adventure and wild passion. Dumas took his material where he found it, having barbaric ideas of literary property. Already in 1832 a well-founded accusation of plagiarism had forced him to travels, of which he has left a lively series of Impressions. (Consult Wormeley, Journeys with Dumas, Boston, 1902.) It did not lead him to mend his ways, however. Volumes have been written about his "novel factory," of his purchase of work by unknown authors or translators, and of publishing under his name what he had not so much as read (consult Quérard's Les superchéries littéraires, 1859); though these charges have been grossly exaggerated. He was always ready to buy ideas, he was willing to buy novels and rewrite them, he also supplied ideas and let others do the mechanical work of composition, and in later life he may have been even less scrupulous; but none who claimed to share his honor as well as his profits ever did under their own names work like that which they claim to have done for him, and we know that Dumas was as rapid and industrious a penman as he was a facile composer. No doubt he squandered his genius under the urgent demands of the press. Nor did he confine himself to novel writing; he was a most forceful figure in the Romantic drama. His Antony (1831) introduced the modern social play and popularized the pale-faced, dark-haired, wicked Byronic hero in France. His melodramatic Tour de Nesle (1832) reeked with mystery and crime. Although his best work was almost all done between 1843 and 1850, in one way or another Dumas is responsible for 298 somewhat closely printed volumes. For a generation he was the world's Scheherazade, doing more than all others together to give French fiction a cosmopolitan audience in the great middle class, while he also found admirers among the highly cultured, such as Thackeray. His work brought enormous returns, but he was a phenomenon of thriftlessness. He became involved in many lawsuits over contracts signed with thoughtless levity. He built a palace, Monte Cristo, for 500,000 francs in 1847, then sold it in 1851, and fled from his creditors in 1853. Then for 19 years he became a pathetic wanderer in search of "copy." He visited England (1857), Russia and the Caucasus (1858), and Italy (1860 and 1866). Last came four years of senile poverty, relieved by the son whose boyhood he had neglected and whose youth he had misguided. By him he was taken from the excitements and dangers of Paris in war time to Puys, near Dieppe, where he died on the day of its occupation by the Prussians, Dec. 5, 1870. He was buried in 1872 at his boyhood's home in Villers-Cotterets. A uniform and nearly complete translation of Dumas's novels is published in Boston. Consult: Blaze de Bury, Alexandre. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. VII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 317-318. |