Three Generations of Dumas
FERGUSON, DELANCEY
Three Generations of Dumas The Titans. Reviewed, by DeLancey Ferguson By Andre Maurois. Former chairman, department of Harper. 508 pp. $5.95. English, Brooklyn. College The literary careers of...
...But Dumas pere had filled the stage, figuratively and literally, while he was still in his twenties...
...College The literary careers of the Dumas, pere and fils, span most of the 19th century...
...Profound...
...Admittedly, simple action-narrative is hard to analyze...
...he himself put the final polish on dialogue and characterization...
...Maurois has enriched his book with numerous unedited letters by and to both the Dumas...
...it was esthetically immoral...
...Dumas fils, on the other hand, was only a force of society...
...The title is misleading...
...Never...
...Since Andre Maurois had already written lives of Victor Hugo and George Sand, his turning next to the Gargantua of French letters was almost inevitable...
...But no one can claim that the book is in any way definitive...
...General Dumas, the Haitian mulatto who founded the dynasty, is disposed of in some 20 pages...
...Eugene Sue was Dumas's chief rival as a feuilletoniste, yet The Mysteries of Paris has few readers today...
...Admittedly, too, so long as action-narrative is contemporary, it seldom needs critical interpretation...
...It was a far cry from the dignity of Corneille or Racine to La Tour de Nesle or Henri III et sa Cour, but the French, with a revolution and a restoration behind them, and a couple of more revolutions ahead, loved history as rearranged by Dumas: "something lightly handled, highly colored, with simple contrasts of white and black, the Good on one side and Bad on the other...
...the public applauded...
...Dream...
...he was the source of his son's physique and gasconade, but otherwise little more than a hyphen in the pattern of life...
...Beyond the Titan stands the frock-coated figure of Dumas fils, a mere man of talent, fashioner of well-made plays, "and, once the hot passions of youth were over, curiously addicted to morality...
...Nowhere in the history of the drama is there a period of greater technical proficiency, and greater intellectual poverty, than in France in the latter half of the 19th century...
...Amusing...
...Always...
...He was primarily a dramatist...
...his assistants roughed out scenarios and looked up references...
...Critics frowned or sneered...
...Academic critics shy away from it...
...The general reader will find abundant entertainment in the melange of anecdotes...
...We can take our Rex Stout and Agatha Christie straight...
...His plays were unabashed melodrama...
...For such serials Dumas had the perfect touch...
...But the plays were only apprenticeship in rearranging history...
...It was commercial...
...But Maurois gives more space to celebrating his subject's prowess as spendthrift and town bull than to studying the novels...
...Very seldom...
...He was, as Maurois says, a force of Nature and as such has never been surpassed in his own genre...
...Go on turning the pages...
...At about the same time that Dickens, across the Channel, discovered the profits of publishing in -monthly parts, Parisian newspaper editors discovered the feuilleton serial, whose degenerate descendants are Steve Canyon, Dick Tracy and the Saint...
...But people read the stories then, and they read them now...
...his cliff-hangers were in more vivid danger, his punch-lines were crisper than those of his rivals...
...Yet, sterile though it is, this drama merits intensive study, if only because its mechanical neatness sparked the revolt of Ibsen, Shaw, and the whole international dramaturgy of the generation after Dumas fils...
...For the sake of these letters, serious students of the period will have to read The Titans...
...Maurois, however, offers even less criticism of the son than of the father...
...But Gargantua has been too much for him...
...There was only one Titan...
...Not very often...
...His "well-made" plays, too, suggest the assembly-line, but an assembly-line .producing a standardized Model T, its chassis eternally triangular...
...Touching...
...Dizzied by the sheer animal vigor of Dumas pere, Maurois has submerged his literary achievements in a welter of amours, extravagances and follies...
...When, however, such a story as The Three Musketeers remains triumphantly-readable for five generations, it is time to stop high-hatting its author...
...Because it was founded directly on the younger man's own relationship with Marie Duplessis, La Dame aux Camelias receives ample space...
...That is why the elder Dumas is important: No greater story-teller has ever lived...
...But the rest of the long tale of his theatrical career pays more attention to the actresses who created his roles than to the roles themselves...
...He introduced assembly-line methods of composition...
...they find it easier to write about the complex and obscure than about the lucid...
...Never...
...Maurois sums up' in three rhetorical questions: "Does Dumas make us think...
...But generally the thrill literature of one generation is the boredom of the next...
Vol. 41 • April 1958 • No. 16
