Part 30

Between 'The Demi-Monde,' and 'La Question d'Argent' (The Money Question), which followed, Dumas spent two years at work. 'La Question d'Argent' is a favorite play with the connoisseurs; but its reception by the public was of the coldest. It is a noteworthy fact that plays turning upon money have never been successful. Le Sage's 'Turcaret' is a dramatic masterpiece: it never had the luck to please the crowd. Dumas's Jean Giraud is, however, a very curiously studied character. The author has represented in him the commonest type of the shady money-man, the unconscious rascal. And very skillfully he made an individual out of that general type, by giving to Jean Giraud a certain rough good-nature; the appearance of a good fellow, with a certain degree of fineness; a mixture of humility and self-conceit, of awkwardness and impudence, and even some ideas as to the power of money that do not lack dignity, and some real liberality of sentiment and act,--for wealth alone, though acquired by ignominious means, suggests and dictates to the great robbers some advantageous movements which the small rascal cannot indulge in: and around this Turcaret of the Second Empire how many pictures of honest people, every one of whom, in his or her way, is good and fine!

One year later Dumas carried to the Gymnase, his favorite theatre, 'Le Fils Naturel' (The Natural Son); and the next year 'Un Père Prodigue' (A Prodigal Father; known also in English through a free adaptation as 'My Awful Dad').

In 'Le Fils Naturel' Dumas for the first time wrote a theme-play, a kind of work in which he was to become a master. Hitherto we have seen him drawing pictures of manners. To be sure, philosophical considerations on the period depicted are not wanting, but the play has not the form and does not assume the movement of a thesis. It does not take up one special trait of our social order, one of our worldly prejudices, in order to show its strong and weak sides. 'Le Fils Naturel' is the work of a moralist as well as of a playwright; or rather, it is the work of a playwright who was a born moralist.

'Un Père Prodigue' originally excited great curiosity. It escaped no one that in his Count Fernand de la Rivonnière, Dumas had shown us some traits of his illustrious father, who _had_ been a prodigal father; and that he had depicted himself in Viscount André. Every one made comparisons; some, of course, accused the author of filial disrespect. The accusation was ridiculous, and he did not even answer it. He had so well disguised the persons, he had transported them into such different surroundings, that no one could recognize in them their true prototypes. Then--and this is no small praise--if Count de la Rivonnière is guilty of one fault, that of throwing to the wind his fortune, he is a most amiable nobleman, full of broad ideas and generous sentiments,--has a warm heart. The fourth act, in which the father sacrifices himself in order to save his son's life, is pathetic in the extreme. But nothing equals the first act, which is a model of animated and picturesque composition. No one ever painted in more vivid colors the pillage of a household, and a family without so much as a shadow of discipline. It is an accumulation of small details, not one of which is of an indifferent nature, and which, taken together, drive into our minds the idea that this nobleman, so well-mannered, so charming in conversation, so sober for himself, is running to ruin as gayly as he can.

For four years after the production of 'Un Père Prodigue' Dumas wrote nothing. But in 1864 he reappeared at the Gymnase with a strange play, 'L'Ami des Femmes' (A Friend of the Sex), which completely failed. After 'L'Ami des Femmes' there was another interruption, not of Dumas's labors but of his dramatic production. Perhaps he was sick of an art which had caused him a cruel disappointment. He turned again to novel-writing, and published (1866) 'L'Affaire Clémenceau' (The Clémenceau Case), the success of which was not as great as he had hoped. In France, when a man is superior in one specialty people will not let him leave it. He is not allowed to be at once an unequaled novelist and a first-rate dramatist.

At that time Dumas hesitated which road to follow. An incident which created a great deal of comment threw him back towards the stage, and towards a new form of comedy.

M. Émile de Girardin, one of the best known publicists of the Second Empire, had bethought himself, when over fifty years of age, and knowing nothing of this kind of work, to write a play. He had been a great friend of Dumas père, and had kept up the most affectionate intercourse with his son. He had asked him to fit his play for the stage. It possessed one really dramatic idea. Dumas, in order to oblige his father's friend, made out of it 'Le Supplice d'une Femme' (A Woman's Torture). Émile de Girardin, who was self-conceited and somewhat despotic, refused to recognize his offspring in the bear that Dumas had licked. He declined to sign the play: "Neither shall I," Dumas retorted.

'A Woman's Torture' was acted at the Comédie Française with extraordinary success. This success was for Dumas a warning and a lesson. 'A Woman's Torture' was a three-act play, short, concise, panting, which hurried to the _coup de théâtre_ of the second act, upon which the drama revolved, and rushed to its conclusion. The time of five-act comedies, with ample expositions, copious developments, philosophical disquisitions, curious and fanciful episodes, was gone. Henceforth the dramatist had to deal with a hurried and _blasé_ public, which, taking dinner at eight, could give to the theatre but a short time, and an attention disturbed by the labor of digestion. 'A Woman's Torture,' which lasted only an hour and a half, and proceeded only by rapid strokes, was exactly what that public wanted. After that time Dumas wrote only three-act and one-act plays; using four acts only for 'Les Idées de Madame Aubray' (Madame Aubray's Ideas); and these four acts are very short. In 1867 this play announced Dumas's return to the stage; and Dumas is here more paradoxical than he had ever been. His theme looked like a wager not simply against bourgeois prejudices, but even against good sense, and, I dare to say, against justice. This wager was won by Dumas, thanks to an incredible display of skill. He took up the thesis a second time in 'Denise,' and won his wager again, but with less difficulty. In 'Denise' the lover struggles only against social prejudices, and allows himself to be carried away by one of those emotional fits which disturb and confound human reason. In 'Madame Aubray's Ideas' the triumph is one of pure logic.

'Une Visite de Noces' (A Wedding Call) and 'La Princesse Georges' followed rather closely on 'Madame Aubray's Ideas.' 'A Wedding Call'!--what a thunderbolt then! It was of but one act, _but_ one act the effect of which was prodigious, the echo of which is still heard. Time and familiarity have now softened for us the too sharp outlines of this bitter play. It has been acknowledged a masterpiece. It is certainly one of the boldest works of this extraordinary magician, who, thanks to his unerring skill and to the dazzling wit of his dialogue, brought the public to listen to whatever he chose to put upon the stage. It seemed that, like a lion tamer in the arena, Dumas took pleasure in belaboring and exasperating this many-headed monster, in order to prove to his own satisfaction that he could subdue its revolts.

'La Princesse Georges' is a work of violent and furious passion. We find in it Madame de Terremonde, the good woman who adores her husband, but who adores him with fury, who wants him all to herself, and who, when sure that she is betrayed, passes from the most exasperated rage to tears and despair. There is in the first act a scene of exposition which has become celebrated. No one ever so rapidly mastered the public; no one ever from the first stroke so painfully twisted the heart of the spectators.

Let us pass rapidly over 'La Femme de Claude' (Claude's Wife: 1873). Of all his plays it is the one Dumas said he liked best, the one he most passionately defended with all sorts of commentaries, letters, prefaces, etc.; the one which he insisted on having revived, a long time after it had failed. To my mind that play was a mistake; and the public, in spite of Dumas's arguments, in spite of the protests of the critics, who are often very glad to distinguish themselves by not yielding to the common voice,--the public insisted on agreeing with me.

Only a few months later, Dumas brilliantly retrieved himself with 'Monsieur Alphonse.' His Madame Guichard is the most cheerfully vulgar type of the _parvenue_ which any one ever dared to put upon the stage. She can hardly read and write; she is no longer young, and she is "to boot" very proud of her money; she has no tact and no taste; but at heart she is a good sort of woman. Her morality is as primitive as her education. But deceit disgusts her; she hates but one thing, she says,--lying. She is not troubled by conventionalities; and her speech has all the color and energy of popular speech. But see! Dumas in depicting this woman preserved exquisite measure. Madame Guichard says many pert and droll things; she never utters a coarse word. Her language is picturesque; it is free from slang. Hers is a vulgar nature, but she does not offend delicate ears by the grossness of her utterance. Dumas never drew a more living picture; she is the joy of this rather sad play.

All that remain to be reviewed are 'L'Étrangère,' 'La Princesse de Bagdad,' and 'Françillon'; all of which were given at the Comédie Française. 'L'Étrangère' is indeed a melodrama, with an admixture of comedy. Had he gone further in that direction, Dumas might have made a new sort of play, which would perhaps have reigned a long time on the stage. But after this trial, successful though it was, he stopped. 'La Princesse de Bagdad' entirely failed. 'Françillon' was Dumas's last success at the Comédie Française.

After 1887 Dumas gave nothing to the stage. He had completed a great five-act play, 'The Road to Thebes,' which the manager of the Comédie Française hoped every year to put on the boards. Dumas kept promising it; but either from distrust of himself or of the public, or from fatigue, or fear of meeting with failure, he asked for new delays, until the day when he declared that not only the play would not be acted during his life, but that he would not even allow it to be acted after his death.

This death he saw coming, with sad but calm eyes. It was a sorrow for us to see this man, whom we had known so quick and alert, grow weaker every day, showing the progress of disease in his shriveled features and body. The complexion had lost all color, the cheeks had become flaccid, the eye had no life left.

On October 1st, 1895, he wrote to his friend Jules Claretie:--"Do not depend upon me any more; I am vanquished. There are moments when I mourn my loss, as Madame D'Houdetot said when dying." He was at Puys, by the seaside, when he wrote that despairing letter. He returned to Marly, there to die, surrounded by his family, on November 28th, 1895, in a house which he loved and which had been bequeathed to him years before by an intimate friend.

His loss threw into mourning the world of letters, and the whole of Paris. People discovered then--for death loosens every tongue and every pen--how kind and generous in reality was Dumas, who had often been accused of avarice by those who contrasted him with his father; how many services he had discreetly rendered, how open his hand always was. His constant cheerfulness and good-nature had finally caused him to be forgiven for his wit, which was sarcastic and cutting, and for his success, which had thrown so many rivals into the shade. This witty man, who was always obliging and even tender-hearted, had no envy, and gave his applause without a shadow of reserve to the successes of others. Every young author found in him advice and support; he did not expect gratitude, and therefore was soured by no disappointment. He was a good man, partly from nature, partly from determination; for he deemed that, after all, the best way to live happy in this world is to make happy as many people as possible.

If in this long essay I have not spoken of Dumas as a moralist, it is because, in my opinion, in spite of all that has been said, Dumas was a dramatist a great deal more than a philosopher. In his comedies he discussed a great many moral and social questions, without giving a solution for any; or rather, the solutions that he gave were due not to any set of fixed principles, but to the conclusion which he was preparing for this play or that. He said, indifferently, "Kill her" or "Forgive her," according to the requirements of the subject which he had selected; and he would afterwards write a sensational preface with a view to demonstrate that the solution this time given by him was the only legitimate one. These prefaces are very amusing reading; for he wrote them with all the fire of his nature, and he had the gift of movement. But they were a strange medley of incongruous and contradictory statements. Every idea that he expresses can be grasped and understood; but it is impossible to see how it agrees with those that precede and follow. It is a chaos of clear ideas.

Dumas was not a philosopher, but an agitator. He stirred up a great many questions; he drew upon them our distracted attention; he compelled us to think of them. Therein he did his duty as a dramatist.

He gave much thought to the fate of woman in our civilization. We may say, however, that though loving her much, he still more feared her, and I shall even add, despised her. All his characters who have the mission of defending morality and good sense are very attentive to her, but keep her at arm's-length. They are affectionate counselors, not lovers. They hold her to be a frail being, who must be controlled and guided. Some one has said that there was in Dumas something of the Catholic priest. It is true. He was to women a lay director of conscience.

He was a great connoisseur of pictures and a great art lover. Music, I think, is the only art that did not affect him much. He was a dazzling talker; his plays teem with bright sayings; his conversation sparkled with them. I did not know him in his prime, when he delighted his friends and companions by his unceasing flow of spirits. I became intimate with him only later. If you knew how to start him, he simply coruscated. I never knew any one, save Edmond About, who was as witty, and who, like About, always paid you back in good sounding coin.

Dumas was a member of the French Academy. He had not wished for that honor, because it had been denied to his father. He desired, in his reception speech, to call up the great spirit of this illustrious father and make it share his academician's chair. He had this joy; the two Dumas were received on the same day. Their two names will never perish.

[The editors have been compelled, for lack of space, to leave out that part of M. Sarcey's valuable essay which is a professional analysis of several of Dumas's plays, and which would be of interest, chiefly, to special students of the French drama and stage.]

THE PLAYWRIGHT IS BORN--AND MADE

From the Preface to 'A Prodigal Father'

Of all the various forms of thought, the stage is that which nearest approaches the plastic arts--inasmuch as we cannot work in it unless we know its material processes; but with this difference: that in the other arts one learns these processes, while in play-writing one guesses them; or to speak more accurately, they are in us to begin with.

One can become a painter, a sculptor, a musician, by sheer study: one does not become a dramatic author in this fashion. A caprice of nature makes your eye in such a way that you can see a thing after a particular manner, not absolutely correct, but which must nevertheless appear, to any other persons that you wish to have so think, the only correct point of view. The man really called to write for the stage reveals what is an extremely rare faculty, in his very first attempts,--say in a farce in school, or a drawing-room charade. There is a sort of science of optics and of perspective that enables one to draw a personage, a character, a passion, an impulse of the soul, with a single stroke of the pen. Dramatic _cheating of the eye_ is so complete that often the spectator, when he is a mere reader of the play, desiring to give himself once more the same emotion that he has felt as one of the audience, not only cannot recapture that emotion in the written words before him, but often cannot even distinguish the passage where the emotion lies hid. It was a word, a look, a silence, a gesture, a purely atmospheric combination, that held him spellbound. So comes in the genius of the playwright's trade, if those two words can be associated. One may compare writing for the stage in relation to other phases of literature, as we compare ceiling painters with [painters of] pictures for the wall or the easel. Woe to the painter if he forget that his composition is to be looked at from a distance, with a light below it!

A man without merit as a thinker, a moralist, a philosopher, an author, may turn out to be a dramatic author of the first class; that is to say, in the work of setting in motion before you the purely external movements of mankind; and on the other hand, to become in the theatre the thinker, the moralist, the philosopher, or the author to whom one listens, one must indispensably be furnished with the particular and natural qualities of a man of much lower grade. In short, to be a master in the art of writing for the stage, you must be a poor hand in the superior art....

That dramatic author who shall know mankind like Balzac, and who shall know the theatre like Scribe, will be the greatest dramatic author that has ever existed.

Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by E. Irenæus Stevenson

AN ARMED TRUCE

From 'A Friend of the Sex'

[The following conversation in the first act of the play takes place in the pleasant morning-room of a country-house near Paris, the home of M. and Madame Leverdet. M. Leverdet is asleep in his chair. The speakers are Madame Leverdet, a coquettish, sprightly lady approaching middle age, and young M. De Ryons, a friend and neighbor. Madame Leverdet is determined to marry off De Ryons advantageously, and as soon as possible. Unfortunately he is a confirmed bachelor, not to say woman-hater, whose cynicism is the result of severely disappointing experiences. Under that cynicism there is however genuine respect and even chivalry as to the right sort of woman,--the superior and sincere type, which he does not happen often to encounter.]

_Madame Leverdet_--Let us come to serious topics while we are alone, my friend.

_De Ryons_--And apropos of them?

_Madame Leverdet_--Are you willing to be married off yet?

_De Ryons_ [_with a start of terror_]--Pardon me, my dear lady! At what hour can I take the first train for Paris?

_Madame Leverdet_--Now listen to me, at least.

_De Ryons_--What! Here it is two years since I have called on you; I come to make you a little visit of a morning, in all good friendship, with the thermometer forty, centigrade; I am totally unsuspecting; all I ask is to have a little lively chat with a clever woman--and see how you receive me.

_Madame Leverdet_ [_continuing_]--A simple, charming young girl--

_De Ryons_ [_interrupting her, and in the same tone_]-- --musical, speaks English, draws nicely, sings agreeably, a society woman, a domestic woman,--all at the choice of the applicant.

_Madame Leverdet_ [_laughing_]--Yes, and pretty and graceful and rich; and, by-the-by, one who finds you a charming fellow.

_De Ryons_--She is quite right there. I shall make a charming husband--I shall; I know it. Only thirty-two years old; all my teeth, all my hair (no such very common detail, the way young men are nowadays); lively, sixty thousand livres income as a landed proprietor--oh, I am an excellent match: only unfortunately I am not a marrying man.

_Madame Leverdet_--And why not, if you please?

_De Ryons_ [_smiling_]--It would interfere severely with my studies.

_Madame Leverdet_--What sort of studies?

_De Ryons_--My studies of--woman.

_Madame Leverdet_--Really! I don't understand you.

_De Ryons_--What! Do you not know that I am making women my particular, my incessant study, and that I am reckoning on leaving some new and very interesting documents dealing with that branch of natural history?--a branch very little understood just at present, in spite of all that has been written on the topic. My friend, I cannot sacrifice the species to the individual; I belong to science. It is quite impossible for me to give myself wholly and completely--as one certainly should do when he marries--to one of those charming and terrible little carnivora for whose sake men dishonor themselves, ruin themselves, kill themselves; whose sole preoccupation, in the midst of the universal carnage that they make, is to dress themselves now like umbrellas and now like table bells.

_Madame Leverdet_ [_scornfully_]--So you really think you understand women, do you?

_De Ryons_--I rather think I do. Why, just as you see me this instant, at the end of five minutes' study or conversation I can tell you to what class a woman belongs,--whether to the middle class, to women of rank, artists, or whatever you please; what are her tastes, her characteristics, her antecedents, the state of her heart,--in a word, everything that concerns my special science.

_Madame Leverdet_--Really! Will you have a glass of water?

_De Ryons_--Not yet, thank you.

_Madame Leverdet_--I suppose, then, you are under the impression that you know me too.

_De Ryons_--As if I did not!

_Madame Leverdet_--Well, and I am--what?

_De Ryons_--Oh, you are a clever woman. It is for that reason that I call on you [_aside:_ every two years].

_Madame Leverdet_--Will you kindly give me the sum of your observations in general? You can tell me so much, since I am a clever woman.

_De Ryons_--The true, the true, the true sum?

_Madame Leverdet_--Yes.

_De Ryons_--Simply that woman of our day is an illogical, subordinate, and mischief-making creature. [_In saying this De Ryons draws back and crouches down as if expecting to be struck._]

_Madame Leverdet_--So then, you detest women?

_De Ryons_--I? I detest women? On the contrary, I adore them; but I hold myself in such a position toward them that they cannot bite me. I keep on the outside of the cage.

_Madame Leverdet_--Meaning by that--what?