The Lady of the Camellias

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THE LADY OF THE CAMELLIAS

fr:La Dame aux camélias pl:Dama kameliowa zh:巴黎茶花女遺事

The Novels of Alexandre Dumas the Younger

THE NOVELS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS THE YOUNGER

With every man who has excelled in several directions, but particularly in one, there is a temptation for the observer of his work to slip immediately, though unconsciously, to that section of it in which his qualities are seen in most brilliant perfection. The younger Dumas was successful as a novelist, as a pamphleteer, and as a playwright, but his successes were so numerous and so sparkling on the boards of the theatre that they outdazzled the rest. If we speak of Dumas fils, we are apt to be thinking of the author of Denise and of Francillon; we leap over everything else which he has written, and settle on the problem plays of the seventies. Even his most famous novels were turned into not less famous dramas, and if we describe La Dame aux Camélias and L'Affaire Clémenceau, we have to be very careful to mention that it is the stories, not the pièces, to which we refer. But, in truth, the domi- neering and revolutionary talent of Dumas had a much greater interest in what it said than in how it said it. If there was a certain thing to be spoken, a certain moral departure to be made, to this the younger Dumas applied himself with a frank pertinacity which thought very little of mere form.

Those who knew the second Alexandre personally combine in presenting to us certain traits which are consistent with what we possess of his work. When they tell us of his bold and penetrating eyes, his broad shoulders pushing through the crowd, his loud, eager voice that insisted upon attention and easily gained it, when they describe how he laid down the law, and argued in and out of season, and stared a new acquaintance out of countenance while he was hammering away at his point of view, we realize how like his books the man must have been. In all French literature there is so great a tendency toward charm, for its own sake, that we are scarcely prepared, at first, to take at his own valuation a writer who is fired with so proselytizing an ardour of conviction, attended often by so much ignorance and prejudice, and by so little of the desire to please, as Dumas. We find ourselves wondering where the magic lay, since magic there unquestionably was, in his problems and sensations. But his force grows upon us as we study him. We come at last to understand why he holds so uncontested a place in the development of European, or at all events of Latin, civilization.

The keynote to a comprehension of all these vehement romances and prefaces and plays is the moral temperament of the author. He was a very close observer of life, and he was born into the world with disadvantages which would have made him a very sour observer, if he had not also been extremely lucky, and if he had not been almost immediately relieved from anxiety by exceptional good fortune. But he was not so relieved too soon to have noticed, with his native clairvoyance, that less lucky people are exposed to a system of social disability which can prove so irksome to them as to destroy the pleasure of life altogether. So, on behalf of these exceptionally luckless persons, the exceptionally lucky Dumas early decided to be a propagandist. He was born to look upon literature as the natural weapon of a modern man, but he scorned to use the pen for personal objects only. His great father, le père prodigue, had been all for self; Alexandre the second, in his odd way, would be all for others. He became, as we put it, "conscious of a mission." In one of his prefaces—speaking of the didactic elements in his work—he says quite clearly: "I have received from my conscience a mandate to write in this particular way, on this special class of subjects." To him, to write L'Étrangère or L'Affaire Clémenceau was an 'action." On the psychology of all this M. Paul Bourget has discoursed with the most delicate discrimination. But all we must pause to say here on the subject is that Dumas fils must be read as one who was a moralist above all things, as a man who saw errors in the social scheme, and passionately desired to correct them. It was no doubt a secret sense of this vivid moral sensibility that so irresistibly arrested the attention of his contemporaries. Nowadays, the conditions being in many cases corrected, it adds a difficulty to the sympathetic study of his books.

There is a general impression that the novels of the younger Dumas are few and short; on the contrary, they are extremely numerous and many of them are particularly long. But in a less pedantic sense, it is correct to say that he is not the author of more than two or three works of prose fiction, since the vast majority of his novels are as negligible as they certainly are neglected. In his precocious and untrained youth, he lived in close relations with that ebullient and absurd man of genius, his prodigal father. The elder Dumas was pouring forth novels as from—what indeed it too truly was—a factory, and the son, in his turn, covered reams of paper with his extravagant inventions. The novel was the easiest and the most obvious gate by which he could enter that city of literature which had been his dream from boyhood. His ignorance of life was amazing, but his confidence and cheery dogmatism were equal to it. The novels of the youth of Dumas are now scarcely literary curiosities, but they demand a few words of general analysis. The earliest of them, Adventures of Four Women and a Parrakeet, has the amazing high spirits of youth, wedded to the peculiar romance affected by the author's father. It is, to be frank, entirely unreadable. It was promptly followed by a series of books, not quite so primitive, of which Life at Twenty is a typical (and fortunately a short) example. In all these books, for those who care to seek it, there is depicted Life (with a capital letter) as observed with the affected insipidity of a buck of 1845. The types of these novels are "sceptigues par genre"; they admit that the only thing in the universe that is really elegant or witty is to believe in neither God nor woman. These books, scribbled by lamplight on the steps of the opera-house, are mere chains of anecdotes, linked together by smart conversation and a prodigious wealth of highfalutin' sentiment. The misfortune in them all is that the author has no great fund of native imagination. At no period of his life was Dumas an inventor. To be successful he needed to tell what he had seen, and until he wrote The Lady of the Camellias he had seen practically nothing but the fashionable young man of the period.

The heroes of the early novels of Dumas fils are always twenty-four years of age; they have brown eyes, dark complexions, curly black hair, white teeth, pretty hands, and small feet. They wear voluminous paletots and walk with a certain flowing swagger and open-breasted elegance. They are never seen unless one graceful hand is modelled in a pearl-gray glove, while the other swings loosely, involved in the nice conduct of a clouded cane. They are proud, quick, frivolous, sentimental, and umbrageous; they always say "Maman!" with a catch in their voices, when they recollect their mothers. They are excessively affectionate to young ladies who do not always deserve their care. They earn eighty francs a month by writing in archaeological reviews, and they spend this rich stipend in immense cigars. When they have bought too many cigars, they re- tire to a castle in the woods and live for days upon one penny loaf. In the course of time they marry, and while retaining a "bouche rose et fraîche comme celle d'une femme," they spoil the effect of it by wearing long Piccadilly whiskers and a tall white hat. They are consummately absurd, and they give the impression of a certain innocence in the pursuit of pleasure which is as captivating as the tune of a Barbary organ heard a long way off.

But Dumas came after the great romantigues had risen to their zenith and were preparing to decline. He was never really romantic, and after he grew tired of recording the silly little loves of Amanda and Antonia, he broke away from the influence of his father. He was among the young writers of France who earliest comprehended the importance of the moral reflections which struck across the poetry of the romantic age from the writings of George Sand and of Michelet. He began to wish to be a realist, that he might come nearer to the ideas which he already dimly saw were to be his beacons. This tendency to realism, or, in other words, to exact observation, was of immense value to him. It saved him from intellectual shipwreck; it cured him of his absence of equilibrium and his obscurity. He learned by im- pact with life and by revulsion against the preposterous rodomontade of the hour, that the heart alone, sensitive and unbiassed, can point the road to moral truth. He dropped the tiresome elements of his early style, and in particular the fatuous solemnity in facetiousness, which had been so wearisome. He reformed his caricatures of society; for his chained anecdotes he substituted the evolution of a single story. A fiery compassion for those who suffer, although they have not acted ill, became more and more an instinct with him.

Before, however, his genius became adult, and thrilled Europe from one end to the other by a succession of magnificent dramas, it continued for some time to express itself by certain novels, which are neither so empty as the author's legion of early romances nor worthy to be named alongside the two transcendent books with which he has permanently enriched French fiction. Of these transitional stories, the best known is Diane de Lys, which has preserved a certain popularity. This tale may be read with interest as an example of the degree to which the mind of Dumas became absolutely subservient to dramatic ideas. Diane de Lys is a novel only in external form; in spirit it is purely a study for the stage, a series of artificially conceived incidents arranged for dramatic business, and written down, one would say, for no other purpose than to aid the playwright in preparing his scenario. Effective as it has been behind the foot-lights, the plot of Diane de Lys will hardly bear reading to-day, and will certainly not bear telling in any detail, simply because the author has not taken the trouble to attend to the most elementary probabilities. There is a marquise, Diane de Lys, who is insufferably bored at home, and who, from sheer ennui, accepts an intrigue with a certain Baron Maximilien, who is one of Dumas's typical young dudes—white teeth, black curls, small feet, and the rest of it. They hold their assignations in the studio, kindly lent them for the purpose—on the Box and Cox principle—by a struggling but extremely gifted painter, Paul Aubrey. The point of the whole thing is that Diane de Lys, having an empty heart and an idle mind, falls in love with the idea of Paul Aubrey, of whom she has never seen even a portrait. The painter is understood to be Dumas's conception of himself, such an adventure having once occurred to him in the gallant days of his youth, when he was pursued over half of Europe by the eccentric and beautiful Countess Lydie de Nesselrode.

The stories of which Diane de Lys is a type are not to be recommended to readers to-day, who will do better to pass at once to the dramatization of these and their parallels. But they are interesting to the critic, as showing the mode in which the mind of Dumas was working out that extreme originality in the observation of life which was to be his main characteristic. The absurdities in Diane de Lys—the heroine falls in love with Paul Aubrey after reading a letter to his mother, which she has stolen out of the pocket of his painting coat; and she has a virtuous friend who acts throughout "for the best," as people say, but in a manner which would justify her removal to a lunatic asylum—these very absurdities are due to the process of growth in the author's mind. He is in the act of becoming a very great master on purely theatrical lines, and, engaged in his problems, he neglects, for the time being, the carpentering of the scenes he begins so boldly to throw together. And after all, if we call the sketch for Diane de Lys a novel, what we see in it is a Dumas who is on his way to be a very great master of another art than fiction. He is the writer of moral dramas, who is very soon to produce such comedies as Denise and Francillon, and to be the only modern French dramatist fit to be mentioned in the same hour with Molière.

But it is with another Dumas the Younger that we have to deal to-day. It is unquestionable that in his novels he did not, as a rule, attain to anything like the same beauty of form that he reached in his plays. But among so many failures and half-successes, there stand out two romances from the pen of Dumas which are admirable in the absolute sense. Twice he contrived, by sheer sincerity and intentness of purpose, to rise above all the inconveniences—for such he considered them—which fence about the structure of the novel. Twice he was strong enough to compose works in prose fiction which had the force, and passion, and unity of his best dramatic masterpieces. When we speak of the younger Dumas as a novelist, we think of two books—of The Lady of the Camellias, the novel of his youth, and of The Clémenceau Case, the novel of his maturity. In these two books he spoke to the whole world, and he still is speaking. He denounces in each of these books one of the two errors of society which came home to him most acutely—the harshness which excludes the woman of pleasure in her decline from the natural consolations of pity, and the cruelty which avenges on the nameless child the egotism and error of its father. In either case we miss the point of the novelist if we fail to see that his central note is a tender humanity. Dumas is loud, strident, sometimes hard and rough, but he is always dominated by "love for the lovely who are not beloved." Everywhere the ruling quality of pity makes itself felt. On this feature of his writing he has himself made an observation which may be taken as the epigraph of all his literary labours. He says—in one of his splendid prefaces, in that to La Femme de Claude—that when he began to feel his powers ripen within him, he sought for the point at which the faculty of observation, with which he felt he was endowed, could be made to produce most fruit, not merely for himself, but for others. He found it at once. With something of the glow of the mystic, with something rapturous that takes him from the side of Ibsen to place him at the right hand of Tolstoi, he exclaims: "Ce point—c'était l'amour."

Of the two great novels, we will take the later first, since dates have unusually little importance in the work of Dumas fils. L'Affaire Clémenceau was published in 1864, and it produced at its first appearance a sensation which it is now difficult to reconstitute. Up to that time the prin- ciples of naturalism were scarcely developed, although France was ripe to receive them. Zola and Alphonse Daudet had given no sign of the ultimate tendency of their work; the Goncourts were carefully preparing the field for the harvest of the seventies. But if we compare such a book as René Mauperin, which belongs to the same year, with L'Afaire Clémenceau, we can perceive the difference of appeal to the public. The style of Dumas was never delicate, like that of the Goncourts, nor did he sound very deeply into the abyss of personality. But Dumas spoke with a voice which every one was obliged to listen to. It is amusing, after nearly forty years, to turn to the original criticism of L'Affaire Clémenceau. Even those who admired it most were shocked at what they called its "breathless realism." They were embarrassed, while they applauded; they seemed to deprecate their own contemplation of so naked a movement of life. And even to day, after so many years in which each young bravo of the pen has sought to outdo the last in audacity, the Affaire can not be read without a certain troublous emotion.

The Clémenceau Case is the defence drawn up in prison by Pierre Clémenceau, a French sculptor, who is accused of murdering his wife, a Pole, whose name was Iza Dobronowska. In order to set his soul right before his judges and the world, the man writes his life from the beginning, aiming to show that in the turbulence and irony of events, and battered by the terrible sorrows which have befallen him, he could have done nothing else than "execute" his wife. This form of a plaidoyer, or defence, gives a writer of the temper of Dumas great advantages, since, without any loss of verisimilitude, he can omit whatever does not interest him, or emphasize whatever excites him. The whole novel is a vast and magnificent pamphlet, and, dealing as it does with violent and open moral obliquity, it is only right to say that, with all the author's Latin license of phrase, we never question for a moment that he brings two cognate issues before us—a sincere hatred of sin, and a pitiful tenderness for the sinner.

All the world knows, for he never pretended to conceal the fact, that the author of L'Affaire Clémenceau was a natural child. The earlier portions of the novel have an extraordinary interest from the minuteness of the picture they give of the life of a boy brought into the world with this social disadvantage. It is known that they form an autobiographical record of the discomforts which the youthful Alexandre suffered from in his early school-days. We are told by Pierre Clémenceau that his mother kept a millinery establishment, where he was brought up in comfort and happiness, until the time came when he had to go to school. We follow him to the fashionable pension to which his mother has the ambition to send him, and where he soon finds the intolerable discomfort of not being able to say what his father "does"—it being quite unknown to him whether his fathher is alive or dead, and even what his name is, since he bears his mother's surname only. It is now known that the experiences of Pierre were copied closely from those of his creator. The young Alexandre was sent at the age of nine to the Pension St. Victor, which was the largest, most fashionable, and least-disciplined private school in Paris. It was kept by a certain M. Goubeaux, an educational theorist of some note in that day, who lacked the moral and physical force to keep his school in order. He was aware of the social disability of his latest dark-eyed pupil, and a very amiable story is told of him. When a report reached Paris that the elder Dumas had been killed while travelling in Sicily, M. Goubeaux called the boy into his parlour, and said that if this proved to be true, he was in future to consider himself his son. This schoolmaster is the M. Frémin of the novel.

The lad left the Pension St. Victor at the age of fifteen, having undergone in early years something like the persecution and ostracism of which he gives so moving an account. But before he was called to face the world an event occurred which altered his prospects. His father one day surprised him in the deep study of a book, which the boy endeavoured to conceal. The father insisted on seeing what it was, and to his surprise discovered the Émile of Rousseau. "Do you find anything there to interest you?" "Much," replied the child, with a certain determination. "Well, give me your impressions." "I think Emile showed courage." "How?" "When a father refuses to give his son his name—" said the child, and stopped. "Well? well?" cried Dumas. "Then the son ought to take it." "Ah!" exclaimed the great Alexandre, who until that time had never openly acknowledged the relationship between them; "you rascal, you wish to use my name, then, do you? Well, then, for the future use it, and let's say no more about it!" At this point, then, the author of L'Affaire Clémenceau parts company from his Pierre, for, openly acknowledged by his father, who gave him plenty of money to spend, and who loved to see himself accompanied everywhere by the "demi-ethiopian charm" of this handsome son with his curly head and melting creole eyes, the life of the younger Alexandre became a delightful one. But his imagination enabled him to pursue the misfortunes of a natural son less unusually lucky than himself. No one, however, should study the first half of the L'Affaire Clémenceau without reading, as a personal corrective, the royal tribute to his magnificent parent, which forms such a purple passage in the preface to Le Fils Naturel.

Pierre Clémenceau is handsome, strong, and pure. His isolation has even been an advantage to him, for he has grown up in a noble solitude of soul, with serene ambitions. He will be a sculptor, and he discovers a marked predisposition to this fine profession. But he is weak on the side of experience, and his unsullied ideality exposes him to be the dupe of an unworthy adventuress. At a vulgar bal travesti, he meets a Polish girl, still almost a child, who accompanies her mother, the Countess Dobronowska, in the dress of a page. The account of this couple, of the ball at which they appear, of their behaviour, and of their tawdry lodging, forms one of the finest descriptive passages in the writings of Dumas. The Poles disappear from Paris, but the young sculptor—who meanwhile becomes famous—retains his infatuation for the child, whom, now grown a lovely woman, he finally invites to Paris, and marries. Iza, a muddy soul in a marble body, at first loves Pierre after her kind, but she is radically sensual, graceless, and hateful. She plays upon his credulity, and fools him to the top of her bent. At last, quite suddenly, and long after the more perspicacious reader has perceived her wickedness, Pierre wakes up to her infamy, and drives her from his house. He goes to live in Rome that he may forget her; but she has entered, like a poison, into his bones, and he can not dismiss her from his mind. He returns to Paris, to find her living in splendour, the mistress of a foreign king, and he quietly kills her.

It is in this novel that several of the most celebrated formulas of Dumas are first stated. In the early pages we meet with the "recherche de la paternité" which has since become so famous. The end of the book is a statement of the Tue-la, which became more famous still in the shuddering denouement of L'Homme-Femme and La Femme de Claude. M. Anatole France, who is something of a Gallio in these grave matters, has detected the germ of weakness in such excess of strength. He has pointed out that Pierre Clémenceau is too good for this world, or too bad, and that, however splendid his intentions, he remains neither more nor less than a murderer. "C'est un ouvrage stupide que d'assassiner une femme." So, indeed, it seems to an Anglo-Saxon mind, which is pleased to find a supporter so brilliant as M. France; the fact being that many of the moral axioms of the younger Dumas are none the less sincere and remarkable for being almost exclusively addressed to the Latin conscience. It is very difficult, without excess of phraseology and tiresome circumlocution, to express in English just what his position with regard to women is, since it is formed out of antagonistic elements—pity and hatred, tender desire and contemptuous loathing, anger and sympathy and shame. Such a denunciation of women as is found in the long and brilliantly written tirade of Constantin toward the end of L'Affaire Clémenceau is as good an example as could be found of the chasm which divides the Latin from the Anglo-Saxon race on questions of sentiment.

Who shall explain by what necromancy Dumas contrived, among the tedious and confused novels of his earliest youth, all of which have been long forgotten, to produce one romance which has be come one of the permanent treasures of the French language and an unquestioned classic? Why is that fortune reserved for the Lady of the Camellias which was immediately and finally denied to Tristan de Roux and The Silver Box? Mainly, no doubt, because, as we remarked before, Dumas is not a great inventor, and could not be successful until he took to telling simply, clearly, poignantly what he had seen with his eyes and felt with his heart. He had been born into a bad tradition; he had formed the impression that a mountebank thing of rouge and tinsel, which was called the "romantic novel," was the proper object for a young man of letters to concentrate his powers upon. A general florid looseness, a vague acceptance of types, suited best with this spurious kind of fiction. But Dumas fils required the very opposite of this to stimulate his invention. He was not mindful of the type; by temperament he was drawn to the study of sharply defined instances and striking exceptional cases. It was out of the impassioned contemplation of one of these that the marvellous story of Tke Lady of the Camellias arose.

The heroine of this book was closely studied from a real person, prominent perhaps in her day, but who owes her immortality entirely to the author's partiality. She was of the same age as Dumas, having been born in 1824. She was a farmer's daughter, and her baptismal name was Alphonsine Plessis; as something flat and vulgar rings to a French ear in "Alphonsine," she early exchanged it for Marie. Her career was, in the main, exactly that of Marguerite Gautier in the story, and the curious incident of her having attracted the attention of a duke, at Spa, through her extraordinary resemblance to his dying daughter, is said to be historic. It was only the episode of Marguerite's momentous sacrifice for the sake of Armand which Dumas would confess that he had invented, and this he said that Marie Plessis would have made—if she had ever been given the opportunity. Dumas seems to have seen her first when he came back from the Mediterranean after his first long journey with his father; she was then at the summit of her capricious beauty, and the impression she made on the youth of twenty was ineffaceable.

To the second edition of the Lady of the Camellias, Jules Janin contributed a preface, now generally reprinted with it, in which he added some interesting details as to the charm of Marie Plessis. What the relations of Dumas himself to her were he had the rather surprising good taste not, so far as I remember, to record. But the recollection of her rare qualities remained with him singularly vivid. More than twenty years after her death, he drew a brilliant little portrait of her, which is worthy to be added to our impression of the book. Marie Plessis, he said—looking back across Marguerite Gautier to her remoter prototype—"was tall, very slight, with black hair, and a pink and white complexion. Her head was small; she had long enamelled eyes, like a Japanese woman's, but they were sparkling and alert. Her lips were ruddier than the cherry, her teeth were the prettiest in the world; she looked like a little figure made of Dresden china." With the heroine of the novel, Marie Plessis was early attacked by pulmonary disease, which heightened her beauty at first in the mirage of its hectic flush; and then, in 1847, at the age of twentythree, she died. Her gaiety and courage in the face of approaching death seem to have astonished every one.

It may be advanced that the evidence we possess with regard to the character of Marie Plessis is not of the most trustworthy order. It is, we must confess, mainly supplied by ardent young men who were in love with her from afar off, moths in the candle of her transitory brightness.

PORTRAIT OF MARIE DUPLESSIS The original of "La Dame aux Camélias"

But there seems to have been something singularly winning about her. Janin said of her that "l'ennui a été le grand mal de sa vie." This is rendered in Dumas's novel, where we find expressed, as perhaps nowhere else, the intolerable weariness of what is called "a life of pleasure," its emptiness and insipidity, the irritability and inconsistency it produces in sensitive natures. We are told of Marie Plessis, as of Marguerite Gautier, that what she wished for, above all things, was to be alone, to be in silence, to be calm, to be beloved; and one sees that the irony of her existence was that it resembled that of a small, brilliant macaw in the parrot-house of the Zoological Gardens. She seems to have had many amiable traits. Dumas, looking back upon her, after her poor fragile body had lain for a generation in the grave, said: "Elle fut une des dernières et des seules courtisanes qui eurent du cœur," and to this tenderness of heart he attributes, perhaps too sentimentally, her early death. Janin tells us that she hated to disturb family relationships, and that she was no less benevolent than whimsical. Everybody praised her tact and grace, and we are assured that on occasion she could be disinterested. Without the least effort, we can build up an impression of Marie Plessis, a sort of prose version of Marguerite Gautier, very ephemeral but very captivating, and after more than half a century still a bewitching type of lovely woman who has stooped to folly, but is not wholly foolish.