General Alexandre Dumas

Alexandre Dumas, Fils

REMAKER OF THE MODERN FRENCH STAGE
(1824-1895)

ALEXANDRE DUMAS, fils, last of the great Dumases, was the foremost French dramatist of the nineteenth century, and one of the world's most original thinkers.

To him perhaps more than to any other writer belongs the honor of bringing realism to the stage. His genius completely changed the course of the French theatre, turning it away from empty romance and oratory to life, to serious thought, and to purpose.

Dumas' unvarying theme was love, and he ranks as one of the greatest analysts of that passion. No secret of love life was hidden from him. Like a deep-sea diver, he explored the recesses of the human heart and held up his discoveries to the gaze of the world.

His early youth was marred by a great sorrow, which acting on his extremely sensitive nature did more than anything else to make him take up the theme in which he was a master. He was to learn later that when life has a great destiny for us it sometimes begins by hurting us deeply.

Yet Dumas' sorrow was one that is considered ordinary by millions of individuals. It was only illegitimacy. His mother was a humble dressmaker, Marie Labay. The elder Dumas, at that time, was just out of his teens, and was earning less than $5 a week.

At boarding school the boys taunted the shy and intensely proud Alexandre about his birth. That might have been their revenge because he was smarter than the cleverest of them. When he was nine his father, who had not yet reached the height of his fame, gave him his name but the wound to his spirit remained incurable.

The elder Dumas took the boy everywhere-into the salons of the elite, the dens of the underworld, to Russia, Germany, Spain, Italy, and North Africa, where he astonished everybody by his vivacity, precocity, and wit.

In these circumstances he grew up to be a brilliant idler. Then one morning he awoke to find himself penniless, homeless, and $10,000 in debt. In the financial collapse of his father, he had fallen also.

What was there in the world for him to do? His position is best told in his own words:

I found myself sitting sadly on a cane-seated chair before a white wooden table in a miserably furnished room of the hotel where I had taken refuge. I had been driven out of my elegant apartment with everything seized and sold.
I gave myself up to bitter reflection and mechanically I opened the drawer of the table. Inside were some stamped papers and a pad of writing paper evidently forgotten there by the last occupant. I took out the pad, and as I had no occupation, and did not know what else to do, I decided to become an author, and started to write.

Success was not to be won easily. Time and time again he threw aside his manuscripts and decided never to write another line. His first work, a book of poems, attracted hardly any attention. Later, however, the book collectors paid a fabulous price for copies of this edition.

His next work, The Sins of His Youth, had better luck. It treated of the underworld of Paris of which he and his father had tasted deeply, and of his own experiences

This was followed by Camille, his masterpiece. As a novel, Camille went well, but when he turned it into a play (later its more successful form), his early difficulties seemed endless.

Again it was a question of money. While penniless in Marseilles he decided to turn the book into a play in the hope of selling it. At one sitting he dashed off the first three acts "without an erasure," and hurrying off to Paris, finished the remainder in five days.

After much difficulty he found a producer. But when it was ready for a showing, the censors barred it. When he won over the censors, the theatre failed. When he got another house, the leading lady died.

Next he tried to interest Lecont, the leading actor of the day. Lecont kept the manuscript a few days and returned it, greasy and smelly with tobacco, with the comment, "Never would I play such rot."

Dumas, heartbroken, flung the manuscript into the bottom of an old drawer, feeling that that was the end of it. But fate was yet to have its fling. Months later, as he was walking on the boulevards, he met a friend, who invited him to have a drink. While seated there on the terrace, Bouffe, an actor, saw him and stopped to speak with him.

The conversation turned to the rejected play and Bouffe, saying he was to take Lecont's place, promised to do what he could about the play.

Months passed and Dumas heard nothing. Then he received a call from Bouffe. The theatre at which the latter played was in desperate need of a good play to save it from bankruptcy and Camille was accepted as a last resort.

Its success was instantaneous and lasting. Camille remained popular well into the twentieth century. Sarah Bernhardt, Desclee, and other world-famous actresses and actors have played it. It became an opera, and later a motion picture, with Rudolph Valentino in the role of Armand. Still later it was played by Greta Garbo.

Dumas soon became the most talked of playwright in Paris. His father was earning millions. Both stood at the top of their literary world. Each loved the other tenderly and yet no two men could have been less alike. The elder Dumas was gay, jolly, always in good humor, an expansive and easy-going soul.

The younger was reserved and inclined to haughtiness, a stern moralist, an apostle of duty. He believed that his mission was to reform mankind and lead it into the path of right living. Most of all, he believed in fidelity to the marriage vow. He insisted that a husband had a right to punish with his own hand any man who had taken his wife.

The elder delighted people with his wonderful tales; the younger lashed them for their sins and called them to repentance.

The father said of the son, "Alexandre loves preaching overmuch." The son said of his father, "My father is a big child that I had when I was very little."

Later, when the elder squandered the greatest fortune ever earned by a writer, the younger took care of him like a mother. The younger Dumas was witty too, but in a manner entirely different from his father. Unlucky was the one who ran up against him. It was like a striking a buzz saw with a bare hand

Once, in a noted club, a flippant young count, proud of his ancestry, thought he would have some fun with young Dumas.
"Monsieur Dumas," he began, "I understand your father is a quadroon?"

"Yes," replied Dumas.

"And your grandfather was a mulatto?" "Yes."

"And your great-grandfather was a Negro?" "Yes."

"Good," said the count, laughing. "Will you tell us what was your great-great-grandfather, then, M. Dumas?"

"Sir," was the acid reply, "he was an ape. My ancestry began where yours ends."

His plays are filled with biting observations such as the following:

"A woman's past is like a coal mine: do not go into it with a light or there'll be an explosion."

"She is one of those women who spend their lives in lining with soft padding the ditch into which they intend their virtues shall fall, and who, furious at waiting on the edge for someone to push them in, throw stones at other women who pass."

"One can always live with a wife, provided he has something else to occupy his time."

"She had spread all those diamonds over her mother who accompanied her and who resembled the constellation of the Great Bear, not only in brilliance, but in form."

Dumas, fils, won higher literary honors than his father, and in certain learned circles is regarded as the abler of the two. As a thinker, he was undoubtedly profounder. He knew human nature thoroughly and had mastered the theatre as few before or since. He knew that all that touches the flesh interests us; he realized the imperative need of love in the lives of all. He was fearless in depicting these truths, thus his characters are alive. Of a deeply sympathetic nature, his cry of pity for fallen womanhood resounded over the world. The French Academy elected him to membership by a vote of twenty against eleven.

The elder Dumas had coveted this honor and the failure to get it had hurt him deeply. When the son rose to make his first address to the Academy, he scored it for what he considered its neglect of his father.

Seeing also with deep pain that his own reputation was overshadowing that of his illustrious father, he tried to correct this impression by praising his father above himself. He said to them:

It was under the sun of Africa, of African blood, born of a Negro virgin, that was formed the one from whom thou wert to be born . . . the one who as soldier of the Republic stifled a horse between his knees; broke an iron helmet with his teeth; and defended alone the bridge of Brixen against a vanguard of twenty men.

Rome would have borne him in triumph and made him a consul. France, calmer and more economical, refused education to his son, and this son, reared in the forest, under an open sky, driven by need and the force of his genius, invaded one day the great city and strode into the field of literature as his father strode into the field of battle, overturning all who did not make way for him.

Then commenced the cyclopean task that lasted forty years. Tragedy, history, travel, romance, thou has thrown them all out from the vast alembic of thy brain; thou hast peopled the whole world of fiction with new creations. Thou hast caused to crack with .the volume of thy work the newspaper, the book, the theatre, all of which have been too narrow for thy powerful shoulders. Thou hast enriched France, Europe, America, the world. Thou hast enriched the publishers, the translators, the plagiarists. Thou hast made them millionaires, whilst for thyself thou hast nothing left.

Then one day there comes a break. Thou hast become Dumas, the Father, for the respectful, and Father Dumas for the insolent. In the midst of all this fools' clamor thou hast perhaps heard this phrase:

"Decidedly, his son has more genius than he."

How thou oughtest to laugh! Oh, well, no! Thou wert happy like to the first father, believing, perhaps, what was said.

Dear, grand old man, simple and good, thou wouldst give me thy glory as thou gavest me thy gold, when I was young and idle. Let others of my age and value declare that I am thy equal, bearing only thy name, if they wish. But it is necessary for posterity to know that whatever happens it will be forced to count with thee. Know well, it will read our two names, one below the other, as they appear in age, and let me here record that I have never seen in thee but my father, my friend, and my master.

Later he was elected president of the Academy, the highest possible intellectual honor for a Frenchman. The next highest honor, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, was also conferred on him. He died on November 27, 1895, at the age of seventy-one, enjoying the great esteem of the French nation to the end.

Buffenoir gives the following picture of him:

Recently in the rue D' Amsterdam we met this distinguished dramatist, and as he strode along he looked like a victor in life. Truly, he has the air of a master. He is very far from having lost the poise and carriage of his youth. Tall, upright, firm and strong, he has the air of a gentleman born . . . the look a little haughty, the mustache provokingly turned up, the step and the calves firm, with cane in air, he walked as a conqueror in this Paris of which he is the son . . . this Paris in which he is known to all.

That day I saw more than twenty persons turn and say: "It is Alexandre Dumas." A woman who sold papers murmured his name aloud and cried: "Yes, it is he. What a fine and handsome gentleman!" I returned later and saw the same thing each time Dumas went on foot. He reigned in the streets by his presence as he reigned in the theatres with his plays.

Faguenot said,

"A combatant, a man firm in dispute and stub- born in attack, reply and retort. You noticed this at first glance for he possessed a soldier's stride, a military mustache, and a manner of lifting his head like a conquistador."

Alphonse d' Alain wrote:

With the death of Alexandre Dumas, fils, is extinguished the glory of this immortal trio which filled Europe with glory for a full century.

The Ancestor: General of the Republic, the Hercules, the colossus, the giant, the valiant soldier; typifying action.

The Father: the story-teller, par excellence, the master romancer, typifying imagination.

The Son: the subtle and faithful observer, typifying Reason.

Future centuries will write the name of Dumas, fils, in the book of immortality beside that of the best masters of French literature and of the world.

In the Place Malsherbes, Paris, his monument stands near those of his father and grandfather.

REFERENCES

Almeras, Henri F., Avant La Gloire. Paris, 1902.

Buffenoir, H., Hommes et Demeures Celebres. Paris, 1914.

Duquesnel, F., Souvenirs Litteraires. Paris, 1922.

Hermant, A., Alphonse Daudet; Alexandre Dumas, Paris, 1903.

Gribble, F. H., Dumas, Father and Son. New York, 1930.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES

Duncan, John, "The Negro's Literary Influence on Masterpieces of Music." Negro History Bulletin (March, 1948), pp. 134-137, Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Washington, D.C.

Fleming, B. J., and Pryde, M. J., Distinguished Negroes Abroad, pp. 84-87. Washington, D.C., The Associated Publishers, 1946.

James, Henry, Notes on Novelists, pp. 362-384. New York, Biblo and Tannen, 1969.

Maurois, Andre, The Titans. New York, Harper Brothers, 1957.

Marcelin, Frederic, La Confession de Bazoutte, pp. 163-185. Paris, Societe d'Editions Litteraires et Artistiques, 1909.

Saunders, Edith, The Prodigal Father. London, New York, Toronto, Longmans, Green and Company, 1951.

Shaw, Esther Propel, "The Three Alexandres (Dumas)." Negro History Bulletin (December, 1940), pp. 59-61, Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Washington, D.C.

General Alexandre Dumas General Alexandre Dumas (pere)