The Modern Library Children's Classics

by Kenneth Grahame

  “That is because no one deserves it more than you,” said Athos. Then, taking up a quill, he wrote boldly into the blank in the commission:

  D’ARTAGNAN

  and returned it to him.

  “I have lost my friends,” D’Artagnan said ruefully, burying his head in his hands. “I have nothing left but the bitterest of recollections.…”

  Two large tears rolled down his cheeks.

  “You are young,” Athos answered. “Your bitter recollections have the time requisite to change into the happiest of memories.”

  LXVIII

  EPILOGUE

  After a year’s siege, La Rochelle, deprived of the assistance of the British fleet and of the diversion promised by Buckingham, surrendered. The capitulation was signed on October 28, 1628.

  The King returned to Paris on December twenty-third of the same year, receiving as triumphant a welcome as if he came from conquering an enemy rather than his fellow-Frenchmen. He entered the city by the Faubourg Saint-Jacques under arches of greenery.

  D’Artagnan assumed his lieutenancy. (Eventually Planchet obtained a sergeancy in the Piedmont Regiment.)

  Porthos, having left the service, married Madame Coquenard in the course of the following year. The coffers so avidly coveted yielded eight hundred thousand livres. (Mousqueton, clad in a magnificent livery, enjoyed the satisfaction of his supreme ambition: to ride behind a gilded carriage.)

  Aramis, after a journey into Lorraine, suddenly vanished without a word to his friends. Later they learned through Madame de Chevreuse, who told it to a few intimates, that he had retired to a monastery—no one knew where. (Bazin became a lay brother.)

  Athos remained a musketeer under D’Artagnan’s command until 1633 when, after a journey to Touraine, he too quitted the service, under the pretext that he had inherited a small property in Roussillon. (Grimaud followed him.)

  D’Artagnan fought with Rochefort thrice and thrice he wounded him.

  “I shall probably kill you the fourth time,” he declared, as he helped Rochefort to his feet.

  “We had therefore best stop where we are,” the wounded man answered. “God’s truth, I am a better friend than you imagine. After our first encounter, by saying one word to the Cardinal, I could have had your throat slit from ear to ear.”

  This time they embraced heartily, all malice spent; indeed, it was Rochefort who found Planchet his sergeancy.

  As for Monsieur Bonacieux, he lived on very quietly, wholly ignorant of what had become of his wife and caring very little about it. One day he was rash enough to recall himself to the Cardinal’s memory. His Eminence replied that he would provide for the haberdasher so thoroughly that he would never want for anything in the future. In fact, Monsieur Bonacieux, having left his house at seven o’clock in the evening to go to the Louvre, never set foot again in the Rue des Fossoyeurs. In the opinion of those who seemed best informed, he is lodged and fed in some royal stronghold at the expense of His Generous Eminence.

  COMMENTARY

  MARGARET OLIPHANT

  BRANDER MATTHEWS

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  MARGARET OLIPHANT

  [We] owe more innocent amusement [to Alexandre Dumas] than to almost any other writer of his generation.

  We would not, however, have it supposed that in saying this we are setting up Alexandre Dumas as a model writer, or recommending his works as a moral regimen for the young. Nothing could be further from our intention. All that we venture to assert is, that he is purity itself and good taste itself in comparison with the more recent and much more pretentious school of fiction which has openly dedicated itself to the study and elucidation of vice, and which is generally meant when the contemptuous phrase “French novel” drops from British lips.

  It is not from the modern inspiration of fiction, but from [the] wild source of boundless adventure and incident, that [Dumas] draws his power. He appeals not to the deeper principles of nature in his hearers, nor to their sympathy with the struggles of heart and soul, the complications of will and passion, which are the true subjects of poetry; but to that which is most universal in us, the intellectual quality (if it can be justly called intellectual at all) which most entirely pervades humanity, which is common to the child and the sage, the simplest and the most educated—that primitive Curiosity and thirst for story without which man would scarcely be man.

  His was not the art of reflection, of careful balance, and elaborate completeness. He produced his effects sur-le-champ, by chance, by the inspiration of the moment, without pausing to consider, or making any conscious selection of circumstances. He began—but there never appeared to him any necessity to close. The story which he told was one long-continued tale, such as children and simple natures love—a story without an end. With a wild and gay and careless exuberance of strength and of material such as none of his contemporaries could equal, he rushed on from incident to incident, each new adventure leading to another, like the endless peaks of a mountain-range. From one day to another, from one year to another, what matter how far the story led him, he carried his audience on with unflagging interest and frequent excitement.… The charm of dramatic suspense, of uncertainty, and eager curiosity—those universal stimulants of the common mind—attended him wherever he moved.

  [In our opinion, Dumas’s greatest work] was the “Trois Mousquetaires.” … It is the most spontaneous and dazzling, the most joyous, effortless, and endless of romances.… What gay vitality overflows in it, what bustling scenes open around its heroes!—scenes which are so real, so crowded, so full of incident, that we never dream of inquiring into their historical accuracy, nor of bringing them to that dull standard of fact which is alien to romance. Such scenes indeed do not belong to one historical period or another, nor can the bold and brilliant narrative be bound down to formal limits of costume, or the still harder bondage of actual events. They belong rather to that vague period “once upon a time,” familiar to all primitive audiences, in which the action of all fairy tales is laid, and which is the age proper to the primary poet, vague in chronology but dauntless in invention, who is always the earliest chronicler.

  [The] unbounded vivacity of the narrative, its endless variety, the delightful prodigality of movement and frolic-wealth, is to the blasé reader of more reasonable and profitable literature like a dip into some sunshiny sea with flashing waves and currents, with wild puffs of wind and dashes of spray, after the calm navigation of stately rivers. Athos, Porthos, and Aramis are as delightfully real as they are impossible. Does any one ask whether we believe in them? we laugh at the question, and at all the gravity and conformance to ordinary rule which it implies. Believe in them! we know that our four paladins are impossible—as impossible as the seven champions of Christendom, but equally delightful and true to the instincts which, once in a way, ask something more from imagination than sketches of recognisable men and comprehensible circumstances. They are possible as Puck and Ariel are possible, though they are not at all ethereal, but most vigorous and solid human beings, with swords of prodigious temper, and arms of iron, giving blows which no man would willingly encounter. Their combination of ancient knight-errantry with the rude and careless habits of a modern soldier of fortune, their delicate honour and indifferent morals, their mutual praise and honest adulation, combined with the perfect frankness of the author as to their faults, give a reality to these martial figures which no chronological deficiency can detract from, and which even their wonderful and unheard-of successes do not abate.

  [The] author never forgets the characteristic differences of his adventurers. The calm and somewhat sad indifferentism of Athos, the sentimentalism of Aramis, the sturdy conviviality of Porthos, are kept up throughout with unfailing consistency; and nothing can be more individual than the character of d’Artagnan, who is more distinctly the soldier of fortune than any of his friends, and who,… in the very heat of adventure keeps always a corner of his eye upon his own advantage, or rather the advantage of the brother
hood, which to each of the four is as his own. The perpetual contrast and variety thus kept up adds immensely to our interest in the Mousquetaires. It supplies the charm of character which is sometimes wanting to the rapid strain of the improvisatore, and adds what is in its way a distinct intellectual enjoyment to that pleasure which can scarcely be called intellectual—the delight of simple story, a primitive and savage joy.

  The tragic thread which runs through this record of warlike exploits, and which brings in certain chapters which we would gladly get rid of, has on the whole but little to do with the adventures of our Mousquetaires. The portentous creation of Milady, the depraved and dishonoured woman whom we divine at once to have been the wife of the proud Athos and cause of his misfortunes, has little attraction to the wholesome imagination, though she has been the origin of a whole school of wicked heroines.… [We] cannot take upon us to say that any of the women who figure now and then in the story do any credit to Dumas. The best that can be said for him is, that he brings them in only when he cannot help it, and has himself no predilection for scenes of passion, or any intrigues except those which are political. Embarrassing situations and the “delicate” suggestions of vice in which some other French writers delight, are entirely out of the way of the honest raconteur.

  From “Alexandre Dumas,” published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1873

  BRANDER MATTHEWS

  Ben Jonson, we are told, once dreamed that he saw the Romans and Carthaginians fighting on his big toe. No doubt Dumas had not dissimilar dreams; for his vanity was at least as stalwart and as frank as Ben Jonson’s. To defend himself against all charges of plagiarism, the French dramatist echoed the magniloquent phrase of the English dramatist, and declared that he did not steal, he conquered [see excerpt dated 1833]. It is but justice to say that there was no mean and petty pilfering about Dumas. He annexed as openly as a statesman, and made no attempt at disguise. In his memoirs he is very frank about his sources of inspiration, and tells us at length where he found a certain situation, and what it suggested to him, and how he combined it with another effect which had struck him somewhere else. When one goes to the places thus pointed out, one finds something very different from what it became after it had passed through Dumas’s hands, and, more often than not, far inferior to it. It can scarcely be said that Dumas touched nothing he did not adorn; for he once laid sacrilegious hands on Shakspeare, and brought out a “Hamlet” with a very French and epigrammatic last act. But whatever he took from other authors he made over into something very different, something truly his own, something that had Dumas fecit in the corner, even though the canvas and the colors were not his own.… In a word, all his plagiarisms, and they were not a few, are the veriest trifles when compared with his indisputable and extraordinary powers.

  Besides plagiarism, Dumas has been accused of “devilling,” as the English term it; that is to say, of putting his name to plays written either wholly or in part by others. There is no doubt that the accusation can be sustained, although many of the separate specifications are groundless. The habit of collaboration obtains widely in France; and collaboration runs easily into “devilling.” When two men write a play together, and one of them is famous and the other unknown, there is a strong temptation to get the full benefit of celebrity, and to say nothing at all about the author whose name has no market-value. That Dumas yielded to it now and then is not to be wondered at. There was something imperious in his character, as there was something imperial in his power. He had dominion over so many departments of literature, that he had accustomed himself to be monarch of all he surveyed; and if a follower came with the germ of a plot, or a suggestion for a strong situation, Dumas took it as tribute due to his superior ability. In his hands the hint was worked out, and made to render all it had of effect. Even when he had avowed collaborators, as in Richard Darlington, he alone wrote the whole play. His partners got their share of the pecuniary profits, benefiting by his skill and his renown; and most of them did not care whether he who had done the best of the work should get all the glory or not.

  That Dumas plagiarized freely in his earliest plays, and had the aid of “devils” in the second stage of his career, is not to be denied, and neither proceeding is praiseworthy; but, although he is not blameless, it irks one to see him pilloried as a mere vulgar appropriator of the labors of other men. The exact fact is, that he had no strict regard for mine and thine. He took as freely as he gave. In literature, as in life, he was a spendthrift; and a prodigal is not always as scrupulous as he might be in replenishing his purse. Dumas’s ethics deteriorated as he advanced. One may safely say, that there is none of the plays bearing his name which does not prove itself his by its workmanship. When, however, he began to write serial stories, and to publish a score of volumes a year, then he trafficked in his reputation, and signed his name to books which he had not even read. An effort has been made to show that even Monte Cristo and the Three Musketeers series were the work of M. Auguste Maquet, and that Dumas contributed to them only his name on the title page.… I must confess that I do not see how any one with any pretence to the critical faculty can doubt that Monte Cristo and the Three Musketeers are Dumas’s own work. That M. Maquet made historical researches, accumulated notes, invented scenes even, is probable; but the mighty impress of Dumas’s hand is too plainly visible in every important passage for us to believe that either series owes more to M. Maquet than the service a pupil might fairly render to a master. That these services were considerable is sufficiently obvious from the printing of M. Maquet’s name by the side of Dumas’s on the title pages of the dramatizations from the stories. That it was Dumas’s share of the work which was inconsiderable is as absurd as it is to scoff at his creative faculty because he was wont to borrow. Señor Castelar has said that all Dumas’s collaborators together do not weigh half as much in the literary balance as Dumas alone; and this is true. I have no wish to reflect on the talents of Dinaux, the author of Thirty Years, or a Gambler’s Life, and of Louise de Lignerrolles, or on the talents of M. Maquet himself, whose own novels and plays have succeeded, and who is so highly esteemed by his fellow-dramatists as to have been elected and re-elected the president of the Society of Dramatic Authors; yet I must say that the plays which either Dinaux or M. Maquet has written by himself do not show the possession of the secret which charmed us in the work in which they helped Dumas. It is to be said, too, that the later plays taken from his own novels, in which Dumas was assisted by M. Maquet, are very inferior to his earlier plays, written wholly by himself. They are mere dramatizations of romances, and not in a true sense dramas at all. The earlier plays, however extravagant they might be in individual details, had a distinct and essential unity not to be detected in the dramatizations, which were little more than sequences of scenes snipped with the scissors from the interminable series of tales of adventure.… Full as these pieces are of life and bustle and gayety, they are poor substitutes for plays, which depend for success on themselves, and not on the vague desire to see in action figures which the reader has learned to like in endless stories. These dramatizations were unduly long-drawn, naturally prolix, not to say garrulous. When his tales were paid for by the word, when he was “writing on space,” as they say in a newspaper office, Dumas let the vice of saying all there was to be said grow on him. On the stage, the half is more than the whole.

  From “Alexandre Dumas,” French Dramatists of the 19th Century, 1901

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  Dumas’s fame is wrapped in similar clouds to those which wrap the fame of about half of the great Elizabethans. Nobody is quite certain that any idea which Dumas presented was invented by him. Nobody is quite certain that any line which Dumas published was written by him. But for all that, we know that Dumas was, and must have been, a great man. There are some people who think this kind of doubt clinging to every specific detail does really invalidate the intellectual certainty of the whole. They think that when we are in the presence of a mass that i
s confessedly solid and inimitable, we must refrain from admiring that mass until we have decided what parts of it are authentic; where the fictitious begins and where the genuine leaves off. Thus, they say that because the books of the New Testament may have been tampered with, we know not to what extent, we must, therefore, surrender altogether a series of utterances which every rational person has admitted to strike the deepest note of the human spirit. They might as well say that because Vesuvius is surrounded by sloping meadows, and because no one can say exactly where the plain leaves off and the mountain begins, therefore there is no mountain of Vesuvius at all, but a beautiful, uninterrupted plain on the spot where it is popularly supposed to stand. Most reasonable people agree that it is possible to see, through whatever mists of misrepresentations, that an intellectual marvel has occurred. Most people agree that, whatever may be the interpolations, an intellectual marvel occurred which produced the Gospels. To descend to smaller things, most people agree that whatever lending and stealing confused the Elizabethan Age, an intellectual marvel occurred which produced the Elizabethan drama. And to descend to things yet smaller again, most people agree that whatever have been the sins, the evasions, the thefts, the plagiarism, the hackwork, the brazen idleness of the author, an intellectual miracle occurred which produced the novels of Dumas.

  In novels of this kind, novels produced in such immeasurable quantities, of such prodigious length, and marked throughout with its haste of production and dubiety of authorship, it is, indeed, impossible that we should find that particular order of literary merit which marks so much of the work that is now produced and is so much demanded by modern critics; the merit of exact verbal finish and the precision of the mot juste. Stevenson would have lain awake at night wondering whether, in describing the death of a marquis in a duel he should describe a sword as glittering or gleaming, or speak of the stricken man staggering back or reeling back. Dumas could not, in the nature of things, have troubled his head about such points as that, so long as somebody killed the marquis for him at a moderate figure. All technical gusto, the whole of that abstract lust for words which separates the literary man from the mere thinker, were certain, through the facts of the case, to fade more or less out of Dumas. The supreme element of greatness in him … [may be described as] the power of massing a building. He was a great architect, and stands among his hired scribblers like Sir Christopher Wren among the masons at work upon St. Paul’s. The idea that he did actually publish books written in detail by others is very much borne out by the fact that nothing is more noticeable in his work than that its talent is chiefly shown in the planning of an incident or a series of incidents. Without going into any of the actual examples, we can ourselves imagine the class of eventualities which are the glory of Dumas’s romances; and we can imagine Dumas planning them out as a general plans a campaign. We can imagine him telling a secretary, as he went out for the day, that the two cavaliers were to go to six inns, one after another, and find in each a huge banquet prepared for them by an unknown benefactor, or a man in a mask seeking to fix a quarrel upon them. We can imagine him scribbling on a loose piece of paper a list of six Royal Princes, each of whom in succession was to be summoned by the King to assist him against an assassin, and each of whom in turn was to turn his sword against the King. It was in this dramatic sequence that Dumas was greatest and most readable; he excelled in a kind of systematic disaster and a kind of orderly crime. He was, after all, a Frenchman in more ways than one, and with all his violence, worldliness and appetite there remains in his work something fundamentally logical. The man who made the finest scenes in his romantic writings turn on tangles of relationship, like the triple due! which opens The Three Musketeers, had almost the mind of a mathematician.