This structural, systematic, almost numerical method of Dumas’s is really important as throwing some light on the conditions which produce romance so popular and so great as his. There is a very general notion in existence that romance depends upon the unexpected. This is altogether an error: romance depends upon the expected. Unless the elements already existing in the story point to and hint at more or less darkly, but more or less inevitably, the thing that is to follow, the mere brute occurrence of that thing, without rhyme or reason, does not either excite or entertain us.… Anybody could make a mad bull enter the drawing-room in the middle of one of Miss Fowler’s epigrammatic conversations, or make one of Mr. W. W. Jacobs’s stories end abruptly with the blowing of the trump of the Resurrection. Nothing could be more unexpected than these things would be; but they would not excite us; they would bore us like the conversational rambling of an idiot in a cell. Romance depends, if not absolutely upon the expected, at least upon something that may be called the half-expected. The true romantic ending is something that has been prophesied by our subconsciousness. We feel the spirit of romance when Ulysses springs upon the table, his rags falling from him, and shoots Antinous in the throat. It would be much more unexpected, if that were all, if he turned three somersaults in the air and announced that he was only Ulysses’s ship’s carpenter playing a practical joke. Similarly, we feel the spirit of romance when D’Artagnan joins his three adversaries in turning their swords against the musketeers of the Cardinal. It is not unexpected that the four should thus get into a fight together. The most unexpected thing one can imagine in Dumas would be that they should not get into one.
[Dumas’s large scheme of orderly and successive adventures] is his great merit as an artist. He had the power of making us feel that his heroes were moving parts of a great scheme of adventures, a scheme as wide, as politic, as universal and sagacious as one of the plots of his own Cardinal Richelieu. And it is in this that almost all his imitators fail; they imagine that his triumph consisted in the swaggering inconsequence of his events, in innumerable drawn swords; in ceaseless torrents of blood; in the mere multiplication of cloaks, and feathers, and halberds, and rope ladders. These things are not romance: here, as everywhere, materials and materialism mislead us. Dumas was a great romanticist, because he had the sense of something solid and eternal in old valour, in old manners, in old friends. But a mere drawn sword is no more poetical than a pocket-knife. A mere dead man is not in any sense so dramatic as a living one. Men who find no romance in life will certainly find none in death.
From “Alexandre Dumas,” in The Bookman, July 1902
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CHILDREN’S CLASSICS AVAILABLE FROM THE MODERN LIBRARY
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