Home Study Circle Library Volume 11 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 Excerpt: ...as Chateaubriand and Lamartine had done in their "Memoirs" and "Confidences," as Victor Hugo was doing in his odes, his songs, and his dramas, as Musset was doing in his poems, and as George Sand was doing in her romances of the " misunderstood woman." But Dumas had in his literary work what may be called the commercial sense. He divined instinctively what would take and what would not take. He saw that what the public wanted in a dramatic author was not that he should talk about himself, or even show himself in the guise of several more or less interesting aliases; but rather that he should give them striking situations, well-sustained and amusing dialogue, effective characterization and ingenious plot, and, if it could be managed, an impressive moral. Working with this ideal in view he soon produced dramas that were quite destitute of the "individualism "--that is to say, the "self-revelation "--of the romantic school, though in every other respect they were as unlike the dramas of the classical school as could possibly be. The same commercialism that prompted Dumas to change his plan in his dramatic work prompted him subsequently to abandon the drama and to betake himself to the field of the historical novel. He saw what Scott had made of that form of literature, and he divined that a similar success lay open to him should he choose to work for it. What Dumas might have accomplished had he given himself seriously and honestly to literary art, there can be no possible telling, for his genius was of the very highest. As it is he is a phenomenon in literature without a parallel. But it can not be said that he has been a great influence in literature, or the head, as has sometimes been asserted, of a definite...