Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have spent so much of this brief life of ours over a work so little famous as the last. And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my own devotion, but the coldness of the world. My acquaintance with the Vicomte began, somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863, when I had the advantage of studying certain illustrated dessert plates in a hotel at Nice. The name of d‘Artagnan in the legends I already saluted like an old friend, for I had met it the year before in a work of Miss Yonge’s. My first perusal was in one of those pirated editions that swarmed at that time out of Brussels, and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes. I understood but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is of the execution of d’Eymeric and Lyodot—a strange testimony to the dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place de Greve, and forget d‘Artagnan’s visits to the two financiers. My next reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the Pentlands. I would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers; and I would sit down with the Vicomte for a long, silent, solitary lamp-light evening by the fire. And yet I know not why I call it silent, when it was enlivened with such a clatter of horse-shoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and such a stir of talk; or why I call those evenings solitary in which I gained so many friends. I would rise from my book and pull the blind aside, and see the snow and the glittering hollies chequer a Scotch garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white hills. Thence I would turn again to that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was so easy to forget myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as a city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding with delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic into my slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge into the book again at breakfast, it was with a pang that I must lay it down and turn to my own labours; for no part of the world has ever seemed to me so charming as these pages, and not even my friends are quite so real, perhaps quite so dear, as d’Artagnan.

Since then I have been going to and fro at very brief intervals in my favourite book; and I have now just risen from my last (let me call it my fifth) perusal, having liked it better and admired it more seriously than ever. Perhaps I have a sense of ownership, being so well known in these six volumes. Perhaps I think that d’Artagnan delights to have me read of him, and Louis Quatorze is gratified, and Fouquet throws me a look, and Aramis, although he knows I do not love him, yet plays to me with his best graces, as to an old patron of the show. Perhaps, if I am not careful, something may befall me like what befell George IV about the battle of Waterloo, and I may come to fancy the Vicomte one of the first, and Heaven knows the best, of my own works. At least, I avow myself a partisan; and when I compare the popularity of the Vicomte with that of Monte Cristo, or its own elder brother, the Trois Mousquetaires, I confess I am both pained and puzzled.

But Dumas excels Scott himself in the peculiar and sustained faculty by which he can hold his reader by and for the story. With Sir Walter one is never quite unconscious, and one is delighted to be conscious, of the existence and individuality of the narrator. The “architect, artist, and man” (may Heaven forgive me, as Scott certainly would, for coupling his idea in any way with that of the subject of this phrase!) is always more or less before us, with his vast, if not altogether orderly, reading, his ardent patriotism, his saturation with romance coexisting with the shrewdest common-sense and knowledge of business, above all that golden temperament which made him a man of letters without pedantry and without vanity, a man of the world without frivolity and without guile, a “man of good” without prudery and without goodiness.

We were under the spell of Matthew Arnold’s critical theories, and anxious to feed ourselves only on masterpieces whose permanent rank had been established beyond all peradventure. We were either students of the great classics—Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe, for instance—or condescendingly attentive to the more distinguished authors of our own day; and, somehow, I got firmly fixed in my mind the doctrine that one’s real enjoyment should be derived from the few great masters only, though it was perhaps human and pardonable sometimes to take a slight and passing interest in writers who were not quite the “best.” Without ever having opened a volume of Dumas’s work, therefore, I classed him with Bulwer Lytton as a trivial favorite of a bygone generation.

It was several years after I left college that, on a long railway journey, I wonderingly took up “Les Trois Mousquetaires,” influenced largely by the chance remark of a sober-minded physician, who declared that it was about the only book he really cared to read. Surprised to find that the day had passed so quickly and happily, I made a point thereafter to provide myself under similar circumstances with a similar volume; and, thus led from book to book, I found, in the course of some years, not only that I had read the thirty-five volumes that make up Dumas’s three great series of historical romances, but that I was quite prepared to read them anew with equal pleasure. On the whole, I find myself a better and a saner man for this reading. For the dispiriting hours of weariness or anxiety, at least, I can imagine no better companion than Dumas, unless it be an old friend with whom one may join in exercise that is both restful and stimulating. In literature, so far as my own feeling goes, he can be compared only with Scott, whom he imitated and surpassed, and with Sienkiewicz, who, in his great trilogy, in turn imitated and surpassed Dumas....

The exciting plot is not, of course, what is really worth while in Dumas’s romances. Mere excitement we can get at any time from many sources,—from the detective story, for instance,—less artistically produced, but sufficient in quantity. The exciting plot, however, never alone gives permanence to literature; and Dumas’s work must be better based than that if it is to survive. For my own part, I find one explanation of the deeper ef fect these volumes make on me in the fact that Dumas—recklessly as he apparently wrote, and in headlong haste—has somehow managed to build his characters out of genuinely human material. He seems to treat them like the veriest puppets; they wear their hearts on their sleeves; and yet neither the creations of Scott nor of Shakespeare are more truly alive. With women he was less successful; though Marguerite, the queen of folly, the gracious Diane de Monsoreau, and the proud Comtesse de Charny are wonderful types of womanhood. But his men are men. D Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis; Chicot, Henri IV, La Mole, Coconnas, Bussy d’Amboise; Balsamo, Philippe de Taverney, and Gilbert,—not to mention others,—these are as solidly and finely imagined as any characters in literature. How the author could have produced them we may never cease to wonder; but they do exist. He lived a foolish life; and he wrote in haste: but he wrote from his heart; and his heart was by nature clairvoyant. These characters appeal to us because they are implicit in the lives of us all, because they are the varied types of human ambition and endeavor; and this wide appeal assures their permanence. So the “Odyssey” lives, not because of the roll of its hexameter, but because millions of men, far wandering, made by fate to tarry for a time on enchanted isles, have pressed unceasingly forward, by force and guile, toward the longed-for day of their home-coming....

These men grow, not of the author’s set purpose, in the ordinary fashion, according to a rule of logic, but as men grow in life, naturally. He could not have planned it: at the proper time he simply knew it. The Athos, the Porthos, the Aramis, and the d‘Artagnan of “Le Vicomte de Bragelonne” are not those of “Les Trois Mousquetaires,” or even of “Vingt Ans Après.” But the author does not inform us of it, except in a single case; and then he is evidently surprised as we are. They grow; and, if they are honest men, they grow better, on stepping-stones of their own baser selves. D’Artagnan learns that there is a better guide than his own rebellious desire; Porthos drops his braggart ways; and, from a vicious boy, Gilbert becomes an honorable man. Apparently romantically unreal, Dumas’s novels are realistic at bottom; for they are founded on what is true in human life and in human character.