sense, of Richepin's noble, sonorous dramas in rime,
but more feminine. It must be remembered, however,
that Coppee, ardent in his views on many public ques-
tions, created at times, like Sardou, veritable sensa-



222 French Essays and Profiles

tions on the boards and came into conflict with the
political authorities.

The other mistaken impression about Coppee is that
he was really a Parnassian. He identified himself with
the Parnassians, it is true, and stood classed with them,
yet he was nothing but a Romantic. He exhibited
none of the leading Parnassian attributes — hard, im-
peccable virtuosity, adoration of impersonal beauty,
fondness for the barbarous Exotic. On the contrary
he was intimate, personal, sentimental, emphatically
emotional — all Romantic qualities. He was a descend-
ant of Hugo. Even his cult of the Humble was born
direct from Hugo's verse and prose.

Coppee possessed neither the intellectuality, the
ultra-refined sensibilities, the exclusive distinction nor
philosophic training of Sully Prudhomme. Nor did
he have anything of the mystic and musical mystery
and genius of Verlaine, who fathered a school and
whose original influence is fertile, fructiferous and in-
creasing. Nor did Coppee display any of the glorious,
unfeeling brilliance of Leconte de Lisle.

His fame will not grow. His plays, nevertheless,
will remain for no little time a true and living adorn-
ment of the Paris stage. Unfortunately they will
reach no other, for they lose all in translation.

Coppee's literary product is characterized by amia-
bility, smooth-toned lyrisme and expansive generosity.
A winning, popular, beloved figure, he appealed in his
books to the hearts of men and women. He softened
mankind. He left it more justly human through his
emotionalism and through a certain simple and direct
nobleness.



iii. Coquelin the Elder



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

CoQUELiN THE Elder, the most celebrated of French comedians
of the nineteenth century, came from Boulogne. He died in 1909
at the age of 68. When scarcely more than twenty he was in the
front rank of players at the Theatre Frangais and was called to
perform before the emperor and empress. Of a forceful char-
acter, he finally broke with the national theater in 1886. He then
began organizing dramatic tours and reaped fame and wealth in
all European countries. His appearances in America are well
remembered.



COQUELIN THE ELDER

IT is by comparison that Coquelin's greatness looms
forth. We think of his brother, an excellent come-
dian, prominent in the second rank. But he faced
in the direction of farce while Coquelin the Elder
turned always to elegance. The former was a romp,
a clown, with his loge full of pictures of chanticleers in
honor of the family name; with his unbuttoned pan-
tomine; with his embodiments of the common idiocy of
humankind — the Monsieurs de Pourceaugnac and
other amiable imbeciles of Moliere. They in turn and
betimes transform the fastidious stage, parquet and
galleries of the Theatre Frangais into a lively circus
and "ballet" as in the "Ceremonie," in that ancien pays
des femmes et des lavemens — that ancient land of
women and purgings.

Or take the case of M. Got as a different compari-
son. He was the compeer of the elder Coquelin — a
comedian of the highest genre possible to officialdom
in France. His attainments were entirely solid and
meritorious. But he was content for nearly half a
century to travel daily back and forth by tram or
"hirondelle" from his Passy home to the Comedie, like
the most inured and decorated chef de bureau of the
Government. He lacked those greater gifts which
forced his friend out into life and among humanity as

225



226 French Essays and Profiles

it is, and his name is little known away from Paris.
One of the familiar jests of the Coquelins was apropos
of their official-ridden country where "a man without
decorations is like a woman without children."

Coquelin owed his eminence in large part to a rare
quality in his profession — personal culture. We think
of him as a cultivated, talented person outside his art
— one not always and forever exemplifying merely the
vis comica. He could paint some; he was an intelli-
gent connoisseur; he delivered conferences; he wrote
books, critiques, essays — one on that most sensitive,
most strictly intellectual, most refined of all French
poets, Sully Prudhomme. In fact, to speak of Coque-
lin's love and esteem for the poetry and Lucretian phi-
losophy of Sully Prudhomme, is to signify in a word
how sanely mental, delicately sentimental, finely
grained he was. And yet he was born in an humble,
ignorant baker's family, in the northern tip of France,
without advantages.

He was certainly unapproached, the master come-
dian of his time. Societaire of the Comedie Fran^aise
at twenty-three — unique in the case of a man — he
truly outgrew its brilliant but restricted confines in
twenty years, and expanded over into the tumultuous,
ever-modern realm of the theaters on the grand boule-
vards and thence into the vast outer world. This was
because he possessed the larger virtues of imagination,
originality, daring, like his feminine mate Bernhardt.
He was as individualistic as he could be in a nation
where the ultimate standard is the impersonal.

The able presentation of contrasting views by Henry



Coquelin the Elder 227

Irving and by him in their discussion of the final ideal
of the player's art correctly denoted the profound, phil-
osophical difference between the French and Anglo-
Saxons on this subject. As Irving placed the indi-
vidualism of the actor above his part, and therefore
above the play, as the typical English (and American)
point of view, so Coquelin extolled his own racial ideal
of the impersonal : the French conception that the
role should be greater than the embodier. And it is
natural to say that our emphasis on the actor accounts
largely for the vast dearth of enduring plays in our
Anglo-Saxon world since Shakespeare. In France
there are notably playwrights, plays and players; in
England and America we have notably stars.

Comedy is, of course, the genius of the French as
tragedy is the genius of the British, and Coquelin was
wise in not resting his laurels on Moliere and the con-
secrated past. However high Moliere stands in the
halls of fame — and he cannot well be placed too high,
however much, too, we love the man himself for his
extremely human and heart-moving life and character
— he appears lacking in certain elements of universal
growth. He is restricted more and more to the aca-
demic. He does not make a wide, practical appeal
outward and downward in modern democracy. This
may not be due to his limitations perhaps so much as
to the fact that France has been reduced from the
position of aristocratic dominance to that of a mere
nation among equally prominent nations.

The mobility and suavity of Coquelin were found
identified, as a result, with a varied multitude of roles



228 French Essays and Profiles

which he created. He represented, as no other come-
dian, those two opposite poles of the mimetic art —
breadth and exquisiteness. Does an admirer recall him
by preference in the social and ethical "Denise"? Or
as Labussiere in the thunderous "Thermidor"? Or in
the gentle and delicious "Monde ou Ton s'ennuie"?
Or, above all, do we think, of him at nearly sixty (when
he was officially at the age of honorable retirement and
self-consecration to his memories) as adopting and
crystallizing the genius of a young and obscure play-
wright who belonged to a brand-new generation? The
world fell promptly in love with Cyrano and Flam-
beau as Coquelin — all so stirring and magical in the
golden chimes of the author's Alexandrines. One can
scarcely imagine Rostand without his inspirer and vis-
ualises What lover of daring variety did not deeply
regret this loss in the cast of the too long delayed
"Chantecleer"?

Rire et bien dire — to laugh and to recite well — ^was
the characteristic motto in the homes of the Coquelins.
Exemplifying their race, they believed with Rabelais
that To Laugh is to be Truly a Man. Coquelin did
an inestimable service in acquainting foreign peoples
with the intimate delights of French comedy of the
old classic periods. As a mime he brought corporeally
home to other races those perfect pictures of the life
and times of that exalted age when civilization looked
exclusively to Paris for light.

His tact, bonhomie, easy accessibility were only too
well known. He was adored in France despite the fact
that there the dividing lines between schools and



Coquelin the Elder 229

cliques, between what is official and whafis radical and
progressive, are habitually so sharply, so fiercely,
drawn. He made and kept friends in all spots of a
land where people scarcely hesitate to wound forever
those nearest and dearest to them for the sake of a
principle in art or literature. Strange as this seems to
our Yankee race who take these subjects lukewarmly,
not to say chillily, all this is most serious, vital business
on the banks of the Seine. It illustrates, in part, how
the French strive to exalt the drama by the sacrifice
of the individual. And as for what precisely they
idealize in comedy, this is nowhere so deftly and com-
pactly signalized as in one of the fine sonnets of Sully
Prudhomme, dedicated, as it happens, to Coquelin's
brother:

Quel bonheur! n'est-ce pas? de reveiller encore,
En honneur des aieux, dans le rire gaulois
La gaite du bon sens qu'un beau verbe decore I

(What joy to awaken again in Gallic laughter, in
honor of our ancestors, the gayety of good sense dec-
orated by beautiful words!)



iv. Dumas the Elder



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Dumas the Elder died in 1870 when 67 years old. He led a
tumultuous life as reflected in his stories. To avoid creditors he
traveled for years in foreign lands. Three hundred volumes are
credited to his pen. His most widely read novels were written
between 1843 and 1850. His best literary fame rests in France
on his plays which remain live classics and are accepted without
reserve by critics. He antedated Victor Hugo on the French
Romantic stage.



DUMAS THE ELDER

DUMAS was a roistering, rollicking, biuff and
blustering blade who, about 1800, came out
of the medieval forests of Villers-Cotterets,
about fifty miles northeast of Paris — a country of royal
woods of the chase, of feudal chateaux and turreted,
moated fortresses of the truest Gothic type and period.
His color did not of course prove a barrier to him in
France where there is none of the American prejudice
against the negro.

Dumas the Elder was not a man. He was a force
of Nature. To speak more particularly, he smacked
of the campagne — of the French provinces of quon-
dam romance and knightly adventure, and quaint old
village inns with courts full of vehicles and the smell
of hot steeds in the air. Big, thick-set, hairy, he had
the handgrasp of a horse-shoer, the voice of an auc-
tioneer, and a laugh that was loud, immortal and un-
restrained, carrying all persons and things before it.

Without literary antecedents or well-defined sources
of education, he became a master of style, a dialogist
having scarcely a peer in the world, an everlasting
wonder for belletristic fecundity, invention, facility,
imagination. And this too at the time when his friends
Balzac and (especially) Victor Hugo were teaching
the republic of letters to be astonished at nothing. His

233



234 French Essays and Profiles

imagination was so lively, immense, that the truth cut
a poor, small figure in his domains. He was in fact
such a colossal fantast that people could (it was
averred) scarcely believe the opposite of what he said.

More than this, he lived some fifty mature years
with small regard for the laws, rules and conventions
which govern men, and without which civilization
would be impossible. If there were any safeguarding
restrictions he did not ride over, they must simply have
escaped his attention. It was in a hearty, impulsive
fashion that he existed, happy in his irresponsibilities,
with slight concern for the morrow and in total ob-
livion of yesterday; a friend of every one, knowing
everybody, a prodigious farceur, at home in every cor-
ner in France, ready to divide his last sou with the first
comer, and never paying if it could well be avoided.
His life was essentially that of his most popular heroes,
lacking their military aspect.

Naturally such a character did not tarry long In a
place. As Dumas usually could not pay, he moved on
— lived en voyage; for thus it often is that those who
have not the means to dwell anywhere, seem to have
money for travel. In the example of his Musketeers,
he was half expected to appear on the scene at any
place, at any hour, without warning, but always some-
how in the nick of time or at least in a manner apropos,
promptly ready to share in the surprises of any fall
of the curtain.

In turning up at a favorite provincial inn like the
Hotel de La Cloche at Compiegne or the Cadran Bleu
at Fontainebleau, he at once took possession, ordered



Dumas the Elder 235

everybody about, chucked the hotel maids under the
chin, roared out his horselaughs, exploded with huge
jokes, converted night into day. Then suddenly some
fine morning he would be setting off, paying the host
merely with affectionate embraces, feeing the maids
with compliments — and the honest renegade and civil-
ian swashbuckler was gone, not to be heard of perhaps
until from some expensive height in the Alps, or on
some prodigal cruise in the Mediterranean.

He had money only for extravaganzas. It went
against the grain of this child of Nature to pay for
the necessaries of life out of his Gargantuan earnings.
Nor was he sufficiently considerate at any time to try
to borrow enough to liquidate all he owed. Conse-
quently there followed, in his train, bailiffs or other
unpleasant parties, at the urgent instances of creditors
who had small taste for literature at their own expense,
and were not of the stripe to foster genius by fur-
nishing hospitable comforts and cash commodities in
exchange for big handshakes and blunderbuss ha-ha-
has!

A French gentleman whom I knew in Paris was in
the Alps in the early 1850's. A storm caught him late
one afternoon high on a mountain, and he was forced
to seek accommodations in a poor sort of chalet. An-
other storm-driven tourist soon bustled in, and with
jovial boisterousness began trying to have something
served for dinner, the proprietor protesting that they
stayed at their own risk — he was not prepared for
guests. The stranger insisted on at least having
chicken. No chicken at hand. Then it would be eggs.



236 French Essays and Profiles

No eggs, positively. What! not merely two eggs for
two famished visitors? Well, perhaps two eggs might
be spared, no more; and they would be dear, being
from the host's own yard. Eh bien, we'll take the two
eggs fried; and since you have your own eggs, you
have a hen — I knew you were lying; here's five francs
for her. The two men had eggs and chicken for
dinner.

Who was this irrepressible, astonishing stranger?
my friend asked himself. They fell to talking of lit-
erature at table. My friend's favorite writer proved
to be Alexandre Dumas: what youth could resist "The
Three Musketeers?" But at this announcement the
other, who was much older, indulged in expressions of
disgust and wrath. He disapproved of Dumas in
round terms — an author with no style, no ideas, in
short, an imbecile. A fine literary quarrel thereupon
waxed loud and strong, my friend feeling that he must
defend the Musketeers, the Count of Monte-Cristo.
He excitedly set forth the merits of his author as best
he could, smarting under the roustabout arguments
and assertions of his vis-a-vis.

When the young man had finally exhausted the list
of his good reasons for adoring Dumas, the stranger
broke out in roaring enthusiasm, embraced his com-
panion vigorously, exclaiming:

"My boy, / am Alexandre Dumas!" — to the utter
amazement and delight of my friend.

Dumas took him along as a guest for the next three
weeks on a roving Alpine expedition, the former daily



Dumas the Elder 237

scribbling on inn tables an installment of his story then
appearing in a Paris journal.

So it was with him. Wherever present he filled all
the space, loomed on all horizons, made all the noise,
partook of everything offered or unoffered. When
one of his plays came out, he would occupy a con-
spicuous box by the stage and applaud the loudest,
laugh the most uproariously at his own jests, and fre-
quently, too, when the audience discovered no jest at
all and left him to laugh alone. And this, not from
egotism, but from an unconscious, incorrigible pro-
pensity for having a stupendous good time.

Apropos, we in America little realize that Dumas
the Elder was not only perhaps the greatest modern
story-teller, he was one of the leading French play-
wrights of the nineteenth century. Of his many
dramas his "Henri III et sa cour" (1829) and his
"Kean" remain on the Paris repertoires, the former
having been the first stage triumph of the French Ro-
mantic school, antedating "Hernani" by a year. But
more successful was he in comedies, for three of them,
written about 1840, are performed regularly at the
Frangais, and are chaste and acknowledged classics of
their genre and altogether delightful. His famous
son, the author of "Camille," therefore came naturally
enough by his talent for playwrighting, though in no
other respect did he seem to resemble or be in harmony
with his father.

For those who borrow trouble in the thought that
Dumas did not write his own stories, or at least all of



238 French Essays and Profiles

them or all parts of them, and that perhaps he had
not the genius to conceive and write them and was ac-
cordingly a literary mountebank of farcical propor-
tions, it is well to remember that Dumas is acknowl-
edged to have written his own plays. He did not
turn them over to miscellaneous and unknown gifted
persons who were considerate enough not to pen any-
thing worth while after he died or before he was
born. We should not forget too that in his comedies
he presents notably the qualities which we do not as-
sociate with his loose, undisciplined personality and
fame: namely, the well-modulated, justly interbalanc-
ing "medium qualities" which the French so admire,
and regard as the expression of the best, the sanest,
art.

Death at last met this indefatigable tourist, this
"bon diable," in 1870; and not in a noisy inn of Nor-
mandy, or off some Mediterranean island which he had
immortalized by his romances, but in his son's villa at
Puys, just north of Dieppe. It is a pleasant retreat,
in a little wrinkle of the earth, a few rods from the
sea. On the hill at the right are the formidable re-
mains of some unidentified Gallo-Roman camp.

The commemorator of Dumas the Man might per-
haps find a fortunate theme in the fact that Dumas
loved the good women he knew — and there were many
of them, and of the best in France — as a devoted
father or brother, and not as a lover. He was fond
of inscribing in their albums playful sentiments. "To
embark on your career with a woman is to embark
with a tempest, in which, however, she is the lifeboat."



Dumas the Elder 239

He liked to send to them from long distances, at rare
and all the more precious intervals, affectionate letters
and throbbing poesies over which he shed many a tear,
and which made them weep for tenderness, and which
make our eyes moisten to-day. For he could evoke,
with much of the familiar power of his overshadowing
mate and friend, Victor Hugo, a gentle memory and
womanly feelings for days far removed or for friends
long gone or forever.



t



V. Dumas the Younger



BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The famous son of the great Dumas was born in 1824 and
died in 1895. He first distinguished himself in 1852 with the play
"La Dame aux Camelias" which he constructed from his novel of
the same name, published in 1848. His long list of excellent
dramas are of the social type, representing the manners of his day.
They include "Le demi-monde" (1855) — he invented this term;
"La femme de Claude" (1873); "Denise" (1885). He entered
the Academy in 1874.



DUMAS THE YOUNGER

DUMAS THE YOUNGER— Dumas fils—wzs
of only medium height and somewhat portly.
At your second glance the negroid was evi-
dent in his face — the crinkly hair, the skin swarthy, if
not in a pronounced way.

He became the opposite of his father in nearly all
respects. The former, by his plays, amassed wealth
which he snugly kept together. He led throughout
his maturity a conservative, well-ordered existence, be-
ing eminently sagacious in his relations with his fellow
beings. He lived in becoming luxury, surrounded by
fine works of art in which he was a connoisseur.

Dumas was especially devoted to paintings. Some
of those he owned he pointed out to me with relish.
Having at first eyed me cautiously, seeing that I was
interested in French canvases, he led me up his mar-
ble staircase to his bedroom to show me there a large
handsome nude hanging above his couch. I have for-
gotten the name of the artist, but the work was in
the unrelieved realistic style that prevailed before the
days of Impressionism. The picture, of forceful skill,
appeared too hard in treatment to be insinuatingly
seductive.

Paintings are usually the coins current through
whose lore you most easily come to know literary

243



244 French Essays and Profiles

Frenchmen; and this canvas, in its manner Instead of
its subject, let in for me much more light on the na-
ture of Dumas the Younger. A sturdy, unappealing,
not very communicative, well-rounded character, he
was as one held aloof, like this painting, from the view
and reach of the general indiscriminating public. He
was never expansive nor confiding. He had no airs,
cared nothing about attracting attention. On rare oc-
casions only did he appear.

He stood forth, however, as one of the greatest
phrase-makers of his half century. Men halted be-
fore his wit and sarcasm, keen and trenchant, yet al-
ways well-balanced. There was nothing offhand or
casual about his use of these weapons. He maturely
reasoned out everything he said or did.

As we mounted his stairs Dumas gave me a sample
of his humor, though he was more inclined to wit. It
happened that a French scientist had just declared that
he was about to perfect a method with his chemicals
by which children might be born into the world in lab-
oratories in an intelligent, scientific way. The Paris
press, as might be expected, were seizing upon this
purported discovery with Gallic jibes, developing the
promised program with gay deductions.

My host turned to me with a deep twinkle in his
eyes and said:

"No matter what the clever scientists may pretend,
I think the old-fashioned way of producing children
in the home instead of in a factory will always be the
most satisfactory and popular."

Dumas maintained the attitude of a social philos-



Dumas the Younger 245

opher contemplating men and women of class in their
interrelations, and setting forth his views and con-
clusions in the form of dramas instead of essays or
didactic volumes. One of the foremost dramatists of
the nineteenth century, he possessed adept and solid
merits and contributed realism and logic to the play.
He exerted for forty years a serious and powerful
influence on the French theater, adding to its art con-
scientious and technical truth as well as a masterly
psychology as to social conditions and social characters
of the highest bourgeois classes — those which stand
next to the aristocracy. He sought to unravel com-
plexities or sound deluding depths by a sensible can-
dor, and to show a practical way out through dignified
readjustments and compromises.

In the plays of Dumas the Younger there is nearly
always a character who is of a philosophic turn and
out of whose lips come forth the duly weighed pro-
nouncements of the author himself. His general atti-
tude here was to add common sense, practical seemli-
ness and circumspect behavior to the affairs of love.
He strove against Romantic passions and Romantic
motives among whose tempestuous whirlwinds he had,
however, developed into young manhood. If either
the brain or the heart had to be sacrificed, he pro-
posed that the heart be sacrificed in the self-respecting
interest of the common weal. After this fashion, un-