quarters of their total, he will be slow to yield to their importunity, importuning never so loudly.

He need not fear the bogey threat that if he refuses, these schools will have to be abandoned and the burden will press hardly on him. The local authorities might well be given power to subsidise the existing schools if they preferred that to taking them over. Any district could easily retain the present Church management if it wanted to, for if the Church is now willing to manage the schools and raise the money as well, she would be at least equally ready to manage it when the funds were provided for her. In any case the raising of an amount equivalent to the small proportion which the voluntary schools themselves now pay would not be a heavy burden, and it would be amply compensated for by the advantage of placing our elementary education on that national basis which alone can do justice now, and provide for proper expansion in the future.

As regards any public expenditure on the purchase or erection of buildings, if extended over a period of years, the present expense would be only very slightly increased, and the public control and right to the use of the schools would prove an amply corresponding advantage.

Whatever change is made, the proportion borne by the Imperial taxes should not be increased; it is too large already. If those who control the expenditure are not prepared to pay the fraction of income which they now pay, then the claim should be made on the ratepayers of the district, giving them the necessary powers, and leaving them free either to subsidise the existing state of affairs or themselves to take over both local contribution and local control.

J. DUNDAS WHITE.

ALEXANDRE DUMAS FILS AND HIS PLAYS.

66

MANY years ago a French critic said, with some justice and more severity, Monsieur Alexandre Dumas is a bold painter, a powerful writer, but, unless he changes absolutely, he will never be a moralist.” If a moralist is a judge of men and institutions, if he casts a luminous and searching light on every side of a question, if he makes himself master of all the elements it contains, if he weighs and classifies them, then assuredly Alexandre Dumas cannot lay claim to the name. He sees only one aspect at a time, or for a given time. He began by attempting the rehabilitation of the courtesan, and ended by being the implacable censor of the woman of the world. At first he dwelt complacently on the manners and customs of the demi-monde a term he invented, and which has become generic-he affected to believe that the doubtful social centres he depicted under that name were an important portion of French society, and he did not hesitate to bring into the garish light of day the vices that had hitherto done themselves the justice to seek the shade. His unlimited command of language, his sparkling irony, his brilliant wit, his sceptical verve enabled him to handle his subject in so fascinating a fashion, to throw so bewildering a glamour on their repulsive realities, that he aggravated the evil he pretended to expose or censure.

Dumas in his earlier mood has written but one chapter in the long roll of his dramatic work-a chapter, it is only fair to add, as exhaustive as it well can be. This extensive monograph, composed of plays in five and four acts, or in one, goes from Marguerite Gautier, who sells her horses and diamonds for her lover, to Albertine, who sells nothing, and saves an income of fifty thousand franes in her shameless career, wherewith she buys a husband. A great number of varieties of the same species separate the two extreme types. The author, conscious himself that he was trespassing on dangerous, if not prohibited ground, wrote in his preface to the Demi-Monde, "I remarked to the Minister of Beaux-Arts that I ought to be considered as an auteur de tolérance, and that my literature was more in the competence of the Préfecture de Police than his." Under the irony of these lines lurks almost a confession.

Alexandre Dumas openly professed to be a disciple of Balzac; in his scarcely decent way of unveiling social sores he was putting into practice the great novelist's teachings, but he did not, like his master, make these physiological revelations alternate with scenes which would have come as a relief to the alarmed and disconcerted spectators. He aimed as he says in another preface, and these prefaces are not

the least interesting portion of his voluminous work—he aimed at "knowing men as Balzac did and the stagelike Scribe," but nevertheless he refused to tread the wider fields of the former, or to confine himself to the Arcadian paths of the latter. He stuck to the narrow road he had selected at his début, unmindful of treacherous pitfalls of deep mire and unwholesome malaria.

La Dame aux Camelias is not the story of Marguerite Gautier alone, she merely rises like a dethroned queen over a number of congeners. The Demi-Monde, a much finer play in many respects, shows a special feature in the habits of the dangerous and malevolent beings dragged on the stage by Dumas for the amusement of a morbidly inquisitive audience. He makes the wretched manoeuvrer lift herself by slow degrees into marriage and public consideration from the impure depths where her snares were laid. But if all the sham countesses and baronesses were struck out of the piece, we should still be confronted by Suzanne weighed down by her past, and, in spite of every effort to throw off the burden, finding it fall back to crush her. The long series of her prevarications, explanations, and deceits form the whole knot of the play.

Birth, rank, and fortune alone prevent Diane de Lys from being a femme entretenue, and it is doubtful whether even those advantages can wholly protect a woman whose instincts are unconsciously perverse, and who does not possess an innate respect for chastity and virtue. Here again we find a reminiscence of Balzac, who has placed in his picture gallery the portraits of many honest women as debased as courtesans, and of courtesans as virtuous as honest women. In spite of the author's talent, of a new and original setting, of the faultless interpretation of the part by the most accomplished actress-the ever-regretted Aimée Desclées-the character of Diane de Lys was not accepted by the public without opposition; it was too complex and too much at variance with recognised types to be wholly harmonious; the nearest approach to reproducing it was made in Francillon. When Dumas had exhausted Les Dames aux Camelias, the feminine monsters of the Demi-Monde, the women of the world corrupt at heart, he had still some pages of the everlasting chapter to fill with fresh presentments, so he created Albertine, of the Père Prodigue, carrying off her splendid spoils; Madame Aubry with her "Ideas," which are but sophistry; Cesarine Rippert, of La Femme de Claude, audaciously braving both her husband and her lover, and the depraved girl-wife of L'Affaire Clemenceau. Here and there religious and patriotic sentiments, noble and elevated feelings admirable in themselves, couched in magnificent language, are thrust into the dialogue, but they appear too inconsistent with the prevailing tone of the subject to produce their full effect. At the same time audiences in presence of so high and rare a talent, of so profound a knowledge of

stage-craft, of ability, imagination, and fecundity, attracted and repulsed by the spectacle offered to them, rose to demand of Monsieur Dumas that he should show what he was capable of if he abandoned scandal for virtue; if he passed from the lower to the higher order, and began to paint humanity, not in its vices, but in its purer aspirations. The author responded to that appeal with the measure of his gifts and his temperament.

It was then that a certain similarity was noticeable between the Dumas heroines and those of Emile Augier. In saying this I do not mean to admit for an instant what has been repeated more than once since the death of the author of Maître Guerin, that there is any close analogy between the two dramatists beyond the fact that they are both kings of the modern stage. It was hinted that had Dumas not written La Dame aux Camelias, and Le Demi-Monde, Augier would not have written Les Lionnes Pauvres. This is unfair, for every student of humanity must at some tangent or other meet other students of the same subject. It would be as plausible to say that without Rousseau there would have been no Chateaubriand and without the author of the Incas no Victor Hugo. There is room in the world of letters for more than one race of men of genius, and they need not necessarily borrow from each other.

Women occupy the chief place in Dumas' plays. Consciously or unconsciously he struck the key of popularity by awarding them the lion's share; they are creatures of flesh and blood, guilty or vile, no matter; they love, lie and betray as women do in real life; they are passionate, reckless and extravagant with the passion, recklessness and extravagance of real women, and as such they have already been recognised as types. La Baronne d'Ange represents all her kind and the circle in which she moves; the title of the play in which she is the baleful heroine-Le Demi-Monde-has entered into the current vocabulary of the world, if not exactly in the same sense in which the author created it, at least as the accepted and euphonious denomination of a class hitherto branded by more brutal names or not mentioned at all.

If some of Augier's heroines have a distant kinship with Dumas', it must be admitted that the former have not as striking an individuality, or as much genuine originality as the latter. Hypercritical judges have attempted to show that L'Aventurière is only La Dame aur Camelias grown older and having forgotten Armand; Olympe the same Marguerite marrying her lover in the expectation of being recognised by his aristocratic family without divesting herself of the nostalgie de la boue; and Thérèse of Les Lionnes Pauvres likewise distantly related to the same person. But Augier's more effaced heroines are only similar to themselves, which made Albert Delpit say that when he came across one of them in a comedy by the author

of Les Effrontés he instantly recognised "Mademoiselle Augier." Dumas has minimised the young girl in his works-and for obvious

reasons.

When Alexandre Dumas decided to satisfy the demands of the public and to realise the expectations of those who honestly admired and believed in his genius by breaking new ground, he did not repudiate his principles of using dramatic art as a method for pleading a moral thesis. He made a rule of the formula "that the essence of a society morally organized is in the equilibrium of the family." He holds that as soon as the man who is producer and breadwinner is checked in his legitimate vocation, and baffled in its results by the prodigality of the wife who squanders his earnings, the equilibrium is destroyed, and the couple is wrecked rudderless on the shoals of a social perturbance. According to his own expression, he inaugurated the Theatre fonction-the stage going relentlessly to its proposed goal, daring all, risking all, shirking nothing, propounding the problems of life behind the footlights and solving them. All the younger dramatists have been more or less influenced by these doctrines; they have practised them with more or less felicity, and, it must be owned, too often with regrettable results.

In his more recent works Alexandre Dumas has given drastic advice to the stronger sex. This advice amounts, on the whole, to this: "If you are betrayed by your wife kill her lover (Diane de Lys); if she is too callous for repentance kill her (La Femme de Claude); if it is repugnant to you to stain your hands with blood, drive her out into the world homeless and childless (La Princesse de Bagdad). You may stretch out a helping hand to the lost woman who craves to be rehabilitated, but at any cost you must expose and brand the futile, weak, capricious, conscienceless female animal, the calculating, extravagant or mischievous creature whom you have made your wife (L'Ami des Femmes and La Princesse Georges). When the man does not violently assert his supremacy, when he ceases to rule with a hand of iron, he invariably becomes the pitiful tool of the other sex, commits suicide as in La Comtesse Romani, disappears like the Duc de Septmomts-the ribrion in L'Etrangère— or sinks step by step into shameful dishonour like Octave in Monsieur Alphonse, and ceases at once to obtain pity for his misfortunes."

The bent of Dumas' mind reflected in his books and plays is possibly the logical outcome of his early life and surroundings. Among the celebrities of our epoch there existed perhaps no more singular, complex, and striking individuality than his. If it were possible to analyse a human being as thoroughly as any material compound, there would be found in him a dramatist of the romantic school, a sceptic, a poet, a legislator, a physician, a collector, a boulevardier, a man of the world, an artist, and an apostle. Born in retirement,