Rossetti has kindly confirmed this record with his own testimony.
"It is perfectly truc," he writes, "that my brother took the greatest delight in reading Dumas, and I think it may be said that, if he had been asked 'whom do you regard as the greatest novelist that ever existed—in those qualities which are most essential for novel-writing?' he would have replied 'Dumas.' Of course he would at the same time have been conscious that Walter Scott, as a precursor of Dumas, had to some extent served him as a pattern."[1]
Henley strikes the same note of praise. "Dumas is assuredly one of the greatest masters of the art of narrative in all literature," he says, and amplifies his assertion thus: "He was an artist at once original and exemplary, with an incomparable instinct of selection, a constructive faculty not equalled among the men of this century, an understanding of what is right and what is wrong in art, and a mastery of his materials which in their way are not to be paralleled in the work of Sir Walter himself."
The frequent references to Scott force us without
- ↑ Another passage in this letter is interesting, in connection with much that has been written above. "In my very early years—say 1846-7," adds Mr Rossetti, "my brother and I knew more of Dumas as a dramatist than novelist. 'Don Juan de Marana' was our favourite; next might come 'Antony' and 'Caligula.' 'Kean' we used to laugh over, for its amusing travestie of English manners and Customs."
