ookish, he taught himself to
read very young: in Buffon, the Bible, and books of mythology. He knew
all about Jupiter--like David Copperfield's Tom Jones, "a child's
Jupiter, an innocent creature"--all about every god, goddess, fawn,
dryad, nymph--and he never forgot this useful information. Dear
Lempriere, thou art superseded; but how much more delightful thou art
than the fastidious Smith or the learned Preller! Dumas had one volume
of the "Arabian Nights," with Aladdin's lamp therein, the sacred lamp
which he was to keep burning with a flame so brilliant and so steady. It
is pleasant to know that, in his boyhood, this great romancer loved
Virgil. "Little as is my Latin, I have ever adored Virgil: his
tenderness for exiles, his melancholy vision of death, his foreboding of
an unknown God, have always moved me; the melody of his verses charmed me
most, and they lull me still between asleep and awake." School days did
not last long: Madame Dumas got a little post--a licence to sell
tobacco--and at fifteen Dumas entered a notary's office, like his great
Scotch forerunner. He was ignorant of his vocation for the stage--Racine
and Corneille fatigued him prodigiously--till he saw _Hamlet_: _Hamlet_
diluted by Ducis. He had never heard of Shakespeare, but here was
something he could appreciate. Here was "a profound impression, full of
inexplicable emotion, vague desires, fleeting lights, that, so far, lit
up only a chaos."

Oddly enough, his earliest literary essay was the translation of Burger's
"Lenore." Here, again, he encounters Scott; but Scott translated the
ballad, and Dumas failed. _Les mortes vont vite_! the same refrain woke
poetry in both the Frenchman and the Scotchman.

"Ha! ha! the Dead can ride with speed:
Dost fear to ride with me?"

So Dumas' literary career began with a defeat, but it was always a
beginning. He had just failed with "Lenore," when Leuven asked him to
collaborate in a play. He was utterly ignorant, he says; he had not
succeeded in gallant efforts to read through "Gil Blas" and "Don
Quixote." "To my shame," he writes, "the man has not been more fortunate
with those masterpieces than the boy." He had not yet heard of Scott,
Cooper, Goethe; he had heard of Shakespeare only as a barbarian. Other
plays the boy wrote--failures, of course--and then Dumas poached his way
to Paris, shooting partridges on the road, and paying the hotel expenses
by his success in the chase.