Various - Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 331, May, 1843

[ Souvenirs de Voyage en Italie, par ALEXANDRE DUMAS. 5 vols. duod.]

France has lately sent forth her poets in great force, to travel, and to write travels. Delamartine, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and others, have been forth in the high-ways and the high-seas, observing, portraying, poetizing, romancing. The last-mentioned of these, M. Dumas, a dramatist very ingenious in the construction of plots, and one who tells a story admirably, has travelled quite in character. There is a dramatic air thrown over all his proceedings, things happen as pat as if they had been rehearsed, and he blends the novelist and tourist together after a very bold and original fashion. It is a new method of writing travels that he has hit upon, and we recommend it to the notice of our countrymen or countrywomen, who start from home with the fixed idea, happen what may, of inditing a book. He does not depend altogether upon the incidents of the road, or the raptures of sight-seeing, or any odd fantasy that buildings or scenery may be kind enough to suggest: he provides himself with full half of his materials before he starts, in the shape of historical anecdote and romantic story, which he distributes as he goes along. A better plan for an amusing book could not be devised. Your mere tourist, it must be confessed, however frivolous he submits for our entertainment to become, grows heavy on our hands; that rapid and incessant change of scene which is kindly meant to enliven our spirits, becomes itself wearisome, and we long for some resting-place, even though it should be obtained by that most illegitimate method of closing the volume. On the other hand, a teller of tales has always felt the want of some enduring thread—though, as some one says in a like emergency, it be only packthread —on which his tales may be strung—something to fill up the pauses, and prevent the utter solution of continuity between tale and tale—something that gives the narrator a reasonable plea for going on again , and makes the telling another story an indispensable duty upon his part, and the listening to it a corresponding obligation upon ours; and ever since the time when that young lady of unpronounceable and unrememberable name told the One Thousand and One Tales, telling a fragment every morning to keep her head upon her shoulders, there has been devised many a strange expedient for this purpose. Now, M. Dumas has contrived, by uniting the two characters of tourist and novelist, to make them act as reliefs to each other. Whilst he shares with other travellers the daily adventures of the road—the journey, the sight, and the dinner—he is not compelled to be always moving; he can pause when he pleases, and, like the fableur of olden times, sitting down in the market-place, in the public square, at the corner of some column or statue, he narrates his history or his romance. Then, the story told, up starts the busy and provident tourist; lo! the voiture is waiting for him at the hotel; in he leaps, and we with him, and off we rattle through other scenes, and to other cities. He has a track in space to which he is bound; we recognize the necessity that he should proceed thereon; but he can diverge at pleasure through all time , bear us off into what age he pleases, make us utterly oblivious of the present, and lap us in the Elysium of a good story.

With a book written palpably for the sole and most amiable purpose of amusement, and succeeding in this purpose, how should we deal? How but receive it with a passive acquiescence equally amiable, content solely to be amused, and giving all severer criticism—to him who to his other merits may add, if he pleases, that of being the first critic. Most especially let us not be carping and questioning as to the how far, or what precisely, we are to set down for true . It is all true—it is all fiction; the artist cannot choose but see things in an artistical form; what ought not to be there drops from his field of vision. We are not poring through a microscope, or through a telescope, to discover new truths; we are looking at the old landscape through coloured glasses, blue, or black, or roseate, as the occasion may require. And here let us note a favourable contrast between our dramatic tourist, bold in conception, free in execution, and those compatriots of our own, authors and authoresses, who write travels merely because they are artists in ink, yet without any adequate notion of the duties and privileges of such an artist.

When a writer has got a name, the first rational use to make of the charming possession is to get astride of it, as a witch upon her broomstick, and whisk and scamper over half the kingdoms of the earth. Talk of bills of exchange!--letters of credit!--we can put our name to a whole book, and it will pass—it will pass. The idea is good—quite worthy of our commercial genius—and to us its origin, we believe, is due; but here, as in so many other cases, the Frenchman has given the idea its full development. Keeping steadily in view the object of his book, which is—first, amusement—secondly, amusement—thirdly, amusement; he adapts his means consistently to his end. Does he want a dialogue?—he writes one: a story?—he invents one: a description?—he takes his hint from nature, and is grateful—the more grateful, because he knows that a hint to the wise is sufficient. It is the description only which the reader will be concerned with; what has he to do with the object? That is the merely traveller's affair. Now, your English tourists have always a residue of scruple about them which balks their genius. Not satisfied with pleasing, they aspire to be believed; are almost angry if their anecdote is not credited; content themselves with adding graces, giving a turn, trimming and decorating—cannot build a structure boldly from the bare earth. This necessity of finding a certain straw for their bricks, which must be picked up by the roadside, not only impedes the work of authorship, but must add greatly to their personal discomfort throughout the whole of their travels. They are in perpetual chase of something for the book. They bag an incident with as much glee as a sportsman his first bird in September. They are out on pleasure, but manifestly they have their task too; it is not quite holiday, only half-holiday with them. The prospect or the picture gives no pleasure till it has suggested the appropriate expression of enthusiasm, which, once safely deposited in the note-book, the enthusiasm itself can be quietly indulged in, or permitted to evaporate. At the dinner-table, even when champagne is circulating, if a jest or a story falls flat, they see with an Aristotelian precision the cause of its failure, and how an additional touch, or a more auspicious moment, would have procured for it a better fate; they stop to pick it up, they clean it, they revolve the chapter and the page to which it shall lend its lustre. Nay, it is noticeable, that without much labour from the polisher, many a dull thing in conversation has made a good thing in print; the conditions of success are so different. Now, from all such toils and perplexities M. Dumas is evidently free; free as the wildest Oxonian who flies abroad in the mere wanton prodigality of spirits and of purse. His book is made, or can be made, when he chooses: fortune favours the bold, and incidents will always dispose themselves dramatically to the dramatist.

Our traveller opens his campaign at Nice. It may be observed that M. Dumas cannot be accused, like the present minister of his country, of any partiality to the English; if the mortifying truth must be told, he has no love of us at all; to which humour, so long as he delivers himself of it with any wit or pleasantry, he is heartily welcome. Our first extract will be thought, perhaps, to taste of this humour; but we quote it for the absurd proof it affords of the manner in which we English have overflooded some portions of the Continent:—