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

Excerpt

DUMAS IN ITALY.

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....