"'Los Tres Mosqueteros'!"

He was homesick for "The Three Musketeers," and they cured him
easily.

That is what Dumas does. He gives courage and life to old age, he
charms away the half-conscious nostalgie, the Heimweh, of childhood.
We are all homesick, in the dark days and black towns, for the land
of blue skies and brave adventures in forests, and in lonely inns,
on the battle-field, in the prison, on the desert isle. And then
Dumas comes, and, like Argive Helen, in Homer, he casts a drug into
the wine, the drug nepenthe, "that puts all evil out of mind." Does
any one suppose that when George Sand was old and tired, and near
her death, she would have found this anodyne, and this stimulant, in
the novels of M. Tolstoi, M. Dostoiefsky, M. Zola, or any of the
"scientific" observers whom we are actually requested to hail as the
masters of a new art, the art of the future? Would they make her
laugh, as Chicot does? make her forget, as Porthos, Athos, and
Aramis do? take her away from the heavy, familiar time, as the
enchanter Dumas takes us? No; let it be enough for these new
authors to be industrious, keen, accurate, precieux, pitiful,
charitable, veracious; but give us high spirits now and then, a
light heart, a sharp sword, a fair wench, a good horse, or even that
old Gascon rouncy of D'Artagnan's. Like the good Lord James
Douglas, we had liefer hear the lark sing over moor and down, with
Chicot, than listen to the starved-mouse squeak in the bouge of
Therese Raquin, with M. Zola. Not that there is not a place and an
hour for him, and others like him; but they are not, if you please,
to have the whole world to themselves, and all the time, and all the
praise; they are not to turn the world into a dissecting-room, time