gives way to the preacher, it is sometimes the audience which does the nodding. The catalogue of this playwright's sins is long; but we are inclined to apply to him the passage from Luke which he takes as text for his first stage-sermon. In his critical prefaces, which bulk considerably larger in number of words than the total of his plays, he takes note of many of the faults which are laid at his door. Some of them he admits; others he debates with unnecessary heat and prolixity. Only one of the charges against him has for us any real importance. Since he set himself up as a preacher and teacher of morality, the question is forced upon us: Do his plays appear to have an uplifting effect, or, as many sagacious critics, from Sarcey on, have maintained, have they, by keeping the thought of sin before the public mind, rather intensified than abated the evil which they attacked?

For the settlement of this question the present writer has no data. He can only repeat that he has found less of the salacious in Dumas than in the work of any other Continental dramatist who has dealt with the same problems; and while he readily admits that doctors have sometimes increased the prevalence of disease, and lawyers the frequency and virulence of quarrels and crime, he hesitates to advocate for that reason the cancellation of all medical and legal licenses. Youth have been corrupted by Rabelais, who is vile and lubricious; by Voltaire, who is ironical and mocking; by the Paris Rire, which jests at prac tices fraught with shame, suffering and death. The great peril comes from treating these matters as if they were trifles; and they were never trifles to Dumas.

Alexandre Dumas the Younger was born in Paris, July 28, 1824. After a riotous and spendthrift youth and some unimportant novel-writing in imitation of his father, he went to writing seriously, about the time he attained his majority, to escape becoming an object of charity. His best-known plays are The Lady of the Camelias, whose theme is the purifying effect of a great love in the life of a woman of the town; The Demi-Monde, which deals with the unsuccessful efforts of a woman adventurer to whitewash her past and secure a decent husband and social position; The Money Question, discussed above; The Natural

Son and A Prodigal Father, in which the two Dumas, father and son, appear in person; The Ideas of Madame Aubray, a plea for the complete forgiveness of a woman who has made a misstep; The Princess Georges, the most stirring fine female character in the whole series, who is brave enough to pardon an unfaithful husband; Claude's Wife, written immediately after the FrancoPrussian war, and introducing a thinly-disguised Prussian spy and a sublimely devilish wife, whose flawless husband shoots her as calmly as he would have crushed a snake; Monsieur Alphonse, presenting the exemplary chastisement of a conscienceless young beau who battens off weak women; The Foreigner, whose protagonist is a beautiful mulatto from the States, who slakes her thirst for vengeance on the American planter who wronged her mother, by sewing discord in European families; and two saner masterpieces, Denise and Francillon. In the last six or eight years of his life (he died in 1895), he wrote at least one more play which he did not have the heart to bring to the boards. The disheartened and sceptical France of the fin du siècle no longer listened well to prophets. But that the theatre-going France of the twentieth century is again willing to be preached to, is proved by the recent successes of the Reverend Doctor Eugène Brieux and the Reverend Doctor Paul Hervieu.

ROY TEMPLE HOUSE.

The University of Oklahoma.

BOOK REVIEWS

REFLECTIONS ON THE NAPOLEONIC LEGEND. By Albert Léon Guérard. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1924. Pp. 276.

A graph of the popularity of Napoleon Bonaparte, rising and falling at almost regular intervals of years, would be found to end at the present moment in the trough of one of its periodic waves. Van Loon, pretending a readiness to follow "the little man on the white horse," is more picturesquely rhetorical than friendly; Shaw casts his glance Napoleonward in Back to Methusaleh and sneers; Wells holds his idealistic nose over the "cockeril upon a dunghill"; Guedalla mercilessly exposes the hoax of Bonapartism; and now Professor Guérard attempts to break the imperial icon once and for all.

Were it not for the fact that Napoleon is still something more than an historical figure, that he still stands for a cause—for a religion almost, about which has accumulated the literature of polemics and apologetics that characterizes hagiolatry, it would be difficult to account for the curious succession of curves of enthusiasm and reaction in the development of popular feeling toward the first Emperor. For Napoleon the historical figure is easily explained-so easily that there is astonishing unanimity in the interpretation of the outstanding facts of his career among the more recent and more capable of his biographers--the Frenchman Pariset, the American Sloane, the Austrian Fournier, the German Kircheisen, and the Englishmen Rose and Fisher. They agree in general that he was an ambitious fellow with wisdom enough to take advantage of certain favorable circumstances that he found ready-made for him, and ability enough to make others to order; that with this equipment of circumstances he proceeded to conquer most of Europe, until he was overwhelmed by the very enormity of his undertakings; that nevertheless the receding tide of his carcer left behind it wherever it had gone the indelible mark of the French theory of politics and of Napoleon's own unmistakable efficiency in government. There are, to be sure, moot points. Did he save or destroy the Revolution? Did he fight to protect France against her enemies, or

did he force other nations to fight to protect themselves against France? Did he deliberately choose a career of conquest, or was it thrust upon him by jealous England and her allies? Did he sacrifice himself for the glory of the France that he had done so much to create, or had he created France in order to sacrifice it to his glory? Even some of the facts are in dispute. Yet it is clear that like everyone else Napoleon was a product of heredity and environment; and that because his heredity and his environment were both unusual, he was destined to achieve the unusual. He was, in other words, great.

Professor Guérard writes as if he would prefer to deny this, but cannot. To be sure, he does minimize the credit due Napoleon. He points out that Carnot had done much toward creating Napoleon's army; that there were other good generals between 1792 and 1815; that a restoration of the Bourbons in 1800 might have been a good thing; that Napoleon's political reforms were but a mask for his dictatorship; that the Code was not his work and was of slight value, anyway; that the Legion of Honor was merely an appeal to vanity; that in education Napoleon simply adopted the work of the Convention and moulded it to the teaching of loyalty to the Emperor; that the Concordat of 1801 settled very little of importance and was the seed of the Clerical problem of subsequent years; that Napoleon's popularity in his own time was artificially created; that his writings do not belong to great literature; and that Napoleon III was a better man. He seems even to enjoy his rôle as a destroyer of the faith, with a certain malicious relish; but he cannot help letting a crumb of charity fall every now and then from this feast of disillusionment. Under certain circumstances "Napoleon was able to carry on, in splendid style, the work of Lazare Carnot"; "Napoleon is the soldier par excellence"; in resisting him the kings of Europe "were also attempting to block the spread of the Rights of Man"; "he did not impose his own thoughts upon the multitude: he tried to think the common thought"; "the most persistent delusion about Napoleon is that he could have acted otherwise, that nothing but a flaw in his character spoilt a unique opportunity and a splendid record."' There is very little in the first group of statements that is un

acceptable,-very little, indeed, not already pointed out. Yet if the second group are facts, as Mr. Guérard so grudgingly concedes, they indicate that Napoleon's own character and the attendant circumstances both conspired to make him great. And that is all that an earnest student of Napoleonic res gestae will maintain.

No serious writer upon Napoleon, not even Thiers, who, more than any other individual, was responsible for the Napoleonic Legend, ever claimed much more than this for Napoleon. None but devotees of a cult could possibly believe, as Mr. Guérard would have it appear the world at large believes, in a "Man of Destiny, invulnerable, ubiquitous, omniscient"; who "alone could save France"; who "took France bankrupt, torn by factions, threatened with invasions, and through the sheer magic of his genius. . . . made her the sovereign power of Europe"; who descended "alone like Moses from Mount Sinai, with the tables of the law in his hands"; at the touch of whose hand "the churches are reopened, the priests are respected, order and decency are restored, and France enjoys a century of peace." Such a portrait might have been in the minds of adoring peasants, but certainly not in that of Thiers, who concluded the first seven volumes of his Consulate and Empire-the only ones to appear before the advent of the third Napoleon-with the remark:

Everyone will ask himself how it was possible to display so much prudence in war, so little in politics. The answer will be easy-in war Napoleon was guided by his genius, in politics by his passions.

Despite Voltaire, history is something more than a trick played upon the dead. The historian can be held responsible for little more than the earthly tale of a deified mortal. The articles of creed rest with the believers. The Napoleonic Cult, we suspect, was to a certain extent a growth, in spite of the researches of Thiers and other Napoleonists as well as because of them.

In short, the Legend of Napoleon never was quite so radiant as Professor Guérard supposes, save in the minds of simple folk and children. But the Legend of a liberal paladin fighting the