[In the following essay, Shaw offers a condensed overview of Dumas's life and works.]

Alexandre Dumas was the son of a mulatto general, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, who served under Napoleon. His grandfather was the Marquis Davy de la Pailleterie, who had married a native named Marie-Cessette Dumas while running a plantation on the island of Haiti. Both Dumas and his father ignored the title to which they had a right, preferring to use the name Dumas.

Dumas was born in Villers-Cotterets, forty miles from Paris, on July 24, 1802. After finishing his schooling he went to Paris and obtained a position as clerk for the Duke of Orleans. It was not long before he had a mistress, and in 1824, a son. The son, Alexandre Dumas fils, was destined to become a writer like his father and even for a time to surpass him in popularity as a dramatist. For Dumas père, still in his twenties, a farce written with a friend had a modest success and started young Alexandre on a serious career as a dramatist.

Dumas swept through nineteenth-century Paris like a whirlwind. He was the uncrowned "King of Paris" who—according to a contemporary—could have filled every theatre if all other dramatists had stopped writing. Victorien Sardou called Dumas the best man of the theatre of his century. His influence in the field of drama has been enormous, although often overlooked by writers of theatre history. His Henri III et sa cour (1829) was the first great triumph of the Romantic movement. His Antony (1831) was the first romantic drama in modern dress, attacking the accepted idea of marriage and proclaiming the rights of love. The play created a sensation in Paris, and it became the inspiration for hundreds of "triangle" plays that persist to this day.

The intense passion and power of Antony were again put to work in Kean (1836), a play whose hero was ostensibly the English actor Edmund Kean, but in reality Dumas himself. The play has never left the stage in France, and a movie version was made many years ago.

Dumas created the historical drama, the play of "cape and sword," first in the most popular melodrama of all time, La tour de Nesle (1832), and later in the dramatizations of his Les trois mousquetaires, Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge, and other novels. Dumas, who became as popular a novelist as he was dramatist, put most of his novels on the stage, and even built his own Théâtre Historique where they were presented. It was also in this theatre that Dumas first produced his verse translation of Hamlet, to be the standard version of that Shakespeare play in France until 1916, racking up 207 performances at the Comédie-Française. One of the big events in Paris during February, 1848, was the performance of Monte Cristo, a play so long that it had to be produced on two successive evenings. To critics who said the play was too long, Dumas replied: "There are neither long nor short plays, only amusing plays and dull ones."

Dumas also tried his hand at comedy, and was very successful. Three of his comedies, Les demoiselles de Saint-Cyr, Un mariage sous Louis XV, and Mademoiselle de Belle-Isle, played in repertory at the Comédie-Francaise for many years.

The playwright's travelogues were as widely popular as his novels and plays. His accounts of his trips to Switzerland, Russia, and Algeria are like no other travel books ever written. English editions of these travel books appeared in the United States in the 1960s.

Dumas monopolized Parisian society as he did the theatre and the novel. When he entered a room, women sighed and men grew envious. When he spoke, the most eloquent held their breath to listen. Not the most modest of men, he was quite aware of his magnetism and charm. Once, when asked if he had enjoyed a certain gathering, he replied: "I should have been quite bored if I hadn't been there."

With unbounded enthusiasm Dumas could draw an astounding number of facts from the depth of a phenomenal memory. He usually wrote fourteen hours a day, in a perfect hand, seldom making a correction, and without groping for a word. Very often he had a novel or play complete in his head before he sat down to write. He wrote the first volume of Le Chevalier de Maison Rouge in sixty-six hours on a bet.

But in 1845 Dumas met with ill luck; he was attacked as a plagiarist by a disgruntled writer named Mirecourt. The accuser was sentenced to two weeks in prison for libel, but much damage was done to Dumas's reputation. For many years in France, Dumas was belittled as an improvisor. Writers were jealous of this giant of a man who dominated every field of literature. Today, the true genius of Alexandre Dumas is recognized more than ever; new editions of his works appear constantly in France, and as translations in other lands.

Fiorentino, with whom Dumas collaborated on some works dealing with Italy, said: "Dumas is not a dramatic writer, he is the drama incarnate. And how many believed themselves to be his collaborators who were only his confidants! In his books, but above all in his plays, his collaborators had only the slightest share. He remodeled the scenarios, changed the characters, added or cut down scenes, and wrote all in his own hand."

George Bernard Shaw, in his Dramatic Criticism, said: "Dumas père was what Gounod called Mozart, a summit of art. Nobody ever could, or did, or will improve on Mozart's operas, and nobody ever could, or did, or will improve on Dumas's romances and plays."

It was the revolution of 1848 that hastened the decline of Dumas. Shortly after the coup d'état of 1851 with which Louis-Napoleon declared himself emperor, Dumas fled to voluntary exile in Brussels. His theatre went into bankruptcy, and creditors seized his cherished chateau of Monte Cristo at Port-Marly, a mansion into which he had poured vast sums.

A few years later he returned to Paris in an attempt to recoup his fortune. He tried his hand at the editorship of several newspapers, and he continued to write at a furious pace. He had plays on the boards every year until 1869, the year before he died. But the quality of his work declined under the intense pressure. Plays on the level of Antony, Kean, and Mademoiselle de Belle Isle did not come again from his pen. The two exceptions were a one-act gem called Romulus, which he wrote for the Comédie-Française, and a full-length historical comedy-drama called La jeunesse de Louis XIV. This play, which in many ways surpasses Les trois mousquetaires, was accepted by the Comédie-Française, but was stopped by the censors. It had a successful run in Brussels, however, and played in Paris after the death of Dumas, well into the twentieth century.

Dumas died in December, 1870, at the home of his son near Dieppe, as Bismarck's troops were invading France. Four years earlier, in his novel titled La terreur prussienne, he had warned of the danger of Prussian imperialism. The writer was buried in the cemetery of Villers-Cotterets, beside his mother and father.

Both Dumas, father and son, were dramatists. The father became a novelist, but never stopped writing plays. The son started as a novelist but eventually devoted himself to the theatre. His chief claim to fame today resides in one play, La dame aux camélias, called Camille in English-language versions, which was also the basis for Verdi's opera La traviata. Neither as novelist nor dramatist was the son capable of creating heroic characters like those that dominate the father's work: d'Artagnan, Edmond Dantes, Chicot the jester, Bussy d'Amboise, Porthos, Athos, Aramis, Annibal de Coconnas, and Cagliostro. All of those men except Edmond Dantes had actually lived, but they had been long forgotten until Dumas père immortalized them. Dumas put himself into his heroes.

In 1883 a statue of Dumas père, designed by Gustave Doré, was unveiled in Paris, on the Place Malesherbes. Dumas is seated at the summit; on one side a group of people is reading one of the romances that have been printed and reprinted in every language, and on the other side is a bronze of D'Artagnan with drawn rapier. At the statue's inauguration, one speaker said that if every person who had been thrilled by The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo had contributed a penny to the memory of Dumas, the statue could have been cast in solid gold.

Published posthumously, with the help of Anatole France, was Dumas's Grand dictionnaire de cuisine. Culinary art was just another interest in the life of the irrepressible Alexandre Dumas. Far from being a dull collection of recipes, his cookbook is an amazing series of anecdotes, with interesting treatises on food, dining, wine, and even mustard.

The fabulous chateau of Monte Cristo, about which Dumas wrote in only one book, his charming Histoire de mes bêtes, has been declared a national monument by the French government, and an organization called L'association des amis d'Alexandre Dumas, founded by the popular French writer Alain Decaux, is engaged in restoring the chateau and the spacious gardens to their former splendor.

Meanwhile the name of Alexandre Dumas père survives—on the printed page, on the stage, and in more than three hundred films based on his plays and novels, in France, England, the United States, and even in Japan, where thirty movies have been made from his works.

His future remains unlimited.