"I ne-ne-ne-never de-de-de-deceived an-an-an-anybody," exclaimed Baccarat, imitating the other's defect in pronunciation.
"He will make all his characters stutter soon," said Millaud. "We had better pay him by the line." Of course this is a story _faite à plaisir_, as is also the one that as soon as Dumas made his first contract by the line, enchanted with the arrangement, he invented dear old Grimaud, who only opened his mouth to utter "yes," "no," "what?" "ah!" "bah!" and other monosyllables; but when the editor, who knew the cash price of "peuh" and "oh," declared he would only pay for lines half full, Grimaud was slaughtered the next morning. However, these yarns show that the French can satirize their jerky, staccato style of _feuilleton_, with each sentence staked off in a paragraph by itself, like some grimacing clown, who expects each particular joke or handspring to be observed individually, and to be greeted with separate applause. Across the channel we of course find the English journals going to the other extreme, in insular pride, and packing distinct subjects into the same paragraph.
Greek and Roman Tuppers used, no doubt, to "reel off a couple of hundred lines, standing on one foot;" but the veneering of a thin layer of ideas upon a thick layer of words is naturally the special trait of our age of cheap ink and paper, of steam printing, and of paying for writing by long measure. The "Country Parson" is a favorite writer of this sort, whose excellence is in "the art of putting things," rather than in having many things to put. The essays of the "Spectator," "Guardian," "Tatler," "Rambler," rarely gave only a pennyworth of wit to an intolerable deal of words; but our modern periodical essay achieves success by taking some such assertion as "Old maids are agreeable," or "Old maids are disagreeable," and wire-drawing it into sundry yards of readable matter. Macbeth's
The Devil damn thee black, thou cream-fac'd loon! Where got'st thou that goose-look?
would supply a modern playwright with a square foot of gold-beaten invective. "True poems," said Irving, "are caskets which enclose in a small compass the wealth of the language--its family jewels." But when poems are paid by the line, bards are pardonable for diffuseness. And then, besides diffuseness, our age has wonderful literary fecundity. Few people know how much painters paint, and how much great writers write; for the bards of a single poem, as Mr. Stedman shows, are exceptional, and rich quantity as well as rich quality is the usual rule for greatness, whether of novelist, poet, essayist, metaphysician, or historian. So here we come upon another source of the accumulated floods of literature. The other day I was looking through a prodigious list of the works of Alexandre Dumas, _père_. There were 127 of them, mostly novels--"Monte Christo," "Three Musketeers," "Bragelonne," and the rest that we used to read. They made 244 volumes; but the plays were not included, and many slighter miscellanies did not seem to be there; and the posthumous work on cookery was certainly not there; and of course there was no effort to collect everything from "Le Mois," "La Liberté," and the half dozen other journals he edited or wrote in; so that I doubt not the writings of this illustrious man, if ever brought together in a complete edition, would make at least 150 works of 300 or 400 stout volumes. And in English literature we have many Salas and Southworths. I remember an announcement in the "Lancet" that "Mr. G. A. Sala is completely restored to health, and in the full discharge of his professional duties." An expressive term, that "full discharge"!