He was lucky in the field of his labours. The history of the France that he described flashes out in brilliant episodes, and is rich in characters and situations that give the hint for more. It is the history of the great--of kings and statesmen and of the first in the land--but it is at the same time an extraordinarily personal kind of history, not a tale of dry public events. It was set in scenes of gallantry and colour, and was just distant enough to come to readers with a glamour. And Dumas by the multiplicity of the characters whose fortunes he intertwined in his novels laid a wide field of its incident and adventure open to himself, and brought a large range of actual recorded facts into the scope of his novels. But it was his way of twining history and fiction into one another, instead of tacking the one on to the other, and of making one story out of them, that gave him his power. He ran the whole into one flowing narrative. A list could be made of the incidents in his novels that are taken from history but only a close student, and a man as learned in the history of those times as Dumas himself, can detect the joint, the place where the actual and the invented episodes fit into one another. History and fiction cannot be disentangled in these novels, and a separate rôle, a particular function in the combined work, be assigned to each; they grow into each other, and reinforce one another; each somehow gives its character to the other; so much in the novels is actual history that this lends its character to the whole, and gives it a root in actuality, so that the works come as a narrative of France, a stream of national story, a kind of history themselves. The works of Dumas, therefore, do not come as a series of shifting episodes that displace one another. There is no stopping to set the scene for an episode or an event. The story will run into the Massacre of St Bartholomew and straight out of it, and there will be no drawing of the curtain, no break in the action, while a stage is being arranged. Exploits and adventures and intrigues come in quick succession, and keep the reader on tip-toe. The result is an effect of sheer movement. Everything seems in motion. The novels are pure story, and Dumas is pre-eminently a teller of stories. History may be regarded as a chain of ages that overlap, and run into each other and then fold under--as an ocean of human life, generations of peoples, coming in waves through the centuries. It may also be regarded as a thread of narrative, a stream of story, winding through time. Dumas more than anybody else has succeeded in turning history into narrative like this. His works are a thread of story running through centuries of the history of France.