Comments & Questions

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

COMMENTS

Emilio Castelar

To the natural curiosity of children, which continues through all our lives in some degree; to the desire of being entertained, and of being separated from the daily realities of life, the pen of Alexandre Dumas was always directed, and so successfully, that his works form in themselves not only a library, but a literature. When he was at the summit of his fame, at the period when his imagination was in such vigour that he was publishing ten stories at the same time, filling the magazines of Europe and America, and startling the press by showering his fertile pages like snowflakes from a winter cloud, I read “The Three Musketeers,” clumsily translated into Spanish, and published in what was then a most important journal, El Heraldo. I can never forget the impression left upon my mind by the reading of that book. The characters are life-like, and stand out in such high relief, that I seemed to see them, to speak to them, to distinguish their features and manners, and even to compare them with real persons among my acquaintances. So absorbing was my interest in the story, that I watched for each new number with feverish impatience to read the end of these adventures, as if they were intimately connected with some one beloved, with my former friends, with my nearest relations, with my own soul.

—as translated by Mrs. Arthur Arnold, from Life of Lord Byron and Other Sketches (1875)

George Saintsbury

Dumas has the faculty, as no other novelist has, of presenting rapid and brilliant dioramas of the picturesque aspects of history, animating them with really human if not very intricately analysed passion, and connecting them with dialogue matchless of its kind. He can do nothing more than this, and to ask him for anything more is a blunder. But he will pass time for you as hardly any other novelist will, and unlike most novelists of his class his pictures, at least the best of them, do not lose their virtue by rebeholding. I at least find the Three Musketeers as effectual for its purpose now as I found it nearly twenty years ago, and I think there must be something more in work of such a virtue than mere scenepainting for a background and mere lay figures for actors.

—from Fortnightly Review (October 1, 1878)

Andrew Lang

[Dumas‘s] faults are on the surface, visible to all men. He was not only rapid, he was hasty, he was inconsistent; his need of money as well as his love of work made him put his hand to dozens of perishable things. A beginner, entering the forest of Dumas’s books, may fail to see the trees for the wood. He may be counselled to select first the cycle of d’Artagnan—the “Musketeers,” “Twenty Years After,” and the “Vicomte de Bragelonne.” Mr. Stevenson’s delightful essay on the last may have sent many readers to it; I confess to preferring the youth of the “Musketeers” to their old age.

—from Essays in Little (1891)

New York Times

Out of [Dumas’s “Three Musketeers”] there stepped, alive and instantly familiar, the marvelous three, the three who were four, humanest of heroes, bravest and gayest of soldiers, realest of men, with whom in literal bodily companionship he walked the streets of old Paris, galloped along the roads of old France, fought duels and battles, loved Queens and ladies in waiting, drank innumerable bottles of wine that never affected a bit his head or his health, quaked under the Cardinal’s sharp glance, and, one terrible night, stood by the river and heard—the noise of the elevated railway is no plainer this minute—the scream that Milady de Winter gave as the executioner’s sword came down on her beautiful neck and slicked it off close to the dim, shameful mark of the lily!

Such are the memories left by the shabby little volumes—of adventures really lived, of romance made intimately personal, of familiar companionship with flesh and blood knights, of swords flashing in noble quarrels, of jewels on white hands, on silken doublets over indomitable hearts, and all these seen, felt, loved, in an air vibrant with honor, with gentleness in its season, with fierceness on proper occasions.

—December 9, 1894

Harry A. Spurr

Every lover of the “Mousquetaires” has his own particular hero, in one of the famous four. Thackeray, for instance, writes:

“Of your heroic heroes, I think our friend Monseigneur Athos, Count de la Fère, is my favourite. I have read about him from sunrise to sunset with the utmost contentment of mind. He has passed through how many volumes? Forty? Fifty? I wish, for my part, there were a hundred more, and would never tire of him rescuing prisoners, punishing ruffians, and running scoundrels through the midriff with his most graceful rapier. Ah! Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, you are a magnificent trio.”

Stevenson had a weakness for Porthos. “If,” he wrote to a friend, “by any sacrifice of my own literary baggage I could clear the ‘Vicomte de Brageloone’ of Porthos, Jekyll might go, and the Master and the Black Arrow, you may be sure, and I should think my life not lost for mankind if half a dozen more of my volumes must be thrown in.”

—from The Life and Writings of Alexandre Dumas (1902)

QUESTIONS

1. What is it about The Three Musketeers that has made it perennially popular? Given that the novel remains popular despite the vast social and political changes that have occurred since it first appeared, should we say that it addresses basic truths about human nature rather than historical and social issues?

2. The most villainous of villains in The Three Musketeers is a beautiful woman known as Milady. Her nefarious plots are thwarted by the male bonding of the (ultimately) four Musketeers. Is Dumas consciously or subconsciously making a point in this opposition—male against female—and its outcome? If so, what is he trying to say? If not, what is the purpose of pitting a woman against a man in this novel?

3. The Three Musketeers is full of scenes of eating and drinking. Do you feel that in these scenes Dumas is simply indulging his passion for food and camaraderie, or do the scenes function thematically, setting tone, defining characters, creating atmosphere?

4. Would you define Dumas as a writer of escape literature (swashbuckling adventure novels)—and if so, would you be putting him down? Is it possible that he gets at important human truths indirectly by adopting this format? If so, what truths does he reveal? Do they still apply today?