The First Bestsellers

SIR WALTER SCOTT, HIS LIFE & PERSONALITY (295 pp.)--Hesketh Pearson--Harper ($4).

ALEXANDRE DUMAS, A GREAT LIFE IN BRIEF (198 pp.)--Andre Maurois--Knopf ($2.50).

The two writers were as different as Scotch and Burgundy. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was a gentleman genius who practically invented the historical novel, and wrote out of rich learning in Scotland's romantic past; Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870) was a brilliant upstart who wrote with "the overflow of a gush of personality," and used the help of educated men to do the research for many of his best stories. Scott was lamed by a child hood attack of polio and was ill for much of his life; Dumas was in overpowering good health and spirits all his days. But both men were master storytellers, both made -- and lost -- fortunes at their trade, both turned out such mountains of work as to make the most diligent modern writers seem sluggards by comparison.

Scott and Dumas were the first great heroes of history's first mass reading public -- a public that was created with the rise of the middle class, when literature ceased being mostly a fixture of the countryhouse and the coffeehouse, and was taken up by the new masters of the countinghouse. In his excellent new study, Biographer Hesketh Pearson (G.B.S., Dickens, Oscar Wilde) calls Scott "the first of the best-selling novelists." In his artful little life of the elder Dumas, Biog rapher Andre Maurois (Proust, Disraeli, Voltaire) says: "Better than any other novelist, Dumas knew how to share and satisfy the passions of the masses."

The Clansman. Trained in the law but bored by it, Scott led a bluff and loyal clansman's life in George III's Scotland and collected the Border ballads he loved. At 33 he published his own ballad. The Lay of the Last Minstrel, and it sold an unheard-of 40,000 copies. After such narrative poems as Marmion and The Lady of the Lake (which started a great tourist rush for the Scottish moors and highlands), Scott started turning out his medieval romances and his beloved tales of bygone borderers and buccaneers.

Benevolent and good-humored, Scott was a tradition-loving Tory who, says Biographer Pearson, "thought nothing of his fame as a writer compared with his place as . . . clansman of Buccleuch." He tossed off such novels as Ivanhoe and Rob Roy without revising or even rereading, dictating at times while racked by pain from gallstones and stomach cramps. He was extravagant: his "hut" at Abbotsford became a castle, where he spent immense sums buying up land, planting trees (3,000 laburnums, 3,000 Scotch elms, 100,000 birches) and entertaining noblemen, statesmen, lairds and literary lights.

At the high noon of his fame, Scott's badly managed ventures in printing and publishing failed. Debts of -L-130,000 were charged against him. Refusing bankruptcy, Scott said: "I will not yield without a fight for it." Through the last six years of his life, he fought by writing. He produced a nine-volume life of Napoleon and in two years turned over -L-40,000 to his creditors. He kept on writing bestsellers until his frail health finally cracked and he died at 61; later the sale of his works settled the last of the debts that helped kill him.

The Lion. If Scott drew on his tradition, his greatest disciple created the most popular works in igth Century French literature by sheer personal exuberance. The son of an illegitimate mulatto general from Santo Domingo, Dumas crashed the august Comedie Franc,aise with a rip-roaring historical drama, Henri III and His Court, and became the kinky-maned lion of Paris.

Dumas wrote day and night, working with and without collaborators, laughing as the wonderful pages of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo rolled off. In a suburban castle even bigger and uglier than Scott's Abbotsford, surrounded by his menagerie and mistresses, he gave ducal parties (he often did the cooking) and spent money as fast as he made it. When Napoleon III pulled his 1851 coup and restored the Empire, Dumas fled to Belgium with Victor Hugo and other republicans. "The difference," says Maurois, "was that Hugo was fleeing before a tyrant, Dumas before the bailiffs."

Back in Paris within two years, Dumas founded a newspaper called the Musketeer; the first issue announced 50 forthcoming volumes of his memoirs. He toured Russia (seven volumes), bought a little schooner, scooped up a charmer from a Paris theater and sailed for the Levant. But in Genoa he joined Garibaldi, took some of the Thousand aboard, and landed with the liberators in Sicily.

The Hero. When the old lion arrived back in Paris by night train several years later, his illegitimate son Alexandre III, already a famous dramatist in his own right (Camille), waited to take him to his home. Instead, Dumas pere demanded to be taken at once to the home of his friend Author-Critic Theophile Gautier. "But, Papa, it's so late," said Dumas fils. "And you've been traveling eight days." But they went, roused Gautier and gossiped till 4. Finally they headed for home on foot, and Dumas pere never stopped talking. When they arrived at 6, Dumas pere immediately demanded a lamp. "A lamp? But why?" asked his son. "To see by, of course. I am going to get to work." Forthwith he started on The Garibaldians and another novel.

Before he died at 68, Alexandre the Great wrote between 500 and 600 books and plays -- an exact account is impossible. Says Biographer Maurois: "Dumas was a hero out of Dumas. As strong as Porthos, as adroit as d'Artagnan, as generous as Edmond Dantes, this superb giant strode across the 19th century breaking down doors with his shoulder . . . It is as im possible not to like him as it is not to read him . . . No one has read all of Dumas --this would be as implausible as writing it was. But most of mankind has read part."

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