There is a great deal of nice writing here. Happy words come at a call and occupy their inevitable places. Now and then a Scotch word, with a real terrier phiz and the best qualities of "black and tan," gives the page a local flavor which we should not like to miss. But the writing is not provincial. There is Scotch character everywhere: the keenness, intensity, reverence, shaggy humor, sly fun, and just a touch of the intolerance. The somewhat literal regard for Scripture, the awe, and the unquestioning, childlike way of being religious, with the independence of Kirk and Sessions and National Establishments, all belong to the best intelligence of Edinburgh. But the literary felicity, the scholarship, the various reading, the cultivated appreciation of books, men, and systems, while they make us admire—as a good many bright volumes printed in Edinburgh have done before—the mental power and refinement which that most picturesque of Northern cities nourishes, do still belong to the great commonwealth of letters, remind us not of wynds and closes, and run away from the littleness of time and place.
If the reader would understand the difference between the sentimental and the pathetic treatment of a subject, let him see in "Rab and his Friends" how the pen of Dr. Brown follows the essential lines of that most pure and tender of all stories. In doing so he has given us a new creation in Ailie Noble. Not a line can be effectively added to that ideal narrative of a true history, not a word can be pushed from its place. The whole treatment is at once delicate, incisive, tender, reserved, and dramatic. And after reading it,—with or without tears, according to your capacity for dogged resistance to a distended lachrymal duct,—you will be conscious of bearing away a sweet and subduing impression, like that which a rare friend can sometimes give, which lingers many days.
Let nobody omit to read the "Letter to John Cairns, D.D.," because he does not care for J.C. or know who he is. It contains some reminiscences by Dr. Brown of his father, a noted clergyman, of whose life and character Dr. Cairns had prepared a memoir. In this, and in the Essay upon Dr. Chalmers, Dr. Brown shows his capacity to observe and portray human moods and characteristics. There are his usual literary excellences, brought to the service of a keen and faithfully reporting eye, and his fine humane qualities, his tenderness, reverence, and humor.
This volume is one of the best ventures of the literary year.
Cecil Dreeme. By THEODORE WINTHROP. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 16mo.
In the death of Major Winthrop, at the promising commencement of his military career, the nation lost one of its purest, noblest, and most capable spirits. His industry, sagacity, and intrepidity all rested on a firm basis of fixed principle and deep enthusiasm; and had he lived, we have little doubt that both his moral and practical power would have been felt among the palpable forces of the country. In the articles he contributed to this magazine, describing his brief military experience, every reader must have recognized the singular brightness of his mind and the singular joyousness of his courage. Powers which, in meditation, worked at the bidding of pensive or melancholy sentiments, seemed to be braced by action into unwonted healthiness and hilarity; and had he survived the experience of the present war, there can be little doubt that his intellect and imagination would, by contact with events, have been developed to their full capacity, and found expression in literary works of remarkable power.
"Cecil Dreeme" is one of several novels he wrote before the war broke out, and it conveys a striking impression of his genius and disposition. The utmost sensitiveness and delicacy of moral sense were combined in him with a rough delight in all the manifestations of manly strength; and these two tendencies of his nature are fitly embodied and exquisitely harmonized in the characters of Cecil Dreeme and Robert Byng. They are opposites which by their very nature are necessarily attracted to each other. The obstacle to their mental and moral union is found in a third person, Densdeth, in whom manly strength and genius have been corrupted by selfishness and sensuality into the worst form of spiritual evil. This person is simply abhorred by Cecil, while Byng finds in him something which tempts appetite, piques curiosity, develops sensuous feeling, and provokes pride, as well as something which excites moral disgust and loathing. Byng's distrustful love for Emma Denman admirably represents this stage of his moral experience.
Densdeth is undoubtedly the central character of the book. It proves its creator to be a true spiritual as well as physical descendant of President Edwards; and not even his ancestor has shown more vividly the "exceeding sinfulness of sin." Densdeth is one of those evil natures in whom delight in evil pleasures has subsided into a delight in evil itself, and a desire to communicate it to others. He has the diabolical power of calling out the latent evil in all natures with whom his own comes in contact, and he corrupts, not so much by example, as by a direct communication of the corrupt spiritual life of his individual being. He is an accomplished devil, wearing the guise of a New-York man of fashion and fortune,—a devil such as tempts every person thrown into the vortex of our daily commonplace life. Every pure sentiment, noble aspiration, and manly instinct, every natural affection, gentle feeling, and religious principle, is tainted by his contaminating companionship. He infuses a subtle skepticism of the reality of goodness by the mere magnetism of his evil presence. Persons who have been guarded against the usual contrivances by which the conventional Devil works his wonders find themselves impotent before the fascinations of Densdeth. They follow while they detest him, and are at once his victims and his accomplices. In those whose goodness, like that of Cecil Dreeme, is founded on purity of sentiment and strength of principle, he excites unmitigated abhorrence and strenuous opposition; but on all those whose excellence is "respectable" rather than vital, who are good by the felicity of their circumstances rather than the force of their conscience, he exercises a fascination almost irresistible. To everybody, indeed, who has in him any latent evil not overbalanced by the habitual performance of positive duties, Densdeth's companionship is morally blighting. The character, fearful in its way as the Mephistopheles of Goethe, is represented with considerable artistic skill.
Though the most really prominent person in the drama, he is, in the representation, kept in the background,—a cynical, sneering, brilliant demi-devil, who appears only when some plot against innocence is beginning its wiles or approaching its consummation.
The incidents of the novel occur in some of the best-known localities of New York. Nobody can mistake Chuzzlewit Hotel and Chrysalis College. Every traveller has put up at the first and visited some literary or artistic friend at the second. Indeed, Winthrop seems to have deliberately chosen the localities of his story with the special purpose of showing that passions almost as terrible as those which are celebrated in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles may rage in the ordinary lodging-houses of New York. He has succeeded in throwing an atmosphere of mystery over places which are essentially commonplace; and he has done it by the intensity with which he has conceived and represented the internal thoughts, struggles, and emotions of the men and women by whom these edifices of brick and stone are inhabited.