Though a clear narrator, when the story required clear narration, Winthrop perfectly understood the art of narrating by implication and allusion. He paints distinctly and minutely, not omitting a single detail, when the occasion demands such faithful representation of real facts and localities; but he has also the power of flashing his meaning by suggestive hints which the most labored description and explication could not make more effective. He makes the mind of the reader work sympathetically with his own in building up the idea he seeks to convey. Crimes which are nameless are mutually understood by this refined communion between author and reader. The mystery of the plot is not directly explained, but each party seems to bring, as in private conversation, his individual sagacity to bear upon the right interpretation.
The style of the book is admirable. It is brief almost to abruptness. The words are few, and are crammed with all the meaning they can hold. There is not a page which does not show that the writer is an economist of expression, and desirous of conveying his matter with the slightest possible expenditure of ink. Charles Reade himself does not condense with a more fretful impatience of all circumlocution and a profounder reliance on the absolute import of single words.
We might easily refer to particular scenes from this book, illustrative of the author's descriptive and representative powers. Among many which might be noticed, we will allude to only two,—that in which Cecil is revived from his "sleep of death," and that in the opera-house, where Byng is apprised of the guilt of Emma Denman. Nobody can read either without feeling that in the disastrous fight of Great Bethel we lost a great novelist as well as a chivalrous soldier and a noble man.
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