THEODORE WINTHROP'S WRITINGS.
On an accessible book-shelf in my library, stand side by side four
volumes whose contents I once knew by heart, and which, after the lapse
of twenty years, are yet tolerably distinct in my memory. These are
stoutly bound in purple muslin, with a stamp, of Persian design
apparently, on the centre of each cover. They are stained and worn, and
the backs have faded to a brownish hue, from exposure to the light, and
a leaf in one of the volumes has been torn across; but the paper and
the sewing and the clear bold type are still as serviceable as ever.
The books seem to have been made to last,--to stand a great deal of
reading. Contrasted with the aesthetically designed covers one sees
nowadays, they would be considered inexcusably ugly, and the least
popular novelist of our time would protest against having his
lucubrations presented to the public in such plain attire.
Nevertheless, on turning to the title-pages, you may see imprinted, on
the first, "Fourteenth Edition"; on the second, "Twelfth Edition"; and
on the others, indications somewhat less magnificent, but still
evidence of very exceptional circulation. The date they bear is that of
the first years of our civil war; and the first published of them is
prefaced by a biographical memoir of the author, written by his friend
George William Curtis. This memoir was originally printed in the
_Atlantic Monthly_, two or three months after the death of its subject,
Theodore Winthrop.
For these books,--three novels, and one volume of records of
travel,--came from his hand, though they did not see the light until
after he had passed beyond the sphere of authors and publishers. At
that time, the country was in an exalted and heroic mood, and the men
who went to fight its battles were regarded with a personal affection
by no means restricted to their personal acquaintances. Their names
were on all lips, and those of them who fell were mourned by multitudes
instead of by individuals. Winthrop's historic name, and the
influential position of some of his nearest friends, would have
sufficed to bring into unusual prominence his brief career and his fate
as a soldier, even had his intrinsic qualities and character been less
honorable and winning than they were. But he was a type of a young
American such as America is proud to own. He was high-minded, refined,
gifted, handsome. I recollect a portrait of him published soon after
his death,--a photograph, I think, from a crayon drawing; an eloquent,
sensitive, rather melancholy, but manly and courageous face, with grave
eyes, the mouth veiled by a long moustache. It was the kind of
countenance one would wish our young heroes to have. When, after the
catastrophe at Great Bethel, it became known that Winthrop had left
writings behind him, it would have been strange indeed had not every
one felt a desire to read them.
Moreover, he had already begun to be known as a writer. It was during
1860, I believe, that a story of his, in two instalments, entitled
"Love on Skates," appeared in the "Atlantic." It was a brilliant and
graphic celebration of the art of skating, engrafted on a love-tale as
full of romance and movement as could be desired. Admirably told it
was, as I recollect it; crisp with the healthy vigor of American wintry
atmosphere, with bright touches of humor, and, here and there, passages
of sentiment, half tender, half playful. It was something new in our
literature, and gave promise of valuable work to come. But the writer
was not destined to fulfil the promise. In the next year, from the camp
of his regiment, he wrote one or two admirable descriptive sketches,
touching upon the characteristic points of the campaigning life which
had just begun; but, before the last of these had become familiar to
the "Atlantic's" readers, it was known that it would be the last.
Theodore Winthrop had been killed.
He was only in his thirty-third year. He was born in New Haven, and had
entered Yale College with the class of '48. The Delta Kappa Epsilon
Fraternity was, I believe, founded in the year of his admission, and he
must, therefore, have been among its earliest members. He was
distinguished as a scholar, and the traces of his classic and
philosophical acquirements are everywhere visible in his books. During
the five or six years following his graduation, he travelled abroad,
and in the South and West; a wild frontier life had great attractions
for him, as he who reads "John Brent" and "The Canoe and the Saddle"
need not be told. He tried his hand at various things, but could settle
himself to no profession,--an inability which would have excited no
remark in England, which has had time to recognize the value of men of
leisure, as such; but which seems to have perplexed some of his friends
in this country. Be that as it may, no one had reason to complain of
lack of energy and promptness on his part when patriotism revealed a
path to Winthrop. He knew that the time for him had come; but he had
also known that the world is not yet so large that all men, at all
times, can lay their hands upon the work that is suitable for them to
do.
Let us, however, return to the novels. They appear to have been written
about 1856 and 1857, when their author was twenty-eight or nine years
old. Of the order in which they were composed I have no record; but,
judging from internal evidence, I should say that "Edwin Brothertoft"
came first, then "Cecil Dreeme," and then "John Brent." The style, and
the quality of thought, in the latter is more mature than in the
others, and its tone is more fresh and wholesome. In the order of
publication, "Cecil Dreeme" was first, and seems also to have been most
widely read; then "John Brent," and then "Edwin Brothertoft," the scene
of which was laid in the last century. I remember seeing, at the house
of James T. Fields, their publisher, the manuscripts of these books,
carefully bound and preserved. They were written on large ruled
letter-paper, and the handwriting was very large, and had a
considerable slope. There were scarcely any corrections or erasures;
but it is possible that Winthrop made clean copies of his stories after
composing them. Much of the dialogue, especially, bears evidence of
having been revised, and of the author's having perhaps sacrificed ease
and naturalness, here and there, to the craving for conciseness which
has been one of the chief stumbling-blocks in the way of our young
writers. He wished to avoid heaviness and "padding," and went to the
other extreme. He wanted to cut loose from the old, stale traditions of
composition, and to produce something which should be new, not only in
character and significance, but in manner of presentation. He had the
ambition of the young Hafiz, who professed a longing to "tear down this
tiresome old sky." But the old sky has good reasons for being what and
where it is, and young radicals finally come to perceive that, regarded
from the proper point of view, and in the right spirit, it is not so
tiresome after all. Divine Revelation itself can be expressed in very
moderate and commonplace language; and if one's thoughts are worth
thinking, they are worth clothing in adequate and serene attire.
But "culture," and literature with it, have made such surprising
advances of late, that we are apt to forget how really primitive and
unenlightened the generation was in which Winthrop wrote. Imagine a
time when Mr. Henry James, Jr., and Mr. W. D. Howells had not been
heard of; when Bret Harte was still hidden below the horizon of the far
West; when no one suspected that a poet named Aldrich would ever write
a story called "Marjorie Daw"; when, in England, "Adam Bede" and his
successors were unborn;--a time of antiquity so remote, in short, that
the mere possibility of a discussion upon the relative merit of the
ideal and the realistic methods of fiction was undreamt of! What had an
unfortunate novelist of those days to fall back upon? Unless he wished
to expatriate himself, and follow submissively in the well worn steps
of Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope, the only models he could look to
were Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Foe, James Fenimore Cooper, and
Nathaniel Hawthorne. "Elsie Venner" had scarcely made its appearance at
that date. Irving and Cooper were, on the other hand, somewhat
antiquated. Poe and Hawthorne were men of very peculiar genius, and,
however deep the impression they have produced on our literature, they
have never had, because they never can have, imitators. As for the
author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," she was a woman in the first place, and,
in the second place, she sufficiently filled the field she had
selected. A would-be novelist, therefore, possessed of ambition, and
conscious of not being his own father or grandfather, saw an untrodden
space before him, into which he must plunge without support and without
guide. No wonder if, at the outset, he was a trifle awkward and
ill-at-ease, and, like a raw recruit under fire, appeared affected from
the very desire he felt to look unconcerned. It is much to his credit
that he essayed the venture at all; and it is plain to be seen that,
with each forward step he took, his self-possession and simplicity
increased. If time had been given him, there is no reason to doubt that
he might have been standing at the head of our champions of fiction
to-day.
But time was not given him, and his work, like all other work, if it is
to be judged at all, must be judged on its merits. He excelled most in
passages descriptive of action; and the more vigorous and momentous the
action, the better, invariably, was the description; he rose to the
occasion, and was not defeated by it. Partly for this reason, "Cecil
Dreeme," the most popular of his books, seems to me the least
meritorious of them all. The story has little movement; it stagnates
round Chrysalis College. The love intrigue is morbid and unwholesome,
and the characters (which are seldom Winthrop's strong point) are more
than usually artificial and unnatural. The _dramatis personae_ are,
indeed, little more than moral or immoral principles incarnate. There
is no growth in them, no human variableness or complexity; it is "Every
Man in his Humor" over again, with the humor left out. Densdeth is an
impossible rascal; Churm, a scarcely more possible Rhadamanthine saint.
Cecil Dreeme herself never fully recovers from the ambiguity forced
upon her by her masculine attire; and Emma Denman could never have been
both what we are told she was, and what she is described as being. As
for Robert Byng, the supposed narrator of the tale, his name seems to
have been given him in order wantonly to increase the confusion caused
by the contradictory traits with which he is accredited. The whole
atmosphere of the story is unreal, fantastic, obscure. An attempt is
made to endow our poor, raw New York with something of the stormy and
ominous mystery of the immemorial cities of Europe. The best feature of
the book (morbidness aside) is the construction of the plot, which
shows ingenuity and an artistic perception of the value of mystery and
moral compensation. It recalls, in some respects, the design of
Hawthorne's "Blithedale Romance,"--that is, had the latter never been
written, the former would probably have been written differently. In
spite of its faults, it is an interesting book, and, to the critical
eye, there are in almost every chapter signs that indicate the
possession of no ordinary gifts on the author's part. But it may be
doubted whether the special circumstances under which it was published
had not something to do with its wide popularity. I imagine "John
Brent" to have been really much more popular, in the better sense; it
was read and liked by a higher class of readers. It is young ladies and
school-girls who swell the numbers of an "edition," and hence the
difficulty in arguing from this as to the literary merit of the book
itself.
"Edwin Brothertoft," though somewhat disjointed in construction, and
jerky in style, is yet a picturesque and striking story; and the gallop
of the hero across country and through the night to rescue from the
burning house the woman who had been false to him, is vigorously
described, and gives us some foretaste of the thrill of suspense and
excitement we feel in reading the story of the famous "Gallop of three"
in "John Brent." The writer's acquaintance with the history of the
period is adequate, and a romantic and chivalrous tone is preserved
throughout the volume. It is worth noting that, in all three of
Winthrop's novels, a horse bears a part in the crisis of the tale. In
"Cecil Dreeme" it is Churm's pair of trotters that convey the party of
rescuers to the private Insane Asylum in which Densdeth had confined
the heroine. In "Edwin Brothertoft," it is one of Edwin's renowned
breed of white horses that carries him through almost insuperable
obstacles to his goal. In "John Brent," the black stallion, Don Fulano,
who is throughout the chief figure in the book, reaches his apogee in
the tremendous race across the plains and down the rocky gorge of the
mountains, to where the abductors of the heroine are just about to
pitch their camp at the end of their day's journey. The motive is fine
and artistic, and, in each of the books, these incidents are as good
as, or better then, anything else in the narrative.
"John Brent" is, in fact, full enough of merit to more than redeem its
defects. The self-consciousness of the writer is less noticeable than
in the other works, and the effort to be epigrammatic, short, sharp,
and "telling" in style, is considerably modified. The interest is
lively, continuous, and cumulative; and there is just enough tragedy in
the story to make the happy ending all the happier. It was a novel and
adventurous idea to make a horse the hero of a tale, and the manner in
which the idea is carried out more than justifies the hazard. Winthrop,
as we know, was an ideal horseman, and knows what he is writing about.
He contrives to realize Don Fulano for us, in spite of the almost
supernatural powers and intelligence that he ascribes to the gallant
animal. One is willing to stretch a point of probability when such a
dashing and inspiring end is in view. In the present day we are getting
a little tired of being brought to account, at every turn, by Old
Prob., who tyrannizes over literature quite as much as over the
weather. Theodore Winthrop's inspiration, in this instance at least,
was strong and genuine enough to enable him to feel what he was telling
as the truth, and therefore it produces an effect of truth upon the
reader. How distinctly every incident of that ride remains stamped on
the memory, even after so long an interval as has elapsed since it was
written! And I recollect that one of the youthful devourers of this
book, who was of an artistic turn, was moved to paint three little
water-color pictures of the Gallop; the first showing the three
horses,--the White, the Gray, and the Black, scouring across the
prairie, towards the barrier of mountains behind which the sun was
setting; the second depicting Don Fulano, with Dick Wade and John Brent
on his back, plunging down the gorge upon the abductors, one of whom
had just pulled the trigger of his rifle; while the third gives the
scene in which the heroic horse receives his death-wound in carrying
the fugitive across the creek away from his pursuers. At this distance
of time, I am unable to bear any testimony as to the technical value of
the little pictures; I am inclined to fancy that they would have to be
taken _cum grano amoris_, as they certainly were executed _con amore_.
But, however that may be, the instance (which was doubtless only one of
many analogous to it) shows that Winthrop possessed the faculty of
stimulating and electrifying the imagination of his readers, which all
our recent improvements in the art and artifice of composition have not
made too common, and for which, if for nothing else, we might well feel
indebted to him.