John Brent
By , Author of “ Cecil Dreeme.” Boston : Ticknor & Fields. 16mo.
IT is probable that we have not yet completely appreciated the value of the bright and noble life which a wretched Rebel sharpshooter extinguished in the disastrous tight of Great Bethel. “John Brent” is a book which gives us important aid in the attempt to form an adequate conception of Winthrop’s character. Its vivid pages shine throughout with the author’s brave and tender spirit. “ Cecil Dreeme ” was an embodiment of his thoughts, observations, and imaginations ; “John Brent” shows us the inbred poetry and romance of the man in the grander form of action. The scene is placed in the wild Western plains of America, among men entirely free from the restraints of conventional life ; and the book has a buoyancy and brisk vitality, a dashing, daring, and jubilant vigor, such as we are not accustomed to in ordinary romances of American life. Sir Philip Sidney is the type of the Anglo-Saxon hero; but we think that Winthrop was fully his match in delicacy and intrepidity, in manly courage, and in sweet, instinctive tenderness. As to style, the American far exceeds the Englishman. A certain conventional artifice and dainty affectation clouded the clear and beautiful nature of Sidney, when he wrote. The elaborate embroidery of thought, the stiff and cumbrous Elizabethan dress of language, with all its ruffles and laces, make the “ Arcadia” an imperfect exponent of Sidney’s nature. His intense thoughts, delicate emotions, and burning passions are half concealed in the form he adopts for their expression. But Winthrop is as fresh, natural, strong, and direct in his language as in his life. He used words, not for ornament, but for expression. Every phrase is stamped by a die supplied by reflection or feeling, and not a paragraph in “John Brent” differs in spirit from the practical heroism which urged the author to expose himself to certain death at Great Bethel. The condensed, lucid, picturesque, and sharp-cut sentences, flooded with will, show the nature of the man, — a man who announced no sentiments and principles he was not willing to sacrifice himself to disseminate or defend. A living energy of soul glows over the whole book, — swift, fiery, brave, wholesome, sincere, impatient of all physical obstacles to the operation of thought and affection, and eager to make stubborn facts yield to the impatient pressure of spiritual purpose.
We cannot say much in praise of the plot of “John Brent,” but it at least enables the author to supply a good framework for his incidents, descriptions, and characters. The plot is based rather on possibilities than probabilities ; but the men and women he depicts are thoroughly natural. It would be difficult to point to any other American novel which furnishes incidents that can compare in vigor and vividness with some of the incidents in this romance. The ride to rescue Helen Clitheroe from her kidnappers is a masterpiece, worthy to rank with the finest passages of Cooper or Scott. The fierce, swift black stallion, “Don Fulano,” a horse superior to any which Homer has immortalized, is almost the hero of the romance. That Winthrop, with all his sympathy with the “ advanced ” ideas and sentiments of the reformers and philanthropists of the time, was not a mere prattling and scribbling sentimentalist, is proved by his glorious idealization of this magnificent horse. He raises the beast into a moral and intellectual sympathy with his human rider, and there is a poetic justice in making him die at last in an attempt to further the escape of a fugitive slave.
The characterization of the hook is original. Gerrian, Jake Shamberlain, Armstrong, Sizzum, the Mormon preacher, are absolutely new creations. Hugh Clitheroe may suggest Dickens’s Skimpole and Hawthorne’s Clifford, but the character is developed under entirely new circumstances. As for Wade and Brent, they are persons whom we all recognize as the old heroes of romance, though the conditions under which they act are changed. Helen, the heroine of the story, is a more puzzling character to the critic; but, on the whole, we are bound to say that she is a new development of womanhood. The author exhausts all the resources of his genius in giving a “local habitation and a name ” to this fond creation of his imagination, and he has succeeded. Helen Clitheroe promises to be one of those “ beings of the mind ” which will be permanently remembered.
Heroism, active or passive, is the lesson taught by this romance, and we know that the author, in his life, illustrated both phases of the quality. His novels, which, when he was alive, the booksellers refused to publish, are now passing through their tenth and twelfth editions. Everybody reads “ Cecil Dreeme ” and “ John Brent,” and everybody must catch a more or less vivid glimpse of the noble nature of their author. But these books give but an imperfect expression of the soul of Theodore Winthrop. They have great merits, but they are still rather promises than performances. They hint of a genius which was denied full development. The character, however, from which they derive their vitality and their power to please, shines steadily through all the imperfections of plot and construction. The novelist, after all, only suggests the power and beauty of the man; and the man, though dead, will keep the novels alive. Through them we can commune with a rare and noble spirit, called away from earth before all its capacities of invention and action were developed, but still leaving brilliant traces in literature of the powers it was denied the opportunity adequately to unfold.