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.
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