The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 04, No. 21, July, 1859

Seacliff: or the Mystery of the Westervelts. By J.W. DE FOREST, Author of "Oriental Acquaintance," "European Acquaintance," etc., etc. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. pp. 466. 12mo.

This is a very readable novel, artful in plot, effective in characterization, and brilliant in style. "The Mystery of the Westervelts" is a mystery which excites the reader's curiosity at the outset, and holds his pleased attention to the end. The incidents are so contrived that the secret is not anticipated until it is unveiled, and then the explanation is itself a surprise. The characters are generally strongly conceived, skilfully discriminated, and happily combined. The delineation of Mr. Westervelt, the father of the heroine, is especially excellent. Irresolute in thought, impotent in will, and only occasionally fretted by circumstances into a feeble activity, he is an almost painfully accurate representation of a class of men who drift through life without any power of self-direction. Mrs. Westervelt has equal moral feebleness with less brain, and her character is a study in practical psychology. Somerville, the villain of the piece, who unites the disposition of Domitian to the manners of Chesterfield, is the pitiless master of this female slave. The coquettish Mrs. Van Leer is a prominent personage of the story; and her shallow malice and pretty deviltries are most effectively represented. She is not only a flirt in outward actions, but a flirt in soul, and her perfection in impertinence almost rises to genius. All these characters betray patient meditation, and the author's hold on them is rarely relaxed. A novel evincing so much intellectual labor, written in a style of such careful elaboration, and exhibiting so much skill in the development of the story, can scarcely fail of a success commensurate with its merits.

To Cuba and Back. A Vacation Voyage. By R.H. DANA, JR., Author of "Two Years before the Mast." Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1859. pp. 288. 16mo.

It was, perhaps, a dangerous experiment for the author of a book of the worldwide and continued popularity of "Two Years before the Mast" to dare, with that almost unparalleled success still staring him in the face, to tempt Fortune by giving to the public another book. But long before this time, the thousands of copies that have left the shelves of the publishers have attested a success scarcely second to that of Mr. Dana's first venture. The elements of success, in both cases, are to be found in every page of the books themselves. This "Vacation Voyage" has not a dull page in it. Every reader reads it to the end. Every paragraph has its own charm; every word is chosen with that quick instinct that seizes upon the right word to describe the matter in hand which characterizes Mr. Dana's forensic efforts, and places him so high on the list of natural-born advocates,—which gives him the power of eloquence at the bar, and a power scarcely less with the slower medium of the pen. These Cuban sketches are real stereographs, and Cuba stands before you as distinct and lifelike as words can make it. Single words, from Mr. Dana's pen, are pregnant with great significance, and their meaning is brought out by taking a little thought, as the leaves and sticks and stones and pigmy men and women in the shady corners of the stereograph are developed into the seeming proportions of real life, when the images in the focus of the lenses of the stereoscope. We know of no modern book of travels which gives one so vivid and fresh a picture, in many various aspects, of the external nature, the people, the customs, the laws and domestic institutions of a strange country, as does this little volume, the off-hand product of a few days snatched from the engrossing cares of the most active professional life. With a quick eye for the beauties of landscape, a keen and lively perception of what is droll and amusing in human nature, a warm heart, sympathizing readily where sympathy is required, the various culture of the scholar, and the training of the lawyer and politician, all well mixed with manly, straightforward, Anglo-Saxon pluck, Mr. Dana has, in an eminent degree, all the best qualities that should mark the traveller who undertakes to tell his story to the world.

Some statistics, judiciously introduced, of the present government, and of the institution of slavery and the slave-trade, with the author's comments upon them, give a practical value to the book at this time for all thinking and patriotic citizens, and make it one not only to be read for an hour's entertainment, but carefully studied for the important practical suggestions of its pages.

Memoir of Theophilus Parsons, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts; with Notices of some of his Contemporaries. By his Son, THEOPHILUS PARSONS. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1859. pp. 476.

The division of the United States into so many wellnigh independent republics, each with official rewards in its gift great enough to excite and to satisfy a considerable ambition, makes fame a palpably provincial thing in America. We say palpably, because the larger part of contemporary fame is truly parochial everywhere; only we are apt to overlook the fact when we measure by kingdoms or empires instead of counties, and to fancy a stature for Palmerston or Persigny suitable to the size of the stage on which they act. It seems a much finer thing to be a Lord Chancellor in England than a Chief Justice in Massachusetts; yet the same abilities which carried the chance-transplanted Boston boy, Lyndhurst, to the woolsack, might, perhaps, had he remained in the land of his birth, have found no higher goal than the bench of the Supreme Court. Mr. Dickens laughed very fairly at the "remarkable men" of our small towns; but England is full of just such little-greatness, with the difference that one is proclaimed in the "Bungtown Tocsin" and the other in the "Times." We must get a new phrase, and say that Mr. Brown was immortal at the latest dates, and Mr. Jones a great man when the steamer sailed. The small man in Europe is reflected to his contemporaries from a magnifying mirror, while even the great men in America can be imaged only in a diminishing one. If powers broaden with the breadth of opportunity, if Occasion be the mother of greatness and not its tool, the centralizing system of Europe should produce more eminent persons than our distributive one. Certain it is that the character grows larger in proportion to the size of the affairs with which it is habitually concerned, and that a mind of more than common stature acquires an habitual stoop, if forced to deal lifelong with little men and little things.

Even that German-silver kind of fame, Notoriety, can scarcely be had here at a cheaper rate than a murder done in broad daylight of a Sunday; and the only sure way of having one's name known to the utmost corners of our empire is by achieving a continental _dis_repute. With a metropolis planted in a crevice between Maryland and Virginia, and stunted because its roots vainly seek healthy nourishment in a soil impoverished by slavery, a paulopost future capital, the centre of nothing, without literature, art, or so much as commerce,—we have no recognized dispenser of national reputations like London or Paris. In a country richer in humor, and among a people keener in the sense of it than any other, we cannot produce a national satire or caricature, because there is no butt visible to all parts of the country at once. How many men at this moment know the names, much more the history or personal appearance, of our cabinet ministers? But the joke of London or Paris tickles all the ribs of England or France, and the intellectual rushlight of those cities becomes a beacon, set upon such bushels, and multiplied by the many-faced provincial reflector behind it. Meanwhile New York and Boston wrangle about literary and social preëminence like two schoolboys, each claiming to have something (he knows not exactly what) vastly finer than the other at home. Let us hope that we shall by-and-by develop a rivalry like that of the Italian cities, and that the difficulty of fame beyond our own village may make us more content with doing than desirous of the name of it. For, after all, History herself is for the most part but the Muse of Little Peddlington, and Athens raised the heaviest crop of laurels yet recorded on a few acres of rock, without help from newspaper guano.

Theophilus Parsons was one of those men of whom surviving contemporaries always say that he was the most gifted person they had ever known, while yet they are able to produce but little tangible evidence of his superiority. It is, no doubt, true that Memory's geese are always swans; but in the case of a man like Parsons, where the testimony is so various and concurrent, we cannot help believing that there must have been a special force of character, a marked alertness and grasp of mind, to justify the impression he left behind. With the exception of John Adams, he was probably the most considerable man of his generation in Massachusetts; and it is not merely the caruit quia vate sacro, but the narrowness of his sphere of action, still further narrowed by the technical nature of a profession in itself provincial, as compared with many other fields for the display of intellectual power, that has hindered him from receiving an amount of fame at all commensurate with an ability so real and so various.

But the life of a strong man, lived no matter where, and perhaps all the more if it have been isolated from the noisier events which make so large a part of history, contains the best material of biography. Judge Parsons was fortunate in a son capable of doing that well, which, even if ill done, would have been interesting. A practised writer, the author of two volumes of eloquent and thoughtful essays, Professor Parsons has known how to select and arrange his matter with a due feeling of effect and perspective. When he fails to do this, it is because here and there the essayist has got the better of the biographer. We are not concerned here, for example, to know Mr. Parsons's opinions about Slavery, and we are sure that the sharp insight and decisive judgment of his father would never have allowed him to be frightened by the now somewhat weather-beaten scarecrow of danger to the Union.

In the earlier part of the Memoir we get some glimpses of pre-Revolutionary life in New England, which we hope yet to see illustrated more fully in its household aspects.8 The father of Parsons was precisely one of those country-clergymen who were "passing rich on forty pounds a year." On a salary of two hundred and eighty dollars, he brought up a family of seven children, three of whom he sent to college, and kept a hospitable house.

Of Parsons's college experiences we get less than we could desire; but as he advances in life, we find his mind exercised by the great political and social problem whose solution was to be the experiment of Democracy at housekeeping for herself,—we see him influencing State and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining the end to being known as the means,—and finally, as Chief Justice, reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the Common Law of the country.

We know nothing more striking than the dying speech recorded in the concluding chapter. At the end of a life so laborious and so useful, the Judge, himself withdrawing to be judged, murmurs,—"Gentlemen of the Jury, the facts of the case are in your hands. You will retire and consider of your verdict." In this volume, the son has submitted the facts of the case to a jury of posterity. His case will not be injured by the modesty with which he has stated it. He has claimed less for his father than one less near to him might have done. We think the verdict must be, that this was a great man marooned by Destiny on an out-of-the-way corner of the world, where, however he might exert great powers, there was no adequate field for that display of them which is the necessary condition of fame.

Mr. Parsons has done a real service to our history and our letters in this volume. Accompanying and illustrating his main topic, he has given us excellent sketches of some other persons less eminent than his father, sometimes from tradition and sometimes from his own impressions. We hope in the next edition he will give us a supplementary chapter of personal anecdotes, of which there is a large number that deserve to be perpetuated in print, and which otherwise will die with the memories in which they are now preserved. The strictly professional part of the biography, illustrating the Chief Justice's more important decisions, might also be advantageously enlarged.

1

I remember to have seen an excellent portrait of him, by Alexander, in the studio of that artist, in the year 1825; but in whose possession it now is, I am unable to say.

2

Commenced actor, commenced author, commenced tinker, commenced tailor, commenced candlestick-maker:—Elegant phraseology, though we venture to think, hardly idiomatic or logical, which came into vogue in England in the early part of the last century, and which, as it is never uttered here by cultivated people, it may be proper to remark, is there used by the best writers. Akin to it is another mode of expression as commonly met with in English books and periodicals, e.g., "immediately he arrived at London he went upon the stage," meaning, as soon as he arrived, etc., or, when he arrived at London, he immediately went upon the stage. As far as our observation extends, Lord Macaulay, alone of all Great-Britons, has neglected to add the latter lucid construction to the graces of his style.

3

Shakespeare a Lawyer. By William L. Rushton. 16mo. pp. 50. London: 1858. Shakespeare's Legal Acquirements Considered. By John Lord Campbell, LL.D., F.R.S.E. 12mo. pp. 117. London: 1859.

4

Into the trap so innocently set the London Athenaeum thus plunges headlong:—"Chalmers, we believe, first put Shakespeare in an attorney's office. Malone accepted the hint."

5

Lord Campbell gives the date 1589; but see Mr. Dyce's indisputable authority. Greene's Works. Vol. I., pp. xxxvii. and ciii.

6

It seems clear, on the contrary, that Nash's object was to sneer at Jasper Heywood, Alexander Nevil, John Studley, Thomas Nuce, and Thomas Newton,—one or more of them,—whose Seneca, his Tenne Tragedies translated into Englysh, was published in 1581. It is a very grievous performance; and Shakespeare, who had read it thoroughly, made sport of it in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

7

Falstaff, for instance, speaks of "the wearing out of six fashions, which is four terms or two actions."

8

Mr. Elliott, in his New England History, has wisely gathered many of those unconsidered trifles which are so important in forming a just notion of the character of a population. We cannot but wish that our town-historians, instead of giving so much space to idle and often untrustworthy genealogies, and to descriptions of the "elegant mansions" of Messrs. This and That, would do us the real service of rescuing from inevitable oblivion the fleeting phases of household scenery that help us to that biography of a people so much more interesting than their annals. We would much rather know whether a man wore homespun, a hundred years ago, than whether he was a descendant of Rameses I.