Chapter XX, “A Nocturne,” is as good a place as any to observe this “stereoscopic” textuality in a short compass. Robert and Cecil have a habit of taking long walks together at night, when the reclusive painter feels relatively safe from public observation. But on this night the city seems ominous: “Night! When the gas-lights, relit, reawaken harmful purposes, that had slept through all the hours of honest sunshine in their lairs; when the tigers and tigresses take their stand where their prey will be sure to come; when the rustic in the peaceful country, with leaves whispering and crickets singing around him, sees a glow on the distant horizon, and wonders if the bad city beneath it be indeed abandoned of its godly men, and burning for its crimes. Night! The day of the base, the guilty, and the desolate!” (142). The evocation here of Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities of the plain understood to be given over to the carnal wickedness to which the name sodomy was therefore given, destroyed by the Lord, who rained “brimstone and fire” upon them (Genesis 19:24), cannot be accidental. And yet we are also given the thought of a young man in the rural countryside, looking toward what he has been told is the “bad city,” and wondering whether it is in fact really “abandoned of its godly men, and burning for its crimes.” It is in this very chapter that Dreeme and Byng first touch each other: “He dropped his cloak and took my arm. It was the first time he had given me this slight token of intimacy” (143). The gesture seals their love; they are now “Orestes and Pylades” (144), as they will be “Damon and Pythias” (204), two exemplary classical pairs of samesex lovers. But then they have a fateful encounter with Densdeth outside a theater, and he recognizes (but conceals his recognition of) Clara Denman in the guise of Cecil Dreeme. The two love plots (the romantic and the sinister) meet and gaze at one another, so to speak—we might almost say cruise each other—on the nocturnal streets of New York City.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Cecil Dreeme has been reproduced here from its first printing (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1861) and has not been modernized except in one incidental respect. Contractions have been closed up (e.g., is n’t becomes isn’t, he ’s becomes he’s, did n’t becomes didn’t, I ’ve becomes I’ve, should n’t becomes shouldn’t). A few minor typographical errors have also been silently corrected.
The notes to the text at the back of the book, keyed to page numbers, identify quotations and many literary allusions; provide classical, biblical, biographical, and other historical references; translate non-English words and phrases; and provide other kinds of supplementary information.
THEODORE WINTHROP
From Lillian C. Buttre, The American Portrait Gallery: With Biographical Sketches of Presidents, Statesmen, Military and Naval Heroes, Clergymen, Authors, Poets, Etc., Etc., Vol. II (New York: J. C. Buttre, 1877), n.p.
CECIL DREEME
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR
George William Curtis
Theodore Winthrop’s life, like a fire long smouldering, suddenly blazed up into a clear, bright flame, and vanished. Those of us who were his friends and neighbors, by whose firesides he sat familiarly, and of whose life upon the pleasant Staten Island, where he lived, he was so important a part, were so impressed by his intense vitality, that his death strikes us with peculiar strangeness, like sudden winter-silence falling upon these humming fields of June.
As I look along the wooded brook-side by which he used to come, I should not be surprised if I saw that knit, wiry, light figure moving with quick, firm, leopard tread over the grass,—the keen gray eye, the clustering fair hair, the kind, serious smile, the mien of undaunted patience. If you did not know him, you would have found his greeting a little constrained,—not from shyness, but from genuine modesty and the habit of society. You would have remarked that he was silent and observant, rather than talkative; and whatever he said, however gay or grave, would have had the reserve of sadness upon which his whole character was drawn. If it were a woman who saw him for the first time, she would inevitably see him through a slight cloud of misapprehension; for the man and his manner were a little at variance. The chance is, that at the end of five minutes she would have thought him conceited. At the end of five months she would have known him as one of the simplest and most truly modest of men.
And he had the heroic sincerity which belongs to such modesty. Of a noble ambition, and sensitive to applause,—as every delicate nature veined with genius always is,—he would not provoke the applause by doing anything which, although it lay easily within his power, was yet not wholly approved by him as worthy. Many men are ambitious and full of talent, and when the prize does not fairly come they snatch at it unfairly. This was precisely what he could not do. He would strive and deserve; but if the crown were not laid upon his head in the clear light of day and by confession of absolute merit, he could ride to his place again and wait, looking with no envy, but in patient wonder and with critical curiosity, upon the victors. It is this which he expresses in the paper in the July number of the Atlantic Monthly Magazine, “Washington as a Camp,” when he says, “I have heretofore been proud of my individuality, and resisted, so far as one may, all the world’s attempts to merge me in the mass.”
It was this which made many who knew him much, but not truly, feel that he was purposeless and restless. They knew his talent, his opportunities. Why does he not concentrate? Why does he not bring himself to bear? He did not plead his ill-health; nor would they have allowed the plea. The difficulty was deeper. He felt that he had shown his credentials, and they were not accepted. “I can wait, I can wait,” was the answer his life made to the impatience of his friends.
We are all fond of saying that a man of real gifts will fit himself to the work of any time; and so he will. But it is not necessarily to the first thing that offers. There is always latent in civilized society a certain amount of what may be called Sir Philip Sidney genius, which will seem elegant and listless and aimless enough until the congenial chance appears. A plant may grow in a cellar; but it will flower only under the due sun and warmth. Sir Philip Sidney was but a lovely possibility, until he went to be Governor of Flushing. What else was our friend, until he went to the war?
The age of Elizabeth did not monopolize the heroes, and they are always essentially the same. When, for instance, I read in a letter of Hubert Languet’s to Sidney, “You are not over-cheerful by nature,” or when, in another, he speaks of the portrait that Paul Veronese painted of Sidney, and says, “The painter has represented you sad and thoughtful,” I can believe that he is speaking of my neighbor. Or when I remember what Sidney wrote to his younger brother,—“Being a gentleman born, you purpose to furnish yourself with the knowledge of such things as may be serviceable to your country and calling,”—or what he wrote to Languet,—“Our Princes are enjoying too deep a slumber: I cannot think there is any man possessed of common understanding who does not see to what these rough storms are driving by which all Christendom has been agitated now these many years,”—I seem to hear my friend, as he used to talk on the Sunday evenings when he sat in this huge cane-chair at my side, in which I saw him last, and in which I shall henceforth always see him.
Nor is it unfair to remember just here that he bore one of the few really historic names in this country. He never spoke of it; but we should all have been sorry not to feel that he was glad to have sprung straight from that second John Winthrop who was the first Governor of Connecticut, the younger sister colony