Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/168

Rh yearneth. He is, we fear, like Pelham and Devereux, and others of the same sublime category, at once too good and too bad to be true—too sensible and too ridiculous—too sagacious and too soft-brained. He will not let us despise or dislike him, but he forces us a great way towards both feelings. Such a character is a convenient agent for a clever writer's outlay of social wit and worldly wisdom. Cecil Danby is the satirist and eke the slave of the beau monde. He becomes dictator to the world of fashion—a coxcomb of genius—a sovereign who, when he meets Brummel at Calais, regards that dethroned exile much as Cromwell surveys the features the decapitated king, in Delaroche’s picture of Charles I. in his coffin. Cecil became a coxcomb for life by catching a glimpse of himself, at six months old, in the swing-glass of his mother's dressing-room: to infant instinct there was something irresistible in its splendid satin cockade; and from that apocalyptic hour it was discovered that Master Cecil "was always screaming, unless danced up and down by the head nurse within view of the reflection of his own fascinating little person." The rise and progress of his dandyism is detailed with edifying minuteness. What the moral of such a chronicle may be, it were hard to say; unless, as has been suggested in the case of Pelham, to show that under the corsets of a dandy there sometimes beats a heart. Cecil, indeed, is eager to aver that there is no more sentiment in his composition than in ajar of Jamaica pickles; but ho knows better. He would be simply intolerable were that true. Quite necessary to the cohesion of his frivolous particles, is the occasional substratum of sentiment involved in the stories of Emily Barnet, Franszetta, Helena, &c. Indispensable to the redemption of his character from sneering heartlessness, are his intervals of sober sadness, his parentheses of self-inquiry and self-condemnation. At such intervals, he beholds an aimless destiny unaccomplished—eternity flowing through his hand, like the limpid waters of a fountain through the unconscious, unenjoying lips of some marble Triton; the conclusion to which he tends is the melancholy definition of such biographies—youth a blunder, manhood a struggle, old age a regret. The narrative of Cecil's adventures is very loosely constructed, and herein greatly inferior to Sir Bulwer Lytton's performance, which it rivals in wit and brilliance. It is a collection of sketches, the only unity of which consists in the puppyism of the narrator. This puppyism changes its aspects with the changes of life's seasons: it has its springy germination, its summer efflorescence, its autumnal ripeness, and its wintry decline; but in each avatar it is alter et idem. Mrs. Gore has relieved the almost oppressive artificial light of the book, by episodes of graver interest: the scene with old Barnet at Cintra, for instance, which conducts us to Emily's newly-dug grave—the Mignon-like picture of the Italian dancing-girl—and the death of little Arthur Danby, are effectively rendered. But these ore mere "by the way" digressions; the staple is coxcombry, its smart sayings and misdoings. Every chapter bristles with points; every paragraph has its piquant tit-bit. In respect of elaborate cleverness, pungent antithesis, and sprightly badinage, "Cecil" is probably the most remarkable of its author's remarkable productions. In plot, as we have hinted, and in delineation of character, it is subordinate to many. Cecil alone interests us. Emily comes and goes like a shadow; more might have been made, and profitably, of her ingenuous nature—