Chapter III: The Writings

_Fresh Gleanings_ is a volume of travel, written in a way to persuade one of the uselessness of pictorial illustrations. Its manner occasionally suggests Sterne’s _Sentimental Journey_, which the young traveller may have been reading of late. Sentiment and humor are agreeably blended. Under ‘Ik Marvel’s’ guidance one visits Paris, Limoges, Arles, Nîmes, Montpellier, Rouen, carefully avoiding the ‘objects of interest’ and learning much about the life. A less courageous writer would have told us more and shown us less.

Books like this always contain interpolated stories, told around the inn fire, or over the half-cup at the café. The ‘Story of Le Merle,’ ‘An Old Chronicle of the City,’ ‘Hinzelmann,’ and ‘Boldo’s Story’ are graceful, but so brief as to seem mere anecdotes.

_The Lorgnette_, consisting of the lucubrations of one ‘John Timon,’ is an amusing and instructive periodical. Not its least entertaining feature is the account of the literary distempers of the day, the Tupper fever, the Festus outbreak, the Jane Eyre malady, and the Typee disorder, together with other literary epidemics. Neither _The Lorgnette_ nor _Fudge Doings_ is now much read. But if the modern cynic, who takes, possibly, a condescending attitude towards these old satires on fashionable life, will but pick up a copy of _Fudge Doings_ and try a few chapters, he will be forced to admit that if we should not to-day think of writing satire in this manner, it may have been a good way in 1855. Perchance in opening the volume at random he comes on the account of the adventure of Wash. Fudge with the black domino. In which case he will find himself betrayed into reading two chapters at least, for he must needs take the trouble to learn how the affair ended.

_Fudge Doings_ and _The Lorgnette_ may be looked on as a contribution to the history of manners. By their aid one reconstructs the drama of fashionable life in the mid-century, sees what was then thought monstrous, and incidentally learns how simple the vices of the grandfathers were.

_Reveries of a Bachelor_ ushers one into a quaint and delightful world. The reveries are of love--whether, in the words of Robert Burton quoting Plotinus, ‘it be a God, or a divell, or passion of the minde.’ The book is by no means compounded exclusively of moonshine and roses. Some of the pictures are calculated to give a bachelor pause. Here is Peggy who loves you, or at least swears it, with her hand on the _Sorrows of Werther_. She is not bad looking, Peggy, ‘save a bit too much of forehead.’ But she is ‘such a sad blue’ who will spend her money on the ‘Literary World’ and the _Friends in Council_.

By the severer standards of our day Peggy was not so much of a ‘blue.’ None the less she is distinctly literary. She reads Dante and ‘funny Goldoni’ and leaves spots of baby-gruel on a Tasso of 1680. She adores La Bruyère; even reads him while nurse gets dinner and ‘you are holding the baby.’

The vision presently becomes terrific and can only be dispelled by a vicious kick at the forestick. Revery, misnamed idleness, has its uses. Whatever else comes true, the Bachelor will not marry a young woman who consoles her husband for an ill-cooked dinner by quotations from the Greek Anthology.

_Dream Life_ is also a collection of ‘reveries.’ Under the similitude of the seasons, the author has pencilled little sketches of boyhood, youth, manhood, and age. The temptation to the obvious in morals and sentiment must have been great; but again Mitchell’s literary skill and his humor carry him through successfully.

_Seven Stories with Basement and Attic_ is a group of narratives drawn from the author’s ‘plethoric little note books of travel.’ The ‘Basement’ is the introduction, the ‘Attic’ the conclusion. The first story, ‘Wet Day at an Irish Inn,’ shows how, if he be observant, a man may have adventures without taking the trouble to cross the street in search of them. Three of the stories are French (‘Le Petit Soulier,’ ‘The Cabriolet,’ and ‘Emile Roque’); another is Swiss (the ‘Bride of the Ice King’); yet another is Italian (‘Count Pesaro’), and all are exquisite, written in a style which for sweetness and unaffected ease is, if not a lost art, at all events a neglected one. It has been said that our young men would not care to write in this fashion to-day; it is a question whether our young men would be able to do so.

One novel stands to ‘Ik Marvel’s’ credit, _Doctor Johns_, a story of a New England country parsonage, well written because its author could not write otherwise, faithful and exact because he knew the life, yet going no deeper than other attempts to explain the New England character, the externals of which are so easy to portray and the real essence so baffling.

Among the best of ‘Ik Marvel’s’ books are those dealing with rural life. _My Farm of Edgewood_ sets forth the author’s adventures in buying a country home, and his subsequent adventures in settling therein and making life variously profitable. It is a successful attempt to magnify the office of gentleman-farmer. The attractiveness of the life is not over-emphasized, nor is it pretended that that is legitimate farming which produces big crops regardless of expense.

The picture as a whole is seductive in ways not to be referred to the literary skill of the artist. It is odd enough how a lay-reader, unused to carrots and cabbages, will follow every detail of Mitchell’s experiment. Here must be some outcroppings of the primitive instinct. Moreover, the book relates to home-making, a subject perennially dear to the American heart. Our restlessness has never unsettled us in that regard.

_Wet Days at Edgewood_ is a companion volume. The days here celebrated, nine in number, were made bright by readings about ‘old farmers, old gardeners, and old pastorals.’ Rejoicing in the strong common sense of ancient writers on husbandry, and in the quaint flavor of their style, ‘Ik Marvel’ chats of Roman farm and villa life, recalling what Varro and Columella had to say about the art of tilling the soil. He takes pleasure in the reflection that ‘yon open furrow ... carries trace of the ridging in the “Works and Days;” that the brown field of half-broken clods is the fallow (Νεός) of Xenophon,’ and that ‘Cato gives orders for the asparagus.’

Then he comes to modern times, to the days of Thomas Tusser, Sir Hugh Platt, Gervase Markham, Samuel Hartlib, Jethro Tull, and William Shenstone, men who farmed practically, or theoretically, or even poetically. ‘Ik Marvel’ loves them all, even those whose enthusiasm was in the ratio of their helplessness. No less dear to him is Goldsmith, who wrote what passes for a rural tale and is not rural at all, but comically urban, and Charles Lamb, who hated the country and gladly avowed it.

These are Mitchell’s principal works. Having read thus far, it were a pity to overlook the two volumes on _English Lands, Letters, and Kings_, and a greater pity to overlook the instructive and entertaining _American Lands and Letters_. In brief, the reader who insists on knowing ‘Ik Marvel’ only by _Reveries of a Bachelor_ does his author an injustice and robs himself of many hours of literary delight.

Sentimentalism will always manifest itself in literature in one form or another. That there will be a return to the manner which we associate with ‘Ik Marvel’ is not likely, yet it was sentimentalism in its manliest form. The continued popularity of _Reveries of a Bachelor_ suggests that Americans of to-day are not quite as cynical and irreverent as they are sometimes painted, or as they love to paint themselves.

FOOTNOTES:

[61] There were to have been two volumes of _Battle Summer_,
called respectively the ‘Reign of the Blouse’ and the ‘Reign
of the Bourgeoisie.’ Only the first was published.

[62] Reprinted under the title _Out-of-Town Places_, 1884.