Part 23

Curtis wrote one novel, _Trumps_, and was disappointed in the result. The book is readable, but not because it is a story. Many good novelists are made, not born. _Trumps_ is the work of a novelist in the making.

V

THE EASY CHAIR

The twenty-seven essays of the volume entitled _From the Easy Chair_ show very well in brief compass the range of their author’s powers in this form. Here are reminiscences of Browning and his wife, of the Dickens readings in ’67, of Everett’s oratory and Jennie Lind’s singing, of a lecture by Emerson and a recital by Gottschalk or by Thalberg, of a night at the play-house with Jefferson, or a dinner at the old (the _very old_) Delmonico’s, when that famous eating-house stood at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street. The flavor of by-gone days is here. ‘It was a pleasant little New York,’ says the essayist regretfully, being mindful of the charm which a lively small city possesses, and which a big city, be it never so lively, somehow lacks.

Half the attractiveness of the ‘Easy Chair’ papers is due to their seemingly unpremeditated character. Curtis was not writing a book, nor was he proposing at some time, ‘in response to the earnest solicitations of friends upon whose judgment I rely,’ to collect and republish these fugitive leaves. He comes home after a little chat, perhaps, with John Gilbert and sits down to tell us about it. Two or three reflections suggested by the interview are thrown in quite happily, and while we listeners are most absorbed and in no mood to have him break off, Curtis rises, and with some pleasant little remark, nods, and smiles, and is gone. And one of the listeners says, ‘I wish we saw him oftener. He comes only once a month.’

The ‘Easy Chair’ papers are urban as well as urbane. Curtis was a city man. We know that he had a summer home in ‘Arcadia’ and was happy there, but his joy in city life is betrayed in almost every paper he wrote. No passionate lover of nature, intent on fringed gentians and purling brooks, penned that description of a gown--‘a mass of pleats and puffs and marvelous trimmings, which, when profusely extravagant upon the form of an elderly woman, always reminds me of signals of distress hung out upon a craft that is drifting far away from the enchanted isles of youth.’

Satirist though he is, Curtis in the ‘Easy Chair’ is always the gentle satirist. He writes of the mannerless sex, of the people who rent boxes at the opera because they can talk better there than at home, of the taste of the town so greedy for minute details of the doings of the rich and the fashionable, but there is no acerbity in his tone. Here is an illustration of his manner. The Cosmopolitan of the ‘Easy Chair’ talks with Mrs. Grundy, who proposes as a great boon to introduce him to a very rich man. ‘“You say he is very rich?” “Enormously, fabulously,” replied Mrs. Grundy, as if crossing herself.’

‘Trifles light as air’ would be a not inadequate description of hundreds of the ‘Easy Chair’ papers. And they are quite as wholesome as air.

VI

_ORATIONS AND ADDRESSES_

Curtis’s biographer holds that the volume of reports and addresses on Civil Service reform is ‘in some respects the most valuable of all [his] writings.’[60] The entire collection of _Orations and Addresses_, comprising over a thousand pages, is no less a manual of literary than of civic virtues. A student of the art of expression can well afford to make this book his vade mecum. Here is a body of practical illustration of how to write and how to speak. The oration on ‘The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times,’ delivered when Curtis was thirty-two years of age, is an extraordinary performance. Few addresses hold one in the reading like this. What it must have been in the delivery we can but faintly imagine. It is another splendid proof that literature and oratory may occupy a common ground, neither usurping the other’s place. With the amplest use of oratorical arts the speaker makes rhetoric subordinate to thought. It shows fully (does this oration) one marked virtue of Curtis’s public discourse, its perfect urbanity. His speeches were free from invective, from personalities of any sort, from every feature born of mere impulse of the moment. If he was ever tempted to give vigor and point to his phrase by means which must afterward be regretted, temptation never got the better of him.

The leading thesis of the Wesleyan College oration--that the scholar is not the recluse, the pale valetudinarian, a woman without woman’s charm, but a man--may not have been new; but the putting was fresh, vivid, inspiring, eloquent. The oration may be compared with Emerson’s utterances on the same theme. Emerson’s treatment is the more philosophical; that of Curtis is the better adapted to public speech.

Along with this oration should be read the address on ‘Patriotism,’ in which Curtis defends the doctrine that where law violates the primary conception of human rights it is our duty to disobey the law, and the address entitled ‘The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question,’ in which Curtis said, ‘Government is, unquestionably, a science of compromises, but only of policies and interests, not of essential rights; and if of them, then the sacrifice must fall on all.’

These three are but the beginning of a series of orations from among which the great eulogies of Sumner and of Wendell Phillips, of Bryant and of Lowell, may be chosen as the very crown of his work.

* * * * *

The critic (and there are such critics) who values almost lightly the sentimental and poetic literary work of Curtis’s young manhood is perhaps not entirely unjust; Curtis would have agreed with him. But the critic would be unjust if he overlooked the value of this literary training in giving an enormous increase of power. We shall never know how much the editorial writer and political orator gained in clarity, precision, beauty of style, effectiveness, by the penning of a series of books in which for pages together he revels in the mere music of words. The author of the address on Sumner was largely indebted to the author of the _Nile Notes of a Howadji_ and _Prue and I_.

FOOTNOTES:

[58] When Curtis gave this address in Philadelphia (Dec. 15, 1859) a mob armed with stones and bottles of vitriol attempted to break up the meeting. Cary’s _Curtis_, pp. 126–129.

[59] Cary.

[60] Cary’s _Curtis_, p. 296.

XVII

_Donald Grant Mitchell_

REFERENCES:

[=H. A. Beers=]: ‘Donald G. Mitchell’ in the _Cyclopædia of American Biography_.

I

HIS LIFE

Donald Grant Mitchell, who won literary reputation under the name of ‘Ik Marvel,’ was born at Norwich, Connecticut, on April 12, 1822. He is a son of the Reverend Alfred Mitchell, formerly pastor of the Second Congregational Church of Norwich, and a grandson of Stephen Mix Mitchell, an eminent jurist and member of the Continental Congress. He prepared for college at John Hall’s school at Ellington, and was graduated at Yale in 1841.

Three years of life on a farm for his health gave him a bent towards rural pleasures and occupations. In 1844, still in pursuit of health, he visited England, the Isle of Jersey, France, and Holland. His first book, _Fresh Gleanings, or a New Sheaf from the Old Fields of Continental Europe_ (1847), was the literary fruit of this journey.

Mitchell took up the study of law in New York, but found himself physically unequal to a sedentary life. Moreover, France was on the eve of revolution. The young law student thought it no time to dawdle over Puffendorf, Grotius, and ‘the amiable, aristocratic Blackstone,’ when there was a chance to see history made. He ‘threw Puffendorf, big as he was, into the corner,’ and started for Paris, spent eight months there, saw what he went to see, and described it in his second book, _Battle Summer_ (1850).[61]

His third literary venture was a periodical essay, _The Lorgnette, or Studies of the Town, by an Opera-Goer_. It was published weekly for six months, and sold by Henry Kernot, ‘a small bookseller up Broadway, at the centre of what was then the fashionable shopping region.’ For a time the secret of the authorship was well kept, Kernot being as much in the dark as the public. To divert suspicion from himself, Mitchell thought to bring out in a distant city, and under his own name, something ‘of an entirely different quality and tone’ from _The Lorgnette_. He failed in getting a Boston publisher, and _Reveries of a Bachelor_, the book in question, was published by Baker and Scribner in New York (1850). Its success led to the making of another series of ‘reveries.’ This was _Dream Life_, written in six weeks of the summer and published in the fall of 1851. On these two books ‘Ik Marvel’s’ reputation with the general reading public still rests.

In May, 1853, Mitchell was appointed United States consul at Venice. On the thirty-first of the same month he married Miss Mary F. Pringle, of Charleston, South Carolina, and in June sailed for Italy. The account of his induction into the consular office will be found in _Seven Stories_. A lively and good-humored narrative, it is not to be read without great amusement, together with a feeling of contempt for the shabby way in which our glorious (and sometimes parsimonious) republic used to treat its humbler officials. During the two years of his consulship Mitchell collected materials for a history of the Venetian Republic. The book is still unpublished, and presumably has been long since abandoned.

The days of his public service being at an end, Mitchell returned to America and settled on an estate near New Haven (‘Edgewood’), where since 1855 he has led the life of a man of letters and gentleman farmer. In addition to the books already named, he has published: _Fudge Doings_, 1855; _My Farm of Edgewood_, 1863; _Seven Stories_, 1864; _Wet Days at Edgewood_, 1865; _Doctor Johns_, 1866; _Rural Studies_, 1867;[62] _About Old Story Tellers_, 1877; _The Woodbridge Record_, 1883; _Bound Together_, 1884; _English Lands, Letters, and Kings_, 1889–90; _American Lands and Letters_, 1897.

For a time Mitchell was editor of the ‘Atlantic Almanac’ (1868–69), and for one year (1869) editor of ‘Hearth and Home.’ He served as one of the judges of industrial art at the Centennial Exhibition (1876), and was a United States commissioner at the Paris Exposition of 1878. He has lectured much on literature and art. Yale recognized his achievements in letters by conferring on him, in 1878, the degree of LL. D.

He is one of the most attractive figures of our time, not alone because of his unaffected goodness, his charm of manner, his literary reputation, but because he is the last survivor of a group of writers who in the Fifties made New York famous, and about whose association there still clings a very attractive atmosphere of romance.

II

THE AUTHOR AND THE MAN

A critic who was given a copy of _Dream Life_ and asked to draw the character of the author therefrom, might possibly come to conclusions like these. ‘Ik Marvel,’ he would say, must be very generous, sympathetic with respect to the lesser weaknesses of human nature, and charitable towards the greater, or else this book is a falsehood from beginning to end. He must be very manly, for in all its two hundred pages there is not a cynical note or a sneer. He must be humorous, or he could not have written the chapters on ‘A New England Squire’ and ‘The Country Church,’ to say nothing of the account of the loves of Clarence and Jenny. He must be sentimental, or the chapter entitled ‘A Good Wife’ had been an impossibility.

At every point the book betrays its Puritan origin. ‘Ik Marvel’ is a moralist. He makes a direct and constant appeal to the ethical sentiment. In one of his prefaces he mentions the fact--doubtless an amused smile played about his lips as he wrote the lines--that _Dream Life_ has sometimes insinuated itself into Sunday-school libraries. He hopes it has ‘worked no blight there.’ At all events, ‘there are six days in the week ... on which its perusal could do no mischief.’ Doubtless the moral lessons are commonplace enough, but their triteness is relieved by the literary quality. Puritanism without its narrowness, and sentimentalism controlled by humor and good sense, lie at the basis of _Reveries of a Bachelor_ and _Dream Life_. The character of their author is to be plainly if not completely read in these two books.

The distinctive flavor of ‘Ik Marvel’s’ literary style may be got in the pleasing volume entitled _Fresh Gleanings_. Limpidity, grace, ease, are among the virtues of his prose. The fabric of words is light, airy, richly colored at times, but not over colored. With due recognition of his individuality it may be said that ‘Ik Marvel’ was a literary son of ‘Geoffrey Crayon.’ The sweetness, the leisurely flow of the narrative, the unobtrusiveness of manner, all suggest Irving. Perhaps Mitchell meant to acknowledge his literary paternity when he dedicated _Dream Life_ to the author of _The Sketch Book_. But while we recognize this debt to Irving it is most important that we do not exaggerate it.

One marked exception must be made. There is no hint of Irving in _Battle Summer_, an account of the Revolution of 1848, every page of which echoes more or less distinctly the voice of Carlyle. So close is the imitation at times as to awaken a doubt whether _Battle Summer_ was not intended for a ‘serious parody.’ At all events, it is one of many proofs of the strong hold the _History of the French Revolution_ had on the minds of young men.

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.

XVIII

_JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL_

REFERENCES:

=F. H. Underwood=: _The Poet and the Man: Recollections and Appreciations of James Russell Lowell_, 1893.

=E. E. Hale=: _James Russell Lowell and his Friends_, 1899.

=H. E. Scudder=: _James Russell Lowell, a Biography_, 1901.

=Ferris Greenslet=: _James Russell Lowell, his Life and Work_, 1905.

I

HIS LIFE

The Lowells of New England are descendants of Percival Lowell, a prosperous Bristol merchant who came to America in 1639 and settled at Newbury, Massachusetts. The family has been distinguished through its various representatives for public spirit and business acumen as well as for a devotion to letters. The grandfather of the poet, Judge John Lowell, was author of the clause in the Bill of Rights abolishing slavery in Massachusetts. One of his sons was founder of the great manufacturing city on the Merrimac which bears his name. A grandson established the Lowell Institute, a system of popular instruction by free courses of lectures,--a system unique, in that it aims to bring to its audiences representative scholars, chosen less for their skill in the graceful but often specious art of public speaking than for solid attainments.

James Russell Lowell, the youngest son of the Reverend Charles Lowell, minister of the West Church in Boston, was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the colonial mansion known as ‘Elmwood,’ on February 22, 1819. His mother, Harriet (Spence) Lowell, was a daughter of Keith Spence, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.[63]

Under William Wells (an English pedagogue of the old school) Lowell prepared for college, entered Harvard, and after some disciplinary tribulations was graduated with his class (1838). He studied law and was admitted to the bar (August, 1840), but remained briefless during the few months of his efforts to begin a practice.