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.