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.