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.