The Charm of "Ik Marvel"

“MIDDLE age does not look on life like youth; we cannot make it. And why mix the years and the thoughts ? Let the young carry their own burdens and banner ; and we — ours. For me those young years are gone. I cannot go back to that tide. I hear the rush of it in quiet hours like the murmur of lost music.” Such was Mr. Mitchell’s answer forty years ago when he was asked to revise, for a new edition, those Reveries which had early won for him the fellowship of thousands of readers. Twenty years later came the same request from the publishers, met by a similar protest. He added a word of grateful surprise at the steady demand for the little book which, “in spite of its youngness and fervent rhetoric,” appealed yearly to so many new readers and old friends. Thirty years ago these essays of reverie and dream-life were familiar to college students throughout our country; they were read, not as “college requirements in English,” but because they appealed to the emotions and ambitions of young manhood. In those days the literary rather than the athletic spirit pervaded our universities. The books were also household favorites in that same past, before the reign of Women’s Clubs and classes, and before the surplus of light periodicals had intruded upon cultural reading by the fireside.

In these later days, younger students may not be sure of “Ik Marvel’s” work in letters, but they have found in the rural and literary studies of Donald G. Mitchell the same happy fancy and form which charmed the older generation. To name the essential quality of his writings we must turn to the primal meaning of sentimental, without any taint of excess or artifice. His theme may be idyllic or realistic, but it is always treated with wholesome, frank sentiment. To-day, as in the past, his fancies and musings, his gleanings in rural and literary fields, give mental pleasure and more gracious temper. Past fourscore, in touch with the highest life in ideal and actuality, Mr. Mitchell deserves the tribute which he once gave to Irving, — “ Fashions of books may change — do change; a studious realism may put in disorder the quaint dressing of his thought. . . . But the fashion of his heart and of his abiding good-will towards men will last—will last while the hills last.”

In his books are common traits of other favorites, — the geniality of Lamb and Irving, the domestic tenderness of Longfellow and Curtis, the subtle wit of Lowell and Holmes, the outdoor delight of Walton, Thoreau, and Miss Mitford, the romantic fancy of such modern reveries as My Lady Nicotine and Dream Days. There is also a strong individuality which emphasizes, if it does not explain, the charm of both his earlier and later books. The reader knows his author’s personality, a man of rare kindliness, well-trained mind, wise ideals, and a winsome modesty shown by the greeting, given with a hearty hand-clasp of welcome, to a recent “interviewer” who called at Edgewood, — “Well, I am sorry to say I dread your call as much as I would that of a kindly disposed dentist.”

The roots of this personality may be traced in two sturdy, college-bred New England families, the Mitchells and the Woodbridges. The masterful Scotch ancestor, Donald Grant, has had his name twice honored. Alfred Mitchell, father of our author, was a fine scholar, with plenty of courage in matters of duty, but “diffident to a fault.” On the hillside burial-ground in Norwich, Connecticut, overlooking the church where he preached for seventeen years, is the record of his character, “sound in doctrine, plain and faithful in his preaching, conscientious and upright, amiable and affectionate in every relation of life.” At the Otis Library of the same city may be read three or four of his printed sermons, undoubtedly “sound in doctrine,” but no less kindly in their appeal to his “dear, perishing hearers.” His rural tastes heralded the joys of his son at Edgewood. Up a little path behind the parsonage, at the entrance to dense woods still standing, he constructed a “retreat.” Mrs. Sigourney, neighbor and friend of the family, said that within this arbor one would always find a single book, the Bible.

Though Norwich was not long the home of Donald Mitchell after his boyhood and his father’s death, yet he never lost his vivid impressions of his birthplace. For Miss Perkins’s book, Old Houses of ye Antient Town of Norwich, he made a map from his memories of the town about 1830, when he was eight years old. It is most interesting, this colored drawing, — “ A Boyish Remembrance.” Incidentally, he marked the Court House, the Brick Tavern, and an occasional church, school, or residence; but with conspicuous skill he located the Skating-Pond, the Peat-Pond, the RopeWalk, the Watering-Trough, the Red Barn, the cranberry meadow, the clump of mulberry trees, and the long avenue of white sycamores.

Behind the New Haven homestead of Donald Mitchell rise the Woodbridge hills, commemorating the name of his maternal family. On his last public appearance four years ago at the Yale bicentennial, he gave the address of dedication for Woodbridge Hall. Recalling the family traits, he expressed, in one of his unique metaphors, the true meaning of the occasion: “ And so this great belt of Woodbridge influences which I have sketched in bald outline, cropping out in churches, in teeming villages, in mills that fire the October nights, —this whole Woodbridge belt, I say, is to-day buckled by this jewel of a building about the loins of this stalwart University of Yale!”

In Ellington, in old Winsor, at Dr. John Hall’s famous school for boys, Donald Mitchell passed a brief season and later used some impressions of this strict, nature-loving master and other village types in his story of Dr. Johns. Some pages of Dream Life are autobiographical in feeling, if not in fact, especially the chapter on “Cloister Life.” Far more than to the average student of his day or of ours, his college years gave mental equipment and focus towards the future. Here he began literary work on the college journal; as class orator, he made a personal plea for “ The Dignity of Learning” as a vital part of life’s purpose. With the first steps towards literature, there was mingled that love for country life which gave impetus to much of his writing. He came in direct contact with the soil by hard work, during vacations and after college, at the ancestral farm in Salem, near Norwich. The grapes and the nuts, the clover, the pastures, and the barn-rafters were photographed upon his heart. In the book of mature life, Rural Studies, he devoted a chapter to this large farm, “wild, unkempt, slatternly,” with elements of drudgery and ugliness, but with many compensations for senses and soul. “Nothing to see? Lo, the play of light and shade over the distant hills, or the wind, making tossed and streaming wavelets on the rye. Nothing to hear? Wait a moment and you shall listen to the bursting, melodious roundelay of the merriest singer upon earth, — the black and white-coated Bobo-Lincoln, as he rises on easy wing, floats in sunshine, and overflows with song, then sinks, as if exhausted by his brilliant solo, to some swaying twig of the alder bushes. Nothing to hope? The maize leaves through all their close, serried ranks are rustling with the promise of golden corn. Nothing to conquer? There are the brambles, the roughnesses, the inequalities, the chill, damp earth, the whole teeming swamp-land.”

Like many another lover of nature he had been urged to outdoor life by illhealth. At twenty-four he was suddenly called to decide his immediate future, whether he should remain upon the old farm or travel across the sea. He chose the latter, and in three journeys, within a few years, toured Europe, seeking health as well as culture. After eight years he confided to the college friend, to whom he dedicated The Battle Summer, his feeling of unrest, “still drifting with memories for friends and the world — a home.” These foreign travels, tinged with yearnings for a more stable life, gave the first themes for his literary work. Forgotten as are the books to-day amid the more timely records of travel, they have a pleasing, romantic flavor. He leisurely guides his readers on wayside excursions, among unfrequented villages, within tiny cottages on the Isle of Jersey, among the vintagers of Belgium, and frankly asks if they do not like thus to amble along, “seeing common things commonly.” Not alone in his spirit of approach, but also in his titles and imagery, he fosters the rural and the domestic. Throughout Fresh Gleanings the bucolic scene is in evidence; it is the word of a traveler who “has plucked a grain-head here and a grain-head there,” with never-waning memories of the old farm and of boyhood dreams. Within his brain was a medley of new impressions, but he was ever loyal to the past; — “sweet memories make up the pleasure of our life, for they nurse our hopes of sweet memories to come.”

In contrast with the simple life of farm and fireside, he found in New York, during a period of legal and literary venture, social standards which he observed with amusement, but upon which he meditated with regret, often with disgust. Satire and irony crept into his literary form. The modern problem-novel, with ridicule and photography blended, was not then in fashion. English and American writers had chosen the satiric essay and sketch for their social pictures and rebukes. The Spectator and The Tatler had imitations in the early Echo by the Hartford wits, The Lay Preacher by Joseph Dennie, and Irving’s Salmagundi. Such were Mr. Mitchell’s models. Following the custom of anonymity, he issued, in 1850, in serial sheets, The Lorgnette, or Studies of the Town by an Opera-Goer. A passing feeling of surprise flits over the reader of to-day, who sees “ the eleventh edition” on the title-page, “set off with Mr. Darley’s Designs.” To us nearly all of the allusions are trite, many of the descriptions are tiresome, there is little of the poignancy of Addison or Holmes; yet within these papers once so popular, and in their successors, Fudge Doings,there are passages of value as well as entertainment to the student of American customs. They were exceptionally true to their time, while the comments on household trappings and crude decorative art, on “Ways of Getting into Society,” are not irrelevant to these later days.

From these earlier sketches, and two later books of fiction, one carries the impression that Mr. Mitchell just escaped becoming a novelist,—and for the escape and his own appreciation of its wisdom we may be thankful. At best, he would have been only an indifferent writer of fiction. He lacked constructive skill in plot and in expanded characterization. Fortunately, he chose a distinctive form, more elastic and less familiar, — that of romantic reverie. A bachelor and wayfarer in city life, with longings for the country, he turned for literary material to his untainted memories and hopes. Taking the public into his confidence, with dignified reserve, he wrote A Book of the Heart. The eighteen editions within two years and the multiform reprints of both Reveries of a Bachelor and Dream Life proclaim the wholesome charm and good company which these books have supplied to readers for more than fifty years. They are contemporaneous in atmosphere and in literary dress. They belong as truly to the past generation as do “the dressing-gown and slippers” in which the reader is urged to apparel himself as preparation for an evening of enjoyment. These accessories of time and manner are gone; such frank confession of sentiment is out of fashion; some of the phrases would not please our nice rhetoricians; yet there are salient and incidental qualities that linger. The wood fire upon the hearth has recovered its place in the home; there are many new brands of nicotine since the days of that long-lived companion of the dreamer; but they still promote quiet reverie, as well as symbolize good fellowship. There are still Aunt Tabithas, with modern gowns, skilled in the latest fads of embroidery and lace-making, but with the same halfskeptical, half-tender interest in youthful dreams and aspirings. In truth, the imagination and the heart, vibrating from hope to melancholy, are the same, yesterday, to-day, and forever.

The condition of mind known as reverie, where there is neither conscious effort nor responsibility, only a medley of hazy memories, realities, and fancies, is one of the happiest of psychologic states. The literary reverie, founded on personal experience and perfected by imagination, has a fitting, but too much neglected, place in literature. It furnishes, in a way, the natural sequel to the taste for fairy tales and myths. The youth, realizing his powers, in imagination substituting personal fears and aims for tales of gods and heroes, finds delight in drifting away from actual duties and prescribed mental tasks into the holidayland of reverie, day-dream, and castlebuilding. The parts of Mr. Mitchell’s romance which treat of adolescence and young manhood are superior to the later chapters on old age. The latter seem often too close to the borders of weak sentimentalism. Had the books been written in later life, the judgment might have been reversed. As they stand, revelations of youthful feelings and aspirations which maturity could not revise without loss of identity, the first three Reveries are almost perfect in spontaneity and grace. So the first chapters of Dream Life surpass the scenes of marital joys and griefs: one misses here the tender pathos of Lamb’s Dream-Children or the vital thrill of Irving’s The Wife. The best reveries by Ik Marvel are gentle visions of mild happiness and sorrow; the threads of his emotion are seldom tangled, seldom strained; they have a definite, sane purpose which keeps out vagaries. There is day-dream for the youth, aspiration for the man, retrospect for the aged. In sympathy more or less complete with each period of life, Mr. Mitchell has poetically expressed the elusive yet lasting charm of these musings: “What is Reverie, and what are these Day-dreams, but fleecy cloud-drifts that float eternally, and eternally change shapes, upon the great overarching sky of thought. You may seize the strong outlines that the passion breezes of to-day shall throw into their figures; but to-morrow may breed a whirlwind that will chase swift gigantic shadows over the heaven of your thought, and change the whole landscape of your life. Dream-land will never be exhausted until we enter the land of dreams, and until, in ‘shuffling off this mortal coil,’ thought will become a fact, and all facts will be only thought.”

It has been well said that one of the best equipments for an author is a bundle of varied, happy memories of his boyhood. To a romanticist there is a sequel as important, — the ability to understand and to interpret the feelings, standards, and ambitions of the genus boy. The adolescent period is revealed with justice and delicacy in the chapters on “Boy Sentiment” and “Boy Religion,” in Dream Life. We are told that a Glasgow publisher, in reprinting the book, omitted the chapter on “Boy Religion” lest by its implied censure of long prayers and abstruse sermons it might “onsettle ” some orthodox readers. In this day of child-study and analysis of religious emotions the portrayal seems truthful and helpful. We find here a real boy forming his notions of Heaven and religion, fixing his criteria for faith, for clergymen, and for sinners.

Speaking through these reveries of domestic life was an undertone of delight in nature. The Fourth Reverie is a bucolic of detached beauty, — a spring day under the oaks at the old farm, with the flitting of swallows, the lowing of cattle, and glimpses of a minnow in the brook. Dream Life is in its very essence and title “A Fable of the Seasons.” Over the traits of the satirist prevailed the spirit of gentle Walton, lover of streams and woods, of men and children. Mr. Mitchell found city life debilitating; he sought the tonic of the open. Law, editorship, a brief diplomatic service drolly told in The Account of a Consulate, failed to bring healthful impulse or contentment. With a new joy in that companionship which is the first element in a home, he cast about, as he tells his readers with genuine wit, to establish a family life on some accessible farm, with requisites of woodland, arable and pasture lands, and, if possible, a bit of sea view. For ten years after Edgewood had been found in the suburbs of New Haven, he devoted his energies to a little editorial work and more cultivation of gardens and orchards. After a season of agricultural experiment, in this interest which had rounded out his life, he was again ready to take readers into his confidence and tell them, with his wonted intimacy and dignity, the vexations and joys of this Sabine farm. It was a homely theme, the story of acquiring and improving a large farm. By adapting style to subject he produced two sequential books, — such was his favorite mode in publishing, — that are still pungent and instructive. These rural essays should have revival in this day of joy in country life as well as scientific nature-study. The first volume, My Farm of Edgewood, appeared in 1863, and was well summarized as “practical enough for an agriculturalist, yet romantic enough for a poet.” The author designed, and carried out to perfection, the blending of the practical and the fanciful. In fine analogy he expanded the thought: “It is — if I may use a professional expression, - the fruit from a graft of the fanciful set upon the practical, and this is a style of grafting which is of more general adoption in the world than we are apt to imagine. . . . Commercial life is not wholly free from this easy union, — nor yet the clerical. All speculative forays, whether in the southern seas or in the sea of metaphysics, are to be credited to the graft Fancy; and all routine, whether of ledger or of litany, goes to the stock-account of the Practical. Nor is this last necessarily always profit, and the other always loss. There are, I am sure, a great many Practical failures in the world, and the number of Fanciful successes is unbounded.”

Advice,—“ What to do with the Farm, ” — hints to harmonize economy with simple grace, are interspersed among many droll, personal confessions. There is less sprightly merriment than in Mr. Warner’s My Summer in a Garden, but there are amusing situations at Edgewood: counsel for treating frisky cows and obstinate poultry, or Pat’s report of sowing delicate seeds, — “Byried ’em an inch if I byried ’em at all,” — with his master’s comment, — “An inch of earth will do for some seeds but for others it is an Irish burial—without the wake.” There are also romantic and literary fancies, — memories of Kit Marlowe’s milkmaids, delight in the ivy slip from Kenilworth, and the winsome picture of his own children ferreting out wild flowers, and suggesting the symbolism, — “Flowers and children are of near kin, and too much of restraint or too much of forcing or too much of display ruins their chiefest charms.” Mr. Mitchell is both a ruralist and a book-lover. When his readers were familiar with his environment he invited them to come within his library and share with him the solaces of Wet Days at Edgewood, introducing them to many forgotten and new acquaintances among pastoral poets and essayists. In none of his books will one find such deftness of touch and phrase as in these tributes to classic farmers and English poets, from Piers Plowman to Burns and Cowper. He adroitly uses a well-known story rather than a trite comment on English weather: “Raleigh, indeed, threw his velvet cloak into the mud for the Virgin queen to tread upon, — from which we infer a recent shower; but it is not often that an historical incident is so suggestive of the true state of the atmosphere.”

With the passing of the years, Edgewood has changed from a large farm with a small cottage to a noble estate, a part leased to expert agriculturalists. Of late its master’s activities have been within his library more than in his gardens. Edgewood has achieved its purpose in his life, and the earlier zeal has settled into quiet enjoyment. His latest — with sad truth, one must say, his last — literary expression has been as photographer of English and American Lands and Letters. Two or three lesser known writings mark the transition from the rural to the distinctly literary. Dr. Johns, appearing the year after the second Edgewood book, resembles Judd’s Margaret and Mrs. Stowe’s stories of New England villages. The minor characters are labored, and the minister too severe in outline, but Reuben, with hot blood and orthodox conscience, yearning for sympathy, is to-day an interesting character; he embodies his author’s thoughts on the sentiments and needs of boyhood in the earlier Dream Life. This novel is inferior to the short stories of three years later, culled from note-books of foreign travel, with the whimsical title, Seven Stories, with Basement and Attic. Two of these tales are admirable: “ The Petit Soulier ” suggesting the subtle pathos and charm of Les Sabots du petit Wolff, by that master of modern conteurs, Francois Coppée, and “ The Bride of the Ice-King,” graphic and haunting, not inferior to some of Hawthorne’s legends of warning and doom.

On the reference shelves of many of our colleges and libraries are found a half dozen volumes by Mr. Mitchell on English and American Letters, treated historically and illustratively. Adapted, says the author, to youth, they are no less alluring to the friends of Ik Marvel of the past. As literary studies, with due adjustment of values, the books display many gaps and extravagances. They do not pretend to be exhaustive; they do not even claim to be unprejudiced and discreet. With blithe independence he selects his favorites, turns down certain long-respected winters with a few phrases of cold summary, and challenges you to approve or to dissent. He fulfills his aim, “to make an own book, and not an echo of the distinguished likes and dislikes of this or that expositor.” Half a century ago, when it was thought to be a compliment to call an American author an imitator of some popular Englishman, Mr. Mitchell was often known as “the American Elia.” The common and distinctive traits of the two authors are recognized by current readers. To Mr. Mitchell Charles Lamb has been a neighbor in spirit since boyhood days. In him he found not alone a fireside companion but a literary artist of surpassing influence, as he has testified in many a passage. There is great skill in condensation of research in these literary studies. Volumes are summarized in pages, paragraphs are reduced to effective phrases. Witness his advocacy of a simple style in description, “Nature is better than millinery.” To express the differences in tastes of the two early colonies he cites a striking antithesis: “But if poems, and stone chapels, — which were veritable daughters of the English mother church, — and ambitious country houses with fat dinners, and hunting chaplains to say grace, came first to Virginia shores, school-houses and a printing-press and long, inexorable sermons came earliest to New England.”

In conclusion, as in beginning, the same thought prevails, — gratitude for the winsomeness and cheer of “Ik Marvel,” youthful dreamer, for the racy essays of the Farmer of Edgewood, and for the mellowed, yet keen, literary studies of Mr. Mitchell’s harvest years. In these diverse forms one element is ever present, — the companionableness of the author. None of the books excel in aim or workmanship, but they all have a sure place in the goodly company of

They appeal to the mood of relaxing enjoyment, if we confess to such a mood at present. They are so leisurely that they sometimes seem slow in movement, with easy digressions from sad to serenely happy; they remind us that there are more sunbeams than shadows on life’s panorama. Pathos is tearful in What is Gone, but sanity and hope reassert themselves in appreciation of What is Left. Mr. Mitchell has a delightful unconsciousness of his gifts and their services. Long ago, almost in apology for the simplicity of his printed page, he wrote, “My thoughts start pleasant pictures to my mind.” No words could better express the source of his charm. His books have rank in our memories because they are sincere, gracious effusions from the heart of this venerable lover of nature, lover of men, and lover of the best in literature.