effect, like that of diminished sevenths in music. Of minor rhetorical
arts it is the poorest, the most seductive, the most readily abused.
But we should miss it sadly from the ‘Howadji’ books. Removed from the
context these phrases quoted have an artificial sound, in their place
they blend perfectly.
Curtis’s style grew less florid and sensuous after the early writings.
At all times it is singularly easy. One gets the impression that he was
a spontaneous writer. Great productivity is not possible when there
must be a constant retouching of phrases and paragraphs. The unlabored
nature of his writing may explain the light estimate Curtis put on it.
He is said to have been quite unwilling to reprint a volume of essays
from the ‘Easy Chair.’ That anything which came with so little effort
could be worth re-reading seemed not to occur to him.
He was the orator almost as soon as he was the man of letters. A
rhetorician by taste and training, he knew the dangers of rhetoric and
in his oratory avoided them. Clarity and grace are the most obvious
characteristics of every sentence. Curtis could no more have been
awkward and heavy than he could have been obscure.
He can hardly be praised enough for the ease and naturalness of his
allusions. We auditors grow restless when a speaker begins to cite
classical names. We fear our old friends Cicero and Catiline, Cæsar and
Brutus. We cannot away with Hannibal and Hamilcar. The ear has been
dulled by constant repetition. Curtis knew how to make the oldest of
these tiresome references seem new. All his allusions have an air of
freshness and spontaneity. One would suppose the declaimers had long
since exhausted the virtues of Spartacus. Curtis dared to make the old
gladiator accessory to his argument in a passage like this:--
‘Spartacus was a barbarian, a pagan, and a slave. Escaping he summoned
other men whose liberty was denied. His call rang clear through Italy
like an autumn storm through the forest, and men answered him like
clustering leaves.... He had no rights that Romans were bound to
respect, but he wrote out in blood upon the plains of Lombardy his
equal humanity with Cato and Cæsar. The tale is terrible. History
shudders with it still. But you and I, Plato and Shakespeare, the
mightiest and the meanest men, were honored in Spartacus, for his wild
revenge showed the brave scorn of oppression that beats immortal in the
proud heart of man.’
Nature had bestowed on Curtis gifts which, if not indispensable to a
speaker, are like free-will offerings as against tribute, and make
the pathway smooth. His commanding presence, his winning smile and
manner, his glorious voice, the air of high breeding, a self-possession
which when accompanied by unaffected good nature is one of the most
attractive traits--all combined to place him among the first of
American orators. He was properly said (in a phrase which through vain
repetition has almost lost its meaning) to ‘grace’ the platform.
IV
_NILE NOTES OF A HOWADJI_, _PRUE AND I_, _TRUMPS_
‘In Shakespeare’s day the nuisance was the Monsieur Travellers who had
swum in a gundello,’ wrote Fitzgerald in a half-petulant, half-humorous
mood, ‘but now the bores are those who have smoked _tchibouques_ with a
_Peshaw_!’ He was speaking of _Eothen_. The fever for Eastern books was
at its height when Curtis went abroad in 1846.
The _Nile Notes of a Howadji_ describes the four weeks’ flight of the
‘Ibis’ up the river to Aboo Simbel, and the ‘course of temples’ on the
return voyage. It is a book of impressions and rhapsodies, a glowing
record of travel in which realism struggles with poetry and is usually
worsted. It is a dream of the Orient, delightfully parsimonious as to
improving facts, and prodigal of whatever helps the home-keeping reader
to comprehend the witchery and fascination of the East. A few timid
souls were disturbed by ‘Fair Frailty’ and ‘Kushuk Arnem,’ which seem
innocent enough now, but the timid souls no doubt found peace in other
chapters, such as ‘Under the Palms.’
_The Howadji in Syria_ continues the record. The conditions are
changed. Instead of the dahabieh, the camel; for the Ibis was
substituted MacWhirter, whose exertions in trotting ‘shook my soul
within me;’ for the mud villages and mysterious temples of the Nile,
Jerusalem, Acre, Damascus. The temper of the book differs from that of
its predecessor. In this volume Curtis is poetical, in the other he was
a poet. The mocking American note is heard, as when the Howadji says
‘a storm besieged us in Nablous and a fellow Christian of the Armenian
persuasion secured us for his fleas, during the time we remained.’
The Howadji has evidently undergone a measure of disenchantment. The
wonders of the East are less wonderful because less vague. In Egypt
there was intoxication, in Palestine and Syria there is curiosity,
mingled with amusement and contempt. The characteristic quality of the
second Howadji book is to be found in the descriptions of the cafés,
the bazaars, and in that most excellent account of the Turkish bath
(‘Uncle Kühleborn’), quite the best thing of the kind that has been
written.
_Lotus-Eating_ is a series of journalistic letters on the Hudson,
Trenton Falls, Niagara, Saratoga, Newport, and Nahant, when Nahant was
‘a shower of little brown cottages fallen upon the rocky promontory
that terminates Lynn beach.’ Not in this wise do young men now write
for newspapers, with ornate periods and quotations from Waller and
Herrick. The book abounds in happy characterizations. At Saratoga ‘we
discriminate the arctic and antarctic Bostonians, fair, still, stately,
with a vein of scorn in their Saratoga enjoyment, and the languid,
cordial, and careless Southerners, far from precise in dress or style,
but balmy in manner as a bland Southern morning. We mark the crisp
courtesy of the New Yorker, elegant in dress, exclusive in association,
a pallid ghost of Paris--without its easy elegance, its _bonhomie_,
its gracious _savoir faire_, without the _spirituel_ sparkle of its
conversation, and its natural and elastic grace of style.’ And so it
runs on.
_The Potiphar Papers_ is in another key. The placid observer, who,
in _Lotus-Eating_, quoted from De Quincey a delectable passage on
the poetry of dancing, is now a bitter satirist contemplating a
corps-de-ballet of society buds gyrating in the arms of the _jeunesse
dorée_. These ‘bounding belles’ and their admirers shock the observer
with a style of dancing which in its whirl, its ‘rush, its fury is
only equalled by that of the masked balls at the French opera.’ The
book is a new treatment (new in 1853) of the old subject of Vanity
Fair. The humor is severe. The touch is not light and the caustic
writing is not happy. Curtis was never a master of the whip of
scorpions. Nevertheless _The Potiphar Papers_ had a vogue.
_Prue and I_ is a book of the sort Zola used to hate--literature
which ‘consoles with the lies of the imagination.’ It is the idyl
of contented obscurity, the poetic side of humble life. Delicately
wrought, light in texture, shot with charming fancies and dainty
conceits, having the grace that belongs to old-school manners, this
little prose poem is justly accounted its author’s masterpiece.
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.