Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/128

 no Later Essayists ments of early days, his vision did not seek the future with any sincere scrutiny. Revelling in personalities, he is expository only secondarily, if at all; and inspiring never. The writer of our own time who works up an interview with some man of mark is following Willis not alone in his interest in the super- ficialities of personality, but often in the very tricks of style, varying from gaudy metaphor to the epithet that has the tang of the unexpected. Our journalists, by and large, remain lesser members of the Willis tribe. Still a third writer, Washington Irving, ' exerted a notable influence as the originator of a literary form which, for want of a better phrase, might be called the story-essay, wherein the narrative element runs its gentle course over a bed of personal reflections and descriptive comment of individual flavour. He had a whole school of followers, ^ and even Haw- thorne ' for a time moved among them ; while two more natural inheritors of his moods of tender sentiment and gentle satire are Donald Grant Mitchell (1822-1908) and George William Curtis, with whom the history of our later essayists may weU begin. The two volumes, Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) and Dream Life (1851), which Mitchell, as a young writer, issued tinder the pseudonym of Ik Marvel, are volumes that strike the same chords whose artistically modulated music resounds in so much of Irving, to whom the latter volume was dedicated; while in The Lorgnette, or Studies of the Town (1850) we have a series of papers directly modelled on Salmagundi. These sketches, despite the facile manner of their kindly satire, belong in the topical realm of ephemera, and are of interest mainly to the historical critic, who, harking back to the days of The Spec- tator and The Taller, finds in them another nexus between English and American Uterature. Not so, however, can we dismiss Reveries of a Bachelor and Dream Life. Their hold on the affections of later generations is secure despite that naive sentimentality frequently displayed by American literature in the period just preceding the Civil War. Both these books present a series of pictures in the imaginary life of their author, and there is a general adherence to the concept of life as a succession of the seasons. This parallel does not, however, 'See Book II, Chap. IV. "/Wd.,Chap. vii. ' /Wd., Chap. xi.