1827-1831.
BOSTON AND THE AMERICAN MONTHLY.
The profession of letters was Willis’s manifest destiny. Family tradition,
his inborn tastes and talents, the course of his studies, and his
achievements hitherto, all pointed that way. Yet in the then state of the
American press it took no small amount of self-confidence to decline a
paying profession and launch upon the uncertain currents of literary life.
His next four years were spent in Boston and were years of apprenticeship
in his life-work as an editor and journalist. He continued to write and
publish verses, but his hand was acquiring cunning, through constant
practice and frequent failure, in the production of that light, brilliant
prose which made him the favorite periodical writer of his day; and he was
also learning how to conduct a magazine. He still made occasional
contributions to the “Recorder”--among others the New Year’s verses, then
essential to every well-regulated paper--for 1828 and 1829. But his first
editorial engagement was with Samuel G. Goodrich, the well-known
bookseller and publisher, who had removed from Hartford to Boston in 1826.
One of the first books which he had published in Boston was Willis’s
“Sketches,” and he now employed the author of it to edit “The Legendary”
for 1828 and “The Token” for 1829. Goodrich was a fine example of Yankee
enterprise and versatility. He was one of the pioneers of “the trade” in
America, entering the field at the same time with the Harpers. Under the
pen-name of “Peter Parley,” he wrote or edited a long list of books for
the young, histories, travels, biographies, tales, works of natural
history, school text-books, etc. He had himself some pretensions as a
poet, by virtue of “The Outcast and Other Poems,” 1841. He was an
extensive traveler, and he became in 1851 United States consul at Paris.
It was the fashion among a certain set in Boston to abuse “Peter Parley”
and laugh at his literary claims. But he was a very successful publisher,
and in selecting his editorial assistants, he had a keen eye for the kind
of talent that takes, and the kind of work that pays. In his interesting
“Recollections of a Lifetime” he gives contrasted sketches of the two
principal contributors to his annuals--Willis and Hawthorne. Goodrich’s
perceptions were, perhaps, not of the finest, but he was a shrewd
observer of matters within his ken, and his recollections of Willis are
worth repeating.
“The most prominent writer for ‘The Token’ was N. P. Willis. His
articles were the most read, the most admired, the most abused, and
the most advantageous to the work. In 1827 I published his volume
entitled ‘Sketches.’ It brought out quite a shower of criticism, in
which praise and blame were about equally dispensed: at the same
time the work sold with a readiness quite unusual for a book of
poetry at that period. One thing is certain, everybody thought
Willis worth criticising. He has been, I suspect, more written about
than any other literary man in our history. Some of the attacks upon
him proceeded, no doubt, from a conviction that he was a man of
extraordinary gifts and yet of extraordinary affectations, and the
lash was applied in kindness, as that of a school-master to a loved
pupil’s back. Some of them were dictated by envy, for we have had no
other example of literary success so early, so general, and so
flattering. That Mr. Willis made mistakes in literature and life, at
the outset, may be admitted by his best friends; for it must be
remembered that before he was five-and-twenty he was more read than
any other American poet of his time; and besides, being possessed of
an easy and captivating address, he became the pet of society and
especially of the fairer portion of it. As to his personal
character, I need only say that, from the beginning, he has had a
larger circle of steadfast friends than almost any man within my
knowledge. It is curious to remark that everything Willis wrote
attracted immediate attention and excited ready praise, while the
productions of Hawthorne were almost entirely unnoticed. Willis was
slender, his hair sunny and silken, his cheek ruddy, his aspect
cheerful and confident. He met society with a ready and welcome hand
and was received readily and with welcome.”
It is needless to pursue the contrast which the writer goes on to draw
between Willis and the other and greater Nathaniel, who was then “the
obscurest man of letters in America.” The publisher’s sympathies were
obviously with his more lively and popular contributor, and he is puzzled
to understand why such articles as “Sights from a Steeple,” “Sketches
beneath an Umbrella,” “The Wives of the Dead,” and “The Prophetic
Pictures,” should have “extorted hardly a word of either praise or blame”
when originally published in “The Token,” while “now universally
acknowledged to be productions of extraordinary depth, meaning, and
power.” He is inclined to attribute it to a “new sense” in a portion of
the reading world--obtained unluckily too late to profit the publisher of
“The Token”--“which led them to study the mystical.” To Goodrich’s
personal description of Willis may be added the following little portrait
by Dr. Holmes, who remembers him well, as he looked during this Boston
period.
“He came very near being very handsome. He was tall; his hair, of
light brown color, waved in luxuriant abundance, and his cheek was
as rosy as if it had been painted to show behind the footlights, and
he dressed with artistic elegance. He was something between a
remembrance of Count d’Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde.
There used to be in the gallery of the Luxembourg a picture of
Hippolytus and Phædra, in which the beautiful young man, who had
kindled a passion in the heart of his wicked stepmother, always
reminded me of Willis.”
“The Legendary” described itself as consisting of original pieces in prose
and verse; tales, ballads, and romances, chiefly illustrative of American
history, scenery, and manners. It was designed as a periodical, but only
two volumes were issued, one in the early, and one in the later part of
1828. “The work proved a miserable failure,” said Goodrich, though
numbering among its contributors Mrs. Sigourney, Miss Sedgwick, Halleck,
Pierpont, Willis, Gaylord Clark, George Lunt, Grenville Mellen, and others
less known to this generation. Willis wrote the two prefaces and
contributed half a dozen poems of no importance, unless we except “The
Annoyer,” which had considerable currency, and three prose papers,
“Unwritten Poetry,” “Unwritten Philosophy,” and “Leaves from a Colleger’s
Album.” These last were very juvenile and he never reprinted them. The
first two were tales with a moral, one depicting the restorative
influences of nature on a heart crushed by bereavement, the other
describing a scholarly recluse, who lived alone with nature and his books,
and finally educated and married his landlady’s daughter. The story in
both instances is very slight, overladen with sentiment, descriptive
digressions, and philosophy, that might better have stayed “unwritten.” In
short, they are tedious--which Willis in his later work never was.
“Unwritten Poetry” included, however, a description of Trenton Falls and a
fine rhapsody about water which he rehabilitated afterwards and
incorporated with “Edith Linsey.” Both of these had the honor--in the then
paucity of our literature--to be selected by Mary Russell Mitford for her
“Stories of American Life by American Authors.” “Leaves from a Colleger’s
Album” was a first experiment of another kind, a humorous sketch of a trip
on the Erie Canal, utilizing the experiences of his senior vacation, and,
in particular, the incident of his reading a sermon in the cabin of the
canal boat on Sunday. It contains, in the person of Job Clark, the nucleus
of Forbearance Smith in the “Slingsby” papers--the nearest approach that
Willis ever made to the genuine creation of a character. He was always
thus economical of his material, repeatedly working over the same stuff
into new shapes.
“The Token” belonged to the class of illustrated publications known as
Annuals. It was the age of Annuals, Gift Books, Boudoir Books, Books of
Beauty, Flowers of Loveliness, and Leaflets of Memory. The taste for these
ornate combinations of literature and art was imported from England, where
the Ackermans had published “The Forget-Me-Not,” the earliest specimen of
the kind, in 1823. Carey & Lea of Philadelphia brought out the first
American Annual, “The Atlantic Souvenir,” for which Willis had been asked
to write, when in college, and to which he actually did contribute a copy
of birthday verses, “I’m twenty-two--I’m twenty-two,” in the volume for
1829. These were written, he affirmed, “in a blank leaf of a barber’s
Testament, while waiting to be shaved.” They were also inserted in the
“London Literary Souvenir” for the same year, by Alaric A. Watts, a
copious editor of Annuals, whose middle initial was cruelly asserted by
Lockhart to stand for _Attila_. The rage for Annuals soon became general
and lasted for about twenty years. Goodrich enumerates some forty of
them, bearing such fantastic titles as The Gem, The Opal, The Wreath, The
Casket, The Rose, The Amulet, The Keepsake, Pearls of the West,
Friendship’s Offering. And these are probably not half the list. There
were religious Annuals, juvenile Annuals, oriental, landscape, botanic
Annuals. Most rummagers among the upper shelves of an old library have
taken down two or three of them, blown the dust from their gilt edges,
ruffled the tissue papers that veil “The Bride,” “The Nun,” “The Sisters,”
and “The Fair Penitent,” and wondered in what age of the world these
remarkable “embellishments” and the still more remarkable letterpress
which they embellish could have reflected American life. There is a faded
elegance about them, as of an old ball dress: a faint aroma, as of
withered roses, breathes from the page. Those steel-engraved beauties,
languishing, simpering, insipid as fashion plates, with high-arched marble
brows, pearl necklaces, and glossy ringlets--not a line in their faces or
a bone in their bodies: that Highland Chieftain, that Young Buccaneer,
that Bandit’s Child, all in smoothest _mezzotint_,--what kind of a world
did they masquerade in? It was a needlework world, a world in which there
was always moonlight on the lake and twilight in the vale; where drooped
the willow and bloomed the eglantine, and jessamine embowered the cot of
the village maid; where the lark warbled in the heavens and the
nightingale chanted in the grove ’neath the mouldering ivy-mantled tower;
where vesper chimes and the echoes of the merry bugle-ugle-ugle horn were
borne upon the zephyr across the yellow corn; where Isabella sang to the
harp (with her hair down) and the tinkling guitar of the serenader under
her balcony made response; a world in which there were fairy isles,
enchanted grottoes, peris, gondolas, and gazelles. All its pleasantly
_rococo_ landscape has vanished, brushed rudely away by realism and a
“sincere” art and an “earnest” literature.
In these Gems and Albums, the gemmy and albuminous illustrations
alternated with romantic tales of mediæval or eastern life and with “Lines
on Seeing----,” or “Stanzas occasioned by” something. “The May-Flowers of
Life,” for example, “suggested by the author’s having found a branch of
May in a volume of poems which a friend had left there several years ago.”
In the Annual dialect a ship was a “bark,” a bed was a “couch,” a window
was a “casement,” a shoe was a “sandal,” a boat was a “shallop,” and a
book was a “tome.” Certain properties became gemmy by force of
association, as sea-shells, lattices, and Æolian harps. In England L. E.
L. and in America Percival and Mrs. Sigourney were perhaps the gemmiest
poets. But much of Willis’s poetry was album verse, with an air of the
boudoir and the ball-room about it, a silky elegance and an exotic perfume
that smack of that very sentimental and artificial school. This passage
from “The Declaration” is in point:--
“’Twas late and the gay company was gone,
And light lay soft on the deserted room
From alabaster vases, and a scent
Of orange leaves and sweet verbena came
From the unshuttered window on the air,
And the rich pictures, with their dark old tints,
Hung like a twilight landscape, and all things
Seemed hushed into a slumber. Isabelle,
The dark eyed, spiritual Isabelle,
Was leaning on her harp.”
“The Token,” begun in 1828 and continued to 1842, was edited by Goodrich
every year except 1829, when Willis had charge of it. Like other Annuals
it contained, in spots, some good art and good writing. There were
delicately designed and engraved vignette titles or presentation plates by
Cheney, the Hartford artist. There was an occasional contribution, in
prose, from Longfellow or Mrs. Child--then Miss Francis, and likewise a
contributor to “The Legendary.” Many of Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales”
came out in “The Token.” Mrs. Sigourney’s “Connecticut River” divided
with Willis’s “The Soldier’s Widow” the $100 prize offered by the
publisher for 1828. Among the contributors to Willis’s volume (1829) were
John Neal, Colonel William L. Stone, Mrs. Sigourney, Mrs. Hale, the Rev.
T. H. Gallaudet, Willis’s Albany friend, J. B. Van Schaick, and Goodrich
himself. The Rev. G. W. Doane--afterward Bishop Doane--gave his well known
verses, “What is that, Mother?” Willis gave five poems of his own, the
only noteworthy one among which was “Saturday Afternoon,” written to
accompany the frontispiece, engraved by Ellis from a painting by Fisher,
and representing children swinging in a barn. This had more the character
of a simple, popular ballad than anything else which he had written, and
was liked by many readers who cared little about his more elaborate verse.
Another poem in “The Token,” “Psyche before the Tribunal of Venus,” he
wrote for the engraving by Cheney from a drawing of Fragonard. A college
tale, “The Ruse,” was a slight advance on the experiments in “The
Legendary;” the dialogue was handled more freely, but the story was weak
as a whole, hardly worth mentioning, certainly not worth preserving.
Willis continued to contribute verses to “The Token” after he had resigned
its editorship. “To a City Pigeon,” “On a Picture of a Girl leading her
Blind Mother through the Woods,” and doubtless other pieces were printed
in subsequent numbers. He wrote for other Annuals, at various times: “The
Power of an Injured Look,” for “The Gift,” a Christmas book, 1845; an
article “On Dress,” for “The Opal,” 1848, and edited “The Thought
Blossom,” a memorial volume, as late as 1854. “The Torn Hat” was
contributed to “The Youth’s Keepsake” for 1829, and “Contemplation” was
written in 1828 to accompany an engraving in “Remember Me,” a religious
Annual published in Philadelphia. But he had no very high opinion of the
class of literature that they cultivated, and spoke of them as “yearly
flotillas of trash.”
In the spring of 1829 he entered upon his first serious venture as a
journalist, by starting the “American Monthly Magazine,” which ran two
years and a half--from April, 1829, to August, 1831. Mr. Thomas Gold
Appleton describes Willis’s undertaking as “a slim monthly, written
chiefly by himself, but with the true magazine flavor.” Appleton and his
friend Motley, then students in Harvard, were both contributors. For a
young _littérateur_, only a year and a half out of college, without
capital, without backing, almost without experience, the establishment of
a monthly magazine was certainly an enterprise of some boldness. His
expectations, however, were modest enough, and his preliminary card, “To
the Public,” casts some light on the conditions of literary journalism at
that time. He says that he cannot pay much for contributions, like the
English magazines which he took for his model. “The difficulties of
transmission over such an immense country and the comparatively small
proportion of literary readers limit our circulation to a thousand or two,
at the farthest.” He had, moreover, “the ebb of a boyish reputation”
against him. Notwithstanding he launched upon his voyage with excellent
pluck and vigor. He conducted his magazine with little assistance, writing
himself from thirty to forty pages of printed matter every month in the
shape of tales, poems, essays, book reviews, and sketches of life and
travel. Boston was not yet the Boston of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and
Holmes, but it had already as fair a claim to the title of literary
metropolis as New York. Everett and Channing were great names. Dana,
Pierpont, and Sprague were among its poets. These men were not available
for Willis’s purposes, but he rallied to his support a number of younger
men, such as Richard Hildreth, the historian, George Lunt, the poet, Park
Benjamin, Isaac McLellan, the Rev. George B. Cheever, Albert Pike,
afterwards the Arkansas poet and fire-eater, and Rufus Dawes,--then a
budding genius, subsequently a preacher of erratic doctrines,--J. O.
Rockwell, Mrs. Sigourney, and others whose names have fallen silent. Next
to the editor’s own graceful work, the most notable things given to the
public through the columns of the “American Monthly” were Pike’s “Hymns to
the Gods,” poems of a richly classical inspiration, which have often
provoked comparison with Keats’s odes; and which, if their workmanship
were equal to their imaginative fervor, would justify the comparison.
Willis led off in the opening number with a carefully written, but not
very characteristic, essay on “Unwritten Music.” It was thought monstrous
fine by his friends, but suggests, it must be confessed, that dreariest
product of the human mind,--a prize composition. As a study of the
harmonies of nature, it was much too general in its reflections and
descriptions to please a modern taste, wonted to the sharp and full detail
of Thoreau and his successors. The editorial articles, prose and verse, in
the “American Monthly” were too many to be mentioned here individually.
There were stories, “The Fancy Ball,” “The Elopement,” “P. Calamus, Esq.,”
and others which their author never recognized so far as to give them any
place in his collected writings. Others, as “Baron von Raffloff,”
“Captain Thompson,” “Incidents in the Life of a Quiet Man,” etc., were the
rough drafts of later tales, such as “Pedlar Karl,” “Larks in Vacation,”
and “Scenes of Fear.” “Albina M’Lush” was the best of these. “The Death of
the Gentle Usher” contained an eloquent passage on the night heavens,
which obtained a better setting in “Edith Linsey.” “An Inkling of
Adventure” lent its name and nothing else to the first published
collection of Willis’s “Slingsby” stories. Then there were sketches of
travel in New York State and Canada, partly reminiscences of senior
vacation and partly memorials of holidays from the editorial desk, spent
at Saratoga, Lebanon Springs, or elsewhere: “Notes upon a Ramble,”
“Letters of Horace Fritz, Esq.,” and “Pencillings by the Way,”--a title
afterward used to better advantage. Parts of these were similarly
refurbished for later employment. The secret of that skillful blending of
gayety and sentiment, the quick, light transitions, which make much of the
charm of Willis’s best stories and sketches, like “F. Smith,” or
“Pasquali,” he had not yet learned. In these earlier efforts the serious
parts drag and the humorous parts are flashy and thin. Besides the monthly
“table” there were editorial articles of that rambling, chatty description
peculiar to the period, and which the “Noctes” had done as much as
anything to introduce: “Scribblings,” “The Scrap Book,” “The Idle Man,”
“Tête-à-tête Confessions,” etc., in which the editor takes the reader into
his confidence and his sanctum, makes him sit down in his red morocco
_dormeuse_, reads him bits of verse from his old scrap-books and his
favorite authors, calls attention to his japonica, his smoking pastille,
his scarlet South American trulian (a most familiar bird with Willis--he
gets it in again in “Lady Ravelgold”), and his two dogs Ugolino and L. E.
L., whose lair is in the rejected MSS. basket. He fosters an agreeable
fiction that he writes with a bottle of Rudesheimer and a plate of olives
at his elbow, and he says now and then in a hospitable aside “Take another
olive,” or “Pass the Johannisbergh”; this to his imaginary interlocutor,
Cousin Florence, or Tom Lascelles, or The Idle Man, an epicure and dandy,
“who eats in summer with an amber-handled fork to keep his palm cool.”
These amiable coxcombries of Willis gave dire offense to the critics, and
especially to Joseph T. Buckingham, the veteran of the Boston press and
editor of the “Courier,” then the most influential Whig newspaper in
Massachusetts. He published epigrams on Willis, with very blunt points,
administered fatherly rebukes to him for his affected English, and
objected strongly to Ugolino, L. E. L., and the trulian. Willis retorted
in kind, and a good-natured war raged between the “Courier” and the
“American Monthly,” though their editors were privately the best of
friends. In his “Specimens of Newspaper Literature,” Buckingham paid a
glowing and, indeed, extravagant compliment to the talents of his young
adversary. Willis’s experience in editing the “American Monthly” was of
great advantage to him. He had a natural instinct for journalism, and he
soon acquired by practice that personal, sympathetic attitude toward his
readers, and that ready adjustment of himself to the public taste, which
made him the most popular magazinist of his day and defined at once his
success and his limitations. For its purposes Willis’s crisp prose was
admirable: “delicate and brief like a white jacket,--transparent like a
lump of ice in champagne,--soft-tempered like the sea-breeze at night.” It
had an easy, conversational grace, the air of “the town,” the tone of good
society. In his review of Lady Morgan’s “Book of the Boudoir,” he made a
plea for that _negligé_ style which he practiced so daintily himself. “We
love this rambling, familiar gossip. It is the undress of the mind. There
are few people who possess the talent of graceful trifling, either in
writing or conversation. Study may make anything but this. It is like
_naïveté_ in character,--nature let alone.” There was a great deal of good
writing in Willis’s “American Monthly” articles; bright thoughts expressed
in exquisite English, here and there a page which Charles Lamb or Leigh
Hunt might have been glad to claim. Some of these he rescued from the old
files of the magazine and inserted in his later work. The chapter on
“Minute Philosophies,” “A Morning in the Library,” and “The Substance of a
Diary of Sickness” were used again in “Edith Linsey,” and a spirited
description of Nahant in one of the “tables” did duty in “F. Smith.” But
many a nice bit was too small for resetting and remained lost in the
ephemeral context,--many such a scrap as this little picture of summer in
town:
“Was ever such intense, unmitigated sunshine? There is nothing on
the hard, opaque sky but a mere rag of a cloud, like a handkerchief
on a tablet of blue marble, and the edge of the shadow of that tall
chimney is as definite as a hair, and the young elm that leans over
the fence is copied in perfect and motionless leaves like a very
painting on the broad sidewalk.”
The “New England Galaxy,” which was also under Buckingham’s management,
was edited for a time by one William Joseph Snelling, who made quite a
stir in Boston newspaper circles. He had been an under-officer in the army
and stationed somewhere in the Northwest, but came to Boston about 1830
and devoted himself to sensational journalism and in particular to a
crusade against gamblers. His life was threatened for this, and he
converted his office into a sort of arsenal. In 1831 he published a
slashing lampoon, “Truth: a New Year’s Gift for Scribblers,” in which he
blackguarded American writers in general and paid his respects to Willis
as follows:--
“Muse, shall we not a few brief lines afford
To give poor Natty P. his meet reward?
What has he done to be despised by all
Within whose hands his harmless scribblings fall?
Why, as in band-box trim he walks the streets,
Turns up the nose of every man he meets,
As if it scented carrion? Why of late
Do all the critics claw his shallow pate?
True he’s a fool;--if that’s a hanging thing,
Let Prentice, Whittier, Mellen also swing.”
Some of this delicate banter was exhumed and quoted a few years later by
Captain Marryat, in the article in the “Metropolitan” which led to the
affair of honor between that warrior and Willis. The latter answered
Snelling “contemptuously but effectively,” Goodrich reports, “in some half
dozen verses inserted in the ‘Statesman,’ and addressed to _Smelling_
Joseph. The lines stuck to poor Smelling for the remainder of his life.”
The pasquinader himself afterwards went to New York and conducted a
meat-axe publication, “The Censor.” Goodrich adds, that he “fell into
habits of dissipation, which led from one degradation to another, till his
miserable career was ended,”--a victim, no doubt, to the angry muse.
Willis also contrived to offend Mrs. Lydia Maria Child by a satirical
review of her “Frugal Housewife” and by harping on a sentence from that
authority, “hard ginger-bread is nice.” She took this very much to heart,
and when she afterwards had charge of the literary department of the
“Traveller” showed an abiding hostility toward her whilom critic. He early
attained to the dignity of parody. “The Annoyer” was travestied in the
“Amateur” and a humorous imitation of “Albina M’Lush” was also printed.
Mere literary criticism, however unfair, need not greatly disturb any one.
But Willis was subjected, in Boston, to personalities of a very annoying
character. He was constantly in receipt of anonymous letters calling him a
puppy, a rake, etc. He was attacked in the newspapers for his frivolity,
his dandyism, and his conceit. Private scandal, circulated by word of
mouth, concerning his debts and his alleged immoralities, sometimes got
into print. It would not be easy to explain why so kind a man as Willis,
one always so eager to oblige and so prone to say good-natured things
about everybody, should have excited so much wrath, not only at this time,
but all through his life, by his harmless literary fopperies and foibles,
did we not remember that he was successful, that he was a favorite in
society, and, above all, that he wore conspicuously good clothes. There
was also something about his airy way of writing and the personality it
suggested that was and is peculiarly exasperating to a certain class of
serious-minded people who resent all attempts to entertain them on the
part of any one whom they cannot entirely respect. Willis carried it off
lightly enough, though, of course, it must have stung him. He knew, he
said, “how easy it is to despise the ungentlemanly critic and forget the
poor wrong of his criticism.”
In intervals of work on the “American Monthly” he contributed frequently
to the “Boston Statesman,” having been engaged, together with Lunt and
Dawes, to write something for it every week, “short or long, prose or
verse,” at the rate of five dollars an article, an arrangement that lasted
for some months. This seems now beggarly pay, but Nathaniel Greene of the
“Statesman” was, according to Willis, the only editor in the country who,
as early as 1827, paid anything at all for verse. During these early
years of journalistic life Willis sojourned awhile in the pleasant land of
Bohemia. He was a member of a supper club, which included two
representatives of each profession. Washington Allston and Chester Harding
were the artists; Willis and Dawes the men of letters; Horace Mann and
five or six more completed the tale. Willis was a frequent lounger in
Harding’s studio, and some years after he was delighted to come across his
tracks at Gordon and Dalhousie castles, where Harding was known. Willis
was fond of fast horses, and used to drive his friends out to Nahant, for
a spin on the hard beach along the edge of the surf. This was the scene of
“F. Smith,” one of his most perfect and characteristic stories. With Dawes
and others he resorted, not seldom, for a game supper, to an ancient and
once somewhat stately hostelry, known as the “Stackpole House,” where the
wines were excellent and the landlord good-humored and disposed to
trust,--the original, doubtless, of Gallagher in “The Female Ward,” a
story written long afterwards, but whose incidents and descriptions are
assignable to this period.
Willis’s position in Boston was in some respects a difficult one. His
family connection were plain, good folks, not “in society,”--not, at
least, in the literary society, which was Unitarian, or in the so-called
aristocratic society, which was mainly either Unitarian or Episcopalian.
He himself was socially ambitious, and these were the circles which he
wished to frequent. “The pale of Unitarianism,” he wrote, “is the limit of
gentility.” He was a great favorite with Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, the
“lady autocrat” and leader of the _ton_ in the Puritan capital for many
years. He was constantly at her house when she was in town, and was
invited to be one of her party when she went to Saratoga in the summer.
Nor was this a passing fancy with Mrs. Otis, but stood the test of time
and separation. She made him a long visit at Idlewild during the latter
years of his life. But the Park Street Church people, among whom he had
been brought up, looked askance upon his fashionable associations. The old
stories of his college dissipations were revived, while rumors of his
Boston irregularities reached the ears of his New Haven acquaintances.
Willis himself took no notice of these slanders, but they were warmly
resented by his friends. His brother-in-law, Joseph Jenkins, wrote to Mr.
D. W. Whiting of New Haven: “Nat is a good fellow. He is not dissipated in
any way; nor traveling the Tartarean turnpike, as the good New Haven
people suppose. He is attending to his magazine, and doing his duty as
well as any of us.” Though Willis did not make the impression of a man of
very scrupulous morality, he was certainly not given to any serious
dissipations. It was not in his temperament to run into physical excesses.
His senses were delicate, and he always respected them. He never, for
example, used tobacco; he was never a hard drinker. In youth he affected a
moderate conviviality and had an æsthetic liking for champagne. In middle
age he was accustomed to mix a little spirit with his water, expressing a
horror for the pure element, on the whimsical ground that it tasted of
sinners ever since the flood. In this Boston period, his offenses were
probably limited to running up bills at livery stables and inns, with a
too sanguine expectation of being able to pay them from the proceeds of
his literary work. Edward Beecher, who had been a tutor at Yale during his
college course, was at this time pastor of the Park Street Church. Finding
himself unwilling to conform his life to the strict rules of that society,
Willis called on Mr. Beecher and stated the manner of his supposed
conversion in a revival at Andover, and the influences that had induced
him to join the church. He said that he was sincere in the act, but was
convinced afterward that he was mistaken in his conviction, and that he
had not experienced the change that qualified him for church membership;
and he requested Mr. Beecher to obtain for him an honorable dismission.
Mr. Beecher sympathized with him in his feelings, and made an effort to
satisfy his request, but failed, as the church then believed that there
were but three ways out of it, death, dismissal to another church, or
excommunication. Accordingly, at a church meeting on April 29, 1829, in
which Mr. Beecher took no part, the following sentence was passed:--
“Whereas certain charges have been made against Brother N. P.
Willis, which, in the opinion of this church has been fully proved,
namely: Absence from the communion of this church and attendance at
the theatre as a spectator; and whereas he has neglected to appear
before the church to answer the said charges, although duly
notified; and has not given to the church satisfactory evidence of
penitence, but has evinced by a letter laid before the church an
entirely different state of feeling; therefore voted, That Mr.
Nathaniel P. Willis be, and he hereby is, in the name and by the
authority of the Lord Jesus Christ, excommunicated from this
church.”
Deacon Willis was naturally grieved by this turn of affairs, although he
acquiesced silently in the church’s decision. Theatre going, indeed, was
an offense against family, as well as church discipline. Naturally, also,
the object of this _significavit_ always afterwards thought and spoke
with some bitterness of “the charity of a sect in religion.” He never
renounced definitely his Christian belief. He never became skeptical; was
not at any time, in fact, a thinker on such themes and subject to the
speculative doubts which beset the thinker. He remained through life
easily impressible in his religious emotions. “Worldling as I am,” he
wrote many years after, “and hardly as I dare claim any virtue as a
Christian, there is that within me which sin and folly never reached or
tainted.” But this ended his connection with organized Christianity, and
he ceased for a long time to be a church-goer.
His position in Boston was also made painful by an unsuccessful love
affair. He had paid court to Mary Benjamin, a woman of uncommon beauty of
person and graces of mind and character, the sister of Park Benjamin and
afterwards the wife of the historian Motley. She returned his feeling and
the two were engaged to be married, but the engagement was broken through
the determined opposition of the lady’s guardian, Mr. Savage. Willis
carried this thorn in his side for years, and it gave him many hours of
bitter homesickness while abroad. In a letter written a few days after
landing in England, in the summer of 1834, he said:--
“I loved Mary B., and never think of her without emotion; but with
all the world in France, Italy, and England treating me like a son
or a brother, I am not coming home to fight my way to her through
bitter relatives and slander and opposition. They nearly crushed me
once, and I shall take care how they get another opportunity. Still,
after three years’ separation, I think I never loved any one so
well, and if my way were not so hedged up, it would draw me home
now.”
To Mary Benjamin was addressed the lovely little poem, “To M----, from
Abroad,” with its motto from Metastasio,--
“L’alma, quel che non ha, sogna et figura.”
By 1829 Willis had accumulated verses enough to fill another slender
volume of “Fugitive Poetry.” Of the forty-three pieces in this, the
“Dedication Hymn,” written to be sung at the consecration of the Hanover
Street Church in Boston, has the best title to remembrance. It possesses a
brief energy seldom attained by Willis. As late as 1856, his old English
friend, Dr. William Beattie, wrote to him: “Your beautiful ‘Hymn’ was sung
in one of our cathedral towns, at the consecration of a new church, by an
overflowing congregation. Surely this is a fact worth noting. Miss Rogers
was the first who told me of it, and often have I repeated ‘The perfect
world by Adam trod,’ etc.” “The Annoyer” and “Saturday Afternoon” have
been already mentioned. “Contemplation”--
“They are all up, the innumerable stars”--
had the feeling, though not the artistic touch, of Tennyson’s “St. Agnes,”
and came near to being a fine poem. There were five sonnets, one of
them--an acrostic to Emily Marshall--with a good closing couplet,--
“Life in thy presence were a thing to keep,
Like a gay dreamer clinging to his sleep.”
“A Portrait,” also, which Willis did not republish, contained an effective
passage, beginning
“I go away like one who’s heard,
In some fine scene, the prompter’s word,” etc.
There were two more scriptural pieces, and the remainder of the book was
of no importance. Many of its contents were written before those of the
earlier volume of “Sketches.”
The “American Monthly” proved a failure financially, owing, doubtless, to
a lack of the right business management, for which Willis had no faculty,
and with which, in truth, he had nothing to do. At the close of the summer
of 1831 the magazine suspended publication, and its editor, shaking off
the dust of his feet against the New England metropolis, fled to more
genial climes. He left behind him the squibs of his brother journalists,
the cackle of the tea-tables, and some $3,000 of debts incurred through
the failure of his enterprise. He never quite forgave Boston. In a letter
to his mother from England, September 12, 1835, he wrote:--
“They have denied me patronage, abused me, misrepresented me,
refused me both character and genius, and I feel that I owe them
nothing. I have never suffered injustice except from my countrymen,
and I have in every other land found kindness and favor. I would not
write this for another human eye, but you know how unjustly I have
been treated, and can understand the wound that rankles even in so
light a heart as mine. The mines of Golconda would not tempt me to
return and live in Boston.”
The “New York Mirror” of September 10, 1831, contained the following item:
“We take much pleasure in announcing to our readers that the ‘American
Monthly Magazine’ has been united to the ‘New York Mirror,’ and that
Nathaniel P. Willis, Esq., will, from this period, be an associate editor
of the joint establishment.” This announcement was followed in the next
week’s issue by “A Card to the Public,” in which the new editor promises
that, “having transferred the only literary undertaking in which he has
any interest to the proprietor of the ‘Mirror,’ his whole time and
attention will hereafter be given to this work.” The “Mirrors” of
September 10th and 17th published, furthermore, two letters from
Saratoga, written by Willis in August, and containing some characteristic
verses, “The String that tied my Lady’s Shoe,” and “To----,”--
“’Tis midnight deep: I came but now
From the bright air of lighted halls;”
as also a “Pencilling by the Way,” descriptive of Providence and Brown
University, where he had just been delivering a Commencement poem. On
September 25th the editorial page for the first time bore the heading,
“Edited by George P. Morris, Theodore S. Fay, and Nathaniel P. Willis.”
The journal with which he had now connected himself--and with whose
successors, under different names, he continued to be identified until his
death, thirty-six years later--was a weekly paper, published on Saturdays,
and “devoted to literature and the fine arts.” It had been founded in 1823
by Samuel Woodworth, author of “The Old Oaken Bucket,” and General George
P. Morris, but Woodworth had withdrawn some time before Willis joined it.
Morris, with whom Willis now began a business partnership that lasted,
with slight interruptions, for the rest of their lives, and a personal
friendship almost romantic in its tenderness and fidelity, was the most
popular song writer of his generation in America,--a sort of cis-Atlantic
Tom Moore, whose songs, adapted to the piano, were on all the music-racks
in the land. “Near the Lake where droops the Willow” was a universal
favorite in the days of gem-book minstrelsy. “My Mother’s Bible” was dear
to the great heart of the people, and the air of “Woodman, spare that
Tree” was heard by wandering Americans ground out from every hurdy-gurdy
in the London streets. Unless a clever letter in the “Mirror” of March 2,
1839, is wholly a hoax, this last-mentioned song compared in popularity
with “Home Sweet Home,” having suffered translation into French
(“Bûcheron, épargne mon arbre”), German (“Haue nicht die alte Eiche
nieder”), Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch; the German version being even
introduced by an essay, “Ueber Morris’s Entwickelung, Denken und Wirken.”
“The Amaranth” for 1840, an annual, edited by Nathaniel Brooks and
dedicated to Morris, contains Greek and Latin renderings of his “Woodman,”
as well as of Wilde’s almost equally familiar and far better lyric, “My
Life is like the Summer Rose.” Morris was a bustling, affable little man,
with a shrewd, practical side to him. He was a good business manager, and
as Willis had no talent in that kind, the association was mutually
advantageous. Morris’s intellectual stature was not great, and Willis,
who loved the man, was unable to admire the poet. He praised his songs in
print, but there was more of friendship than critical sincerity in his
praise. He had been in correspondence with Morris before, and had
contributed occasionally to the “Mirror,” having sent it a poem in
competition for a twenty-dollar prize when he was still in college. He now
began to decant into its columns a number of his “American Monthly”
articles, a circumstance which not only shows how local the circulation of
the latter must have been, but sheds a curious light on the methods of
journalism at that epoch. The old “New York Mirror” had a reputation for
brightness in its time and a circulation then considered large, but as
compared with the great magazines of to-day it seems a very primitive
affair, with its “Original Essays,” its “Popular Moral Tales,” “Desultory
Selections,” and “Extracts from an Unpublished Tragedy,” its poems “For
the ‘Mirror,’” by Isidora and Iolanthe, and its solemn “Answers to
Correspondents.” Now and then there is a contribution of more pronounced
individuality, a poem by Halleck, a story by Paulding or Fay. Theodore S.
Fay, the other editor, was a man of parts. He was the author of several
once popular novels, “The Countess Ida” and “Hoboken,” _tendenz_ romances
against dueling, “Ulric,” a poetical romance, and “Norman Leslie,” which
was afterwards dramatized, and was founded on a famous murder trial in
which Burr and Hamilton had figured as counsel. Fay contributed to the
“Mirror” satirical letters on New York society, “The Little Genius,” and
in 1832 published a volume of his “Mirror” articles under the title of
“Dreams and Reveries of a Quiet Man.” In 1833 he went abroad, and his
letters from Europe, “The Minute Book,” appeared in the paper side by side
with Willis’s “Pencillings.” He was appointed secretary of legation at
Berlin in 1837, and minister resident at Berne in 1853. His novels have
now gone quite out of sight, but many of his short tales are really very
clever,--written in a rattling style, with abrupt, jerky dialogues,--and
may be read even now without much effort. Another name connected with the
“Mirror” was that of William Cox, an English printer employed upon the
paper, whose “Crayon Sketches by an Amateur,” published in 1833, were
highly commended by Willis. He, too, was abroad during Willis’s and Fay’s
sojourn in Europe, and wrote letters from England to the “Mirror,” whose
foreign correspondence was thus uncommonly varied. The first thought of
sending Willis abroad occurred while the three editors were supping
together at Sandy Welsh’s oyster saloon. Long and earnestly they revolved
the question of ways and means. At length $500 were scraped together as
_viaticum_, and it was agreed that Willis was to write weekly letters at
ten dollars the letter. The investment proved a good one both for the
“Mirror” and for its traveling editor. With this slender capital in his
pocket he embarked at Philadelphia October 10th, the only passenger on the
merchant brig Pacific, bound for Havre. He was young, sanguine, eager to
see life, but in his most hopeful mood he could hardly have foreseen the
dazzling experiences of his next four years, or the far-reaching
consequences which the trip thus lightly undertaken were to have for him.
Before sailing he had found time to visit Philadelphia, Baltimore,
Washington, and Mount Vernon, and make a “Pencilling” of them for the
“Mirror.” Another letter gave his impressions of New York, now become his
American address. He had also put to press the poem delivered before the
“Society of United Brothers,” at Brown University, on September 6th, the
day before Commencement, together with a few other pieces written since
1829. The dedication was “To one of whom, in this moment of departure for
a foreign land, I think sadly and only--to my mother.” The name-poem was
one of those conventional performances with which unlucky recipients of
invitations to “speak a piece” before Phi Beta Kappas, United Brothers,
or other such academic bodies, are wont to dazzle the young alumni. It was
in blank verse, of course, and dealt with the usual commonplaces about
ambition, content, the beauty of human love, and the folly of skepticism
and contempt. It showed more maturity than the poem delivered before his
own Alma Mater four years before, but it was much the same sort of thing.
Of the remaining contents of the book two were Scripture sketches and four
were of a more ambitious description than Willis had previously attempted.
These were “Parrhasius,” “The Dying Alchemist,” “The Scholar of Thebet Ben
Chorat,” and “The Wife’s Appeal” to her husband to “awake to fame.” The
theme of all these and the central thought of this whole volume is the
vanity of an inordinate thirst for knowledge, power, or fame.
“Parrhasius,” the story of an old Olynthian captive who was tortured to
death by the Athenian painter that he might catch the expression of his
last agony for his picture of Prometheus, comes the nearest to success.
Willis had read the tale in Burton’s “Anatomy of Melancholy.” “The Scholar
of Thebet Ben Chorat” was the story of a young Bedouin who grew mad and
died from too close application to astrology, on which science Willis
seems to have crammed up for the nonce, if one may judge from the
profusion of his foot-notes. But in truth these poems were little better
than wax-work. The sweet and natural lines, “To a City Pigeon,” were worth
all the rest of the book.