1845-1852.
THIRD VISIT TO ENGLAND--THE HOME JOURNAL.
On his arrival in London, Willis was attacked with a brain fever, which
confined him to his bed for a fortnight. As soon as he could get about he
brought his little daughter to see Lady Blessington, and then took her and
her nurse to Steventon Vicarage, near Abingdon, in Berkshire, to stay with
her aunt, the wife of Rev. William Vincent, formerly of Bolney Priory. He
took lodgings for himself in the village near by, and, after a short trip
to Bath, returned to London and spent some time in visiting, dining out,
sight-seeing, and making new acquaintances. He met a Mr. Stiles of
Georgia, an old schoolmate, who was passing through England on his way to
Vienna, where he had lately been appointed _chargé d’affaires_, and who
gave him a complimentary appointment as _attaché_ to his legation, an
addition to his passport of the kind that had proved so serviceable in the
days of his “Pencillings.” This determined him to shape his course for
the capital of Austria, taking in Germany, which was new to him, on the
way. Leaving his daughter at Steventon, he crossed the Channel, went up
the Rhine, and joined his brother Richard, who was studying music at
Leipsic. Here he passed a month, and then, accompanied by his brother,
went on to Dresden. There the two parted, and Willis traveled alone to
Berlin, where he was again seriously ill, and was kindly ministered to by
his old friend and associate on the “New York Mirror,” T. S. Fay, at that
time secretary of legation at Berlin. Mr. Henry Wheaton, the American
minister, attached Willis also to the Prussian mission. But of these
appointments and the opportunities they promised he was unable to avail
himself. Continued ill health forced him to abandon his journey to Vienna,
and to make his way back to England, whence he sailed for home in the
spring of 1846. He had meant to leave Imogen with her mother’s family for
a time, to be put to school in England. But his heart failed him at the
last, and he brought her back with him to America, sending her, still in
charge of her nurse, to live with his sister, Mrs. Louis Dwight, in
Boston. He himself took rooms in New York until other arrangements could
be made. His child’s nurse, Harriet Jacobs, who was in his employ from
1842 to 1861, was a remarkable woman, whose career, if fully told, would
form an interesting chapter in the history of American slavery. She was an
escaped slave from a plantation near Edenton, North Carolina. She had run
away from her master when a young woman, and taken refuge with a family of
free negroes, her kinsfolk. They kept her hidden for five years in a cubby
under the roof, during which time she supported herself by fine needlework
which her friends sold for her in town. At last she escaped to the North,
and was engaged by Willis as a house servant when he went to Glenmary. Her
attachment to the interests of the family during the whole period of her
service was a beautiful instance of the fidelity and affection which
sometimes, but not often, distinguish the relation of master and servant
even in this land of change. Mrs. Jacobs’s former owners, having got wind
in some way of her whereabouts, came North in quest of her, and spared no
pains to reclaim the runaway. Several times she had to leave the Willises
and go into hiding at Boston and elsewhere. At last, tired of these
alarms, Willis sacrificed whatever scruples he might have had against such
a step, and bought her freedom out and out. When the civil war began she
went to Washington, and employed her practical abilities, which were of a
high order, in the post of matron to a soldiers’ hospital. In that city
she is still living, at an advanced age.
Though ill nearly all the time of this his third trip abroad, Willis
managed to write a number of “Invalid Letters” to the “Evening Mirror,”
which were collected in “Famous Persons and Places” and in “Rural
Letters.” They were scarcely worth preserving. England was now a
twice-told tale, and in Germany, which was a pasture new, he was too tired
and sick and borne down by his recent bereavement to take much interest in
anything. His articles about the great fair at Leipsic--“What I saw at the
Fair,” in “Godey’s” for October, 1847; and “On Dress,” in “The Opal” for
1848, and “Godey’s” for June, 1849--were the most considerable literary
results of the journey. He also superintended the publication of an
English edition of “Dashes at Life,” in three volumes, and came home under
engagement to write for the London “Morning Chronicle.”
Meanwhile the editorial corps of the “Evening Mirror” had tapered down to
Hiram Fuller. Willis had practically retired from any active share in its
management when he left the country in the spring of 1845. He was still
abroad when Morris withdrew from it and started a new paper, the “National
Press,” toward the close of the same year. Willis joined him in this
enterprise as soon as he got back from England. During the spring and
summer of 1846 he was often in Washington, as correspondent of the
“National Press” and the “Morning Chronicle,” and while there he met Miss
Cornelia Grinnell, the niece and adopted daughter of the Hon. Joseph
Grinnell, who was then representative in Congress from New Bedford,
Massachusetts. To this lady he was married on October 1, 1846, the
eleventh anniversary of his first marriage. She was his junior by nearly
twenty years, but she united to her graces of person and character a
penetrating mind and an uncommon energy and firmness of will, which made
her an invaluable helpmate through the years of trial that were in store
for both. On the 21st of November following, the name of the “National
Press” was changed to the “Home Journal,” under which title the paper has
ever since been published. This was Morris’s and Willis’s final and most
prosperous experiment in journalism. They both remained connected with it
till death: in Willis’s case a service of twenty-one years, during which
his literary toil was devoted almost exclusively to building up the paper.
“For the cultivation of the memorable, the progressive, and the
beautiful,” ran the legend upon its title-page, followed by a sentence
from Goethe, which still stands as the motto of the paper, and would have
served well enough as the motto of Willis’s own career: “We should do our
utmost to encourage the beautiful, for the useful encourages itself.” It
was not a very solid type of literature which was fostered by the “Home
Journal,” but it made for itself a peculiar constituency, and a place in
the world of letters which it still successfully occupies, under the
editorship of Morris Phillips, General Morris’s adopted son, who has
carried out the traditions of the paper as established by his
predecessors. It was and is the organ of “japonicadom,” the journal of
society and gazette of fashionable news and fashionable literature,
addressing itself with assiduous gallantry to “the ladies.”
Willis set himself more especially in both the “New Mirror” and the “Home
Journal” to portray the town. He became a sort of Knickerbocker Spectator,
and his “Ephemera,” published in 1854, is a running record of the
notabilities of New York for a dozen years. He chronicled the operas and
theatres: Ole Bull, Jenny Lind, and Macready; the shops, the omnibuses,
the endless procession of Broadway, the museum, the art galleries, the
Tombs, the Alhambra, the Five Points, the Croton water, the cafés, the
hotels, the balls and receptions, the changes in equipages, customs,
dress. He grew to be a recognized _arbiter elegantiarum_, and his
correspondence columns were crowded with appeals on knotty points of
etiquette or costume. His decisions of these social problems were always
marked by good sense and good taste. There are many nice bits in
“Ephemera,” and some little wholes,--like the letter from Saratoga, “To
the Julia of Some Years Ago,”--which deserve to be rescued from the
oblivion of a book of scraps and trifles. He was a skillful paragrapher;
he had unfailing tact and knew when to stop. Above all, he was eminently
human; his gregariousness and his cheerful philosophy cast a gleam of
their own on this looking-glass of urban life. He imported a rural air
into the city; watched how April greened the grass in the public squares,
and June spread the leaves in Trinity Churchyard; stopped to pick “a
clovertop or an aggravating dandelion ’twixt post office and city hall;”
and discovered even in the stream that washed the curbstone, “a clear
brook--a brook with a song, tripping as musically (when the carts are not
going by) as the beloved brook” in Glenmary. Pan, we know, has been found
in Wall Street; and Willis contrived to find something like a nymph in the
waste of the Park fountain. When his work kept him at the desk all through
the hot summer, he borrowed a breeze from “the outermost bastion of
Castle Garden,” and made the Jersey ferryboat his “substitute for a
private yacht.”
When he came to New York to live, in 1842, and during his continued
residence there for more than ten years from that date, Manhattan was by
no means the metropolis that it is to-day, though it had begun to assume
already that cosmopolitan and intensely commercial character which
distinguishes it from all other American cities. It had a considerable and
swiftly growing foreign population, and its society was marked by a
liveliness and extravagance which contrasted with the plainer and more
earnest tone prevailing in Boston, and with the somewhat provincial cast
of Philadelphia life. The Battery was still the fashionable promenade,
Canal Street was “up town,” Hoboken, a rural suburb, Pine, Ann, and
William Streets, and the Bowling Green were genteel residence quarters.
The old Park Theatre was--after the burning of the National--the only
respectable playhouse, until Niblo’s was opened in what was then the
outskirt of the town. New York prided itself, moreover, on being a
literary centre. The term “Knickerbocker School,” which has been invented
to describe a group of metropolitan writers who owed their inspiration, in
some sort, to Washington Irving, is of uncertain application; and there
was no such cohesion among the members of the group as to warrant the name
of a school. But if the term be extended to cover all the authors whose
birth or long residence identified them with New York city, it may include
Bryant and Halleck, who were the most prominent literary figures when
Willis went there to live, though both of them, like him, were of New
England birth and breeding. Bryant had been since 1826 editor of the
“Evening Post” and Halleck, who had almost ceased to write and was
devoting himself exclusively to his duties as secretary to Mr. John Jacob
Astor, left the city in 1849, and retired to his old home in Guilford,
Connecticut. With both of these Willis was more or less intimate, meeting
them frequently at dinners and in general society. Irving himself, the
starting-point of the Knickerbocker writers, was out of the country when
Willis settled in New York, having gone as minister to Spain in 1842. He
came back in 1846 and took up his residence at Sunnyside. Cooper was
living at Cooperstown, where Willis made him a flying visit and renewed
the acquaintance so pleasantly begun at Paris in 1832. This was in the
summer of 1848, which Willis spent at Sharon Springs, recovering from an
attack of rheumatism. Theodore Fay too was abroad, filling diplomatic
posts in Germany and Switzerland. Years after, on his return to America,
he visited Willis at Idlewild, and the latter found him greatly aged and
saddened since the days when he wrote mild town satires and humorous
sketches for the “New York Mirror.” Eastburn, Sands, and Drake were all
dead, and Paulding had signalized the close of his literary career by
publishing a collection of his works in numerous volumes. He too had been
a contributor to the old “Mirror,” and so had another of the
Knickerbockers, Charles Fenno Hoffman, who had once edited the paper for a
month, before Willis had any connection with it. Hoffman, who died just
the other day, is known to this generation almost solely by his still
popular song, “Sparkling and Bright,” and his hardly less popular
“Monterey.” The former is sung by collegians and the latter declaimed by
school-boys. He was the first editor of the “Knickerbocker Magazine.” His
“Winter in the West” and his novel, “Greyslaer,” founded on the famous
Beauchamp tragedy in North Carolina, had wide currency in their time, and
his amusing story, “The Man in the Reservoir,” may still be read with
enjoyment. He was a man of many friends, greatly beloved for his frank and
cordial nature. By 1846 he had already begun to show symptoms of the
mental disease which issued in his chronic insanity. He kept on writing
up to 1850, when it was found necessary to send him to an asylum, in which
confinement he lived for over thirty years. Hoffman once said of Willis’s
eyes that they “always seemed to have nothing but cold speculation in
them,--to be two holes, looking out through a stone wall.” Then there were
Verplanck, the editor of Shakespeare, and Duyckinck the compiler of the
“Cyclopædia of American Literature,” and many forgotten worthies, whose
names may be read in such limbos of departed fame as Poe’s “Literati of
New York.” Many of these literati used to meet each other informally at
the weekly receptions given by Miss Anne Lynch (now Mrs. Botta) the
poetess, and author of the “Handbook of Universal Literature,” whose
hospitable parlors have been for forty years a rallying place for
interesting and distinguished people. With this lady Mr. and Mrs. Willis
formed a close and lasting friendship. Willis used to go often to Horace
Greeley’s, where he got interested for a time in spirit rappings, and
wrote some papers on the subject in the “Home Journal.” Greeley once urged
him in a letter (November 18, 1854) to publish a volume of selections from
his lifelong writings. “I want such a one,” he wrote, “for my boy, so
that, should I live to see him sixteen, I may try ‘Unwritten Music’ on
him and see if it impresses him as it did me at about that age, when it
appeared.”
During the first winter and spring after their marriage, Willis and his
wife lived in lodgings. In the autumn of 1847 they went to housekeeping at
No. 19 Ludlow Place, where their eldest son, Grinnell, was born, April 28,
1848. In the fall of that year they bought the house No. 198 Fourth
Street, where they remained till the fall of 1852. A daughter, Lilian, was
born April 27, 1850.
For ten years Willis’s tall and elegantly dressed figure was a familiar
sight on Broadway, and was often pointed out to strangers at public
assemblages, or in private society, where his agreeable manners made him a
general favorite. He was never what is called a brilliant
conversationalist, but he was an easy talker and quick at an impromptu,
many of his “good things” in which kind are remembered and quoted by his
contemporaries. Thus, on one occasion, at a dinner party in Washington, a
young lady who sat between Willis and a gentleman named Campbell was
rather too partial in her attention to the former. Her mother sitting
opposite, and considering Mr. Campbell a desirable _parti_, slipped her a
note across the table, “Pay more attention to your other neighbor.” This
being shown to Willis, he wrote on the back of it,--
“Dear Mamma don’t essay my flirtation to trammel:
I but strain at a Nat while you swallow a Campbell.”
When in Germany, he went with some gentlemen to visit a deaf and dumb
asylum which had an inscription over the gate, _Stiftung_, etc.
“Stifftongue,” said Willis, looking up; “very appropriate.”
Like most men who overwork their pens, he was impatient of private
correspondence. When in England, he excused his brevity on the plea that
he was paid a guinea a page for everything he wrote, and could not afford
to waste manuscript. “Private Letters,” he declared in a note to Edgar
Poe, “are the ‘last ounce that breaks the camel’s back’ of a literary
man.” And he once answered a friend who proposed a correspondence, that to
ask him to write a letter after his day’s work was like asking a penny
postman to take a walk in the evening for the pleasure of it. His letters
to his family and friends have seldom any literary quality, though they
contain, now and then, characteristically quaint or playful touches. “Kiss
mother on her sad expression” is a message in one of them; and in another
he refers to one of his little nieces as the most charming “copy of
Willis” extant. Having been invited to sit on the stage, at the
Commencement of Rutgers Female College, as “the author of ‘Absalom’ and
‘Hagar,’” he wrote, “I shall try to have the air of the Old Testament, but
have my doubts as to success.”
The easy _dégagé_ air of his writing was, as is usually the case with
seemingly ready writers, the result of laborious care. It appears from the
testimony of Poe, Parton, Phillips, and others who were his associates on
the “Mirror” or “Home Journal” and knew his habits of composition, that
his manuscript was full of erasures and interlineations. He blotted, on an
average, one line out of every three, but his copy was so neatly and
legibly prepared that the compositors preferred it to “reprint,” even his
erasures having “a certain wavy elegance.” He was likewise very particular
about having his articles printed just as he wrote them. “My copy _must_
be followed,” he wrote to an offending foreman. “If I insert a comma in
the middle of a word, do you place it there and ask no questions.” Once a
slight alteration by Morris in the wording of a paragraph in Willis’s
manuscript came near causing a quarrel between the two old friends,
“probably the only misunderstanding or disagreement,” says Mr. Phillips,
“which occurred during the whole of their literary life and business
association.” “I would not stay one week a partner with a man who
ventured to alter a word of my copy and send it to press without my
knowledge,” wrote Willis in his angry note to Morris on this occasion. Mr.
Phillips adds that “General Morris proved his love for Mr. Willis by not
replying to this letter, but simply wrote on the back of it, ‘I would have
received this from no other man living.’” From similar testimony it
appears that Willis took no share in the business management of the paper,
never examined the books, nor asked any questions as to the circulation.
He felt or affected a horror of figures, and confided the matter of
receipts and expenditures entirely to General Morris, between whom and
himself, during the entire period of their partnership, no statement of
account was ever rendered. In money matters Willis was liberal,--not to
say reckless,--and his hospitality knew no limit. Nor was it only his roof
and his table that were at his friends’ service; his literary latch-string
was always out to every new-comer in the field of letters. It was an
honorable trait in his character, and should never be forgotten in casting
his account, that, whatever may have been his foibles, the jealousy which
is the besetting sin of authors and artists was not among them. He was
perpetually on the lookout for young writers of promise, and was the first
to praise them, and to give circulation to their good things by copying
them into his columns. He was the introducer and literary sponsor of many
reputations now fallen silent, and of some which have survived. Among the
last were Mr. T. B. Aldrich--who succeeded James Parton as assistant
editor of the “Home Journal”--and Bayard Taylor. The latter was greatly in
Willis’s debt. His desire for travel was first awakened by reading the
“Pencillings by the Way” when he was a lad of sixteen. And afterwards when
he came to New York to seek the means for foreign travel he applied at
once to the author whose brilliant pictures of European life had roused
his young enthusiasm. Willis befriended him in every way; gave him letters
to wealthy gentlemen in New York, and bestirred himself to interest people
in his adventure and raise the sum necessary to start him on his journey.
On his departure he gave him a letter to his brother Richard, in
Frankfort, with whom the young _handwerksbursch_ tarried for a time, while
he was picking up the German language. His “Views Afoot”--the fruits of
this venture--were dedicated to Willis, who contributed the preface. This
patronage was unkindly referred to in Duganne’s “Parnassus in Pillory,” a
little Dunciad of the old downright “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers”
variety, which made some noise in New York in the year 1851:--
“What time Nat Willis, in the daily papers,
Published receipts of shoemakers and drapers;
What time, in sooth, his ‘Mirror’ flashed its rays,
Like Barnum’s ‘drummond’ on the Broadway gaze,
When lisping misses, fresh from seminaries,
Worshiped ‘mi-boy’ and ‘brigadier’[9] as _lares;_
Then Bayard Taylor--_protégé_ of Natty,
Dixon-like walked into the ‘literati;’
And first to proper use his genius put,
Like ballet-girls, by showing ‘Views Afoot.’”
In another part of his squib the lampooner returns to the charge against
Willis as follows:--
“I almost passed by Willis--‘ah, _mi-boy!_
Foine morning! da-da!’ Faith I wish him joy--
He’s forty-three years old--in good condition--
And, positively, he has gained ‘position.’
Gad! what a polish ‘upper-ten-dom’ gives
This executioner of adjectives;
This man who strangles English worse than Thuggists,
And turns ‘the trade’ to trunk-makers or druggists;
Labors on tragic plays that draw no tiers--
Writes under bridges, and tells tales of peers;
His subjects whey--his language sugared curds;
Gods! What a dose!--had he to ‘eat his words!’
His ‘Sacred Poems,’ like a rogue’s confessions,
Gain him indulgence for his worst transgressions:
His ‘Fugitive Attempts’ will doubtless live--
Oh! that more works of his were fugitive!
Fate to his fame a ticklish place has given,
Like Mahomet’s coffin, ’twixt the earth and heaven;
But be it as it will--let come what may--
Nat is a star, his works--the Milky Way!
“‘Why so severe on Willis?’ Julia cries
(Who reads _De Trobriand_ in an English guise).
Why so severe? Because my muse must make
Example stern for injured Poesy’s sake.
Not that Nat Willis curls his yellow hair--
Not that his sense can breathe but perfumed air--
Not that he plays the ape or ass I mourn,
For ape and ass are worth not even my scorn.
But that, with mind, and soul, and haply heart,
He yet hath stooped to act the fopling’s part;
Trifled with all he might have been to be
The _blasé_ editor--at forty-three;
Flung off the chaplet which his boyhood won,
To wear the fool’s cap of a ‘man of ton,’
I lash not Willis even for this his crime--
Through him I strike the bastard tribe of rhyme;
The race o’er whom, in his own native power,
Jove-like mid satyrs might this Willis tower!”
Another young poet whose career Willis watched with interest was J. R.
Lowell. There was a friendly correspondence between the two in 1843-44,
the younger writer thanking the older for his encouragement, sending him
his new volume of verse, and promising to contribute to the “Mirror,” but
remonstrating with him upon his declared intention--in a very appreciative
review of Lowell’s poems in the “Mirror”--to omit the _James_ from his
“musical surname” and call him simply Russell Lowell:--
“Suppose I, dropping the ‘N.,’ should call you by that mysterious
middle letter--whose signification, without reference to the Parish
Register (or perhaps Griswold’s equally entertaining bead-roll) no
man can fathom--and call you ‘P. Willis.’ Under such painful
circumstances you could imagine how I feel, when you amputate one
sound limb of my name.
“However, it is too cold to say any more about it. What I have left
unsaid shall be frozen up in me like the tune in Munchausen’s bugle,
and thaw out eloquently and startlingly when I meet you in the
warmer atmosphere of New York--as I shall before long.”[10]
In point of fact--if the item is not below the dignity of biography--this
threat of Lowell’s to mind Willis’s P’s for him was without terror for the
latter, who favored his middle initial at the expense of his scriptural
and baptismal _prænomen_, and used to figure on the title-pages of his
later books as N. Parker Willis. He disliked to be called Nathaniel;
respecting which prejudice, his wife and brothers and sisters, as well as
his intimate friends, were accustomed to address him simply as Willis.
“Truly one’s sponsors,” said he, “have much to answer for.” In Lowell’s
smart pasquinade, “A Fable for Critics,” published in 1848, which contains
not only headlong fun, but good poetry and just criticism, there is a
passage on Willis, from which I venture to quote a few lines,--in spite of
its familiarity to many readers,--because its spirit is kindly and it is
one of the best estimates of Willis ever written:--
“There’s Willis so _natty_ and jaunty and gay,
Who says his best things in so foppish a way,
With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o’erlaying ’em,
That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying ’em.…
His prose had a natural grace of its own,
And enough of it, too, if he’d let it alone,
But he twitches and jerks so one fairly gets tired,
And is forced to forgive where he might have admired.
Yet whenever it slips away free and unlaced
It runs like a stream with a musical waste,
And gurgles along with the liquidest sweep.
’Tis not deep as a river, but who’d have it deep?…
No volume I know to read under a tree
More truly delicious than his À l’Abri,
With the shadows of leaves flowing over your book,
Like ripple-shades netting the bed of a brook;
With June coming softly your shoulder to look over,
Breezes waiting to turn every leaf of your book over,
And Nature to criticise still as you read--
The page that bears that is a rare one indeed.…
His nature’s a glass of champagne with the foam on ’t,
As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont;
So his best things are done in the flush of the moment:
If he wait, all is spoiled: he may stir it and shake it,
But, the fixed air once gone, he can never remake it.…
He’d have been just the fellow to sup at the Mermaid,
Cracking jokes at rare Ben, with an eye to the bar-maid,
His wit running up as canary ran down,--
The topmost bright bubble on the wave of The Town.”
One proof of popularity is parody. Until a statesman’s face is so familiar
to the public that its caricature in the comic papers needs no label, and
until an author’s style is so easily recognized that a travesty of it hits
the sense of the reader, neither statesman nor author may consider himself
as really popular. “Excelsior,” and “The Raven,” and “Abou ben Adhem” are
by no means the best poems in the English tongue, but their currency is
attested and doubtless kept up by the innumerable burlesque imitations of
them that swarm the press. Willis had a share of these left-hand honors:
his epistolary style in particular was often caricatured in the
newspapers. In “Godey’s Lady’s Book” for December, 1849, he was selected
together with Poe, Morris, Whittier, and John Neal for humorous imitation.
“My dear Sir:” he is made to write in response to an imaginary
request for a contribution, “to be obliged to penetrate with the
pump-buckets of necessity, prompted by the piston of a fifty-dollar
compensation, with a publisher as the pump-handle, in search of a
poem, is, of itself, annoying enough. To draw one up with the rope
and bucket of gratuity, is a labor which qualifies one for a long
residence in fatiguedom. Your letter found me fagging away over my
work-desk--chasing a brilliant idea in and out of the myriads of
convolutions of my brain. All the while that I was aping Prometheus
(the window being half-opened), I could sniff the delightful odors
of a rose which a fair neighbor will insist on keeping,” etc., etc.
The requested poem is annexed--a scriptural poem, “The Fishwoman’s Son:”--
“Night on the market. Through the colonnade
Of red-brick pillars not a sound was heard,
Save of some whistling urchin as he strode
With stamping footfalls, listening to the noise
Which wore his shoe-soles and the hearer’s patience;
Or the low mutter of the drunken man,
As his wild song, proclaiming fix’d resolve
Not to go home till morning, sank to low
And nearly inarticulate murmurs.”
The fishwoman’s son sings a song, whose first stanza runs:--
“I will not go,
Like a whipt dog, unto the public school,
To wear the cap and tokens of a fool,
While Mexico
Invites me on to glory and to fame,--
Or a cracked crown, which after all’s the same.”
Willis was forty when the “Home Journal” was begun--an age at which
writers who have thought and studied deeply are often no more than ripe,
and have their most productive years before them. But his best work was
already done. After 1846 he wrote hardly any more stories or poems--none
at all of any value. His pen was devoted more and more steadily to
editorial duties, to ephemeræ and paragraphs and fragments of all kinds,
and his well-wishers lamented that wit and fancy which, if properly
directed, might have produced something that would live and delight
future generations, were wasted in dissertations upon the cut of a beard
or the fashion of a coat. To all remonstrances of his friends over his
literary trifling and their exhortations to write for posterity, his
invariable answer, in and out of print, was that the public liked trifles,
and that posterity would not pay his bills--that he must go on “buttering
curiosity with the ooze of his brains.” That this answer satisfied
himself, or that he was without those aspirations after a more enduring
fame which are natural to all, cannot be believed. It is probable that he
sadly acknowledged in his inner consciousness that the best part of his
career was over. His talent, as has been said before, was the result of,
or was closely dependent upon, his physical temperament. When health began
to decay, and youth was over, and his animal spirits had effervesced, life
commenced to have a flat taste. The bloom was off. His writing, too, as we
have seen, was always closely related to his personal experiences; and as
these grew tamer, he had less and less to report, and his writing grew
tame in proportion. With some, mere study and contemplation supply, to a
degree, the ravages which time makes upon the freshness of young
impressions. But it had been Willis’s misfortune in youth that a premature
success had deprived him of the discipline of early rebuffs, and had made
a painful self-culture needless. He never drew much inspiration from
books, and in later life he read very little. He said that he could not
afford to read, partly for want of time, partly from a notion that much
reading would be fatal to originality. Neither was it his privilege to
command, at this or at any time, the stimulating and bracing association
with men of high serious intellects and strenuous aims, such as he might,
perhaps, have had if he had remained in Boston. The occasional hasty
meetings with men of brains and literary tastes in general society did not
at all take the place of that intimate communion with a circle of gifted
spirits which has been so stimulating to others. Moreover it should be
borne in mind, as accounting largely for the mediocrity of his later work,
that for the last fifteen years of his life Willis was a chronic invalid.
Indeed, he was never really a well man after his illness of 1845.
Next to Cooper, Willis was the best abused man of letters in America. It
is easy to understand how the former, who was pugnacious and struck hard,
should have been always in hot water. But why a man of Willis’s urbanity
should have been a target for the newspaper critics is more difficult of
explanation. “Colonel” William L. Stone of the “Commercial Advertiser,”
and “Colonel” James Watson Webb of the “Courier and Enquirer,”
distinguished themselves especially by their stern condemnation of
Willis’s literary affectations, and of what they were pleased to consider
the weaknesses of his private character and life. It is suggestive, by the
way, of the militant disposition of the New York press at that time, that
so many editors were generals and colonels--or at least were breveted such
by public consent, and graced with titular embellishments of a warlike
character. Henry J. Raymond, who joined the “Courier and Enquirer” in
1842, proved his zealous adhesion to the traditions of the paper by an
onslaught upon Willis, in which he asserted that the latter had snobbishly
represented himself as received in the best circles abroad, “when in truth
’twas no such matter.” Willis replied to this in an editorial which Poe
mentions as a clever specimen of skill at fence. An effort was afterwards
made by friends of both to bring them together, at a time when Willis was
living at Idlewild and Raymond was visiting in the neighborhood. The plan
miscarried for some reason or other, though Willis, who seldom cherished a
resentment, was quite ready for a reconciliation.
In 1850 Willis became unpleasantly involved in the famous divorce suit
between Edwin Forrest and his wife. He had known Forrest as early as
1836, admired his acting, and praised it constantly in the “Mirror” and
“Home Journal,” preferring it to the more studied performances of his
English rival, Macready. He had seen little of Forrest for a number of
years; but after his return to New York, in 1846, the two families grew
quite intimate, exchanging visits and dinners. Mrs. Willis and Mrs.
Forrest especially became fast friends, and on one occasion, when the
former was seriously ill, she sent for Mrs. Forrest to come and stay with
her. Mrs. Forrest was the daughter of Sinclair, the great English singer.
She was a lady of refinement, beauty, and social accomplishments. Her
sister Mrs. Voorhies, who lived with her for a time, had inherited her
father’s musical talents, and Mrs. Forrest soon got about her a pleasant
circle of friends, which included many persons of literary and artistic
tastes, editors, authors, professors, clergymen, and their wives. The
Bryants, the Godwins, Dr. Dewey, Henry Wikoff, and Samuel Raymond, the
actor, were among the frequenters of the house. When Richard Willis
returned from his musical studies in Germany in 1848, his brother
introduced him there, and he found so much enthusiasm for his art, that he
called repeatedly, to practice his compositions with Mrs. Voorhies.
Edwin Forrest was a tragedian of great natural force and genius, endowed
with a wonderful voice and a magnificent physique. But he was a man of
passionate and overbearing temper; his education was defective, his
language and manners sometimes offensively coarse, and he had little
relish for intellectual society. He does not appear, however, to have felt
any objection to his wife’s hospitalities, or to have suspected any
impropriety in her receiving her friends, during his frequent absences
from home on professional engagements, until long after other causes of
estrangement had arisen between them. At Cincinnati, in the spring of
1848, he thought that he had discovered evidence of a guilty intimacy
between Mrs. Forrest and an actor named Jamieson; and although she
solemnly protested her innocence and her husband agreed to accept her
oath, his jealousy smouldered and occasionally broke out in scenes of
violence. At length, in April, 1849, they agreed to separate. Mrs. Forrest
made her home for a time with Mr. and Mrs. Parke Godwin, and Forrest took
up his residence in Philadelphia, where in February, 1850, he made an
application for divorce to the Pennsylvania legislature, based upon
affidavits, charging his wife with adultery. This application was
ultimately denied, but meanwhile the lady’s friends in New York had taken
the matter up. She had the sympathy and moral support of such men as
William C. Bryant and his son-in-law, Mr. Parke Godwin, and Dr. Orville
Dewey, the eminent Unitarian divine. Up to this time Forrest had not
implicated Willis in his charges, but hearing that he was among those who
were taking sides with Mrs. Forrest, he had stopped him in the street one
day in January, 1850, and warned him against intermeddling between him and
his wife, denouncing her unfaithfulness in the strongest terms. Willis
replied that he did not believe a word of the slanders against her. The
next day Mrs. Willis received an anonymous letter, accusing her husband of
criminal relations with Mrs. Forrest. On March 28th the “Herald” published
extracts from the evidence on which Forrest had based his application to
the Pennsylvania legislature, which compromised, among others, Mr. Richard
Willis. This drew from his brother a letter of explanation, printed in the
“Herald” of the following day.
“It was not my intention,” wrote Willis, “to say a word in this
letter upon the merits of the case to which this evidence belongs.
To rescue the good name of an absent brother, who, in moral conduct
is irreproachably correct, was my only object. A court of justice
will soon sift the testimony, and better inform the public as to its
credibility on other points. But the mention of my wife’s name, as
a friend and visitor of Mrs. Forrest, makes it incumbent on me to
add that the description of Mrs. Forrest’s manners and style of
hospitality which is given in that evidence is totally at variance
with all we have ever seen and known of that dignified, well-bred,
and delicate mannered lady.”
And in the “Home Journal” for April 6th he published a severe review of
the “Forrest testimony,” warmly defending Mrs. Forrest, expressing the
belief that her husband’s chief motive in the late proceedings had been to
rid himself of the expense of her support; that the real cause of their
separation had been his jealousy of her intellectual superiority; and
condemning indignantly his attempt to “enlist kitchen and brothel against
her, and so sully her fair name by cheap and easy falsehood that he can
throw her off like a mistress paid up to parting.” The article concluded
as follows:--
“We have written the above under the editorial plural, but the facts
being mostly of personal knowledge, and wishing to evade no manner
of responsibility, we close with the writer’s individual signature,
“N. P. WILLIS.”
These two articles, coupled with testimony elicited from Forrest’s
household servants, decided him to drag Willis into the case. His bill
filed in Philadelphia contained the names of nine co-respondents, among
them a clergyman, Mrs. Forrest’s family doctor, and Forrest’s old friend
and traveling companion, Chevalier Wikoff. The last three were afterwards
dropped from the case. Mrs. Forrest, having been served with a copy of the
application and the process issued by the Pennsylvania legislature, filed
a bill in the New York Supreme Court in September, 1850, and obtained an
injunction to restrain her husband from proceeding with his suit in
Philadelphia. She then began suit against him in New York for a divorce on
the ground of adultery, which he defended with cross-accusations; and in
New York the case was finally tried and decided. Meanwhile Forrest was
prowling about his wife’s lodgings in New York, threatening people who
went in or out, and stopping others in the street to warn them against
interference.
On the 17th of June, while Willis was walking in Washington Square, near
his own residence in Fourth Street, Forrest came up to him quickly and
knocked him down with a blow from his fist. He then stood over him, and,
holding him down by the coat collar with one hand, beat him with a
gutta-percha whip till the police came up and interfered. To the group of
spectators which had rapidly assembled, he said, “That is the seducer of
my wife.” Willis would at no time have been physically the equal of his
antagonist, who was a man of powerful frame; but when this assault was
made it was doubly safe from the fact that the victim of it had been ill
for months with a rheumatic fever, and was in an unusually feeble
condition of body. Two days after this heroic action, Forrest met Bryant
and Godwin walking down Broadway and furiously demanded who had put the
account of it into the “Evening Post,” in which he was represented as
having struck Willis from behind.
“I told him,” said Mr. Godwin, in his testimony, “I was responsible
for the article. He then turned round to me in a very ferocious way,
and said there were several things that he was going to hold me
responsible for; he said the article was a damned lie from beginning
to end; he said he meant to attack Mr. Willis, and he believed that
he had told me so formerly. I replied that these were not just the
terms that he used, and that he told me formerly that he meant to
cut his damned heart out; to which Mr. Forrest muttered something in
reply--I don’t know what it was distinctly; I think he said
something about what he would have done if they had not taken him
off.”
Willis brought an action against Forrest for this assault, in the superior
court of the city of New York, and secured a verdict in March, 1852, for
$2,500 and costs. The case was appealed on exceptions, and, upon the new
trial which was ordered, the damages were reduced to one dollar. Forrest
sued Willis for libel in the “Home Journal” article, and got $500 damages.
But in the mean time the suit for divorce had come to trial, in December,
1851, and had been decided in Mrs. Forrest’s favor. The jury found the
defendant guilty of adultery, found the plaintiff innocent, and granted
her the decree prayed for with $3,000 a year alimony. This was one of the
_causes célèbres_ of the last generation. The trial occupied the then
extraordinarily long period of six weeks, and the printed testimony fills
two large volumes. Charles O’Conor, who was Mrs. Forrest’s counsel, dated
his great reputation as an advocate from his conduct of this case. For
eighteen years he fought the battle for his fair client relentlessly and
triumphantly. The case was appealed five times, and judgment affirmed
every time with an increase of alimony. It was not till 1868 that the
defendant tired of resistance, and paid over to the plaintiff the sum of
$64,000. His costs and expenses of litigation, additional to this, were of
course enormous. It is unnecessary to review the evidence given at the
trial, by which it was sought to incriminate Willis in this affair,
further than to say that it consisted almost solely of the testimony of
servants, who were thoroughly discredited in their cross-examination. One
of these witnesses was a man who had been discharged from Willis’s employ.
Another was an ex-chambermaid in the Forrest household, who was brought
all the way from Texas to testify, and who was shown to be a thief, and
the mother of an illegitimate child by a friend of the defendant. Public
opinion, it is needless to say, was divided about the verdict. Forrest was
the idol of the Bowery, and the asserter of the American stage against the
“dudes” and “Anglo-maniacs” of that day. “The boys,” who had stuck by him
in his quarrel with Macready till its upshot in the bloody Astor Place
riot of May 10, 1849, stuck by him now in his domestic tribulations, and
gave him a rousing ovation on his first appearance at the Broadway
Theatre, following the close of the trial. A number of people in society,
too, of those who “demen gladly to the badder end,” made up their minds to
Mrs. Forrest’s guilt. But it is not unfair to say that the great majority
of the decent people and respectable newspapers greeted the verdict with
acclamation. A large party maintained that Forrest was a selfish and
licentious brute, who was tired of his wife and wanted to be rid of her;
that, knowing he had no valid cause of action against her, he trumped up
charges and suborned witnesses. It is not necessary to go so far as this
in order to assert the innocence of Mrs. Forrest and of those who were
made parties to the accusations against her. Alger, in his big “Life of
Edwin Forrest,” after acknowledging that “the innocence of Mrs. Forrest is
publicly accredited, and is not here impugned;” that she “was believed by
her intimate and most honored friends to be innocent, was vindicated by a
jury after a most searching trial, and is now living in modest and
blameless retirement,” simply urges in Forrest’s behalf that he honestly
believed himself a wronged man, and acted with his usual fury and
unforgivingness upon that conviction. Willis and his brother were both
among the witnesses for the plaintiff on the trial, and both, of course,
denied peremptorily the charges against them. But the one circumstance
which more than all else influenced the decision of the jury was the
constant presence in court of Mrs. N. P. Willis, side by side with Mrs.
Forrest, and the brave, clear, and simple way in which she testified in
her friend’s behalf. No one could believe that a spirited and refined
lady, like Mrs. Willis, would have consented, for an instant, to put
herself into such a position, without a full assurance of her husband’s
innocence; and no one who listened to her testimony could have thought her
a woman likely to be deceived. John Van Buren, who was Forrest’s lawyer
in all these cases, was quite generally censured for the needlessly
abusive way in which he handled the witnesses for the other side. In the
trial of the assault and battery case, “Willis _v._ Forrest,” his
personalities went so far beyond the limits usually set to the licensed
insolence of the bar, that on the termination of the suit Willis, who was
about starting on a trip to the South, and had learned from an item in the
“Herald” that Van Buren was going South too, sent him a letter demanding
an apology. In case he should decline to make such apology, the letter
proposed a hostile meeting at Charleston or any other convenient point in
the Southern States. This note the recipient returned (after carefully
making a copy of it) with a short reply, describing it as a “silly and
scurrilous communication.” This it certainly was not, but, on the other
hand, a very dignified and gentlemanly letter; rather too long, it must be
owned, for on these occasions Willis’s pen generally ran away with him.
However, on the receipt of this answer to it, which was forwarded to him
at the South, he replied with sufficient brevity: “I now pronounce you a
coward, as well as a proper companion for the blackguards whose
attorneyship constitutes your career.”
This challenge was something of a flourish on Willis’s part, and his
experience with Marryat might have taught him the folly of such attempts
to get “the satisfaction of a gentleman” from railing editors and
attorneys. He took little by his motion, which simply gave Van Buren an
opportunity to publish the correspondence in a New York morning paper with
comments of his own, characteristically ugly and characteristically smart.
The fact remained, however, that Van Buren had been challenged to fight
and had declined, and the general note made upon the affair by a venal
press was to the effect that “Prince John had shown the white feather.” Of
the many letters of sympathy and congratulation received by Mr. and Mrs.
Willis after the Forrest verdict, the following, from Mr. J. P. Kennedy,
the author of “Swallow Barn,” will serve as an example:--
BALTIMORE, _February 2, 1852_.
MY DEAR WILLIS,--I have often resolved during the war--the _late_
war, I hope I may call it--to assume the privilege of a friend and
send you the only succor I could supply, a word of comfort and a
cheer or two, to let you see that there was some sympathy abroad for
your sufferings, which I know were pungent enough to make a very
respectable saint, if your ambition lay in that way. Now that you
have got through certainly the worst part of your Iliad in the
termination of that horrible trial, I think it a good time to
redeem my promise to myself, and to say to you that I have felt a
friend’s part in the whole progress of your troubles, and the
confidence of a friend that the end would bring you a bright sky and
a pleasant outlook for the future. I particularly congratulate Mrs.
Willis on this result, as I know, or can imagine, the full measure
of her griefs. We _all here_--I mean our household, with whom Mrs.
Willis is associated in so many affectionate remembrances--unite
very sincerely in this message to her. Your defense in the “Home
Journal” of an injured woman, which I noted and applauded from the
first, was, at its least, a manly and generous act, and it became
the more worthy of your manhood as it grew to be perilous. I use
this word much more in reference to the social clamor than to the
ruffian assault it brought you. I trust you are now to triumph very
signally over both. Present Mrs. Kennedy and her sister very kindly
to your wife, as also Dr. Gray, and believe me
Very truly yours,
J. P. KENNEDY.
The result of the Forrest trial was, in a sense, a triumph for Willis. Yet
in all affairs of the kind, although the charges are disproved, the very
fact that they have been made leaves, illogically and unfairly, perhaps,
but still inevitably, a sediment of prejudice in the public mind. It is in
the nature of such cases that the inmost truth about them can seldom be
known to more than two persons. To all others there remains nothing
beyond inference and suspicion. Hence the uncertainty which survives the
judicial decision of the cause and works injustice to the innocent who
have been unlucky enough to be drawn into compromising situations. An
impression has always obtained in many quarters that Willis was profligate
in his relations with women. Rumors to this effect were industriously
circulated by his ill-wishers, and, in one instance, they got into print
in the shape of an accusation publicly brought against him by his ancient
foe, Colonel James Watson Webb of the “Courier and Enquirer.” It is
needless to revive this venerable scandal or any of the less tangible,
miscellaneous gossip once afloat on the current of New York society. It is
no part of a biographer’s duty to “vindicate” his subject from any and all
charges of the kind. I have read the published documents in the
Webb-Willis affair with a sincere effort to be impartial, and they left
upon my mind no impression of anything worse on Willis’s part than vanity
and indiscretion in permitting himself to be drawn into a half literary,
half sentimental correspondence with a very romantic young woman, without
her parents’ knowledge. He was easily flattered by attentions from female
worshipers of genius. He maintained in print and in person a constant
attitude of gallantry toward the sex, which doubtless stimulated the
rumor of his immoralities, and led the reader to identify him with the
Lotharios of his tales. Moreover, it is not to be denied that when a young
man in Italy, and in the fast set of his London acquaintances, he was
exposed to temptations which he did not always resist, and probably had
his share of those adventures which the French indulgently call _bonnes
fortunes_, but less liberal shepherds of Anglo-Saxon race give a grosser
name; and which always turn out the reverse of good fortunes for everybody
concerned. As to his later life, one who knew him well but had quarreled
with him and had small cause to like him, writes: “My belief is that N. P.
Willis was, as he said, perfectly free from fault in that business [the
Forrest affair], and had _no_ intrigues with women after his marriage.”
The spring of 1852 found him much broken in health. He had a wearing
cough, and it was thought that his lungs were diseased. He waited only the
termination of his assault and battery case in March, to start on a
journey to the South with his father-in-law, Mr. Grinnell. The trip
included a cruise to Bermuda and the West Indies, a short stay in
Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, a visit to the Mammoth Cave, and a
sojourn at the neighboring watering-place of Harrodsburg Springs. His
letters to the “Home Journal” from these and other points in the South
were reissued in book form as “A Health Trip to the Tropics.” During the
years covered by this chapter he published a number of volumes similarly
made up of periodical correspondence and miscellaneous contributions to
his paper. “Rural Letters” contained his “Invalid Letters from Germany;” a
reprint of “Letters from under a Bridge,” with two additional to those in
the earlier editions; “Open Air Musings in the City;” letters from Sharon
Springs and Trenton Falls in the summer of 1848; and one story, “A Plain
Man’s Love.” “Hurrygraphs” comprised a series of letters from Plymouth,
New Bedford, Cape Cod, and places on the Delaware and Hudson rivers;
besides sketches--often very acute pieces of mental portraiture--of public
men, authors, and other celebrities, and a good deal of chit-chat about
society, the opera, etc., from the columns of the “Home Journal.”
All that can be said of these traveler’s letters is that they are fairly
good reporting. They hardly attain the rank of literature, and were as a
whole not worth putting between covers. But Willis sold well and,
therefore, found his account in continued book-making, bringing out,
usually, simultaneous editions in London and New York. It is instructive
to compare his letters from Cape Cod--a journey on which Mr. Grinnell was
again his companion--with Thoreau’s book on the same piece of geography.
Both men had quick eyes, and had taught themselves the art of observation.
But Willis’s letters were the notes of an “amateur casual,” or
“here-and-thereian,” on a flying trip over a sand-spit inhabited by queer
people, who was always on the lookout for points which would interest the
lady readers of a metropolitan journal. Thoreau, on the contrary, was like
a palmer on a solemn pilgrimage to one of nature’s peculiar shrines, with
loins girt up and staff in hand, tramping along the heavy sands, with the
eternal thunder of “The Reverend Poluphloisboio Thalasses” in his ear; in
serious and vigilant mood, watching every least token of the ways of the
sea, but careless of men and reading publics.
Now and then there is a quaint or poetic fancy in these itineraries of
Willis which recalls his youthful manner; as where, speaking of the
absence of an atmosphere in the tropic seas, he says: “As to the horizon,
it seems so near that, if you were washing your hands on deck, you might
try to throw the slops over it, as you would over the ship’s side. The sun
goes down, as it were, next door.” In the letters from Trenton
Falls--which he had visited twenty years before and described in “Edith
Linsey”--occurs a startling anticipation of the most admired figure in
Tennyson’s “Queen Mary:”--
“As we stood gazing at this, last night, a little after midnight,
the moon threw the shadow of the rock slantwise across the face of
the fall. I found myself insensibly watching to see whether the
delicate outline of the shadow would not vary. There it lay, still
as the shade of a church window across a marble slab on the wall,
drawing its fine line over the most frenzied tumult of the lashed
and agonized waters, and dividing whatever leapt across it, foam,
spray, or driving mist, with invariable truthfulness to the rock
that lay behind. Now, my song-maker, if you ever have a great man to
make famous--a hero who unflinchingly represents a great principle
amid the raging opposition, hatred, and malice of mankind--there is
your similitude: _Calm as the shadow of a rock across the foam of a
cataract_.”
Willis was induced by Mr. Moore, the proprietor and landlord, to edit a
small illustrated guide-book to Trenton Falls; his own contributions to
which consisted of descriptions reproduced from these letters and from
“Edith Linsey,” and a short biography of the Rev. John Sherman, the first
settler and a grandson of Roger Sherman. In the same way and in the same
year (1851) he put together a little “Life of Jenny Lind,” for whom he had
an ardent admiration, and whom he had been privileged to meet often and
familiarly during her first visit to America. This was, of course, not a
formal biography, but was made up from articles that he had written about
her from time to time for the “Home Journal,” and extracts from the
English papers. He also issued selections from his former volumes under
new names. Such were “People I have Met,” and “Life Here and There,” which
were stories from “Dashes at Life,” and contained little or nothing new,
and “A Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean,” which was a mere reprint of a
part of “Pencillings by the Way.”