Henry A. Beers

“ 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. ”

“ It is, for the most part, the life of this society which Willis so engagingly portrays in the “Slingsby” sketches. His heroes are devil-may-care young fellows, who wander about from one fashionable resort to another, composing love verses, flirting, dancing, eloping, or assisting at elopements. It was the era of the buck or beau, a joyous, flamboyant creature who wore figured waistcoats, was a knowing whip, danced with vigor, loved pink champagne, serenaded the ladies, was gallant in speech, dashing and confident in bearing, and never in the least blasé. ”

“ A residence near London, which gives you the opportunity of enjoying its numerous advantages, without weakening your mind by a too frequent contact with its dissipations, is, of all others, the one I would select for a literary man, and I shall look forward with pleasure to seeing you at Seamore Place in your new and more respectable character of a Domestic Man, which, be assured, will bestow more happiness on you than all the futile successes ever acquired in the heartless maze of fashion and folly, in whose vortex you have been whirled during so many months. ”

“ All the best society of London exclusives is now open to me—me! a sometime apprentice at setting types—me! without a sou in the world beyond what my pen brings me, and with not only no influence from friends at home, but a world of envy and slander at my back. Thank heaven, there is not a countryman of mine, except Washington Irving, who has even the standing in England which I have got in three days only. ”

“ The high spirits of the narrator carry his readers buoyantly along over the bloodiest passages with scarcely an abatement of their cheerfulness. Willis did not take room enough to develop character and motive to the extent required in order to give his thick-coming events an air of vraisemblance. “This tale of many tails,” he said of “Violanta Cesarini,” “should have been a novel. You have in brief what should have been well elaborated, embarrassed with difficulties, relieved by digressions, tipped with a moral, and bound in two volumes, with a portrait of the author.” ”

“ Willis was an extremely agreeable young man in society, somewhat overdressed and a little too demonstratif, but abounding in good spirits, pleasing reminiscences of Eastern and Continental travel and of his residence there for some time as attaché to a foreign legation. He was observant and communicative, lively and clever in conversation, having the peculiar art of making himself agreeable to ladies, old as well as young, dégagé in his manner, and on exceedingly good terms with himself and with the élite of the best society, wherever he went. ”

“ A Man of Genius is out of his natural sphere in such a circle; he loses his identity and blunts the fine edge of his sensibility. You have retired in time, and will, I am persuaded, have reason [174] to bless the gentle and benign influence that has attracted you from it to the pure and healthy atmosphere of domestic life. Be assured, my dear Mr. Willis, that out of the circle of your immediate family you have no friend more truly interested in your welfare or more anxious to promote it than I am, of which no proof in my power shall ever be wanting. ”

“ Death and disease seem clutching their victims away in your very sight, and you see them struggle and go through their last agony in the streets—unpitied. How people can ride in carriages and wear white gloves and smile and look happy, in this great lazar-house, is beyond my conception. I keep my great cloak pocket full of pence, and shut my eyes while I give them into their skinny hands,—poor devils!”
Madden sings the wrath of Campbell over this literary undertaking of Willis: “What could he know of Ireland? How could any American know anything about it? ”

“ 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 [88] in writing or conversation. ”

“ The hero was the inevitable dandy poet,—this time he was twenty-two,—and the heroine who doted on him with a half motherly affection was a well preserved English countess of forty, wedded to a decrepit but accommodating earl. The noble pair go traveling, with the boyish poet in their train, and coming to Rome, the latter becomes enamored of an Italian marchioness and cuts loose from Lady Jane, who, “having loved too late to dream of love again,” grows old as best she may. ”

“ Willis’s English had many excellent qualities. It was crisp, clean cut, pointed, nimble on the turn. He was good at a quotation, deftly brought in, unhackneyed, and never too much of it, a single phrase or sentence or half a line of verse maybe. There is a perpetual twinkle or ripple over his style, like a quaver in music, which sometimes fatigues. Is the man never going to forget himself and say a thing plainly? the reader asks. But the verbal prettinesses and affectations which disfigured his later prose do not abound in his earlier and better work. ”

“ Their air is the air of every day, but their happenings are those of the wildest romance. Their charm—and they have for many old-fashioned readers a quite decided charm—does not lie in truth to life, but in the vivacious movement of the narrative, the glimpses of scenery by the way, the alternations of sentiment and gayety, neither very profound, but each for the time sincere and passing quickly into one another ”

“ Whatever may have been the effect of Willis’s career in Europe upon his character, its influence on his literary fortunes was most propitious. Foreign travel furnished just the stimulus that he wanted. As a writer he was at all times very dependent on his supplies. If they were fresh and abundant his writing was correspondingly so; if life stagnated with him his writing wore thin. Place is comparatively indifferent to men of deep or intense genius, to a philosopher like Emerson or a brooding idealist like Hawthorne. ”

“ A man is not born in college, and he seldom dies or marries there. The struggle which decides his final success or failure is fought on other fields. As to the life itself, though engrossing enough to those who lead it, as stuff for fiction it is scant,—a life of pleasant monotony, varied by contests for honors and prizes which seem paltry to the man, and made exciting by that most fatuous of pursuits, college “politics.” Nevertheless, it has unique features of its own, peculiar developments of sentiment and humor which appeal to the imagination. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Willis did not sit down in Europe, like Longfellow, [118] and become the interpreter to the New World of the Old World’s romantic past. He was never much of a scholar. The literature and legends of the countries he traveled had little to give him, though he possessed just enough of the historic imagination for the proper equipment of a picturesque tourist. In general it was the present that interested him: all this stirring modern life, the strange manners and dresses, the changing landscapes, the gay throngs in the streets, the pretty women and notable men at the drive or the ball. ”

“ This newness in life at the Springs, this background of primitive wilderness against which the drives and dances and piazza promenades of the fashionable frequenters were projected, has long since disappeared, and with it has gone a certain old school exclusiveness which once marked the society at American baths. That society, if not more aristocratic than at present, was at all events more select, simply by virtue of being smaller. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Harvard was the natural destination of a Boston Latin School boy intending college. But the line between the Orthodox and the Unitarians was drawn more sharply in 1820 than in 1884. Even now stray youths from Boston are found at other colleges than Harvard, attracted elsewhere by family ties or theological affinities. But at that time the cleavage made by the schism in Eastern Massachusetts was still raw, and Deacon Willis would almost as soon have sent his boy into the jaws of hell as into such a hot-bed of Unitarianism as the Cambridge college. ”

“ It must be confessed that Willis was something of a cockney in the presence of great Nature. He viewed her more as a landscape gardener than as a naturalist. He had not the intense passion for her, the rapt communion with her, of elect spirits like Wordsworth and Thoreau. She furnished him rather with a hundred pretty and playful analogies, a hundred texts for little sermons on cheerfulness and content, in which he rode his fancy sometimes too [226] far and let his sentiment answer too quickly to trifling provocations. ”

“ For a time even Irving seemed sentimental and Cooper melodramatic. Yet these survive, but whether Willis, whose name has so often been joined with theirs, is destined to find still a hearing, it is for the future alone to say. “He will be remembered,” wrote his kinsman, Dr. Richard S. Storrs, “as a man eminently human, with almost unique endowments, devoting rare powers to insignificant purposes, and curiously illustrating the ‘fine irony of Nature,’ with which she often lavishes one of her choice productions on comparatively inferior ends.” ”

“ Sometimes it is amusement at the writer’s wit and smartness, his brilliant descriptions and wondrous flow and rattle of spirits, and sometimes it is wicked amusement, and, it must be confessed, at Willis’s own expense.... To know a duchess, for instance, is given to very few of us. He sees things that are not given to us to see. We see the duchess pass by in her carriage and gaze with much reverence on the strawberry leaves on the panels and her Grace within; whereas the odds are that the lovely duchess has had, at one time or the other, a desperate flirtation with Willis the conqueror.... ”

“ When I am walking on such evenings as we have had this week past, and amidst such scenery as New Haven presents, chastened and softened in its beauty by the pure and quiet light of the moon, I have an elevation of thought and sentiment which I cannot drown in sleep without reluctance. ”