Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century

by George Paston

A few years later, Mr. Willis returned to Boston, where, in 1816, he started the Boston Recorder, the first newspaper, he was accustomed to say, that had ever been run on religious lines. He seems to have been a respectable, but narrow-minded man, who loved long devotions and many services, and looked upon dancing, card-playing and stage-plays as works of the Evil One. His redeeming points were a sense of humour and a keen appreciation of female beauty, which last characteristic he certainly bequeathed to his son. It was his custom to sit round the fire with his nine children on winter evenings, and tell them stories about the old Dutch tiles, representing New Testament scenes, with which the chimney-corner was lined. The success of these informal Scripture lessons led him to establish a religious paper for young people called The Youth's Companion, in which some of our hero's early verses appeared. His wife, Hannah Parker, is described as a charming woman, lively, impulsive, and emotional. Her son, Nathaniel, whose devotion to her never wavered, used to say, 'My veins are teeming with the quicksilver spirit my mother gave me.'

Willis the younger was sent to school at Boston, where he had Emerson for a schoolfellow, and afterwards to the university of Yale, where he wrote much poetry, and was well received in the society of the place on account of his good looks, easy manners, and precocious literary reputation. On leaving Yale, he was delivered of a volume of juvenile poems, and then settled down in Boston to four years' journalistic work. Samuel Goodrich, better known in England under his pseudonym of 'Peter Parley,' engaged him to edit some annuals and gift-books, an employment which the young man found particularly congenial. In his Recollections Peter Parley draws a comparison between his two contributors, Hawthorne and Willis, and records that everything Willis wrote attracted immediate attention, while the early productions of Hawthorne passed almost unnoticed.

In 1829 Willis started on his own account with the American Monthly Magazine, which had an existence of little more than two years. He announced that he could not afford to pay for contributions, as he expected only a small circulation, and he wrote most of the copy himself. Every month there were discursive, gossiping editorial articles in that 'personal' vein which has been worked with so much industry in our own day. He took his readers into his confidence, prattled about his japonica and his pastilles, and described his favourite bird, a scarlet trulian, and his dogs, Ugolino and L. E. L., who slept in the waste-paper basket. He professed to write with a bottle of Rudesheimer and a plate of olives at his elbow, and it was hinted that he ate fruit in summer with an amber-handled fork to keep his palm cool!

These youthful affectations had a peculiarly exasperating effect upon men of a different type; and Willis became the butt of the more old-fashioned critics, who vied with each other in inventing opprobrious epithets to shower upon the head of this young puppy of journalism. However, Nathaniel was not a person who could easily be suppressed, and he soon became one of the most popular magazine-writers of his time, his prose being described by an admirer as 'delicate and brief like a white jacket--transparent like a lump of sugar in champagne--soft-tempered like the sea-breeze at night.' Unfortunately, the magazines paid but little, even for prose of the above description, and Willis presently found himself in financial difficulties; while, with all his acknowledged fascinations, he was unlucky in his first love-affair. He became engaged to a beautiful girl called Mary Benham, but her guardian broke off the match, and the lady, who seems to have had an inclination for literary men, afterwards married Motley, the historian of the Dutch Republic.

In 1831 the American Monthly Magazine ceased to appear, and Willis, leaving Boston and his creditors without regret, obtained the post of assistant-editor on the New York Mirror, a weekly paper devoted to literature, light fiction, and the fine arts. It was the property of Morris, author of the once world-famous song, 'Woodman, spare that Tree,' and the editor-in-chief was Theodore Fay, a novelist of some distinction. Soon after his appointment it was decided that Willis should be sent to Europe as foreign correspondent of his paper. A sum of about a hundred pounds was scraped together for his expenses, and it was arranged that he should write weekly letters at the rate of two guineas a letter. In the autumn of 1831 he sailed in a merchant-vessel for Havre, whence he journeyed to Paris in November. Here he spent the first five or six months of his tour, and here began the series of 'Pencillings by the Way,' a portion of which gained him rather an unwelcome notoriety in English society by reason of the 'personalities' it contained. When published in book form the Pencillings were considerably toned down, and the proper names were represented by initials, so that people who read them then for the first time wondered what all the excitement had been about. As the chapters which relate to England are of most interest to English readers, Willis's continental adventures need only be briefly noticed. The extracts here quoted are taken from the original letters as they appeared in the New York Mirror, which differ in many respects from the version that was published in London after the attack by the Quarterly Review.

In Paris Willis found himself in his element, and was made much of by the Anglo-French community, which was then under the special patronage of Lafayette. One of the most interesting of his new acquaintances was the Countess Guiccioli, upon whose appearance and manners he comments with characteristic frankness.

'I met the Guiccioli yesterday in the Tuileries,' he writes shortly after his arrival. 'She looks much younger than I anticipated, and is a handsome blonde, apparently about thirty. I am told by a gentleman who knows her that she has become a great flirt, and is quite spoiled by admiration. The celebrity of Lord Byron's attachment would certainly make her a very desirable acquaintance were she much less pretty than she really is, and I am told her drawing-room is thronged with lovers of all nations contending for a preference which, having once been given, should be buried, I think, for ever.' A little later he has himself been introduced to the Guiccioli, and he describes an interview which he has had with her, when the conversation turned upon her friendship with Shelley.

'She gave me one of his letters to herself as an autograph,' he narrates. 'She says he was at times a little crazy--fou, as she expressed it--but there never was a nobler or a better man. Lord Byron, she says, loved him as a brother.... There were several miniatures of Byron hanging up in the room; I asked her if any of them were perfect in the resemblance. "No," she said, "that is the most like him," taking down a miniature by an Italian artist, "mais il était beaucoup plus beau--beaucoup--beaucoup." She reiterated the word with a very touching tenderness, and continued to look at the portrait for some time.... She went on talking of the painters who had drawn Byron, and said the American, West's, was the best likeness. I did not tell her that West's portrait of herself was excessively flattered. I am sure no one would know her, from the engraving at least. Her cheek-bones are high, her forehead is badly shaped, and altogether the frame of her features is decidedly ugly. She dresses in the worst taste too, and yet for all this, and poetry and celebrity aside, the countess is both a lovely and a fascinating woman, and one whom a man of sentiment would admire at this age very sincerely, but not for beauty.'

The cholera frightened Willis away from Paris in April, but before he left, the United States minister, Mr. Rives, appointed him honorary attaché to his own embassy, a great social advantage to the young man, who was thereby enabled to obtain the entrée into court circles in every country that he visited. At the same time the appointment somewhat misled his numerous new acquaintances on the subject of his social position, while the 'spurious' attachéship afterwards became a weapon in the hands of his enemies. However, for the time being, the young correspondent thoroughly enjoyed his novel experiences, and contrived to communicate his enjoyment to his readers. His letters were eagerly read by his countrymen, and are said to have been copied into no less than five hundred newspapers. He eschewed useful information, gave impressions rather than statistics, and was fairly successful in avoiding the style of the guide-book. The summer and autumn of 1832 were spent in northern Italy, Florence being the traveller's headquarters. He had letters of introduction to half the Italian nobility, and was made welcome in the court circles of Tuscany. In the autumn he was flirting at the Baths of Lucca, and at this time he had formed a project of travelling to London by way of Switzerland. 'In London,' he writes to his sister, 'I mean to make arrangements with the magazines, and then live abroad altogether. It costs so little here, and one lives so luxuriously too, and there is so much to fill one's mind and eye, that I think of returning to naked America with ever-increasing repugnance. I love my country, but the ornamental is my vocation, and of this she has none.' This programme was changed, and Willis spent the winter between Rome, Florence, and Venice. Wherever he went he made friends, but his progress was in itself a feat of diplomacy, and few people dreamt that the dashing young attaché depended for his living upon his contributions to a newspaper, payment for which did not always arrive with desirable punctuality. 'I have dined,' he writes to his mother, 'with a prince one day, and alone in a cook-shop the next.' He explains that he can live on about sixty pounds a year at Florence, paying four or five shillings a week for his rooms, breakfasting for fourpence, and dining quite magnificently for a shilling.

In June 1833, Willis was invited by the officers of an American frigate to accompany them on a six months' cruise in the Mediterranean. This was far too good an offer to be refused, since it would have been impossible to get a peep at the East under more ideal conditions of travel. Willis's letters from Greece and Turkey are among the best and happiest that he wrote, for the weather was perfect, the company was pleasant (there were ladies on board), and the reception they met with wherever they weighed anchor was most hospitable; while the Oriental mode of life appealed to our hero's highly-coloured, romantic taste. In the island of Ægina he was introduced to Byron's Maid of Athens, once the beautiful Teresa Makri, now plain Mrs. Black, with an ugly little boy, and a Scotch terrier that snapped at the traveller's heels. He describes the ci-devant Maid of Athens as a handsome woman, with a clear dark skin, and a nose and forehead that formed the straight line of the Greek model.