“Mr. Carr takes me into his family and pays all my expenses. We go to the old palaces of the Abencerrages, perhaps the most romantic country in history, and one very little written about, and it will double the value of my journey to Morris at the same time that it secures me from any reverse of fortune. He means to spend his summers in Spain, which is right opposite Tangiers at two hours’ sail, and next fall he will run down to Italy and the Sicilies, thus giving me every opportunity I want. I have letters from Lord James Hay to his brother-in-law, the governor of Gibraltar, and one from Lord Fife to the governor of the Ionian Islands.”
Why he did not embrace this golden chance remains uncertain, though he hints at a possible difficulty in the fact that his friend, the consul, was a notorious duelist, who had shot seven or eight men and had a very pretty wife. However, before he left Paris, Mr. Rives attached him to his own embassy, a courtesy which proved of the greatest service to him. It entitled him to wear the uniform of a secretary of legation, and the diplomatic button gave him the entrée to the court circles of every country he visited.
Willis saw Paris at an interesting moment. The Polish revolution had just failed, and the city swarmed with refugees. Louis Philippe was already growing unpopular, and there were continual small émeutes on the Boulevard Montmartre, at the Porte Saint Denis, and in other quarters, led by Polytechnic students and put down without much trouble by the troops. It was a cholera year and people were dying by the hundreds daily. Meanwhile the gay world went on much as ever. Carnival was kept with the usual elaborate follies. There were masked balls at the palace. Malibran and Taglioni were on the stage. Paris, with its novelties and splendors, exercised the same fascination over Willis that it exercises proverbially over his compatriots. He was never tired of promenading and sight-seeing. His lodgings were in the Rue Rivoli, facing the Tuileries. Sismondi, the historian, had the apartment under him. In a private letter he thus describes his daily occupations:—
“I have bought a coffee maker and cups, and a loaf of sugar and a pan, etc., etc., and my hostess’s daughter, Christine, brings me my bread and butter, and I breakfast gloriously alone, the doctor (Howe) being always at the hospitals in the morning. I breakfast and write all along the forenoon till twelve, and then see sights and hear lectures till dark, dine at five or six, and either go to some party in the evening, or stay at home and study with Zelie.”
He had no fear of the cholera and firmly believed that it was not contagious. He was advised that good living, frequent bathing, a cheerful frame of mind, and regular habits were the best preventives. He even went boldly through the cholera wards of the Hôtel Dieu, and sent a harrowing description of them to the “Mirror.” But towards spring the pestilence gained more and more. The theatres were shut, all gayeties suspended, and thousands fled the city daily. The upper classes, who had thus far escaped, began to be attacked. The streets were almost deserted, people went about holding camphor bags to their nostrils, and the panic became universal. Finally, toward the middle of April, while dancing at a party, Willis was seized with violent pains in the stomach, vomiting, and chills. He ran out of the room to an apothecary’s, swallowed thirty drops of laudanum, took a carriage home, and a prescription of camphor and ether, and went to bed. These instant remedies, he had no doubt, were all that saved him, and on April 16th he started for Italy.
It is unnecessary for the biographer to follow him step by step in his saunterings through Europe. These are fully recorded in his letters to the “Mirror,” which covered a period of four years, the first appearing in the issue of February 13, 1832, and the last on January 14, 1836. He began them on the voyage out, as soon as he had recovered from his first seasickness, and he continued them until about six months before his return home. The title “Pencillings by the Way,” he had used before, but he retained it and added the sub-caption, “First Impressions of Europe.” Both described well the character of these letters, which were written hastily, often on the wing, and sent off in many cases without revision, to catch the next packet for America; in which, moreover, the writer aimed to “record impressions, not statistics.” There were one hundred and thirty-nine of them in all, and they were designed to appear weekly so far as possible. But by reason of irregular postal facilities, they averaged less than one a fortnight, and sometimes a month or more elapsed between two of them. They were read with eagerness in America, and Morris asserted that they were copied into five hundred newspapers. Their popularity is explained in part by the fact that Europe was much farther off from us in those days than it is now. The voyage by sailing-vessel was tedious, and few Americans went abroad for pleasure. Willis, to be sure, professed himself astonished by the numbers of his countrymen whom he met in Italy and elsewhere, but these were but a handful compared with the annual horde of tourists who rush back and forth in the steamers, and do Great Britain and the continent in three months. It is also true that the literature of travel was not then so abundant. The time has gone by for first impressions of countries. The reader now demands a more minute and authoritative study of some single corner of the map. Yet this does not serve to account altogether for Willis’s success in his “Pencillings.” There were already plenty of books by American travelers in Europe, such as they were, which have long been obsolete. Who ever hears nowadays of James’s “Travels,” for instance, published in 1820; or of Austin’s “Letters from London,” 1804; or of “A Journal of a Tour in Italy by an American,” 1824; to say nothing of innumerable “Americans in Paris,” and “Americans in London,” of later dates? The truth is that Willis’s rapid sketches were capital writing of their kind, and the work of a born “foreign correspondent.” He was a quick and sympathetic, though not a subtle observer, had an eye for effect, and a journalist’s instinct for seizing the characteristic features of a scene and leaving out the lumber. Few of his letters are in the least guide-bookish. His raptures in stated places for admiration, such as galleries, palaces, and cathedrals, are sometimes conventional, and doubtless his passing judgments on famous works of art are often either at second hand or incorrect. His education had not prepared him to pronounce on these, and he had not the patience to cultivate a critical appreciation of them. But in the crowd and out of doors—whither he gladly escapes—he is always happy, and there are many pictures, scattered here and there through these excellent letters, which for sharpness of line and brightness of color have not been excelled either by Hawthorne, in his “Note-Books,” or by Bayard Taylor, in his numerous views, afoot or otherwise, or by Henry James, in his more penetrating and far more carefully finished studies.
Willis did not sit down in Europe, like Longfellow, 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. Nor was his attitude that of criticism, but rather of intense personal enjoyment. He had gone out ready to be pleased, and he was pleased. He gave, in consequence, a somewhat rose-colored view of Europe to his readers at home. Not that the disagreeable side escaped his notice, but he was having his holiday and he gave a holiday account of it, and his engaging egotism lent a personal interest to his descriptions. The “Edinburgh Review,” in a just but rather heavy notice of “Pencillings,” complained of the scantiness of useful information in them. Useful information was a thing which Willis eschewed. He took small interest in politics, public institutions, industrial conditions, etc.; and he knew that they would bore nine out of ten among his readers. He lumped them jauntily under the head of “statistics,” referred the anxious inquirer concerning them to the cyclopædias, acknowledged with delightful candor that he himself was an ornamental person, and went on with his sketches of people and places. Yet “Pencillings by the Way” was a book which so solid a man as Daniel Webster carried with him on a journey, and which, says his biographer, “he read attentively and praised. He said the letters were both instructive and amusing and evinced great talents on the part of the author.” They inspired the young Bayard Taylor with his first longing to travel. Thousands of Americans have taken their impressions of Europe from them; and in spite of all that has since been written by more leisurely and better instructed observers, they retain their freshness wonderfully, and present to the reader of to-day vivid glimpses of the outside of European life, at a time when steam had not yet made the byways of all countries accessible.
Willis spent the summer and autumn of 1832 in the north of Italy, making Florence his headquarters. Dr. Bowring had given him in Paris a letter to Count Porro at Marseilles. The latter had been with Byron in Greece, where Count Gamba, the Guiccioli’s brother, was of his corps and served under him. He gave Willis letters to “half the rank of Italy:” among others, to the Marquis Borromeo, who owned the “Isola Bella” in Lake Maggiore. Porro assured Willis that Borromeo would give him the use of one of his palazzos, “as he has five or six and is happy when people he knows occupy his servants.” The nominal position of attaché to the American legation at Paris obtained for him a private presentation to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and an invitation to the ducal balls and the receptions at the Casino, both of which were given weekly. The Florentines did not entertain much at their houses, but the foreign residents did, and especially the English. Willis was dined by Jerome Bonaparte, the ex-King of Westphalia, who was living at the Tuscan capital with the title of Prince Montfort, and giving very exclusive parties. He resorted to the Saturday soirées of Prince Poniatowski, who professed love for Americans, and whose august name was afterwards borne by the favorite pony of the Willis children at Idlewild. In short, he was freely admitted to Florentine society and took part in its fashionable intrigues and dissipations. He secured lodgings in Florence in the same palazzo with Greenough, in the apartment just vacated by Cole, the American landscape painter. Through Greenough he saw a great deal of artist life in Italy. At Rome Greenough subsequently introduced him to Gibson, the English sculptor, who presented him with a cast of his bas-relief, Cupid and Psyche. Under the guidance of the two, Willis amused himself by trying his hand, in an amateurish fashion, at moulding in clay. He was flattered by their assurances that he had a good touch, and felt half inclined, for a moment, to exchange his dilettantish pursuit of letters for an equally dilettantish pursuit of art. His dreams of the possibilities of such a career took shape long after in the novel of “Paul Fane.” Greenough had moulded a bust of Willis at Florence, and some years after he cut it in marble and gave it to him. There is a story about this which is authentic, and too pretty to leave untold. Mr. Joseph Grinnell of New Bedford happened to be in Florence in the spring of 1830 and had employed Greenough to make him a statue of his niece Cornelia,—then a child of five years,—who became in time Willis’s second wife. It was from a remnant of the same block used for her statue that the sculptor, unconscious of the omen, afterwards carved the bust of her future husband. The two fragments thus strangely reunited stand now in the same drawing-room, the head of the youthful poet, with its Hyperion curls, and the full-length figure of the demure little Quaker maiden, holding in one hand a drinking-cup and in the other a bird. From this portrait-bust of Willis is taken the engraving by Halpin in the illustrated edition of Willis’s poems published by Clark, Austin & Smith, 1859. It was a fair likeness, but somewhat heavy and unideal. Its original had grown quite fat abroad. His inherited tendency to embonpoint was counteracted in later life by the emaciation of long illness. Even as a young man his height gave him a look of slenderness, though his face was full. The “Autocrat,” apropos of dandies whose jaws could not fill out their collars, affirms that “Willis touched this last point in one of his earlier ambrotypes.”
August found him at the Baths of Lucca, “The Saratoga of Italy,” flirting, and recuperating from the exhausting effects of an Italian summer. In a private letter dated on the 20th, he announces his intention of starting for England to-morrow by way of Switzerland and the Rhine, returning to Italy in a few months in time for the Roman season.
“In London 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 daily increasing repugnance. I love my country, but the ornamental is my vocation, and of this she has none. I shall pass the next summer, perhaps, in Germany at a university, and I mean to learn German thoroughly. You would be astonished at the facility of learning a language in the country. I speak French well and Italian passably, and you know how little I knew and how short a time I have been abroad.”