Nathaniel Parker Willis

by Henry A. Beers

The generally agreeable impression which Willis made in English society was not without its exceptions. During this same summer in London he had been taken by a friend to see Miss Harriet Martineau. She was then on the point of embarking for that trip in America, her very outspoken narrative of which afterwards caused so many heart-burnings in this country. Her vinegary reminiscences of Willis, as recorded in her autobiography, though rather long, are perhaps worth reproducing here, not only for their liveliness, but because any contemporary impression, however unjust and mistaken, helps to fill out a complete picture of the man, and there were plenty of people who disliked Willis cordially.

“I encountered,” she says, “one specimen of American oddity before I left home, which should certainly have lessened my surprise at any that I met afterwards. While I was preparing for my travels, an acquaintance one day brought a buxom gentleman, whom he introduced to me under the name of Willis. There was something rather engaging in the round face, brisk air, and enjouement of the young man; but his conscious dandyism and unparalleled self-complacency spoiled the satisfaction, though they increased the inclination to laugh. Mr. N. P. Willis’s plea for coming to see me was his gratification that I was going to America, and his real reason was presently apparent: a desire to increase his consequence in London society by giving apparent proof that he was on intimate terms with every eminent person in America. He placed himself in an attitude of infinite ease, and whipped his little bright boot with a little bright cane, while he ran over the names of all his distinguished countrymen and countrywomen, and declared he should send me letters to them all. This offer of intervention went so very far that I said (what I have ever since said in the case of introductions offered by strangers), while thanking him for his intended good offices, that I was sufficiently uncertain in my plans to beg for excuse beforehand, in case I should find myself unable to use the letters. It appeared afterwards that to supply them and not to have them used suited Mr. Willis’s convenience exactly. It made him appear to have the friendships he boasted of without putting the boast to the proof. It was immediately before a late dinner that the gentleman called; and I found on the breakfast-table next morning a great parcel of Mr. Willis’s letters, inclosed in a prodigious one to myself, in which he offered advice. Among other things, he desired me not to use his letter to Dr. Channing if I had others from persons more intimate with him; and he proceeded to warn me against two friends of Dr. and Mrs. Channing’s, whose names I had never heard and whom Mr. Willis represented as bad and dangerous people. This gratuitous defamation of strangers whom I was likely to meet confirmed the suspicions my mother and I had confided to each other about the quality of Mr. Willis’s introductions. It seemed ungrateful to be so suspicious: but we could not see any good reason for such prodigious efforts on my behalf, nor for his naming any countrywomen of his to me in a way so spontaneously slanderous. So I resolved to use that packet of letters very cautiously, and to begin with one which should be well accompanied. In New York harbor newspapers were brought on board, in one of which was an extract from an article transmitted by Mr. Willis to the ‘New York Mirror,’ containing a most audacious account of me as an intimate friend of the writer. The friendship was not stated as a matter of fact, but so conveyed that it cost me much trouble to make it understood and believed, even by Mr. Willis’s own family, that I had never seen him but once, and then without having previously heard so much as his name. On my return the acquaintance who brought him was anxious to ask pardon if he had done mischief, events having by that time made Mr. Willis’s ways pretty well known. His partner in the property and editorship of the ‘New York Mirror’ called on me at West Point, and offered and rendered such extraordinary courtesy that I was at first almost as much perplexed as he and his wife were when they learned that I had never seen Mr. Willis but once. They pondered, they consulted, they cross-questioned me, they inquired whether I had any notion what Mr. Willis could have meant by writing of me as in a state of close intimacy with him. In like manner, when, some time after, I was in a carriage with some members of a picnic party to Monument Mountain, a little girl seated at my feet clasped my knees fondly, looked up in my face, and said, ‘O Miss Martineau! You are such a friend of my Uncle Nathaniel’s!’ Her father was present; and I tried to get off without explanation. But it was impossible,—they all knew how very intimate I was with Nathaniel; and there was a renewal of the amazement at my having seen him only once. I tried three of his letters; and the reception was in each case much the same,—a throwing down of the letter with an air not to be mistaken. In each case the reply was the same, when I subsequently found myself at liberty to ask what this might mean. ‘Mr. Willis is not entitled to write to me: he is no acquaintance of mine.’ As for the two ladies of whom I was especially to beware, I became exceedingly well acquainted with them, to my own advantage and pleasure; and, as a natural consequence, I discovered Mr. Willis’s reasons for desiring to keep us apart. I hardly need add that I burned the rest of his letters. He had better have spared himself the trouble of so much manœuvring, by which he lost a good deal, and could hardly have gained anything. I have simply stated the facts, because, in the first place, I do not wish to be considered one of Mr. Willis’s friends; and, in the next, it may be useful, and conducive to justice, to show, by a practical instance, what Mr. Willis’s pretensions to intimacy are worth. His countrymen and countrywomen accept, in simplicity, his accounts of our aristocracy as from the pen of one of their own coterie; and they may as well have the opportunity of judging for themselves whether their notorious ‘Penciller’ is qualified to write of Scotch dukes and English marquises and European celebrities of all kinds in the way he has done.”

The simple American reader will have a chance to make up his mind, on independent evidence, of how far Willis was qualified to write of Scotch dukes, etc.; but meanwhile it is not true that the audacious article in the “Mirror” of September 6, 1834 (which was not an “article,” by the way, but an extract from a private letter to Morris), conveyed any implication of an intimacy between Willis and Miss Martineau. On the contrary, it expressly says that his acquaintance with the lady was of only one day’s standing.

“I was taken yesterday,” it begins, “by the clever translator of ‘Faust’ to see the celebrated Miss Martineau. She has perhaps at this moment the most general and enviable reputation in England, and is the only one of the literary clique whose name is mentioned without some envious qualification.”

After some entirely respectful mention of her manner and appearance, the letter then goes on to say:—

“There is no necessity of bespeaking for so distinguished a visitor as Miss Martineau the warmest attentions of our country. She goes with high anticipations, and whatever she may find to object to in our society and institutions, it will be done, there cannot be a doubt, in a spirit of womanly and simple candor. She is sped on her way by the best wishes of the best hearts in England. I trust she will be met over there by wishes and welcomes as warm and as many.”

Any one who knew Willis would have felt sure that his “prodigious efforts” on Miss Martineau’s behalf sprang from his always good-natured and sometimes even officious eagerness to be of service. And most who knew him would probably have admitted that there was some mixture of a “desire to increase his consequence” in his offer of introductions. Motives are usually mixed in this bad world and Willis was seldom indifferent to opportunities for ingratiating himself with people worth knowing. But even so, it would have been more gracious in the lady if, after accepting his offers and the attentions of his partner at West Point, she had taken his professions for what they were worth, and omitted this spiteful mention of him in her book. Had he lived to read the passage, he would probably have consoled himself with the reflection that it was better to win smiles from beauty than approbation from a strong-minded Unitarian female with an ear-trumpet, or, as he politely paraphrased it in his letter to Morris, a “pliable, acoustic tube.”

The last fortnight in August he was ill of a bilious fever, during which his new friends proved very kind. Lady Blessington called daily in her carriage at his lodgings (over the shop of a baker, who gratified Willis by being overwhelmed at her ladyship’s condescension), and Dr. William Beattie, the king’s physician, attended his interesting patient devotedly and refused to take any fee. This excellent gentleman, who was the anonymous author of “Heliotrope” and a prolific contributor to the Annuals, became a firm friend of Willis and his correspondent for many years after his return to America. He was an intimate of Samuel Rogers and of Thomas Campbell, whose life he afterwards wrote, and he introduced Willis to both of them.

By September the latter was sufficiently convalescent to be ordered into the country. He had received an invitation from the Earl of Dalhousie, whom he had met in Italy, to make him a visit at Dalhousie Castle, near Edinburgh, and accordingly he set out for Scotland on the second of the month. Lady Charlotte Bury, a “scribbling woman,” had given him a letter to her brother, the Duke of Argyle, and he carried a score beside to other people in Scotland. At Dalhousie, the feudal castle of the Ramsays, nobly situated on a branch of the Esk, Willis was heartily welcomed, and passed a most agreeable fortnight. The earl had been governor of the Canadas in 1831; Lady Dalhousie was an invalid, and both of them were quiet, domestic people, kindly and simple, living with the profuse and even splendid hospitality proper to their rank, but without ostentation of fashion or gayety. The house was full of guests, among them the countess’s niece, Lady Moncrieff, a lovely widow of twenty-five, who was very polite to Willis during his next winter in London. The earl’s son, Lord Ramsay, was home from Oxford and initiated Willis into the mysteries of shooting over the stubble. This young gentleman succeeded to his father’s title in 1838, was a member of Sir Robert Peel’s ministry from 1843 to 1847, and in the latter year was made Governor-General of India. It was during his viceroyalty that the Burmese war was fought, the Punjaub annexed, and the railway begun from Calcutta to Bombay.