I feel that it is positive ingratitude not to offer our united thanks for your book, which we received in safety, and Miss Hathorne and I are now reading it aloud to Lord Dalhousie in the evening, with very great pleasure and amusement. Your descriptions recall to my mind admirably what I have seen, and paint to my mind’s eye what I wish to see, and the happy sunshine which your own mind has shed over every person and thing you have met is refreshing and enlivening to us, living now much alone in this dark and gloomy December. The “Quarterly” we read with extreme wrath and indignation, and, believe me, it will afford us the most sincere pleasure if you will take, if you find them worthy of it, a few more of your spirited pencillings from D. Castle.… Believe me always very sincerely yours.
C. B. Dalhousie.
It has been said above that there was almost nothing in “Pencillings” that could give pain to any one; but to this statement there are one or two exceptions. The first was the instance of Moore and O’Connell, in which Willis acknowledged and regretted his imprudence. “This publication, to my knowledge,” says Madden in his “Life of the Countess of Blessington,” “was attended with results which I cannot think Mr. Willis contemplated when he transmitted his hasty notes to America,—to estrangements of persons who, previously to the printed reports of their private conversations, had been on terms of intimate acquaintance. This was the case with respect to O’Connell and Moore. Moore’s reported remarks on O’Connell gave offense to the latter, and aroused bad feelings between them which had never previously existed, and which, I believe, never ceased to exist.”
It also appears from a letter from Willis to Lady Blessington, and an unsigned note from a friend of hers to Willis, both of which are printed in Madden’s “Life,” that Fonblanque resented the description of himself in “Pencillings,” and had written the author a note in terms which the latter thought “very unjustifiable.” Fonblanque was an able and estimable man, and Willis’s portrait, or caricature, of him, though not unkindly meant and applying merely to his personal appearance, was certainly not pleasant for the subject of it to see in print.
“I never saw,” it runs, “a much worse face; sallow, seamed, and hollow, his teeth irregular, his skin livid, his straight black hair uncombed and straggling over his forehead; he looked as if he might be the gentleman ‘whose coat was red and whose breeches were blue.’ A hollow, croaking voice, and a small, fiery black eye, with a smile like a skeleton’s, certainly did not improve his physiognomy. He sat upon his chair very awkwardly, and was very ill dressed, but every word he uttered showed him to be a man of claims very superior to exterior attraction.”
With the exception of Lockhart, Moore, Fonblanque, and Captain Marryat, whose case will be mentioned presently, it does not appear that anyone took offense at anything in “Pencillings.” As to Lady Blessington, Lockhart’s misgiving as to whether she would ever “again admit to her table the animal who has printed what ensues” was needless. It was she who saw the book through the press while Willis was in France on his wedding journey. He went to see her frequently during the remainder of his stay in London, and called upon her on his two subsequent visits to England; and their friendship and correspondence continued unbroken till her death in 1849. His poem, “To a Face Beloved,” originally printed in the “Mirror” of November 14, 1835, was addressed to her. It may well have been, however, that the noise made about the book, and the cause for complaint given to a few of the habitués of Gore House, put a certain constraint upon his visits there, and he probably absented himself from the dinners and receptions given by the mistress of the mansion, and which it had formerly been his chief pleasure to attend. In a letter to her from Dublin, January 25, 1840, he says: “I have, I assure you, no deeper regret than that my indiscretion (in ‘Pencillings’) should have checked the freedom of my approach to you. Still my attachment and admiration (so unhappily recorded) are always on the alert for some trace that I am still remembered by you.… My first pleasure when I return to town will be to avail myself of your kind invitation, and call at Gore House.”
In spite of the “Quarterly’s” attack—partly no doubt in consequence of it—“Pencillings by the Way” met, on the whole, with a generous reception from the English public, and even from the English press. Literary criticism in those days was largely influenced by political prejudice. It was useless for a Whig, a “Cockney,” or an American, to hope for justice from the Tory reviews. The “Westminster” (Radical) was edited by Willis’s friend, Dr. Bowring; the “Edinburgh” (Whig), by his acquaintance, Lord Jeffrey. The former accordingly greeted his book with warm approval, and the latter praised it with faint damns. On the other hand, “Fraser’s,” the lightest and brightest of the Tory organs, received it with uproarious contempt. The notice of “Pencillings” in the February number of the magazine for 1836 was by Maginn,—the “Odoherty” of the “Noctes,”—a witty Irish blackguard, the hired bravo of the Tory press, who spent his time, except when drunk or in jail for debt, in writing lampoons and rollicking songs for “Blackwood” and “Fraser,” expressive chiefly of convivial joys and of boisterous scorn of the Whigs. There was a flavor of whiskey and Donnybrook about whatever Maginn wrote, and he wielded his blackthorn with such droll abandon that his victims could hardly help laughing, while rubbing their heads. His onslaught on “Pencillings” began, “This is really a goose of a book, or if anybody wishes the idiom to be changed, a book of a goose. There is not a single idea in it, from the first page to the last, beyond what might germinate in the brain of a washerwoman.” He then goes on to call the author a lickspittle, a “beggarly skittler,” a jackass, a ninny, a haberdasher, a “namby-pamby writer in twaddling albums, kept by the moustachioed and strong-smelling widows or bony matrons of Portland Place;” a “fifty-fifth rate scribbler of gripe-visited sonnets,” a “windy-gutted visitor,” and a “sumph,” whatever that mystic monosyllable may import.[3] His writing is characterized as “chamber-maid gabble,” “small beer,” “penny-trumpet eloquence,” “Willis’s bray,” and “Niagara in a jordan.” President Jackson, whom Maginn supposes to have appointed Willis attaché to the French embassy, is “that most open-throated of flummery-gulpers, Old Hickory.” Alluding to a passage in Willis’s “slimy preface,” the reviewer says, “that Willis should literally set his foot on Lockhart’s head is what we think no one imagines the silly man to have meant. The probabilities are that if the imposition of feet should take place between them, the toe of Lockhart would find itself in disgusting contact with a part of Willis which is considerably removed from his head, and deemed to be the quarter in which the honor of such persons is most peculiarly called into action.” Such were the amenities of criticism half a century ago. Of course this animated billingsgate could not hurt Willis in anybody’s esteem, and called for no reply. Maginn was a wretched creature and no one minded what he said; though, to be sure, the Hon. Grantley Berkeley thought it necessary, in this same year, 1836, to call him out for a scurrilous attack upon himself and his cousin, Lady Euston, in a notice of Berkeley’s novel, “Castle Berkeley.” The latter, in his very diverting “Life and Recollections,” gives a circumstantial history of this duel and of the flogging which he administered to Fraser for publishing the article, and of Maginn’s shameful treatment of poor Miss Landon.
But one of the notices provoked by “Pencillings” came near having serious consequences for Willis. In a letter in the “Mirror” of April 18, 1835, he had inserted a postscript, after his signature, as he claimed, and meant only for Morris’s private eye, giving some information about the sales of books in London. In this occurred, among other things, the sentence following: “Captain Marryat’s gross trash sells immensely about Wapping and Portsmouth, and brings him five or six hundred the book, but that can scarce be called literature.” Morris printed it with the rest of the letter, and when it reached England the gallant captain was naturally displeased by it. His revenge was to publish in his magazine, the “Metropolitan” for January, 1836, a review of “Pencillings,” or rather a grossly personal review of the author of “Pencillings.” The article was less telling than the “Quarterly’s,” simply because Marryat did not drive so sharp a quill as the editor of the “Quarterly.” But the latter knew his business as a reviewer and confined himself to the book in hand. Marryat, on the contrary, traveled outside the record and helplessly allowed his private grievance to appear. He declared that Willis was a “spurious attaché,” who had made his way into English society under false colors.
“He makes invidious, uncharitable, and ill-natured remarks upon authors and their works; all of which he dispatches for the benefit of the reading public of America, and, at the same time that he has thus stabbed them behind their backs, he is requesting to be introduced to them—bowing, smiling, and simpering.” “Although we are well acquainted with the birth, parentage, and history of Mr. Willis, previous to his making his continental tour, we will pass them over in silence; and we think that Mr. Willis will acknowledge that we are generous in so doing.” “It is evident that Mr. Willis has never, till lately, been in good society, either in England or America.”
Finally he exhumed from some quarter the pasquinade of poor Joe Snelling, referred to in our third chapter, from which he printed the following lines by way of showing Willis’s standing at home:—