Captain Marryat and Mr. Willis having placed the arrangement of the dispute between them in our hands, and both parties having repaired hither with the intent of a hostile meeting; we have, previously to permitting such to take place, carefully gone through the original grounds of quarrel, which do not appear to us of sufficient importance to call for a meeting of such a nature.
We are perfectly borne out in this opinion by the arrangement of the 8th of February entered into by the mutual friends of the parties, and on which we think Captain Marryat ought to have withdrawn his challenge of the 4th inst.
That the new quarrel arises from the publication of the challenge and subsequent letters, in which, in our opinion, Captain Marryat was not justified. We are further of opinion that both parties should mutually withdraw the offensive correspondence, the terms on either side being unjustifiable, and we conceive that they more honorably act in so doing than in meeting in the field.
Edward Belcher.
F. G. Walker.
Thus peacefully ended this tempest in a teapot. Willis had carried his point and had acted throughout in a high-spirited and creditable manner—barring the folly of entering into “an affair of honor,” in the first place. His letters to Marryat are those of a gentleman, while his adversary’s language is invariably hectoring and coarse. The quarrel, of course, made a great deal of noise at the time in London literary and social circles. “The United Service Gazette,” the organ of the British Army and Navy, took Willis’s side in a long editorial in which much of the correspondence was reprinted from the “Times.” The latter journal, however, probably voiced the true sentiment of the community when it said: “We confess that we have a great distaste for this sort of squabbling, which exhibits, to say the least, an extraordinary want of judgment in the disputing parties.”
From Chatham Willis posted at once to Woolwich, thirty miles away, where he found his wife in convulsions. He had left a farewell letter for her, fully expecting to be killed in a duel with Marryat, who was reputed a crack shot. Two days later Willis went to London and called out Mr. F. Mills, who had acted as Marryat’s “mediator,” for an offensive letter in the “Times.” Mr. Mills named W. F. Campbell of Islay and Willis named John Tyndale, between whom this subsidiary quarrel was soon patched up, in a manner honorable to both. The assaults in the English magazines and the rumors of the Marryat affair of course found their way speedily to America, and were circulated and commented upon in the American periodicals according to their various prepossessions. “The cultivated old clergymen of the ‘North American Review,’” as Poe used to call them, lent the support of that influential quarterly to Willis in an article by C. C. Felton, a very friendly review of the “Pencillings,” and a defense of their author—a favor which Willis gratefully appreciated.
In March, 1836, he published in London “Inklings of Adventure,” consisting of thirteen stories and sketches of American and European life, reprinted from the “New Monthly,” “The Metropolitan,” and the “Court Magazine,” together with “Minute Philosophies” (from the “American Monthly”) and “A Log in the Archipelago,” from the “Mirror.” The book was handsomely published in three volumes, and dedicated to Edward Everett. For an edition of 1,200 copies Willis was paid £300, reserving to himself the copyright; and as he had received a guinea a page for the original articles, besides what Morris gave him for their republication in the “Mirror,” they may be said to have been fairly profitable.
These “Slingsby” papers are exceedingly clever. With the possible exception of “Letters from under a Bridge” and portions of “Pencillings by the Way,” they are the best work that Willis ever did; and they compare well with such lighter fiction, in the way of short tales or sketches of travel and adventure, as has been produced in America since Willis’s day. Whatever else they are, they are never dull and always readable. They are not read now only because the readers of light fiction habitually follow the market and inquire merely for the last thing out. Many of them were worked over from his “American Monthly” juvenilia, but his touch had grown firmer and he had purchased experience, as his motto declared, by his “penny of observation.” These “Inklings” do not penetrate to the stratum of real character, of strong passion, and of the interplay of motives and moral relations in which all vital fiction has its roots. Their plots are commonly slight, their persons sketchy, their incidents not seldom improbable, their coloring sometimes too high. As transcripts of actual life such stories as “Pedlar Karl,” “The Cherokee’s Threat,” and “Tom Fane and I,” with the easy optimism of their conclusions and their cheerful avoidance of all the responsibilities imposed upon the dwellers in this workaday world, are of course misleading and false. 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; and finally in the style, always graceful, and in passages really exquisite. It has recently been announced that style is “increasingly unimportant,” but can this be true? Not surely, unless fiction is to become hereafter a branch of social science and valuable only for its accurate report of life. It will then be the novelist’s duty to obliterate himself in his message, and any intrusion of his personality between the reader and the subject will be an impertinence. But it is hard to believe that the personal element is to lose its place in fiction and be banished to the realm of autobiography and lyric poetry. Style may be a purely external part of an artist’s equipment, but it is a necessary part all the same. A bad man or a weak man may have it, but that does not make it any the less indispensable for the good man intending literature. Willis was born with it; it showed in his manners, in his dress, in his writing. Whatever he did was done with an air.
The American parts of “Inklings,” written for the English reader, are the best. They reproduce for us the life of gay society, when society was, or seemed, gayer, or at least fresher than at present. It was the era of expansion and hope before the financial panic of 1837. The great waterway lately opened through the state of New York had set people traveling. The beauties of American lakes, forests, and rivers were being discovered, but were as yet unhackneyed. Lake George, The Thousand Isles, and the St. Lawrence, did not swarm with tourists. Nahant was still a fashionable seaside resort and Niagara a watering-place, where people actually went to spend months, and not a fleeting show for bridal couples and a mill-race for manufacturers. Saratoga, and Ballston, and Lebanon were rival spas, the first a “mushroom village” merely,—“the work of a lath and plaster Aladdin,”—when Congress Hall, with its big wooden colonnades, was in its glory. “A relic or two of the still astonished forest towers above the chimneys, in the shape of a melancholy grove of firs, and five minutes’ walk from the door, the dim old wilderness stands looking down on the village.” In which wilderness was embosomed Barhydt’s once famous hermitage, with its ear-shaped tarn and columnar pine shafts, whither one resorted for trout dinners, and where “the long, soft mornings, quiet as a shadowy elysium, on the rim of that ebon lake were as solitary as a melancholy man could desire.”