Nathaniel Parker Willis

by Henry A. Beers

This newness in life at the Springs, this background of primitive wilderness against which the drives and dances and piazza promenades of the fashionable frequenters were projected, has long since disappeared, and with it has gone a certain old school exclusiveness which once marked the society at American baths. That society, if not more aristocratic than at present, was at all events more select, simply by virtue of being smaller. Fewer people were in the habit of going into the country in summer, and fashionable circles in the cities were not so large but that “the best people” from all over the States might know each other at least by name. A reigning belle or a distinguished beau had a national reputation. Southern planters brought their families to Northern resorts and supplied an element which has been missed since the war.

“In the fourteen millions of inhabitants in the United States,” Willis explains, “there are precisely four authenticated and undisputed aristocratic families. There is one in Boston, one in New York, one in Philadelphia, and one in Baltimore. With two hundred miles’ interval between them, they agree passably, and generally meet at one or another of the three watering-places of Saratoga, Ballston, or Lebanon. Their meeting is as mysterious as the process of crystallization, for it is not by agreement. As it is not known till the moment they arrive, there is, of course, great excitement among the hotel-keepers in these different parts of the country, and a village that has ten thousand transient inhabitants one summer, has, for the next, scarcely as many score. The vast and solitary temples of Pæstum are gay in comparison with these halls of disappointment.”

It is, for the most part, the life of this society which Willis so engagingly portrays in the “Slingsby” sketches. His heroes are devil-may-care young fellows, who wander about from one fashionable resort to another, composing love verses, flirting, dancing, eloping, or assisting at elopements. It was the era of the buck or beau, a joyous, flamboyant creature who wore figured waistcoats, was a knowing whip, danced with vigor, loved pink champagne, serenaded the ladies, was gallant in speech, dashing and confident in bearing, and never in the least blasé.

This freshness and youthfulness, this air of stir, adventure, excitement, hope, which was impressed upon American life, books, and society of that date are reflected from Willis’s sparkling pages and give them even a sort of historical interest, apart from their claims as literature. There is a breath of morning wind in them. With the homelier side of life he had little concern, and his writing lacks gravity and simplicity. Whenever he grows serious, it is to grow sentimental. “F. Smith” is perhaps the most artistic of these sketches, and the most representative of its author’s talent, in its quick interchange of poetic description, bright dialogue, light, malicious humor, and natural sentiment; neither mood in excess, nor dwelt on long enough to fatigue. It is a trifling episode—the caprice of a summer belle at Nahant. Its hero is the same “gentle monster” who reappears in many of the “Inklings”—in “Edith Linsey,” “The Gypsy of Sardis,” and “Niagara,” a Green Mountain Frankenstein and Quixote in one, absent-minded and uncouth of aspect, but with a soul filled with enthusiasm for beauty and a delicate, chivalrous devotion to women. He is half hero and half butt, and introduced as a constant foil to Slingsby, the dandy exquisite and man of the world.

“Edith Linsey” was the most ambitious of the American sketches. It was a novel in outline, and had an original plot, the intellectual passion of a young student for a girl who is thought to be dying of consumption, and whose disease has imparted an exaltation to her feelings, and a nervous, spiritual intensity to her thoughts. The anti-climax comes when she unexpectedly recovers her health, and with it her worldly ambitions, and coolly jilts her quondam lover. There are passages in “Edith Linsey”—particularly in the scenes between the lovers in the library—of unusual thoughtfulness, eloquence, and emotional depth, but the story is loosely put together, and interrupted by digressions, and in the latter part of it the author seemed more concerned to deliver himself of college reminiscences and descriptions of scenery than to carry on his narrative with a firm hand.

“The Gypsy of Sardis” was the best of the European sketches, and had a very moving, though slightly melodramatic, conclusion. It was a more highly finished study of Eastern scenery and life than Willis had had leisure to give in his “Pencillings.” A comparison of the two shows from what slight hints he worked up the romance,—a momentary glimpse of a gypsy girl at a tent door, and of an Arab in the slave market at Stamboul, a ride up the Valley of Sweet Waters, and a morning in the shop of old Mustapha, the perfumer. “Love and Diplomacy” and “The Revenge of the Signor Basil” were less successful, because more remote from their author’s experience. He had not the kind of imagination necessary to transport him into alien characters and situations. His fancy required some contact with its object before it would take off the electric spark.

Willis’s English had many excellent qualities. It was crisp, clean cut, pointed, nimble on the turn. He was good at a quotation, deftly brought in, unhackneyed, and never too much of it, a single phrase or sentence or half a line of verse maybe. There is a perpetual twinkle or ripple over his style, like a quaver in music, which sometimes fatigues. Is the man never going to forget himself and say a thing plainly? the reader asks. But the verbal prettinesses and affectations which disfigured his later prose do not abound in his earlier and better work. He had at all times, however, a feminine fondness for italics and exclamations, and his figures had a daintiness which displeased severe critics. Thus: “The gold of the sunset had glided up the dark pine-tops and disappeared, like a ring taken slowly from an Ethiop’s finger.” “As much salt as could be tied up in the cup of a large water-lily” is an instance of his superfine way of putting things. He likened Daniel Webster’s forehead, among the heads at a Jenny Lind concert, to “a massive magnolia blossom, too heavy for the breeze to stir, splendid and silent amid fluttering poplar leaves.” The “crushed orange blossom, clinging to one of the heels” of Ernest Clay’s boots, was a touch which greatly amused Thackeray. And others have been amused by the fantastic headings which he invented for certain columns in the “Home Journal”: “Sparklings of Tenth Waves: or Bits Relished in Recent Readings,” “Breezes from Spice Islands, passed in the Voyage of Life,” and the like, which read like the title of a sixteenth century pamphlet. An old lady in Hartford used to say that “Nat Willis ought to go about in spring, in sky-blue breeches, with a rose-colored bellows to blow the buds open.” It is remarkable with what consent all who have had occasion to characterize Willis’s diction hit upon the metaphor of champagne. “The wine of Bacon’s writings,” said Dr. Johnson, “is a dry wine.” The wine of Willis’s writings was certainly a Schaumwein. It had not the rich, still glow of burgundy, but a fizz and an up-streaming of golden bubbles, and when the spirit had effervesced the residue, as in his later writings, was rather flat.

During his stay abroad he made a few other contributions to literature which have not yet been mentioned. Among these were some miscellaneous papers in the “Mirror”: “Notes from a Scrap Book” and “Fragments of Rambling Impressions,” portions of which he afterwards republished in “Ephemera.” Also a short tale of no value, “The Dilemma,” from which he rescued the verses “To Ermengarde” for his collected poems. He contributed to the London “Athenæum” for January and February, 1835, a series of four articles on American literature, which do not appear in his “Complete Works.” That pioneer of literature in the West, the Rev. Timothy Flint, some time editor of the “Cincinnati Monthly Review,” author of a novel called “Francis Berrian,” and of a work on the Mississippi Valley, had agreed to supply the required papers, but he having left New York for Louisiana Territory, and failed to come to time, Willis was invited to take his place. He wrote the articles hastily, though he asserted that he had “read the productions of two hundred poets and seventy-two prose writers whose works have been printed in America since the settlement of New England.” He made no approach to an exhaustive treatment of the subject, but gave a number of graphic personal sketches of American authors, one in particular, of Channing as a pulpit orator, which excited Lady Byron’s interest, as has been mentioned, and another of Cooper, whom he indignantly defended against the slanders of a portion of the American press. The literary judgments are not always sound (Poe said that Willis had good taste, but was not a good critic), but they were the current opinions of the day rather than of Willis individually. They were in the air. Thus he pronounces Bryant’s “Evening Wind” the best thing he had written, and prefers Percival to Bryant, saying that he is “the most interesting man in America. He has not written anything equal to the ‘Evening Wind’ of Bryant, but his birthright lies a thousand leagues higher up Parnassus.” Timothy Flint afterwards supplemented these papers by a dozen of his own, which amply made up in heaviness for any want of ballast in Willis’s, and were full of “general views,” which, if not correct, were harmless because unreadable. Willis’s “Athenæum” articles first introduced the English public to “The Culprit Fay,” long passages of which he gave from a manuscript in his possession, the poem having not as yet appeared in print. Miss Mitford, who took a warm interest in American literature, wrote him a note of thanks on the publication of this series, praising it in the highest terms.

It appears by a letter to Willis from Carl August, Freiherr von Killinger, dated Carlsruhe, April 13, 1836, that some of the “Inklings” had already attained to the honors of translation. The Freiherr, it seems, was engaged in translating “Pencillings” also, and wanted material for a biographical notice.

“To the author of the ‘Slingsby Papers,’” he wrote, “It is, perhaps, flattering to hear that his ‘Lunatic,’ his ‘Incidents on the Hudson,’ ‘Adventures on the Green Mountains,’[5] his ‘Niagara and So Forth,’ etc., etc., which I had translated into a little periodical of mine, or, rather, a choice collection of interesting articles from English periodicals and annuals, have been read with much interest, and repeatedly been reprinted in Germany.… I could wish to be favored by you with some biographical notices of your own in token, as it were, of your consentment to my translatory attempt.”