The three books on American, Canadian, and Irish scenery were hack work, and there is, of course, little of personal or purely literary interest in them. They were written, however, with more taste and animation than the run of subscription books of the kind. Willis was a natural traveler, with a good eye for landscape effects, and the best chapters are those descriptive of spots with which he was already familiar, Niagara, the Hudson, Trenton Falls, Saratoga, and the like. Here he occasionally drew on his “Inklings.” For places that he had not visited he trusted to the narratives of former travelers, such as President Dwight, John Bartram, and Peter Kalm. The description of the White Mountains was taken mainly from a friend’s manuscript diary; and for statistics and local legends he went to the authorities. The American book contained, among its two hundred and forty-two engravings, a view from Glenmary lawn and another of Undercliff, General Morris’s place on the Hudson. The last gave Willis opportunity for a eulogy on his former partner, and quotations from his songs. “Canadian Scenery” was “lifted,” almost entire, from the narratives of Charlevoix, Adair, Heriot, Hodgson, Murray, Talbot, Cockburn, and other travelers and historians—of course with ample acknowledgments. It was not so purely descriptive as the American book, but contained chapters on the native Indians, the history of the settlement of the country, the present condition of the inhabitants, sporting, immigration, etc. In fact, there is very little of Willis in the book. In “The Scenery and Antiquities of Ireland” he had the assistance of Mr. J. Sterling Coyne, who prepared the whole of the second volume and a part of the first, Willis’s share consisting only of descriptions of the North of Ireland, a portion of Connemara, the Shannon, Limerick, and Waterford.
Before leaving America he had arranged with Colman for the publication of “The Tent Pitched” (“À l’Abri”), “Tales of Five Lands” (“Romance of Travel”), and “The Usurer Matched.” He was to have twenty per cent. on sales, and received $2,000 on account in advance. Meanwhile the Longmans offered him £200 for “Romance of Travel,” if published in advance of the American edition. Willis wrote to Dr. Porter, July 26, 1839, to delay the Colman publication. “If it is printed in America before I get the sheets here, I lose exactly $1,000. I trust in Heaven you have not forgotten my earnest injunctions on this subject. A London publisher will buy it if a published copy has not come over, else he may have it for nothing.” The book was accordingly published first in London, in January, 1840, in three volumes, with the title “Loiterings of Travel,” and, later in the same year, in America, as “Romance of Travel,” in a single volume, very shabbily printed. Virtue also paid him £50 for an English edition of “À l’Abri,” with illustrations by Bartlett. A fourth London edition of “Pencillings,” with four illustrations, was coming out, and, finally, Cunningham, Macrone’s successor, printed an English edition of “Bianca Visconti” and “Tortesa” as “Two Ways of Dying for a Husband.” This was published on half profits, and Willis expected to make about £50 from it. Serjeant Talfourd, the author of “Ion,” wrote him a complimentary letter on its appearance. “My literary receipts in England this year,” wrote Willis to Dr. Porter, on the last day of 1839, “will amount to $7,500, all gone for expenses, back debts, etc.”
“Romance of Travel” was a collection of seven stories contributed to the “Mirror,” the “New Monthly,” and the “Corsair.” They were crowded with duels, intrigues, disguises, escapades, assassinations, masked balls, lost heirs, and all the stock properties of the romancer’s art. The view of life which they presented was unreal to the verge of the fantastic, but they abounded in descriptions of great elegance and even beauty, and the narrative went trippingly along. Willis had many of the gifts of the born raconteur. He lacked a large constructiveness, but in the minor graces of the story-teller he was always happy. He was skillful in managing the callida junctura, good at a start, a transition, or a finish. One must not look in these artificial fictions for truthful delineation of character, or expect to have his emotions deeply stirred. The tragic incidents, especially, fail in the time-honored Aristotelian requirement. They are exciting enough, in a way, but move neither pity nor terror. The high spirits of the narrator carry his readers buoyantly along over the bloodiest passages with scarcely an abatement of their cheerfulness. Willis did not take room enough to develop character and motive to the extent required in order to give his thick-coming events an air of vraisemblance. “This tale of many tails,” he said of “Violanta Cesarini,” “should have been a novel. You have in brief what should have been well elaborated, embarrassed with difficulties, relieved by digressions, tipped with a moral, and bound in two volumes, with a portrait of the author.” From this defect and from the author’s light way of telling his stories, it followed that the more serious of these carried no conviction of reality to the reader’s mind. “Violanta Cesarini” is the history of a humpbacked artist, who turns out to be the heir to the estates of a Roman noble, thereby supplanting his sister, but enabling her to marry his chum, a poor artist, with whom she was secretly in love. The outlines of the plot were from a true story told him by Lady Blessington, but he added the love passages and, of course, all the particulars in the development of the tale. “Paletto’s Bride” was the legend of a Venetian gondolier, who made—and as suddenly lost—a fortune in a single night’s play, figured as a mysterious unknown in the high society of Florence, and carried off a titled beauty to share his home among the lagoons. “The Bandit of Austria” was a modification of a story related to Willis by D’Orsay. The heroine was a Hungarian countess, who had run off with a famous outlaw. The latter having been killed by the Austrian police, the lady, without wasting much time in unavailing regrets, falls in love with the narrator’s handsome English page (a glorified William Michell?), and is wedded to him after a series of extraordinary adventures. Willis worked in here a striking description of the grotto of Adelsberg, in which the most effective scene of the story takes place. “Lady Ravelgold” is a tale of English high life. The hero is a young London banker, who proves in the end to be a count of the Russian Empire, and the inheritor of vast possessions in that conveniently indefinite country. Three high-born beauties are desperately enamored of him, among them a mother and daughter, the latter of whom ultimately gets him. As in “Ernest Clay,” and, in fact, in nearly all Willis’s stories of high life, it is the women who make love to the men. The scene of the garden party at “Rose Eden” was suggested by a fête champêtre at Gore House, and the delicious picture of Lady Ravelgold’s boudoir was doubtless borrowed from the same mansion. The high-piled luxuriance of the upholstery in these “Romances of Travel,” their nonchalant young heroes, their jeweled and embroidered heroines, with Aladdin-like resources in the way of palaces, gardens, retainers, and stalactite caverns, point to “Vivian Grey” and the other expensive fictions of the youthful Disraeli as Willis’s nearest models. Upon the whole, the best story in the book is “Pasquali, the Tailor of Venice,” which was more within the natural compass of Willis’s talent. It has a malicious irony that reminds one of “Beppo” and the “Decameron,” and it is not without an undercurrent of pathos.
In spite of his other literary preoccupations he found time to write a series of weekly or fortnightly letters to the “Corsair,”—“Jottings down in London,”—a portion of which stand in his collected writings as “Passages from an Epistolary Journal.” They are naturally not as fresh as the earlier “Pencillings,” though very good foreign correspondence of an ephemeral sort. In search of matter for these letters, Willis went about a good deal in London. He visited the theatres and the House of Commons, looked up his old acquaintances of 1835, was present at a reception to the Persian ambassadors at Lady Morgan’s,—where he saw Mrs. Norton again,—dined with the Nawaub of Oude, went to a public dinner given to Macready at the Freemasons’ Tavern,—where he sat next Samuel Lover,—to a ball at Almack’s, and a tournament in St. John’s Wood. Disraeli walked home with him from a ball and said he was going to Niagara on his wedding trip. Willis noted some changes in England since his first visit. Among other things William IV. was dead and Victoria on the throne, and the London shops had increased greatly in splendor.
One of the most interesting results of this second stay in England was his meeting with Thackeray—then a young and comparatively unknown writer—and his engaging him as a contributor to the “Corsair,” a stroke of journalistic enterprise which ought to have prolonged the life of that piratical journal, but did not. In a private letter to Dr. Porter, dated July 26th, Willis wrote:—
“I have engaged a contributor to the ‘Corsair.’ Who do you think? The author of ‘Yellowplush’ and ‘Major Gahagan.’ I have mentioned it in my jottings, that our readers may know all about it. He has gone to Paris, and will write letters from there, and afterwards from London, for a guinea a close column of the ‘Corsair’—cheaper than I ever did anything in my life. I will see that he is paid for a while to see how you like him. For myself, I think him the very best periodical writer alive. He is a royal, daring, fine creature, too. I take the responsibility of it. You will hear from him soon.”
The mention in the jottings here referred to appeared in the “Corsair” of August 24th.
“One of my first inquiries in London was touching the authorship of ‘The Yellowplush Papers’ and the ‘Reminiscences of Major Gahagan,’—the only things in periodical literature, except the ‘Pickwick Papers,’ for which I looked with any interest or eagerness. The author, Mr. Thackeray, breakfasted with me yesterday, and the ‘Corsair’ will be delighted, I am sure, to hear that I have engaged this cleverest and most gifted of the magazine-writers of London to become a regular correspondent of the ‘Corsair.’ He left London for Paris the day after, and having resided in that city for many years, his letters thence will be pictures of life in France, done with a bolder and more trenchant pen than has yet attempted the subject. He will present a long letter every week, and you will agree with me that he is no common acquisition. Thackeray is a tall, athletic man of about thirty-five, with a look of talent that could never be mistaken. He has taken to literature after having spent a very large inheritance; but in throwing away the gifts of fortune, he has cultivated his natural talents very highly, and is one of the most accomplished draftsmen in England, as well as the cleverest and most brilliant of periodical writers. He has been the principal critic for the ‘Times,’ and writes for ‘Fraser’ and ‘Blackwood.’ You will hear from him by the first steamer after his arrival in Paris, and thenceforward regularly.”
The same number contained Thackeray’s first letter, dated at Paris, Hôtel Mirabeau, July 25, 1839, and concluding with a characteristic little address to the editor, in which he speaks of his feelings “in finding good friends and listeners among strangers far, far away—in receiving from beyond seas kind crumbs of comfort for our hungry vanities.” These letters were signed T. T. (Timothy Titcomb), and eight of them in all were published in the “Corsair.” A few appear in Thackeray’s collected works in a volume entitled “The Paris Sketch Book,” and all of them, with a few changes, in “The Student’s Quarter; or Paris Five and Thirty Years since,” published by Hotten after Thackeray’s death. Thackeray humorously alludes to this episode in his early literary struggles in his novel of “Philip,” the hero of which contributes a weekly letter, signed “Philalethes,” to a fashionable New York journal entitled “The Gazette of the Upper Ten Thousand.” “Political treatises,” writes the excellent Dr. Firmin to his son, “are not so much wanted as personal news, regarding the notabilities of London.” This description of the “Mirror” pointed, of course, at Willis’s authorship of the phrase, “The Upper Ten Thousand.”