In “A Revelation of a Previous Life” and “The Phantom Head upon the Table,” the supernatural is introduced, but not with success. Willis had not the weird, haunting imagination of Hawthorne or Poe. He does not prepare the reader’s belief by creating the atmosphere of mystery required for illusion. In the midst of the fashionable, real life where they are set, his supernatural incidents lose their effect, and have no vraisemblance. Nor was he more at home in broad comedy. His humor—and he had humor—was delicate rather than robust; was made out of irony, pleasantry, and gay spirits, and depended more upon situation than character. If the situation was droll, the humor was good; otherwise not. “Miss Jones’s Son,” “The Spirit Love of Ione S——,” “Nora Mehidy,” “Meena Dimity,” and “Born to love Pigs and Chickens” were all manqué. The best of the humorous tales is “The Female Ward,” which tells of the embarrassments of a rather fast young gentleman in Boston, who receives an unexpected consignment, in the shape of a raw heiress, from a Southern plantation; her confiding parents intrusting her to his guardianship, with a request that he place her at school in some high-toned seminary. His difficulties in trying to perform this commission, ending with his lodging her temporarily in a private lunatic asylum, are very happily imagined. “The Female Ward” would lend itself nicely to the dramatizer, and make up into a most amusing little farce. “Those Ungrateful Blidginses” was funny, but wicked. It was Willis’s way of avenging himself upon two maiden ladies with whom he had fallen in, and subsequently fallen out, during his travels in Italy, and who, on returning to America, had circulated reports not to his credit. He had another hit at them in “Ernest Clay,” as “two abominable old maids by the name of Buggins or Blidgins, representing the scan. mag. of Florence.” The story caused a good deal of scandal. The victims (whose names were thinly disguised) were high in Knickerbocker social circles, and the doors of many of the best houses in Albany and New York were closed forever against Willis, as a consequence of this indiscretion. There was even some rumor in the Albany newspapers to the effect that he had been challenged by a friend of the injured ladies, and had declined the challenge, but this he denied. “Kate Crediford” is a clever specimen of anti-climax. The writer sees an old love at the theatre and, fancying that she looks unhappy, his flame revives, and he goes home and writes her an impassioned declaration. His letter is answered by the lady’s husband, who informs him of her recent marriage, and explains her pensiveness by the fact that she had eaten too heartily of unripe fruit before going to the play. In “The Poet and the Mandarin” and “The Inlet of Peach Blossoms,” the descriptions are richly fanciful. But the most truly imaginative of all these tales is “The Ghost Ball at Congress Hall.” The theme is one that would have delighted Hawthorne, and though he might have treated it more meaningly, he could not have improved upon its wild, half-eerie gayety, with its undercurrent of regret—the old Horatian regret for the shortness of life and vanished youth. A superannuated beau, lingering in the empty colonnade of Congress Hall after the close of the Saratoga season, sees a spectral procession of coaches drive up to the door and deposit, one after another, their loads of ladies with escorts and baggage. Later in the evening, peering in through the ball-room windows, his brain reels as he beholds the well-remembered belles and dandies—apparently grown no older—of the golden age of the springs, the days of “the Albany regency.” They dance to the same old waltz music, played by the same old negro fiddlers, by the light of spermaceti tapers that floods the dusty evergreens “with a weird mysteriousness, an atmosphere of magic, even in the burning of the candles,” and drink champagne of “the exploded color, rosy wine suited to the bright days when all things were tinted rose.”
It is needless to say that there is an abundance of pretty and clever things scattered through these tales of Willis. “Flirtation”—as an instance of his epigrams—“is a circulating library in which we seldom ask twice for the same volume.” “His politeness,” he says of one of his characters, “had superseded his character altogether.” He tells of “a person of excellent family, after the fashion of a hill of potatoes, the best part of it under ground;” and of the Frenchman who could trace his lineage back to “the man who spoke French in the confusion of Babel.” “Mr. Potts’s income was a net answer to his morning prayer: it provided his daily bread.” “Wigwam vs. Almacks,” which follows out the suggestions of a true story told in “À l’Abri,” is not very satisfactory as a fiction, but is worth noticing for the lovely description, with which it opens, of a wayside spring in the valley of the Chemung.
CHAPTER VII.
1845-1852.
THIRD VISIT TO ENGLAND—THE HOME JOURNAL.
On his arrival in London, Willis was attacked with a brain fever, which confined him to his bed for a fortnight. As soon as he could get about he brought his little daughter to see Lady Blessington, and then took her and her nurse to Steventon Vicarage, near Abingdon, in Berkshire, to stay with her aunt, the wife of Rev. William Vincent, formerly of Bolney Priory. He took lodgings for himself in the village near by, and, after a short trip to Bath, returned to London and spent some time in visiting, dining out, sight-seeing, and making new acquaintances. He met a Mr. Stiles of Georgia, an old schoolmate, who was passing through England on his way to Vienna, where he had lately been appointed chargé d’affaires, and who gave him a complimentary appointment as attaché to his legation, an addition to his passport of the kind that had proved so serviceable in the days of his “Pencillings.” This determined him to shape his course for the capital of Austria, taking in Germany, which was new to him, on the way. Leaving his daughter at Steventon, he crossed the Channel, went up the Rhine, and joined his brother Richard, who was studying music at Leipsic. Here he passed a month, and then, accompanied by his brother, went on to Dresden. There the two parted, and Willis traveled alone to Berlin, where he was again seriously ill, and was kindly ministered to by his old friend and associate on the “New York Mirror,” T. S. Fay, at that time secretary of legation at Berlin. Mr. Henry Wheaton, the American minister, attached Willis also to the Prussian mission. But of these appointments and the opportunities they promised he was unable to avail himself. Continued ill health forced him to abandon his journey to Vienna, and to make his way back to England, whence he sailed for home in the spring of 1846. He had meant to leave Imogen with her mother’s family for a time, to be put to school in England. But his heart failed him at the last, and he brought her back with him to America, sending her, still in charge of her nurse, to live with his sister, Mrs. Louis Dwight, in Boston. He himself took rooms in New York until other arrangements could be made. His child’s nurse, Harriet Jacobs, who was in his employ from 1842 to 1861, was a remarkable woman, whose career, if fully told, would form an interesting chapter in the history of American slavery. She was an escaped slave from a plantation near Edenton, North Carolina. She had run away from her master when a young woman, and taken refuge with a family of free negroes, her kinsfolk. They kept her hidden for five years in a cubby under the roof, during which time she supported herself by fine needlework which her friends sold for her in town. At last she escaped to the North, and was engaged by Willis as a house servant when he went to Glenmary. Her attachment to the interests of the family during the whole period of her service was a beautiful instance of the fidelity and affection which sometimes, but not often, distinguish the relation of master and servant even in this land of change. Mrs. Jacobs’s former owners, having got wind in some way of her whereabouts, came North in quest of her, and spared no pains to reclaim the runaway. Several times she had to leave the Willises and go into hiding at Boston and elsewhere. At last, tired of these alarms, Willis sacrificed whatever scruples he might have had against such a step, and bought her freedom out and out. When the civil war began she went to Washington, and employed her practical abilities, which were of a high order, in the post of matron to a soldiers’ hospital. In that city she is still living, at an advanced age.
Though ill nearly all the time of this his third trip abroad, Willis managed to write a number of “Invalid Letters” to the “Evening Mirror,” which were collected in “Famous Persons and Places” and in “Rural Letters.” They were scarcely worth preserving. England was now a twice-told tale, and in Germany, which was a pasture new, he was too tired and sick and borne down by his recent bereavement to take much interest in anything. His articles about the great fair at Leipsic—“What I saw at the Fair,” in “Godey’s” for October, 1847; and “On Dress,” in “The Opal” for 1848, and “Godey’s” for June, 1849—were the most considerable literary results of the journey. He also superintended the publication of an English edition of “Dashes at Life,” in three volumes, and came home under engagement to write for the London “Morning Chronicle.”
Meanwhile the editorial corps of the “Evening Mirror” had tapered down to Hiram Fuller. Willis had practically retired from any active share in its management when he left the country in the spring of 1845. He was still abroad when Morris withdrew from it and started a new paper, the “National Press,” toward the close of the same year. Willis joined him in this enterprise as soon as he got back from England. During the spring and summer of 1846 he was often in Washington, as correspondent of the “National Press” and the “Morning Chronicle,” and while there he met Miss Cornelia Grinnell, the niece and adopted daughter of the Hon. Joseph Grinnell, who was then representative in Congress from New Bedford, Massachusetts. To this lady he was married on October 1, 1846, the eleventh anniversary of his first marriage. She was his junior by nearly twenty years, but she united to her graces of person and character a penetrating mind and an uncommon energy and firmness of will, which made her an invaluable helpmate through the years of trial that were in store for both. On the 21st of November following, the name of the “National Press” was changed to the “Home Journal,” under which title the paper has ever since been published. This was Morris’s and Willis’s final and most prosperous experiment in journalism. They both remained connected with it till death: in Willis’s case a service of twenty-one years, during which his literary toil was devoted almost exclusively to building up the paper. “For the cultivation of the memorable, the progressive, and the beautiful,” ran the legend upon its title-page, followed by a sentence from Goethe, which still stands as the motto of the paper, and would have served well enough as the motto of Willis’s own career: “We should do our utmost to encourage the beautiful, for the useful encourages itself.” It was not a very solid type of literature which was fostered by the “Home Journal,” but it made for itself a peculiar constituency, and a place in the world of letters which it still successfully occupies, under the editorship of Morris Phillips, General Morris’s adopted son, who has carried out the traditions of the paper as established by his predecessors. It was and is the organ of “japonicadom,” the journal of society and gazette of fashionable news and fashionable literature, addressing itself with assiduous gallantry to “the ladies.”
Willis set himself more especially in both the “New Mirror” and the “Home Journal” to portray the town. He became a sort of Knickerbocker Spectator, and his “Ephemera,” published in 1854, is a running record of the notabilities of New York for a dozen years. He chronicled the operas and theatres: Ole Bull, Jenny Lind, and Macready; the shops, the omnibuses, the endless procession of Broadway, the museum, the art galleries, the Tombs, the Alhambra, the Five Points, the Croton water, the cafés, the hotels, the balls and receptions, the changes in equipages, customs, dress. He grew to be a recognized arbiter elegantiarum, and his correspondence columns were crowded with appeals on knotty points of etiquette or costume. His decisions of these social problems were always marked by good sense and good taste. There are many nice bits in “Ephemera,” and some little wholes,—like the letter from Saratoga, “To the Julia of Some Years Ago,”—which deserve to be rescued from the oblivion of a book of scraps and trifles. He was a skillful paragrapher; he had unfailing tact and knew when to stop. Above all, he was eminently human; his gregariousness and his cheerful philosophy cast a gleam of their own on this looking-glass of urban life. He imported a rural air into the city; watched how April greened the grass in the public squares, and June spread the leaves in Trinity Churchyard; stopped to pick “a clovertop or an aggravating dandelion ’twixt post office and city hall;” and discovered even in the stream that washed the curbstone, “a clear brook—a brook with a song, tripping as musically (when the carts are not going by) as the beloved brook” in Glenmary. Pan, we know, has been found in Wall Street; and Willis contrived to find something like a nymph in the waste of the Park fountain. When his work kept him at the desk all through the hot summer, he borrowed a breeze from “the outermost bastion of Castle Garden,” and made the Jersey ferryboat his “substitute for a private yacht.”
When he came to New York to live, in 1842, and during his continued residence there for more than ten years from that date, Manhattan was by no means the metropolis that it is to-day, though it had begun to assume already that cosmopolitan and intensely commercial character which distinguishes it from all other American cities. It had a considerable and swiftly growing foreign population, and its society was marked by a liveliness and extravagance which contrasted with the plainer and more earnest tone prevailing in Boston, and with the somewhat provincial cast of Philadelphia life. The Battery was still the fashionable promenade, Canal Street was “up town,” Hoboken, a rural suburb, Pine, Ann, and William Streets, and the Bowling Green were genteel residence quarters. The old Park Theatre was—after the burning of the National—the only respectable playhouse, until Niblo’s was opened in what was then the outskirt of the town. New York prided itself, moreover, on being a literary centre. The term “Knickerbocker School,” which has been invented to describe a group of metropolitan writers who owed their inspiration, in some sort, to Washington Irving, is of uncertain application; and there was no such cohesion among the members of the group as to warrant the name of a school. But if the term be extended to cover all the authors whose birth or long residence identified them with New York city, it may include Bryant and Halleck, who were the most prominent literary figures when Willis went there to live, though both of them, like him, were of New England birth and breeding. Bryant had been since 1826 editor of the “Evening Post” and Halleck, who had almost ceased to write and was devoting himself exclusively to his duties as secretary to Mr. John Jacob Astor, left the city in 1849, and retired to his old home in Guilford, Connecticut. With both of these Willis was more or less intimate, meeting them frequently at dinners and in general society. Irving himself, the starting-point of the Knickerbocker writers, was out of the country when Willis settled in New York, having gone as minister to Spain in 1842. He came back in 1846 and took up his residence at Sunnyside. Cooper was living at Cooperstown, where Willis made him a flying visit and renewed the acquaintance so pleasantly begun at Paris in 1832. This was in the summer of 1848, which Willis spent at Sharon Springs, recovering from an attack of rheumatism. Theodore Fay too was abroad, filling diplomatic posts in Germany and Switzerland. Years after, on his return to America, he visited Willis at Idlewild, and the latter found him greatly aged and saddened since the days when he wrote mild town satires and humorous sketches for the “New York Mirror.” Eastburn, Sands, and Drake were all dead, and Paulding had signalized the close of his literary career by publishing a collection of his works in numerous volumes. He too had been a contributor to the old “Mirror,” and so had another of the Knickerbockers, Charles Fenno Hoffman, who had once edited the paper for a month, before Willis had any connection with it. Hoffman, who died just the other day, is known to this generation almost solely by his still popular song, “Sparkling and Bright,” and his hardly less popular “Monterey.” The former is sung by collegians and the latter declaimed by school-boys. He was the first editor of the “Knickerbocker Magazine.” His “Winter in the West” and his novel, “Greyslaer,” founded on the famous Beauchamp tragedy in North Carolina, had wide currency in their time, and his amusing story, “The Man in the Reservoir,” may still be read with enjoyment. He was a man of many friends, greatly beloved for his frank and cordial nature. By 1846 he had already begun to show symptoms of the mental disease which issued in his chronic insanity. He kept on writing up to 1850, when it was found necessary to send him to an asylum, in which confinement he lived for over thirty years. Hoffman once said of Willis’s eyes that they “always seemed to have nothing but cold speculation in them,—to be two holes, looking out through a stone wall.” Then there were Verplanck, the editor of Shakespeare, and Duyckinck the compiler of the “Cyclopædia of American Literature,” and many forgotten worthies, whose names may be read in such limbos of departed fame as Poe’s “Literati of New York.” Many of these literati used to meet each other informally at the weekly receptions given by Miss Anne Lynch (now Mrs. Botta) the poetess, and author of the “Handbook of Universal Literature,” whose hospitable parlors have been for forty years a rallying place for interesting and distinguished people. With this lady Mr. and Mrs. Willis formed a close and lasting friendship. Willis used to go often to Horace Greeley’s, where he got interested for a time in spirit rappings, and wrote some papers on the subject in the “Home Journal.” Greeley once urged him in a letter (November 18, 1854) to publish a volume of selections from his lifelong writings. “I want such a one,” he wrote, “for my boy, so that, should I live to see him sixteen, I may try ‘Unwritten Music’ on him and see if it impresses him as it did me at about that age, when it appeared.”