And caused this tribute to thy memory from Sexton Brown.
In 1854 a book was published which became the occasion of many heart-burnings, and of accusations against Willis that have not yet ceased to go the rounds of the newspapers. This was “Ruth Hall, a Domestic Tale of the Present Time,” by Fanny Fern. The lady who wrote under this pen name was his younger sister, Sarah, the author of much cleverish literature—“Fern Leaves,” and the like—which once enjoyed a prodigious circulation. She was the enfant terrible of the family, a warm-hearted, impulsive woman, but not always discreet. By the death of her husband, Charles Eldridge of Boston, she had been suddenly reduced from comfort to poverty. She afterwards contracted an unfortunate marriage with a Mr. Farrington, from whom she was finally divorced. To support herself and her children, she turned instinctively to literature, in which she at last made a decided hit. Among other things she offered some contributions to the “Home Journal;” but Willis, whose literary taste, though certainly not severe, was fastidious in its way, could not see merit enough in his sister’s writing, and disliked what he regarded as its noisy, rattling style. He felt obliged to decline her articles, but that there was any literary jealousy in this, as is intimated in “Ruth Hall,” will hardly be believed, when his eagerness to welcome and patronize young writers is remembered. It seems to have sprung from an original opposition in character and taste between the two. But it naturally made hard feeling and led to recriminations. Mr. James Parton, who was then sub-editor of the “Home Journal,” took Fanny Fern’s part, and the acquaintance thus begun soon ripened into an engagement of marriage. There was a scene, in consequence, in the office of the “Home Journal,” and Mr. Parton retired from the paper, his place being supplied by Mr. T. B. Aldrich. Smarting under a sense of neglect by her kinsfolk, Fanny Fern wrote and printed this novel of “Ruth Hall,” in which, under a very thin mask of fiction, she washed a deal of family linen in public. Willis figures therein as Hyacinth, a “heartless puppy,” who worships social position, has married an heiress, inhabits a villa on the Hudson, and is the prosperous editor of the “Irving Magazine.” When Ruth asks him to help her by printing her pieces in this periodical, he coldly assures her that she has no talent, and advises her to seek “some unobtrusive employment.” But when she becomes famous and begins to get letters from college presidents, begging her for her autograph, and from grateful readers, saying, “I am a better son, a better brother, a better husband, and a better father than I was before I commenced reading your articles. God bless you!” then, under these triumphant circumstances, Hyacinth, who had given $100 for a vase when Ruth was starving, is proud to point out to a friend, as they sit together in the porch of his country seat, a beautiful schooner tacking up stream with “Floy,” his sister’s nom-de-plume, painted on the bows.
Against this caricature of himself Willis made no public protest. When a man is wounded in the house of his friends, his only refuge is silence. But in private and to his intimates he asserted that the attack upon him in “Ruth Hall” was most unfair; that he had helped his sister in the early days of her widowhood, but that after her second marriage and divorce he had ceased to have any communication with her, and felt justified in letting her alone. Willis was doubtless a man who took his responsibilities lightly. But had he felt called upon to do his utmost for Fanny Fern, even to the end, it is easy to see how his hands were tied in various ways. He had an expensive family of his own, whose support depended upon his pen. His home on the Hudson had been purchased with his wife’s inheritance. As to paying his sister for articles in the “Home Journal,” supposing them to have been otherwise acceptable, the editors were constantly reiterating that the paper did not, as a rule, pay its contributors anything, and could not afford to do so. It paid its own editorial staff, and that was all. Contributors were glad to write for it for the pleasure of seeing themselves in print.
Willis continued to put forth permutations and combinations of old matter under new titles, as long as his books would sell. “Fun Jottings,” “Ephemera,” “Famous Persons and Places,” and “The Rag-Bag” were all made up from the contents of previous volumes, or the teeming sheets of the “Mirror” and “Home Journal.” But in 1857 he published something new, “Paul Fane,” his only novel, and the only book which he wrote as a book, and not as one or more contributions to periodicals. So exclusively a feuilletoniste had he made himself, that any talent for construction on a larger scale which he may once have had was quite frittered away.
“It has been with difficult submission to marketableness,” he had written in his preface to “Dashes at Life,” “that the author has broken up his statues at the joints and furnished each fragment with head and legs to walk alone. Continually accumulating material, with the desire to produce a work of fiction, he was as continually tempted by extravagant prices to shape these separate forms of society and character into tales for periodicals; and between two persuaders—the law of copyright, on the one hand, providing that American books at fair prices should compete with books to be had for nothing; and necessity, on the other hand, pleading much more potently than the ambition for an adult stature in literary fame—he has gone on acquiring a habit of dashing off for a magazine any chance view of life that turned up to him, and selling in fragmentary chapters what should have been kept together, and moulded into a proportionate work of imagination.”
If “Paul Fane, or Parts of a Life Else Untold” was a response to this artistic craving for unity in a sustained work, its author had waited too late. It was, in effect, a poor novel; and—what was unusual with Willis, even at his thinnest—it was dull. The story is told in the first person, and the hero is a young American artist, who, feeling his social equality challenged by a look in the eyes of a cold English girl of high birth, is driven abroad by a restless determination to put himself on a level with any nobility that hereditary rank can bestow. He brings the haughtiest daughters of Albion to his feet. Three or four women fall in love with him, including the original offender and her aunt, but he will none of them. It is Willis’s old theme of nature’s nobleman versus caste. The novel was an experiment, before the times were ripe, in that field of international manners which has since been so cleverly occupied by Henry James. It tries to deal with the perplexities and real miseries, which arise not so much from the deeper conflicts of character as from the attempt to adjust hostile social standards. Mr. James has made a very interesting story out of the simple episode of a young English lady marrying an American, coming to America to live, and then, not finding American ways to her taste, taking her husband back to England with her. But Willis was not well equipped for success in this field. He could not keep his fancy in check; there must be a dash of romance, of exaggeration in his tale. And he was a quick observer rather than a patient student of manners, as of other things. He lacked the sober, truthful vigilance of James and Howells. Miss Firkin, in this book, an overdone Daisy Miller, and Blivins, an American type once rumored to have existed, but inconceivable at this distance of time, show how far his execution fell below the fine and solid work of our contemporary realists. There are passages of vulgarity in “Paul Fane” which are a surprise in any book of Willis’s, but which came rather from the weakness and failure of his hand in its attempt to execute scenes of broad humor, than from any crudity of feeling. This kind of violent and assumed indelicacy on the part of naturally refined writers, when they are trying to put on the healthy coarseness of a Hogarth or Teniers, is a not uncommon phenomenon; daintiness mistaking coarseness for the strength of which it is often a sign or an accompaniment.
In “The Convalescent” were included narratives of a trip to the Rappahannock, to Nantucket, and to the horse fair at Springfield, Massachusetts. In July, 1860, Willis accompanied Mr. Grinnell on a journey to the West,—reported for the “Home Journal” as a “Three Weeks’ Trip to the West,”—going to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and Chicago, and as far as Madison, Wisconsin; then descending the Mississippi in a steamboat to St. Louis, and returning East by way of Cincinnati and Pittsburgh.
In Willis’s later writings his verbal affectations gained upon him to an intolerable extent. “Mr. N. P. Willis,” says Bartlett in his “Dictionary of Americanisms,” “has the reputation of inventing many new words, some of which, though not yet embodied in our dictionaries, are much used in familiar language.” One of the phrases which Bartlett accredits to him is, “the upper ten,”—originally and in full, “the upper ten thousand of New York city.” This seems likely to keep its place in the language. “Japonicadom” took at the time, but has now gone out. He had a fondness for agglutinations. “Come-at-able” is a convenient word which is traced to his mint; and Professor George P. Marsh, in his “Origin and History of the English Language,” lends the weight of his authority to Willis’s “Stay-at-home-itiveness,” as a synonym for the Greek οἰκουρία, and the early English studestapelvestnesse. But such philological monsters as re-June-venescence, worthwhile-ativeness, fifty-per-centity, with which some of his books are strewn, have a painfully forced effect, and the trick became, from repetition, a tedious mannerism. Punning, likewise, was a habit which grew upon him, though both of these offenses are commoner in his private correspondence than in his published work.
At the outbreak of the civil war in the spring of 1861, there was a rush of newspaper men to Washington. It was decided that the “Home Journal,” too, should have its war correspondent, and accordingly Willis, bidding good-by to Idlewild, flung himself into the tide of journalists, soldiers, politicians, office-seekers, contractors, and speculators of all sorts, setting toward the seat of government. At Baltimore he stayed over a day with his friend Kennedy, who was prominently mentioned for the secretaryship of the navy, and who went on to Washington with Willis, where the latter introduced him and Reverdy Johnson to Mrs. Lincoln. The feeding of the “Home Journal” press with “Lookings-on at the War” proved a longer job than Willis had anticipated. It kept him in Washington for over a year, with occasional furloughs for a hurried visit home. He had always been curiously indifferent to politics. His opinions had been Whiggish, and he was, of course, a Union man. But he retained a secret sympathy with the South, and a liking for “those chivalrous, polysyllabic Southerners, incapable of a short word or a mean action,” whom he had known at Saratoga years before. Nevertheless, he dropped his light plummet of observation into the boiling sea of the civil war, where it was tossed about at no great depth below the surface. It is interesting to compare his letters from the capital with the patriotic fervor and swing of such martial sketches as Theodore Winthrop’s “Washington as a Camp.” The war, indeed, may be said to have made Willis and the kind of literature which he cultivated obsolete for a time. A more earnest generation of writers had come to the fore, who struck their roots deeper down into the life of the nation. Mr. Derby, the publisher, proposed in 1863 to make a book out of Willis’s “Lookings-on at the War,” but the project hung fire for some reason, and “The Convalescent” remained, as has been said, his last publication in book form.
Willis found all the world at Washington; among the rest, Lady Georgiana Fane, whom he presented to Mrs. Lincoln. “Fancy anticipating this at Almack’s twenty-five years ago!” he wrote of this conjunction, in a letter to Mrs. Willis. He met Charles Sumner, whom he had known in Boston, and had a long talk with him about the political situation; found Pierpont, the poet, employed as a clerk in one of the departments, and got rooms for him and Mrs. Pierpont in the house where he lodged himself; was introduced to General McClellan and to the cabinet officers, and the numerous congressmen and brigadiers who swarmed Pennsylvania Avenue and crowded the lobbies at Willard’s. He went out to all manner of receptions and dinner parties, and became quite a favorite with Mrs. Lincoln, who drove him out frequently in her barouche, had him to dine en famille at the White House, sent him flowers, and promised him a vase presented to the President by the Emperor of China. In one of his letters to the “Home Journal,” he had described her as having a “motherly expression,” whereupon she addressed him the following note:—