For some remarks that should properly introduce much of the contents of the present volume, the reader is referred to the Preface published with a previous number of the Series, entitled “Pencillings by the Way.” A portion of the original “Pencillings” is here given, the size of the work having compelled an unequal division of it, and the remaining and smaller part serving to complete another volume, with some additional sketches of the same character.
The personal portrayings of distinguished contemporaries, of which this volume is mainly composed, will, (as has been abundantly proved in their previous shapes of publication,) ensure its readableness. It will have a value, from the same quality, that will increase with time, and be, also, independent, to a certain degree, of its literary merits. Sketches of the men of mark of any period are eagerly devoured—more eagerly as the subjects pass away, and are beyond farther seeing and describing—the public requiring less that they should be ably done than that they should be true to the life. Correctness, in such pencilling, is more important than grace in the art. And this I claim to have been proved for these sketches. In the years that they have been before the public, not a single incorrectness has ever been proved or even charged upon them. I sketched what I saw at the time, and, to the best of my ability, sketched truly. With the acrid and persevering warfare that has been waged upon them by the critics, their truth would have been invalidated long ago, if flaw or blemish in this shield of their chief merit could have been found. Expecting vague charges of incorrectness from the malice of criticism, however, I have accumulated testimonials that have never yet been called forth—no friend or acquaintance having ever been estranged or offended by the descriptions I have ventured to give, and subsequent intimacy or exchange of courtesies furnishing ample proof, that, to such sharing of my admiration and opportunities to see more nearly, the world was welcome.
I will add a few remarks, upon somewhat the same point, from a previous Preface:—
For the living portraitures of the book I have a word to say. That sketches of the whim of the hour, its manners, fashions, and those ephemeral trifles, which, slight as they are, constitute in a great measure its “form and pressure”—that these, and familiar traits of persons distinguished in our time, are popular and amusing, I have the most weighty reasons certainly to know. They sell. “Are they innocent?” is the next question. And to this I know no more discreet answer than that mine have offended nobody but the critics. It has been said that sketches of contemporary society require little talent, and belong to an inferior order of literature. Perhaps. Yet they must be well done to attract notice at all; and if true and graphic, they are not only excellent material for future biographers, but to all who live out of the magic circles of fashion and genius, they are more than amusing—they are instructive. To such persons, living authors, orators, and statesmen, are as much characters of history, and society in cities is as much a subject of philosophic curiosity, as if a century had intervened. The critic who finds these matters “stale and unprofitable,” lives in the circles described, and the pictures drawn at his elbow lack to his eye the effect of distance; but the same critic would delight in a familiar sketch of a supper with “my lord of Leicester” in Elizabeth’s time, of an evening with Raleigh and Spenser, or perhaps he would be amused with a description by an eye-witness of Mary Queen of Scots, riding home to Holyrood with her train of admiring nobles. I have not named in the same sentence the ever-deplored blank in our knowledge of Shakspere’s person and manners. What would not a trait by the most unskilful hand be worth now—if it were nothing but how he gave the good-morrow to Ben Jonson in Eastcheap?
How far sketches of the living are a breach of courtesy committed by the author toward the persons described, depends, of course, on the temper in which they are done. To select a subject for complimentary description is to pay the most undoubted tribute to celebrity, and, as far as I have observed, most distinguished persons sympathize with the public interest in them and their belongings, and are willing to have their portraits drawn, either with pen or pencil, by as many as offer them the compliment. It would be ungracious to the admiring world if they were not.
The outer man is a debtor for the homage paid to the soul which inhabits him, and he is bound, like a porter at the gate, to satisfy all reasonable curiosity as to the habits of the nobler and invisible tenant. He owes his peculiarities to the world.
For myself, I am free to confess that no age interests me like the present; that no pictures of society since the world began, are half so entertaining to me as those of English society in our day; and that, whatever comparison the living great men of England may sustain with those of other days, there is no doubt in my mind that English social life, at the present moment, is at a higher pitch of refinement and cultivation than it was ever here or elsewhere since the world began—consequently it, and all who form and figure in it, are dignified and legitimate subjects of curiosity and speculation. The Count Mirabel and Lady Bellair of D’Israeli’s last romance, are, to my mind, the cleverest portraits, as well as the most entertaining characters, of modern novel-writing; and D’Israeli, by the way, is the only English author who seems to have the power of enlarging his horizon, and getting a perspective view of the times he lives in. His novels are far more popular in America than in England, because the Atlantic is to us a century. We picture to ourselves England and Victoria as we picture to ourselves England and Elizabeth. We relish an anecdote of Sheridan Knowles as we should one of Ford or Marlowe. This immense ocean between us is like the distance of time; and while all that is minute and bewildering is lost to us, the greater lights of the age and the prominent features of society stand out apart, and we judge of them like posterity. Much as I have myself lived in England, I have never been able to remove this long perspective from between my eye and the great men of whom I read and thought on the other side of the Atlantic. When I find myself in the same room with the hero of Waterloo, my blood creeps as if I had seen Cromwell or Marlborough; and I sit down afterward to describe how he looked, with the eagerness with which I should communicate to my friends some disinterred description of these renowned heroes by a contemporary writer. If Cornelius Agrippa were redivivus, in short, and would show me his magic mirror, I should as soon call up Moore as Dryden—Wordsworth or Wilson as soon as Pope or Crichton.
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