AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP. BY SIR NATHANIEL. No. IX. N. P. WILLIS. THAT eminent N. P. Willis! Eminently the poet of good society, says Griswold, who loves (ornare) to adorn him. Eminently amusing, whatever he may write about, says Thackeray, who loves (subridere) to genteelly flout him. Eminent in pencillings and poetisings, as feuilletoniste and as attaché, in romantic inklings of adventure and in the conventionalisms of salon life. Eminently the Representative Man of American cockneyism; for, in the lines of his compatriot, Mr. Lowell, He's so innate a cockney, that had he been born Where plain bare-skin's the only full dress that is worn, This jaunty, pert, quasi-distingué air appertains, more or less, to all the eminent man's writings. Not that it is substituted for good sense, or sagacious reflection at times, or dashing cleverness of description. No; Mr. Willis is a clever writer, and can produce really smart sayings, and even tasteful fancies, almost à discretion. But in reading him you never lose sight, for a couple of pages together, of the writer's intense self-consciousness -of his precautions against being merged in his subject-of his resolve to haunt you with the scent of his perfumed kerchiefs, and the glitter of his jewelled attire, and the creak of his japanned boots: never do you escape, as it were, the jingle of rings on his fingers and rings on his toes, wherewith he makes music wherever he goes-be it to Banbury Cross or the Boulevards, Niagara or Chamouny, Auld Reekie or the literal Modern Athens. While yet in statû pupillari at Yale College, Mr. Willis appeared in print as a "religious" poet, and made something of a sensation it is said. Thus encouraged, volume followed volume-a good sprinkling of "religious" verses in each. There are some excellent things, too, among these miscellanies; nor let it be supposed for a moment that we speak scoffingly of poetry often distinguished by touching beauty and simple purity of tone. Most readers of verse are familiar with that fine scriptural study, the "Healing of the Daughter of Jairus,"—though even that somehow reminds one, with a saving difference, of the scriptural studies of certain Parisian conteurs. "Melanie" is a melodiously accented and feelingly rendered tale of brotherly devotion-for an acquaintance with which many English lovers of poetry felt grateful to its English editor, Barry Cornwall-though Bon Gaultier and other critics express their gratitude somewhat ironically, and, while accusing the poet of perpetually quoting and harping on his poem, love to cap his die-away verses, The moon shone cold on the castle court, with some such uncomplimentary complement as this, And the baron he called for something short, Oh, villany! oh, villany! Dec.-VOL. XCIX. NO. CCCXCVI. 2 F "The Dying Alchymist" is another of his most successful pieces-a very effectively told story of an aged suicide-one who, sent blindfold on a path of light, had turned aside to perish-" a sun-bent eagle stricken from his high soaring down-an instrument broken with its own compass." The dramatic poem entitled "Lord Ivon" has also won large approval-containing as it does passages of more sustained vigour and less finical pretence than is the author's wont. Some of his shorter fragments, devoted to household ties and the domestic affections, are however his likeliest claims to anything beyond ephemeral reputemarked as these are, sometimes in a memorable degree, by a tenderness and sincerity of emotion that at once conciliate censorship, and that have probably made more than one hostile critic shed some natural tears," however scrupulous his highness may have been to wipe them soon. 66 Nevertheless, Mr. Willis can hardly be ranked very high among poets, and those American poets. His strains are too glib and fluent, too dainty-sweet and prettily-equipped, too evidently the recreation of an easy-minded essayist, instead of being fraught with sighs from the depths of a soul travailing in the greatness of its strength. He sings, and we listen as to one who has a pleasant voice, and can play well upon an instrument; and having heard him, we pass on, and forget the melody, though we do not forget what manner of man he was. Speaking of a lyrical minstrel-some say, the eminent N. P. Willis himself-Emerson describes his head as a music-box of delicate tunes and rhythms, and his skill and command of language as never to be sufficiently praised. To whomsoever this may refer, what follows will apply to his Eminence: "But when the question arose, whether he were not only a lyrist, but a poet, we were obliged to confess that he is plainly a contemporary, not an eternal man." Yes; that is unmistakably true of N. P. Willis. Plainly a contemporary-a nineteenth-century being-coeval with Gore Housesynchronous with the fashion of "Hurrygraphs." Not at all an eternal man-although the North American Review, in its pride and pleasure, did dub him the American Euripides, and thereby gave the cue to a thousand wittols to exclaim, A very American one indeed! Emerson goes on to say of his lyrist, that he does not stand out of our low limitations, like a Chimborazo under the line, running up from the torrid base through all the climates of the globe, with belts of the herbage of every latitude on its high and mottled sides; but is rather the landscape garden of a modern house, adorned with fountains and statues, with wellbred men and women standing and sitting in the walks and terraces. "We hear, through all the varied music, the ground-tone of conventional life. Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music. The argument is secondary, the finish of the verses is primary"-in disregard of the truth that it is not metres, but a metremaking argument, that makes a poem-that in the order of genesis the thought is prior to the form-"a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing." How plainly Mr. Willis is thought a contemporary, not an eternal man,* by the scribe of the Biglow Papers, Miss Bremer's Apollo's Head, let these lines testify: * In appraising himself, by-the-by, Mr. Willis has characteristically said, “I There is Willis, so natty and jaunty and gay, Who says his best things in so foppish a way, With conceits and pet phrases so thickly o'erlaying 'em, That one hardly knows whether to thank him for saying 'em ; Just conceive of a muse with a ring in her nose! Conception is a blessing, is Hamlet's general proposition. But here the poet will think its quality strained, not blessing him that gives and him that takes. Rather he will quote Hamlet's subsequent words, Slanders, sir; for the satirical rogue says things All which, interpose we old folks, we most powerfully and potently believe. Under protest, however, from a few missy admirers of the Penciller's flourishes-to whom his patron Muse would be in shabby déshabille without the nasal circlet ut suprà. 66 But it is to his prose that N. P. Willis owes, after all, the epigraph of Eminent. Who has not whiled away an hour in pleasant light reading of his purveying? Who has not heard of the amusement and eke the bad blood excited by his "Pencillings by the Way?" That "famous and clever N. P. Willis," as Mr. Titmarsh calls him, "whose reminiscences have delighted so many of us, and in whose company one is always sure to find amusement of some sort or the other. Sometimes it is amusement at the writer's wit and smartness, his brilliant descriptions, and wondrous flow and rattle of spirits; sometimes it is wicked amusement, and, it must be confessed, at Willis's own expense-amusement at the immensity of N. P.'s blunders-amusement at the prodigiousness of his self-esteem." "There would be no keeping our wives and daughters in their senses," adds Mr. Titmarsh (in the sixth number of The Proser), were such fascinators to make frequent apparitions amongst us; but it is comfortable that there should have been a Willis; and (since the appearance of the Proser) a literary man myself, and anxious for the honour of the profession, I am proud to think that a man of our calling should have come, should have seen, should have conquered, as Willis has done." The illustrious stranger's resumés of the table-talk and drawing-room doings of his illustrious hosts and hostesses, were amazingly relished, notwithstanding the outcry elicited. Indeed it is curious to observe, to this day, how reviewers and critics, big, little, and middle-sized, after indignantly crying shame on those imitators of Mr. Willis, who jot down in their journals and books of travel personal anecdotes and descriptions touching the notables they may have dined withal,-proceed forthwith to select, for quotation, the raciest bits of domestic gossip, the very essential oil of the personality just denounced. This should never have been seen in print, they swear, in their first column. In their second, they give it, whole and entire, the benefit of their own extended circulation, Not that we are pleading for Mr. Willis's achievements as Gossipry's "Own Correspondent" and envoy to the privacies of literary and fashionable life. On the contrary, in reading his reports of what he heard and would willingly take a chance for immortality sandwiched between Cooper and Campbell." This was said apropos of his going to reside between Cooper's abode and poetic Wyoming. saw said and done there, we find it indispensable to have in remembrance the caution of that high literator,* whom, of all others, Mr. Willis seemingly hates with most perfect hatred,-viz., that to report conversations fairly, it is a necessary prerequisite that we should be completely familiar with all the interlocutors, and understand thoroughly all their minutest relations, and points of common knowledge and common feeling, with each other; and that he who is not thus qualified, must be in perpetual danger of misinterpreting sportive allusion into serious statement; and may transmute what was some jocular phrase or half-phrase, intelligible only to an old companion, into a solidified opinion which the talker had never framed, or if he had, would never have given words to in any mixed assemblage-" not even among what the world calls friends at his own board." But again, we fancy that a vast deal of the abuse showered down on the American attaché's head, was sham sentiment, and that he was made something like the scapegoat in this matter. Somebody, however, behoved to be the scapegoat; and while the hapless individual suffered, the general public benefited by the protest thus uttered, whether on the whole sincerely or not, against what was tending to become an intolerable nuisance. Accordingly, when it was last announced that N. P. Willis had again arrived in England, that vigilant wag Punch thought it a duty to say as much:-"We mention this fact for the benefit of those would-be literary gentlemen who are anxious to appear in print, as an invitation to Mr. Willis for dinner will be certain to secure them the advantages of publication without any risk or expense. Literary gentlemen are cautioned, however, against speaking too freely in their conversation after dinner, as mistakes have been known to occur in the best-regulated memories-even in Mr. N. P. Willis's. For testimonials, apply to the editor of the Quarterly, or any one mentioned in Mr. Willis's American works, when he was last in England." Happily, Mr. Willis is a lively rattle, not easily abashed, or liable to be put out of spirits by the dull jokes of British malcontents. They will not put him out of countenance by allusions to brass, or his nose out of joint by piercing a ring through it. A liberal public has been found to patronise his lucubrations; and so he has gone on writing, and re-writing, and patching together odds and ends, and dressing up faded beauties with new cuffs and collars, and cramming crambe repetita into new spicilegia, and entertaining easy souls with a rapid succession of "People I have Met," "Hurrygraphs," "Summer Excursions in the Mediterranean," "Life Here and There," "A Health Trip to the Tropics," and many another excursus, related with what Theseus calls The rattling tongue Of saucy and audacious eloquence. Seneca is a great deal too heavy for Mr. Willis, but Plautus not a whit too light. He is effervescent with animal spirits, and dashes you off a gay, buoyant aphorism with the bonhommie of Harold Skimpole himself. Trifles light as air float beamingly through his volumes-the flimsy texture whereof almost justifies at times the satire of Tom Moore, on book-making tactics: "This reptile of criticism," Mr. Willis calls him: adding, "He has turned and stung me. Thank God! I have escaped the slime of his approbation." That Deo gratias is a masterstroke in its way. No matter with what their remembrance is stock'd, Price twenty-four shillings, is all that's requir'd. That gingerbread-cakes always give them the colic. 429 But then our Penciller is not prosy, and has the art ever to keep the attention simmering. Never hum-drumming himself, he never lets you snore. Only let him suspect you of a preliminary yawn, or an incipient drowsiness, and he'll soon mend that by a playful poke in the costal regions, or some such coup-de-main of infallible virtue. The style he can command when at his best-which, probably, is when he is least ambitious of effect*-is a capital vehicle for the chatty coxcombries it hurries along. His prose had a natural grace of its own, And enough of it, too, if he'd let it alone; But he twitches and jerks so, one fairly gets tired, It runs like a stream, with a musical waste, And Willis's shallowness makes half his beauty. It is in fact just the style for his public-the public of magazine-readers, railway students, first-of-the-month folks-who gallop through an article of smooth trim surface as swiftly as Camilla scours the plain, but who are not equal to your cross-country work, and are, after all, most at home when ambling along macadamised road and wooden pavement. * After declaring that Willis's nature is "A glass of champagne with the foam on't, As tender as Fletcher, as witty as Beaumont," Mr. Lowell adds, what would read as well without the questionable comparison with our dramatic Dioscuri, "So his best things are done in the flush of the moment; If he wait, all is spoilt; he may stir it and shake it, But, the fixed air once gone, he can never re-make it." |