Italywas published simultaneously in London and Paris in June, 1821, and produced an even greater sensation than the work on France, though Croker declared that it fell dead from the press, and devoted the greater part of his 'review' in theQuarterlyto an analysis of Colburn's methods of advertisement. Criticism of a penal kind, he explained, was not called for, because, 'in the first place, we are convinced that this woman is whollyincorrigible; secondly, we hope that her indelicacy, vanity, and malignity are inimitable, and that, therefore, her example is very little dangerous; and thirdly, though every page teems with errors of all kinds, from the most disgusting to the most ludicrous, they are smothered in such Boeotian dulness that they can do no harm.' In curious contrast to this professional criticism is a passage in one of Byron's letters to Moore. 'Lady Morgan,' writes the poet, 'in areally excellentbook, I assure you, on Italy, calls Venice an ocean Rome; I have the very same expression inFoscari, and yet you know that the play was written months ago, and sent to England; theItalyI received only on the 16th.... When you write to Lady Morgan, will you thank her for her handsome speeches in her book aboutmybooks? Her work is fearless and excellent on the subject of Italy--pray tell her so--and I know the country. I wish she had fallen in withme; I could have told her a thing or two that would have confirmed her positions.'
Almost simultaneously with the appearance ofItaly, Colburn printed in hisNew Monthly Magazinea long, vehement, and rather incoherent attack by Lady Morgan upon her critics. The editor, Thomas Campbell, explained in an indignant letter to theTimes, that the article had been inserted by the proprietor without being first submitted to the editorial eye, and that he was in no way responsible for its contents. Colburn also wrote to theTimesto refute theQuarterlyreviewer's statements regarding the sales ofItaly, and publicly to declare his entire satisfaction at the result of the undertaking, and his willingness to receive from the author another work of equal interest on the same terms. In short, never was a book worse reviewed or better advertised.
The next venture of the indefatigable Lady Morgan, who felt herself capable of dealing with any subject, no matter how little she might know of it, was aLife of Salvator Rosa. This, which was her own favourite among all her books, is a rather imaginative work, which hardly comes up to modern biographical standards. The author seems to have been influenced in her choice of a subject rather by the patriotic character of Salvator Rosa than by his artistic attainments. Lady Morgan was once asked by a fellow-writer where she got her facts, to which she replied, 'We all imagine our facts, you know--and then happily forget them; it is to be hoped our readers do the same.' Nevertheless, she seems to have taken a good deal of trouble to 'get up' the material for her biography; it was in her treatment of it that she sometimes allowed her ardent Celtic imagination to run away with her. About this time Colburn proposed that Sir Charles and Lady Morgan should contribute to his magazine,The New Monthly, and offered them half as much again as his other writers, who were paid at the rate of sixteen guineas a sheet. For this periodical Lady Morgan wrote a long essay onAbsenteeismand other articles, some of which were afterwards republished.
In the spring of 1824 the Morgans came to London for the season, and went much into the literary society that was dear to both their hearts. Lady Caroline Lamb took a violent fancy to Lady Morgan, to whom she confided her Byronic love-troubles, while Lady Cork, who still maintained a salon, did not neglect her oldprotégée. The rough notes kept by Lady Morgan of her social adventures are not usually of much interest or importance, as she had little faculty or inclination for Boswellising, but the following entry is worth quoting:--
'Lady Cork said to me this morning when I called Miss ---- a nice person, "Don't say nice, child, 'tis a bad word." Once I said to Dr. Johnson, "Sir, that is a very nice person." "Aniceperson," he replied; "what does that mean? Elegant is now the fashionable term, but it will go out, and I see this stupidniceis to succeed to it. What does nice mean? Look in my Dictionary; you will see it means correct, precise."'
At Lydia White's famoussoiréesLady Morgan met Sydney Smith, Washington Irving, Hallam, Miss Jane Porter, Anacreon Moore, and many other literary celebrities. Her own rooms were thronged with a band of young Italian revolutionaries, whose country had grown too hot to hold them, and who talked of erecting a statue to the liberty-loving Irishwoman when Italy should be free. Dublin naturally seemed rather dull after all the excitement and delights of a London season, but Lady Morgan, though she loved to grumble at her native city, had not yet thought of turning absentee herself. Her popularity with her countrymen (those of her own way of thinking) had suffered no diminution, and her national celebrity was proved by the following verse from a ballad which was sung in the Dublin streets:--
'Och, Dublin's city, there's no doubtin',Bates every city on the say;'Tis there you'll hear O'Connell spoutin',And Lady Morgan making tay;For 'tis the capital of the finest nation,Wid charmin' peasantry on a fruitful sod,Fightin' like divils for conciliation,An' hatin' each other for the love of God.'
Our heroine was hard at work at this time upon the last of her Irish novels,The O'Briens and the O'Flaherties, which was published early in 1827, and for the copyright of which Colburn paid her £1350. It was the most popular of all her works, especially with her own country-folk, and is distinguished by her favourite blend of politics, melodrama, local colour, and rough satire on the ruling classes. The reviews as usual accused her of blasphemy and indecency, and so severe was the criticism in theLiterary Gazette, then edited by Jerdan, that Colburn was stirred up to found a new literary weekly of his own, and, in conjunction with James Silk Buckingham, started theAthenaeum. Jerdan had asserted in the course of his review that 'In all our reading we never met with a description which tended so thoroughly to lower the female character.... Mrs. Behn and Mrs. Centlivre might be more unguarded; but the gauze veil cannot hide the deformities, and Lady Morgan's taste has not been of efficient power to filter into cleanliness the original pollution of her infected fountain.' Lady Morgan observes in her diary that she has a right to be judged by her peers, and threatens to summon a jury of matrons to say if they can detect one line in her pages that would tend to make any honest man her foe.
There were other disadvantages attendant upon celebrity than those caused by inimical reviewers. No foreigner of distinction thought a visit to Dublin complete without an introduction to our author, who figures in several contemporary memoirs, not always in a flattering light. That curious personage, Prince Pückler Muskau, was travelling through England and Ireland in 1828, and has left a little vignette of Lady Morgan in the published record of his journey. 'I was very eager,' he explains, 'to make the acquaintance of a lady whom I rate so highly as an authoress. I found her, however, very different from what I had pictured to myself. She is a little, frivolous, lively woman, apparently between thirty and forty, neither pretty nor ugly, but by no means inclined to resign all claims to the former, and with really fine expressive eyes. She has no idea ofmauvaise honteor embarrassment; her manners are not the most refined, and affect theaisanceand levity of the fashionable world, which, however, do not sit calmly or naturally upon her. She has the English weakness of talking incessantly of fashionable acquaintances, and trying to pose for veryrecherché, to a degree quite unworthy of a woman of such distinguished talents; she is not at all aware how she thus underrates herself.' TheQuarterly Reviewseized upon this passage with malicious delight. The prince, as the reviewer points out, had dropped one lump of sugar into his bowl of gall; he had guessed Lady Morgan's age at between thirty and forty.' Miss Owenson,' comments the writer, who was probably Croker, 'was an established authoress six-and-twenty years ago; and if any lady, player's daughter or not, knew whatsheknew when she published her first work at eight or nine years of age (which Miss Owenson must have been at that time according to the prince's calculation), she was undoubtedly such a juvenile prodigy as would be quite worthy to make acasefor theGentleman's Magazine.'
Another observer, who was present at some of the Castle festivities, and who had long pictured Lady Morgan in imagination as a sylphlike and romantic person, has left on record his amazement when the celebrated lady stood before him. 'She certainly formed a strange figure in the midst of that dazzling scene of beauty and splendour. Every female present wore feathers and trains; but Lady Morgan scorned both appendages. Hardly more than four feet high, with a spine not quite straight, slightly uneven shoulders and eyes, Lady Morgan glided about in a close-cropped wig, bound with a fillet of gold, her large face all animation, and with a witty word for everybody. I afterwards saw her at the theatre, where she was cheered enthusiastically. Her dress was different from the former occasion, but not less original. A red Celtic cloak, fastened by a rich gold fibula, or Irish Tara brooch, imparted to her little ladyship a gorgeous and withal a picturesque appearance, which antecedent associations considerably strengthened.'
In 1829The Book of the Boudoirwas published, with a preface in which Lady Morgan gives the following naïve account of its genesis: 'I was just setting off to Ireland--the horses literally putting-to--when Mr. Colburn arrived with his flattering proposition [for a new book]. Taking up a scrubby manuscript volume which the servant was about to thrust into the pocket of the carriage, he asked what was that. I said it was one of my volumes of odds and ends, and read him my last entry. "This is the very thing," he said, and carried it off with him.' The book was correctly described as a volume of odds and ends, and was hardly worth preserving in a permanent shape, though it contains one or two interesting autobiographical scraps, such as the account ofMy First Rout, from which a quotation has already been given. A writer inBlackwoodreviewed the work in a vein of ironical admiration, professing to be much impressed by the author's knowledge of metaphysics as exemplified in such a sentence as: 'The idea of cause is a consequence of our consciousness of the force we exert in subjecting externals to the changes dictated by our volition.' Unable to keep up the laudatory strain, even in joke, the reviewer (his style points to Christopher North) calls a literary friend to his assistance, who takes the opposite view, and declares that the book is 'a tawdry tissue of tedious trumpery; a tessellated texture of threadbare thievery; a trifling transcript of trite twaddle and trapessing tittle-tattle.... Like everything that falls from her pen, it is pert, shallow, and conceited, a farrago of ignorance, indecency, and blasphemy, a tag-rag and bob-tail style of writing--like a harlequin's jacket.'
Lady Morgan bobbed up as irrepressibly as ever from under this torrent of (so-called) criticism, made a tour in France and Belgium for the purpose of writing more 'trapessing tittle-tattle,' and on her return to London, such were the profits on blasphemy and indecency, bought her first carriage. This equipage was a source of much amusement to her friends in Dublin, 'Neither she nor Sir Charles,' we are told, 'knew the difference between a good carriage and a bad one--a carriage was a carriage to them. It was never known where this vehicle was bought, except that Lady Morgan declared it came from the first carriage-builder in London. In shape it was like a grasshopper, as well as in colour. Very high and very springy, with enormous wheels, it was difficult to get into, and dangerous to get out of. Sir Charles, who never in his life before had mounted a coach-box, was persuaded by his wife to drive his own carriage. He was extremely short-sighted, and wore large green spectacles out of doors. His costume was a coat much trimmed with fur, and heavily braided. James Grant, the tall Irish footman, in the brightest of red plush, sat beside him, his office being to jump down whenever anybody was knocked down, or run over, for Sir Charles drove as it pleased God. The horse was mercifully a very quiet animal, and much too small for the carriage, or the mischief would have been worse. Lady Morgan, in the large bonnet of the period, and a cloak lined with fur hanging over the back of the carriage, gave, as she conceived, the crowning grace to a neat and elegant turn-out. The only drawback to her satisfaction was the alarm caused by Sir Charles's driving; and she was incessantly springing up to adjure him to take care, to which he would reply with warmth, after the manner of husbands.'
In 1880 Lady Morgan published herFrance(1829-30). This book was not a commission, but she had told Colburn that she was writing it, and as he made her no definite offer, she opened negotiations with the firm of Saunders and Otley. Colburn, who looked upon her as his special property, was furious at her desertion, and informed her that if she did not at once break off with Saunders and Otley, it would be no less detrimental to her literary than to her pecuniary interest. Undismayed by this threat, Lady Morgan accepted the offer of a thousand pounds made her by the rival firm. Colburn, who was a power in the literary market, kept his word. He advertised in his own periodicals 'LADY MORGAN AT HALF-PRICE,' and stated publicly that in consequence of the losses he had sustained by her former works, he had declined her new book, and that copies of all her publications might be had at half-price. In consequence of these and other machinations, the newFrance, which was at least as good a book as the old one, fell flat, and the unfortunate publishers were only able to make one payment of £500. They tried to get their contract cancelled in court, and Colburn, who was called as a witness, admitted that he had done his best to injure Lady Morgan's literary reputation. Eventually, the matter was compromised, Saunders and Otley being allowed to publish Lady Morgan's next book,Dramatic Scenes and Sketches, as some compensation for their loss; but of this, too, they failed to make a success.
The reviews ofFrancewere few and slighting, the wickedest and most amusing being by Theodore Hook. He quotes with glee the author's complacent record that she was compared to Molière by the Parisians, and that she had seen in a 'poetry-book' the following lines:--
'Slendal (sic), Morgan, Schlegel-ne vous effrayez pas--Muses! ce sont des noms fameux dans nos climats.'
'Her ladyship,' continues Theodore, 'went to dine with one of those spectacle and sealing-wax barons, Rothschild, at Paris; where never was such a dinner, "no catsup and walnut pickle, but a mayonese fried in ice, like Ninon's description of Seveigne's (sic) heart," and to all this fine show she was led out by Rothschild himself. After the soup she took an opportunity of praising the cook, of whom she had heard much. "Eh bien," says Rothschild, laughing, as well he might, "he on his side has also relished your works, and here is a proof of it." "I really blush," says Miladi, "like Sterne's accusing spirit, as I give in the fact--but--he pointed to a column of the most ingenious confectionery architecture, on which my name was inscribed in spun sugar." There was a thing--Lady Morgan in spun sugar! And what does the reader think her ladyship did? She shall tell in her own dear words. "All I could do under my triumphant emotion I did. I begged to be introduced to the celebrated and flattering artist." It is a fact--to the cook; and another fact, which only shows that the Hebrew baron is a Jewd'esprit, is that after coffee, the cook actually came up, and was presented to her. "He," says her ladyship, "was a well-bred gentleman, perfectly free from pedantry, and when we had mutually complimented each other on our respective works, he bowed himself out."'
In spite of her egoism and her many absurdities, it seems clear from contemporary evidence that in London, where she usually appeared during the season, Lady Morgan had a following. The names of most of the literary celebrities of the day appear amid the disjointed jottings of her diary. We hear of 'that egregious coxcomb D'Israeli, outraging the privilege a young man has of being absurd'; and Sydney Smith 'so natural, sobon enfant, so little of a wittitré'; and Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, handsome, insolent, and unamiable; and Allan Cunningham, 'immense fun'; and Thomas Hood, 'a grave-looking personage, the picture of ill-health'; and her old critical enemy, Lord Jeffrey, with whom Lady Morgan started a violent flirtation. 'When he comes to Ireland,' she writes, 'we are to go to Donnybrook Fair together; in short, having cut me down with his tomahawk as a reviewer, he smothers me with roses as a man. I always say of my enemies before we meet, "Let me at them."'
The other literary women were naturally the chief object of interest to her. Lady Morgan seems to have been fairly free from professional jealousy, though she hated her countrywoman, Lady Blessington, with a deadly hatred. Mrs. Gore, then one of the most fashionable novelists, she finds 'a pleasant littlerondeletteof a woman, something of my own style. We talked and laughed together, as good-natured women do, and agreed upon many points.' The learned Mrs. Somerville is described as 'a simple, little, middle-aged woman. Had she not been presented to me by name and reputation, I should have said she was one of the respectable twaddling matrons one meets at every ball, dressed in a snug mulberry velvet gown, and a little cap with a red flower. I asked her how she could descend from the stars to mix among us. She said she was obliged to go out with a daughter. From the glimpse of her last night, I should say there was no imagination, no deep moral philosophy, though a great deal of scientific lore, and a great deal ofbonhomie.' For 'poor dear Jane Porter,' the author ofScottish Chiefs, Lady Morgan felt the natural contempt of a 'showy woman' for one who looks like a 'shabby canoness.' 'Miss Porter,' she records, 'told me she was taken for me the other night, and talked toas suchby a party of Americans. She is tall, lank, lean, and lackadaisical, dressed in the deepest black, with a battered black gauze hat, and the air of a regular Melpomene. I am the reverse of all this, andsans vanité, the best-dressed woman wherever I go. Last night I wore a blue satin, trimmed fully with magnificent point-lace, and stomacherà la Sévigné, light blue velvet hat and feathers, with an aigrette of sapphires and diamonds.' As Lady Morgan at this time was nearer sixty than fifty, rouged liberally, and made all her own dresses, her appearance in the costume above described must at least have been remarkable.
Lady Morgan's last novel, a Belgian story calledThe Princess, or the Béguine, was published by Bentley in 1834, and for the first edition she received, £350, a sad falling-off from the prices received in former days. As her popularity waned, she grew discontented with life in Dublin, 'the wretched capital of wretched Ireland,' as she calls it, and in a moment of mental depression she entered the characteristic query,'Cui bono?' in her diary. To the same faithful volume she confided complaints even of her beloved Morgan, but the fact that she could find nothing worse to reproach him with than a disinclination for fresh air and exercise, speaks volumes for his marital virtue. A more serious trouble came from failing eyesight, which in 1837 threatened to develop into total blindness. It was in this year, when things seemed at their darkest, that a pension of £300 a year was conferred on her by Lord Melbourne, 'in recognition of her merits, literary and patriotic.' It was probably this unexpected accession of income that decided the Morgans to leave Dublin, and spend the remainder of their days in London. They found a pleasant little house in William Street, Knightsbridge, a new residential quarter which was just growing up under the fostering care of Mr. Cubitt. Lady Morgan went 'into raptures over the pretty new quarter,' and wrote some articles on Pimlico in theAthenæum. She also got up a successful agitation for an entrance into Hyde Park at what is now known as Albert Gate. For deserting Ireland, after receiving a pension for patriotism, and writing against the evils of Absenteeism, Lady Morgan was subjected to a good deal of sarcasm by her countrymen. But, as she pointed out, her property in Ireland was personal, not real, the tenant-farm of a drawing-room balcony, on which annual crops of mignonette were raised for home consumption, being the only territorial possession that she had ever enjoyed.
Lady Morgan's eyesight must have temporarily improved with her change of dwelling, for in 1839 the first part of her last work of any importance,Woman and her Master, was published by Colburn, to whom she had at last become reconciled. This book, which was never finished, was designed to prove, among other things, that in spite of the subordination in which women have been kept, and in spite of all the artificial difficulties that have been put in their way, not only have they never been conquered in spirit, but that they have always been the depositaries of the vital and leading ideas of the time. The book is more soberly written than most of Lady Morgan's works, but it would probably be regarded by the modern reader as dull and superficial. It was generally believed that Sir Charles had assisted in its composition, and few men have ever wielded a heavier pen. The pair only issued one more joint work,The Book Without a Name, which appeared in 1842, and consisted chiefly of articles and sketches that had already been published in the magazines.
The Morgans now found their chief occupation and amusement in the society which they attracted to their cheerful little house. One or two sketches of the pair, as they appeared in their later days, have been left by contemporaries. Chorley, an intimate friend, observes that, like all the sceptics he ever approached, they were absurdly prejudiced, and proof against all new impressions. 'Neither of them, though both were literary and musical, could endure German literature and music, had got beyond the stale sarcasms of theAnti-Jacobin, or could admit that there is glory for such men as Weber, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, as well as for Cimarosa and Paisiello.... Her familiar conversation was a series of brilliant, egotistic, shrewd, and genial sallies, and she could be either caressing or impudent. In the matter of self-approbation she had no Statute of Limitation, but boasted of having taught Taglioni to dance an Irish jig, and declared that she had created the Irish novel, though in the next breath she would say that she was a child when Miss Edgeworth was a grown woman.' Her blunders were proverbial, as when she asked in all simplicity, 'Who was Jeremy Taylor?' and on being presented to Mrs. Sarah Austin, complimented her on having writtenPride and Prejudice.
Another friend, Abraham Hayward, used to say that Lady Morgan had been transplanted to London too late, and that she was never free of the corporation of fine ladies, though she saw a good deal of them. 'She erroneously fancied that she was expected to entertain the company, be it what it might, and she was fond of telling stories in which she figured as the companion of the great, instead of confining herself to scenes of low Irish life, which she described inimitably. Lady Cork was accustomed to say, "I like Lady Morgan very much as an Irish blackguard, but I can't endure her as an English fine lady."'
In 1843 Sir Charles died rather suddenly from heart disease. His wife mourned him sincerely, but not for long in solitude. She found the anaesthetic for her grief in society, and after a few months of widowhood writes: 'Everybody makes a point of having me out, and I am beginning to be familiarised with my great loss. London is the best place in the world for the happy and the unhappy; there is a floating capital of sympathy for every human good or evil. I am a nobody, and yet what kindness I am daily receiving.' Again, in 1845, after her sister's death, she notes in her diary: 'The world is my gin or opium; I take it for a few hoursper diem--excitement, intoxication, absence. I return to my desolate home, and wake to all the horrors of sobriety.... Yet I am accounted the agreeable rattle of the great ladies' coterie, and I talkpas malto many clever men all day.... That Park near me, of which my beloved Morgan used to say, "It is ours more than the Queen's, we use it daily and enjoy it nightly"--that Park that I worked so hard to get an entrance into, I never walk in it; it seems to me covered with crape.'
Among the friends of Lady Morgan's old age were the Carter Halls, Hepworth Dixon, Miss Jewsbury, Hayward, and Douglas Jerrold. Lord Campbell, old Rogers, and Cardinal Wiseman frequented hersoirées, though with the last-named she had waged a pamphlet war over the authenticity of St. Peter's chair at Rome. Rogers was reported to be engaged to one of Lady Morgan's attractive nieces, the Miss Clarkes, who often stayed with her. It was in allusion to this rumour that he said, 'Whenever my name is coupled with that of a young lady in this manner, I make it a point of honour to say I have been refused.' To the last, we are told, Lady Morgan preserved the natural vivacity and aptness of repartee that had made her the delight of Dublin society half a century before. 'I know I am vain,' she said once to Mrs. Hall, 'but I have a right to be. It is not put on and off like my rouge; it is always with me.... I wrote books when your mothers worked samplers, and demanded freedom for Ireland when Dan O'Connell scrambled for gulls' eggs in the crags of Derrynane.... Look at the number of books I have written. Did ever woman move in a brighter sphere than I do? I have three invitations to dinner to-day, one from a duchess, one from a countess, and the third from a diplomatist, a very witty man, who keeps the best society in London.'
Lady Morgan was fond of boasting that she had supported herself since she was fourteen (for which read seventeen or eighteen), and insisted on the advantage of giving every girl a profession by which she could earn her living, if the need arose. Speaking to Mrs. Hall on the subject of some girls who had been suddenly bereft of fortune, she exclaimed: 'They do everything that is fashionable imperfectly; their drawing, singing, dancing, and languages amount to nothing. They were educated to marry, and had they had time, they might have gone off with, and hereafterfrom, husbands. I desire to give every girl, no matter her rank, a trade or profession. Cultivate what is necessary to the position she is born to; cultivate all things in moderation, but one thing to perfection, no matter what it is, for which she has a talent: give her a staff to lay hold of; let her feel, "This will carry me through life without dependence."'
With the assistance of Miss Jewsbury Lady Morgan, in the last years of her life, prepared a volume of reminiscences, which she calledThe Odd Volume. This, which was published in 1859, only deals with a short period of her career, and is of little literary interest. TheAthenæum, in the course of a laudatory review, observed that 'Lady Morgan had lived through the love, admiration, and malignity of three generations of men, and was, in short, a literary Ninon, who seemed as brisk and captivating in the year 1859 as when George was Prince, and the author of "Kate Kearney" divided the laureateship of society and song with Tom Moore.'
Lady Morgan, though now an octogenarian, was by no means pleased at these remarks. She still prided herself on her fascinations, was never tired and never bored, and looked upon any one who died under a hundred years of age as a suicide. 'You have more strength and spirit, as well as more genius, than any of us,' wrote Abraham Hayward to her. 'We must go back to the brilliant women of the eighteenth century to find anything like a parallel to you and yoursoirées.' But bronchitis was an enemy with which even her high spirit was powerless to cope. She had an attack in 1858, but threw it off, and on Christmas Day gave a dinner, at which she told Irish stories with all her old vivacity, and sang 'The Night before Larry was Stretched.' On St. Patrick's Day, 1859, she gave a musical matinée, but caught cold the following week, and after a short illness, died on April 16th.
Thus ended the career of one of the most flattered and best abused women of the century. Held up as the Irish Madame de Staël by her admirers, and run down as a monster of impudence and iniquity by her enemies, it is no wonder that her character, by no means innately refined, became hardened, if not coarsened, by so unenviable a notoriety. Still, to her credit be it remembered that she never lost a friend, and that she converted more than one impersonal enmity (as in the case of Jeffrey and Lockhart) into a personal friendship. In spite of her passion for the society of the great, she wrote and worked throughout her whole career for the cause of liberty, and she was ever on the side of the oppressed. An incorrigible flirt before marriage, she developed into an irreproachable matron, while her natural frivolity and feather-headedness never tempted her to neglect her work, nor interfered with her faculty for making most advantageous business arrangements. 'With all her frank vanity,' we are told, 'she had shrewd good sense, and she valued herself much more on her industry than on her genius, because the one, she said, she owed to her organisation, but the other was a virtue of her own rearing.' It would be impossible to conclude a sketch of Lady Morgan more appropriately than by the following lines of Leigh Hunt, which she herself was fond of quoting, and in which her personal idiosyncrasies are pleasantly touched off:--
'And dear Lady Morgan, see, see, when she comes,With her pulses all beating for freedom like drums,So Irish, so modish, so mixtish, so wild;So committing herself as she talks--like a child.So trim, yet so easy--polite, yet high-hearted,That truth and she, try all she can, won't be parted;She'll put you your fashions, your latest new air,And then talk so frankly, she'll make you all stare.'
NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS
Nathaniel Parker Willis
PART I
Any fool, said a wise man, can write an interesting book if he will only take the trouble to set down exactly what he has seen and heard. Unfortunately, it is only a very special kind of fool who is capable of recording exactly what he sees and hears--a rare bird who flourishes perhaps once in a century, and is remembered long after wiser men are forgotten. It is not contended that the subject of this memoir was a fool in the crude sense of the word, though he was responsible for a good deal of folly; but he was inspired by that impertinent curiosity, that happy lack of dignity, and that passion for the trivial and the intimate, which, when joined to a natural talent for observation and a picturesque narrative style, enable the possessor to illuminate a circle and a period in a fashion never achieved by the most learned lucubrations of the profoundest scholars. Thanks to his Boswellising powers, 'Namby-Pamby Willis,' as he was called by his numerous enemies, has left an admirably vivid picture of the literary society of London in the 'thirties,' a picture that steadily increases in value as the period at which it was painted recedes into the past.
Willis came of a family that had contrived, not unsuccessfully, to combine religion with journalism. His immediate forebears seem to have been persons of marked individuality, and his pedigree was, for the New World, of quite respectable antiquity. The founder of the family, George Willis, was born early in the seventeenth century, and emigrated to New England about 1730, where he worked at his trade of brickmaking and building. Our hero's great-grandfather was a patriotic sailmaker, who assisted at a certain historic entertainment, when tar, feathers, and hot tea were administered gratis to his Majesty's tax-collector at Boston. His wife, Abigail, was a lady of character and maxims, who saved some tea for her private use when three hundred cases were emptied into Boston Harbour, and exhorted her family never to eat brown bread when they could get white, and never to go in at the back door when they might go in at the front. The son of this worthy couple conducted a Whig newspaper in Boston during the Rebellion, and became one of the pioneer journalists of the West. His son, Nathaniel's sire, was invited, in 1803, to start a newspaper at Portland, Maine, where the future Penciller was born in 1806, one year before his fellow-townsman Longfellow.
A few years later, Mr. Willis returned to Boston, where, in 1816, he started theBoston Recorder, the first newspaper, he was accustomed to say, that had ever been run on religious lines. He seems to have been a respectable, but narrow-minded man, who loved long devotions and many services, and looked upon dancing, card-playing and stage-plays as works of the Evil One. His redeeming points were a sense of humour and a keen appreciation of female beauty, which last characteristic he certainly bequeathed to his son. It was his custom to sit round the fire with his nine children on winter evenings, and tell them stories about the old Dutch tiles, representing New Testament scenes, with which the chimney-corner was lined. The success of these informal Scripture lessons led him to establish a religious paper for young people calledThe Youth's Companion, in which some of our hero's early verses appeared. His wife, Hannah Parker, is described as a charming woman, lively, impulsive, and emotional. Her son, Nathaniel, whose devotion to her never wavered, used to say, 'My veins are teeming with the quicksilver spirit my mother gave me.'
Willis the younger was sent to school at Boston, where he had Emerson for a schoolfellow, and afterwards to the university of Yale, where he wrote much poetry, and was well received in the society of the place on account of his good looks, easy manners, and precocious literary reputation. On leaving Yale, he was delivered of a volume of juvenile poems, and then settled down in Boston to four years' journalistic work. Samuel Goodrich, better known in England under his pseudonym of 'Peter Parley,' engaged him to edit some annuals and gift-books, an employment which the young man found particularly congenial. In hisRecollectionsPeter Parley draws a comparison between his two contributors, Hawthorne and Willis, and records that everything Willis wrote attracted immediate attention, while the early productions of Hawthorne passed almost unnoticed.
In 1829 Willis started on his own account with theAmerican Monthly Magazine, which had an existence of little more than two years. He announced that he could not afford to pay for contributions, as he expected only a small circulation, and he wrote most of the copy himself. Every month there were discursive, gossiping editorial articles in that 'personal' vein which has been worked with so much industry in our own day. He took his readers into his confidence, prattled about his japonica and his pastilles, and described his favourite bird, a scarlet trulian, and his dogs, Ugolino and L. E. L., who slept in the waste-paper basket. He professed to write with a bottle of Rudesheimer and a plate of olives at his elbow, and it was hinted that he ate fruit in summer with an amber-handled fork to keep his palm cool!
These youthful affectations had a peculiarly exasperating effect upon men of a different type; and Willis became the butt of the more old-fashioned critics, who vied with each other in inventing opprobrious epithets to shower upon the head of this young puppy of journalism. However, Nathaniel was not a person who could easily be suppressed, and he soon became one of the most popular magazine-writers of his time, his prose being described by an admirer as 'delicate and brief like a white jacket--transparent like a lump of sugar in champagne--soft-tempered like the sea-breeze at night.' Unfortunately, the magazines paid but little, even for prose of the above description, and Willis presently found himself in financial difficulties; while, with all his acknowledged fascinations, he was unlucky in his first love-affair. He became engaged to a beautiful girl called Mary Benham, but her guardian broke off the match, and the lady, who seems to have had an inclination for literary men, afterwards married Motley, the historian of the Dutch Republic.
In 1831 theAmerican Monthly Magazineceased to appear, and Willis, leaving Boston and his creditors without regret, obtained the post of assistant-editor on theNew York Mirror, a weekly paper devoted to literature, light fiction, and the fine arts. It was the property of Morris, author of the once world-famous song, 'Woodman, spare that Tree,' and the editor-in-chief was Theodore Fay, a novelist of some distinction. Soon after his appointment it was decided that Willis should be sent to Europe as foreign correspondent of his paper. A sum of about a hundred pounds was scraped together for his expenses, and it was arranged that he should write weekly letters at the rate of two guineas a letter. In the autumn of 1831 he sailed in a merchant-vessel for Havre, whence he journeyed to Paris in November. Here he spent the first five or six months of his tour, and here began the series of 'Pencillings by the Way,' a portion of which gained him rather an unwelcome notoriety in English society by reason of the 'personalities' it contained. When published in book form the Pencillings were considerably toned down, and the proper names were represented by initials, so that people who read them then for the first time wondered what all the excitement had been about. As the chapters which relate to England are of most interest to English readers, Willis's continental adventures need only be briefly noticed. The extracts here quoted are taken from the original letters as they appeared in theNew York Mirror, which differ in many respects from the version that was published in London after the attack by theQuarterly Review.
In Paris Willis found himself in his element, and was made much of by the Anglo-French community, which was then under the special patronage of Lafayette. One of the most interesting of his new acquaintances was the Countess Guiccioli, upon whose appearance and manners he comments with characteristic frankness.
'I met the Guiccioli yesterday in the Tuileries,' he writes shortly after his arrival. 'She looks much younger than I anticipated, and is a handsome blonde, apparently about thirty. I am told by a gentleman who knows her that she has become a great flirt, and is quite spoiled by admiration. The celebrity of Lord Byron's attachment would certainly make her a very desirable acquaintance were she much less pretty than she really is, and I am told her drawing-room is thronged with lovers of all nations contending for a preference which, having once been given, should be buried, I think, for ever.' A little later he has himself been introduced to the Guiccioli, and he describes an interview which he has had with her, when the conversation turned upon her friendship with Shelley.
'She gave me one of his letters to herself as an autograph,' he narrates. 'She says he was at times a little crazy--fou, as she expressed it--but there never was a nobler or a better man. Lord Byron, she says, loved him as a brother.... There were several miniatures of Byron hanging up in the room; I asked her if any of them were perfect in the resemblance. "No," she said, "that is the most like him," taking down a miniature by an Italian artist, "mais il était beaucoup plus beau--beaucoup--beaucoup." She reiterated the word with a very touching tenderness, and continued to look at the portrait for some time.... She went on talking of the painters who had drawn Byron, and said the American, West's, was the best likeness. I did not tell her that West's portrait of herself was excessively flattered. I am sure no one would know her, from the engraving at least. Her cheek-bones are high, her forehead is badly shaped, and altogether the frame of her features is decidedly ugly. She dresses in the worst taste too, and yet for all this, and poetry and celebrity aside, the countess is both a lovely and a fascinating woman, and one whom a man of sentiment would admire at this age very sincerely, but not for beauty.'
The cholera frightened Willis away from Paris in April, but before he left, the United States minister, Mr. Rives, appointed him honorary attaché to his own embassy, a great social advantage to the young man, who was thereby enabled to obtain theentréeinto court circles in every country that he visited. At the same time the appointment somewhat misled his numerous new acquaintances on the subject of his social position, while the 'spurious' attachéship afterwards became a weapon in the hands of his enemies. However, for the time being, the young correspondent thoroughly enjoyed his novel experiences, and contrived to communicate his enjoyment to his readers. His letters were eagerly read by his countrymen, and are said to have been copied into no less than five hundred newspapers. He eschewed useful information, gave impressions rather than statistics, and was fairly successful in avoiding the style of the guide-book. The summer and autumn of 1832 were spent in northern Italy, Florence being the traveller's headquarters. He had letters of introduction to half the Italian nobility, and was made welcome in the court circles of Tuscany. In the autumn he was flirting at the Baths of Lucca, and at this time he had formed a project of travelling to London by way of Switzerland. 'In London,' he writes to his sister, 'I mean to make arrangements with the magazines, and then live abroad altogether. It costs so little here, and one lives so luxuriously too, and there is so much to fill one's mind and eye, that I think of returning to naked America with ever-increasing repugnance. I love my country, but theornamentalis my vocation, and of this she has none.' This programme was changed, and Willis spent the winter between Rome, Florence, and Venice. Wherever he went he made friends, but his progress was in itself a feat of diplomacy, and few people dreamt that the dashing young attaché depended for his living upon his contributions to a newspaper, payment for which did not always arrive with desirable punctuality. 'I have dined,' he writes to his mother, 'with a prince one day, and alone in a cook-shop the next.' He explains that he can live on about sixty pounds a year at Florence, paying four or five shillings a week for his rooms, breakfasting for fourpence, and dining quite magnificently for a shilling.
In June 1833, Willis was invited by the officers of an American frigate to accompany them on a six months' cruise in the Mediterranean. This was far too good an offer to be refused, since it would have been impossible to get a peep at the East under more ideal conditions of travel. Willis's letters from Greece and Turkey are among the best and happiest that he wrote, for the weather was perfect, the company was pleasant (there were ladies on board), and the reception they met with wherever they weighed anchor was most hospitable; while the Oriental mode of life appealed to our hero's highly-coloured, romantic taste. In the island of Ægina he was introduced to Byron's Maid of Athens, once the beautiful Teresa Makri, now plain Mrs. Black, with an ugly little boy, and a Scotch terrier that snapped at the traveller's heels. He describes theci-devantMaid of Athens as a handsome woman, with a clear dark skin, and a nose and forehead that formed the straight line of the Greek model.
'Her eyes are large,' he continues, 'and of a soft, liquid hazel, and this is her chief beauty. There is that looking out of the soul through them which Byron always described as constituting the loveliness that most moved him.... We met her as simple Mrs. Black, whose husband's terrier had worried us at the door, and we left her feeling that the poetry she called forth from the heart of Byron was her due by every law of loveliness.'
By this time the fame of thePencillingshad reached London; and at Smyrna Willis found a letter awaiting him from theMorning Herald, which contained an offer of the post of foreign correspondent at a salary of £200 a year. But as his letters would have to be mainly political, and as he might be expected to act as war-correspondent, which was scarcely in his line, he decided to refuse the offer. On leaving the frigate he loitered through Italy, Switzerland, and France to England, arriving at Dover on June 1, 1834. While at Florence he had made the acquaintance of Walter Savage Landor, who had given him some valuable letters of introduction to people in England, among them one to Lady Blessington. Landor also put into Willis's hands a package of books, whose temporary disappearance through some mismanagement roused the formidable wrath of the old poet. In hisLetter to an Author, printed at the end ofPericles and Aspasia, Landor describes the transaction (which related to an American edition of theImaginary Conversations), and continues:--
'I regret the appearance of his book (thePencillings by the Way) more than the disappearance of mine.... My letter of presentation to Lady Blessington threw open (I am afraid) too many folding-doors, some of which have been left rather uncomfortably ajar. No doubt his celebrity as a poet, and his dignity as a diplomatist, would have procured him all those distinctions in society which he allowed so humble a person as myself the instrumentality of conferring. Greatly as I have been flattered by the visits of American gentlemen, I hope that for the future no penciller of similar composition will deviate in my favour to the right hand of the road from Florence to Fiesole.'
The end of this storm in a teacup was that the books, which had safely arrived in New York, returned as safely to London, where they were handed over to their rightful owner, but not in time, as Willis complained, to keep him from going down to posterity astride the finis toPericles and Aspasia. Long afterwards he expressed his hope that Landor's biographers would either let him slip off at Lethe's wharf, or else do him justice in a note. Before this unfortunate incident, Landor and Willis had corresponded on cordial terms. The old poet wrote to say how much he envied his correspondent the evenings he passed in the society of 'the most accomplished and graceful of all our fashionable world, my excellent friend, Lady Blessington,' while the American could not sufficiently express his gratitude for the introduction to that lady, 'my lodestar and most valued friend,' as he called her, 'for whose acquaintance I am so much indebted to you, that you will find it difficult in your lifetime to diminish my obligations.'
Willis seems to have arrived in England prepared to like everything English, and he began by falling in love with the Ship Hotel at Dover, 'with its bells thatwouldring, doors thatwouldshut, blazing coal fires [on June 1], and its landlady who spoke English, and was civil--a greater contrast to the Continent could hardly he imagined.' The next morning he was in raptures over the coach that took him to London, with its light harness, four beautiful bays, and dashing coachman, who discussed the Opera, and hummed airs from thePuritani. He saw a hundred charming spots on the road that he coveted with quite a heartache, and even the little houses and gardens in the suburbs pleased his taste--there was such anaffectionatenessin the outside of every one of them. Regent Street he declares to be the finest street he has ever seen, and he exclaims, 'The Toledo of Naples, the Corso of Rome, the Rue de la Paix, and the Boulevards of Paris are really nothing to Regent Street.'
Willis called on Lady Blessington in the afternoon of the day after his arrival, but was informed that her ladyship was not yet down to breakfast. An hour later, however, he received a note from her inviting him to call the same evening at ten o'clock. She was then living at Seamore House, while D'Orsay had lodgings in Curzon Street. Willis tells us that he found a very beautiful woman exquisitely dressed, who looked on the sunny side of thirty, though she frankly owned to forty, and was, in fact, forty-five. Lady Blessington received the young American very cordially, introduced him to the magnificent D'Orsay, and plunged at once into literary talk. She was curious to know the degree of popularity enjoyed by English authors in America, more especially by Bulwer and D'Israeli, both of whom she promised that he should meet at her house.
'D'Israeli the elder,' she said, 'came here with his son the other night. It would have delighted you to see the old man's pride in him. As he was going away, he patted him on the head, and said, "Take care of him, Lady Blessington, for my sake. He is a clever lad, but wants ballast. I am glad he has the honour to know you, for you will check him sometimes when I am away...." D'Israeli the younger is quite his own character of Vivian Grey, crowded with talent, but verysoignéof his curls, and a bit of a coxcomb. There is no reverse about him, however, and he is the onlyjoyousdandy I ever saw.' Then the conversation turned upon Byron, and Willis asked if Lady Blessington had known La Guiccioli. 'No; we were at Pisa when they were together,' she replied. 'But though Lord Blessington had the greatest curiosity to see her, Lord Byron would never permit it. "She has a red head of her own," said he, "and don't like to show it." Byron treated the poor creature dreadfully ill. She feared more than she loved him.'
On concluding this account of his visit, Willis observes that there can be no objection to his publishing such personal descriptions and anecdotes in an American periodical, since 'the English just know of our existence, and if they get an idea twice a year of our progress in politics, they are comparatively well informed. Our periodical literature is never even heard of. I mention this fact lest, at first thought, I might seem to have abused the hospitality or the frankness of those on whom letters of introduction have given me claims for civility.' Alas, poor Willis! He little thought that one of the most distinguished and most venomous of British critics would make a long arm across the Atlantic, and hold up his prattlings to ridicule and condemnation.
The following evening our Penciller met a distinguished company at Seamore House, the two Bulwers, Edward and Henry; James Smith of 'Rejected Addresses' fame; Fonblanque, the editor of theExaminer; and the young Duc de Richelieu. Of Fonblanque, Willis observes: 'I never saw a worse face, sallow, seamed, and hollow, his teeth irregular, his skin livid, his straight black hair uncombed. A hollow, croaking voice, and a small, fiery black eye, with a smile like a skeleton's, certainly did not improve his physiognomy.' Fonblanque, as might have been anticipated, did not at all appreciate this description of his personal defects, when it afterwards appeared in print. Edward Bulwer was quite unlike what Willis had expected. 'He is short,' he writes, 'very much bent, slightly knock-kneed, and as ill-dressed a man for a gentleman as you will find in London.... He has a retreating forehead, large aquiline nose, immense red whiskers, and a mouth contradictory of all talent. A more good-natured, habitually smiling, nerveless expression could hardly be imagined.' Bulwer seems to have made up for his appearance by his high spirits, lover-like voice, and delightful conversation, some of which our Boswell has reported.
'Smith asked Bulwer if he kept an amanuensis. "No," he said, "I scribble it all out myself, and send it to the press in a most ungentlemanlike hand, half print, half hieroglyphics, with all its imperfections on its head, and correct in the proof--very much to the dissatisfaction of the publisher, who sends me in a bill of £16, 6s. 4d. for extra corrections. Then I am free to confess I don't know grammar. Lady Blessington, do you know grammar? There never was such a thing heard of before Lindley Murray. I wonder what they did for grammar before his day! Oh, the delicious blunders one sees when they are irretrievable! And the best of it is the critics never get hold of them. Thank Heaven for second editions, that one may scratch out one's blots, and go down clean and gentlemanlike to posterity." Smith asked him if he had ever reviewed one of his own books. "No, but I could! And then how I should like to recriminate, and defend myself indignantly! I think I could be preciously severe. Depend upon it, nobody knows a book's faults so well as its author. I have a great idea of criticising my books for my posthumous memoirs. Shall I, Smith? Shall I, Lady Blessington?"'
Willis fell into conversation with the good-natured, though gouty James Smith, who talked to him of America, and declared that there never was so delightful a fellow as Washington Irving. 'I was once,' he said, 'taken down with him into the country by a merchant to dinner. Our friend stopped his carriage at the gate of his park, and asked if we would walk through the grounds to the house. Irving refused, and held me down by the coat-tails, so that we drove on to the house together, leaving our host to follow on foot. "I make it a principle," said Irving, "never to walk with a man through his own grounds. I have no idea of praising a thing whether I like it or not. You and I will do them to-morrow by ourselves."' 'The Rejected Addresses,' continues Willis, 'got on his crutches about three o'clock in the morning, and I made my exit with the rest, thanking Heaven that, though in a strange country, my mother-tongue was the language of its men of genius.'
One of the most interesting passages in thePencillingsis that in which Willis describes a breakfast at Crabb Robinson's chambers in the Temple, where he met Charles and Mary Lamb, a privilege which he seems thoroughly to have appreciated. 'I never in my life,' he declares, 'had an invitation more to my taste. TheEssays of Eliaare certainly the most charming things in the world, and it has been, for the last ten years, my highest compliment to the literary taste of a friend to present him with a copy.... I arrived half an hour before Lamb, and had time to learn something of his peculiarities. Some family circumstances have tended to depress him of late years, and unless excited by convivial intercourse, he never shows a trace of what he once was. He is excessively given to mystifying his friends, and is never so delighted as when he has persuaded some one into a belief in one of his grave inventions.... There was a rap at the door at last, and enter a gentleman in black small clothes and gaiters, short and very slight in his person, his hair just sprinkled with grey, a beautiful, deep-set, grey eye, aquiline nose, and a very indescribable mouth. His sister, whose literary reputation is very closely associated with her brother's, came in after him. She is a small, bent figure, evidently a victim to ill-health, and hears with difficulty. Her face has been, I should think, a fine, handsome one, and her bright grey eye is still full of intelligence and fire....
'I had set a large arm-chair for Miss Lamb. "Don't take it, Mary," said Lamb, pulling it away from her very gravely. "It looks as if you were going to have a tooth drawn." The conversation was very local, but perhaps in this way I saw more of the author, for his manner of speaking of their mutual friends, and the quaint humour with which he complained of one, and spoke well of another, was so completely in the vein of his inimitable writings, that I could have fancied myself listening to an audible composition of new Elia. Nothing could be more delightful than the kindness and affection between the brother and sister, though Lamb was continually taking advantage of her deafness to mystify her on every topic that was started. "Poor Mary," he said, "she hears all of an epigram but the point." "What are you saying of me, Charles?" she asked. "Mr. Willis," said he, raising his voice, "admires yourConfessions of a Drunkardvery much, and I was saying that it was no merit of yours that you understood the subject."
'The conversation presently turned upon literary topics, and Lamb observed: "I don't know much of your American authors. Mary, there, devours Cooper's novels with a ravenous appetite with which I have no sympathy. The only American book I ever read twice was theJournal of Edward Woolman, a Quaker preacher and tinker, whose character is one of the finest I ever met. He tells a story or two about negro slaves that brought the tears into my eyes. I can read no prose now, though Hazlitt sometimes, to be sure--but then Hazlitt is worth all the modern prose-writers put together." I mentioned having bought a copy ofEliathe last day I was in America, to send as a parting gift to one of the most lovely and talented women in the country. "What did you give for it?" asked Lamb. "About seven-and-six." "Permit me to pay you that," said he, and with the utmost earnestness he counted the money out on the table. "I never yet wrote anything that would sell," he continued. "I am the publisher's ruin. My last poem won't sell a copy. Have you seen it, Mr. Willis?" I had not. "It is only eighteenpence, and I'll give you sixpence towards it," and he described to me where I should find it sticking up in a shop-window in the Strand.
'Lamb ate nothing, and complained in a querulous tone of the veal pie. There was a kind of potted fish, which he had expected that our friend would procure for him. He inquired whether there was not a morsel left in the bottom of the last pot. Mr. Robinson was not sure. "Send and see," said Lamb, "and if the pot has been cleaned, bring me the lid. I think the sight of it would do me good." The cover was brought, upon which there was a picture of the fish. Lamb kissed it with a reproachful look at his friend, and then left the table and began to wander round the room with a broken, uncertain step, as if he almost forgot to put one leg before the other. His sister rose after a while, and commenced walking up and down in the same manner on the opposite side of the table, and in the course of half an hour they took their leave.' Landor, in commenting on this passage, says it is evident that Willis 'fidgeted the Lambs,' and seems rather unaccountably annoyed at his having alluded to Crabb Robinson simply as 'a barrister.'
In London Willis appears to have fallen upon his feet from the very first. To the end of his life he looked back upon his first two years in England as the happiest and most successful period in his whole career. It was small wonder that he became a little dazzled and intoxicated by the brilliancy of his surroundings, which spoilt him for the homelier conditions of American life. 'What a star is mine,' he wrote to his sister Julia, three days after landing at Dover. 'All the best society of London exclusives is now open to me--me!without a sou in my pocket beyond what my pen brings me, and with not only no influence from friends at home, but with a world of envy and slander at my back.... In a literary way I have already had offers from theCourt Magazine, theMetropolitan, and theNew Monthly, of the first price for my articles. I sent a short tale, written in one day, to theCourt Magazine, and they gave me eight guineas for it at once. I lodge in Cavendish Square, the most fashionable part of the town, paying a guinea a week for my lodgings, and am as well off as if I had been the son of the President.'
Willis was constantly at Lady Blessington's house, where he met some of the best masculine society of the day. At one dinner-party among his fellow-guests were D'Israeli, Bulwer, Procter (Barry Cornwall), Lord Durham, and Sir Martin Shee. It was his first sight of Dizzy, whom he found looking out of the window with the last rays of sunlight reflected on the gorgeous gold flowers of an embroidered waistcoat. A white stick with a black cord and tassel, and a quantity of chains about his neck and pocket, rendered him rather a conspicuous object. 'D'Israeli,' says our chronicler, 'has one of the most remarkable faces I ever saw. He is vividly pale, and but for the energy of his action and the strength of his lungs, would seem a victim to consumption. His eye is as black as Erebus, and has the most mocking, lying-in-wait expression conceivable. His mouth is alive with a kind of impatient nervousness, and when he has burst forth with a particularly successful cataract of expression, it assumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of Mephistopheles. A thick, heavy mass of jet-black ringlets falls over his left cheek almost to his collarless stock, while on the right temple it is parted and put away with the smooth carefulness of a girl's, and shines most unctuously with "thy incomparable oil, Macassar."' Willis was always interested in dress, being himself a born dandy, and he was inclined to judge a man by the cut of his coat and the set of his hat. On this occasion he remarks that Bulwer was very badly dressed as usual, while Count D'Orsay was very splendid, but quite indefinable. 'He seemed showily dressed till you looked to particulars, and then it seemed only a simple thing well fitted to a very magnificent person.'
The conversation ran at first on Sir Henry Taylor's new play,Philip van Artevelde, which the company thought overrated, and then passed to Beckford, ofVathekfame, who had already retired from the world, and was living at Bath in his usual eccentric fashion. Dizzy was the only person present who had met him, and, declares Willis, 'I might as well attempt to gather up the foam of the sea as to convey an idea of the extraordinary language in which he clothed his description. There were at least five words in every sentence which must have been very much astonished at the use to which they were put, and yet no others apparently could so well have conveyed his idea. He talked like a racehorse approaching the winning-post, every muscle in action, and the utmost energy of expression flowing out in every burst. It is a great pity he is not in Parliament.'
At midnight Lady Blessington left the table, when the conversation took a political turn, but D'Israeli soon dashed off again with a story of an Irish dragoon who was killed in the Peninsular. 'His arm was shot off, and he was bleeding to death. When told he could not live, he called for a large silver goblet, out of which he usually drank his claret. He held it to the gushing artery, and filled it to the brim, then poured it slowly out upon the ground, saying, "If that had been shed for old Ireland." You can have no idea how thrillingly this little story was told. Fonblanque, however, who is a cold political satirist, could see nothing in a man's "decanting his claret" that was in the least sublime, so "Vivian Grey" got into a passion, and for a while was silent.'
Willis was now fairly launched in London society, literary and fashionable. He went to the Opera to hear Grisi, then young and pretty, and Lady Blessington pointed out the beautiful Mrs. Norton, looking like a queen, and Lord Brougham flirting desperately with a lovely woman, 'his mouth going with the convulsive twitch that so disfigures him, and his most unsightly of pug-noses in the strongest relief against the red lining of the box.' He breakfasted with 'Barry Cornwall,' whose poetry he greatly admired, and was introduced to the charming Mrs. Procter and the 'yellow-tressed Adelaide,' then only eight or nine years old. Procter gave his visitor a volume of his own poems, and told him anecdotes of the various authors he had known, Hazlitt, Lamb, Keats, and Shelley. Another interesting entertainment was an evening party at Edward Bulwer's house. Willis arrived at eleven, and found his hostess alone, playing with a King Charles' spaniel, while she awaited her guests.
'The author ofPelham,' he writes, 'is a younger son, and depends on his writings for a livelihood; and truly, measuring works of fancy by what they will bring, a glance round his luxurious rooms is worth reams of puffs in the Quarterlies. He lives in the heart of fashionable London, entertains a great deal, and is expensive in all his habits, and for this pay Messrs. Clifford, Pelham, and Aram--most excellent bankers. As I looked at the beautiful woman before me, waiting to receive the rank and fashion of London, I thought that close-fisted old literature never had better reason for his partial largess.'
Willis was astonished at the neglect with which the female portion of the assemblage was treated, no young man ever speaking to a young lady except to ask her to dance. 'There they sit with their mammas,' he observes, 'their hands before them in the received attitude; and if there happens to be no dancing, looking at a print, or eating an ice, is for them the most entertaining circumstance of the evening. Late in the evening a charming girl, who is the reigning belle of Naples, came in with her mother from the Opera, and I made this same remark to her. "I detest England for that very reason," she said frankly. "It is the fashion in London for young men to prefer everything to the society of women. They have their clubs, their horses, their rowing matches, their hunting, and everything else is abore! How different are the same men at Naples! They can never get enough of one there."... She mentioned several of the beaux of last winter who had returned to England. "Here have I been in London a month, and these very men who were at my side all day on the Strada Nuova, and all but fighting to dance three times with me of an evening, have only left their cards. Not because they care less about me, but because it is not the fashion--it would be talked about at the clubs; it isknowingto let us alone."'
There were only three men at the party, according to Willis, who could come under the head ofbeaux, but there were many distinguished persons. There was Byron's sister, Mrs. Leigh, a thin, plain, middle-aged woman, of a serious countenance, but with very cordial, pleasing manners. Sheil, the famous Irish orator, small, dark, deceitful, and talented-looking, with a squeaky voice, was to be seen in earnest conversation with the courtly old Lord Clarendon. Fonblanque, with his pale, dislocated-looking face, was making the amiable, with a ghastly smile, to Lady Stepney, author ofThe Road to Ruinand other fashionable novels. The bilious Lord Durham, with his Brutus head and severe countenance, high-bred in appearance in spite of the worst possible coat and trousers, was talking politics with Bowring. Prince Moscowa, son of Marshal Ney, a plain, determined-looking young man, was unconscious of everything but the presence of the lovely Mrs. Leicester Stanhope. Her husband, afterwards Sir Leicester, who had been Byron's companion in Greece, was introduced to Willis, and the two soon became on intimate terms.
In the course of the season Willis made the acquaintance of Miss Mitford, who invited him to spend a week with her at her cottage near Reading. In a letter to her friend, Miss Jephson, Miss Mitford says: 'I also like very much Mr. Willis, an American author, who is now understood to be here to publish his account of England. He is a very elegant young man, more like one of the best of our peers' sons than a rough republican.' The admiration was apparently mutual, for Willis, in a letter to the author ofOur Village, says: 'You are distinguished in the world as the "gentlewoman" among authoresses, as you are for your rank merely in literature. I have often thought you very enviable for the universality of that opinion about you. You share it with Sir Philip Sidney, who was in his day thegentlemanamong authors. I look with great interest for your new tragedy. I think your mind is essentially dramatic; and in that, in our time, you are alone. I know no one else who could have writtenRienzi, and I feltCharles I.to my fingers' ends, as one feels no other modern play.'
Willis was less happy in his relations with Harriet Martineau, to whom he was introduced just before her departure for America. 'While I was preparing for my travels,' she writes, in her own account of the interview, 'an acquaintance brought a buxom gentleman, whom he introduced under the name of Willis. There was something rather engaging in the round face, brisk air, andenjouementof the young man; but his conscious dandyism and unparalleled self-complacency spoiled the satisfaction, though they increased the inclination to laugh.... He whipped his bright little boot with his bright little cane, while he ran over the names of all his distinguished fellow-countrymen, and declared that he would send me letters to them all.' Miss Martineau further relates that the few letters she presented met with a very indifferent reception. Her indignation increased when she found that in his private correspondence Willis had given the impression that she was one of his most intimate friends. In his own account of the interview he merely says: 'I was taken by the clever translator of Faust to see the celebrated Miss Martineau. She has perhaps at this moment the most general and enviable reputation in England, and is the only one of the literary clique whose name is mentioned without some envious qualification.'
A budget of literary news sent to theMirrorincludes such items as that 'D'Israeli is driving about in an open carriage with Lady S., looking more melancholy than usual. The absent baronet, whose place he fills, is about to bring an action against him, which will finish his career, unless he can coin the damages in his brain. Mrs. Hemans is dying of consumption in Ireland. I have been passing a week at a country-house, where Miss Jane Porter [author ofScottish Chiefs] and Miss Pardoe [author ofBeauties of the Bosphorus] were staying. Miss Porter is one of her own heroines grown old, a still noble wreck of beauty.... Dined last week with Joanna Baillie at Hampstead--the most charming old lady I ever saw. To-day I dine with Longman, to meet Tom Moore, who is livingincog.near this Nestor of publishers, and pegging hard at hisHistory of Ireland.... Lady Blessington's new book makes a great noise. Living as she does twelve hours out of the twenty-four in the midst of the most brilliant and intellectually exhausting circle in London, I only wonder how she found time to write it. Yet it was written in six weeks! Her novels sell for a hundred pounds more than any other author's, except Bulwer's. Bulwer gets £1400; Lady Blessington, £400; Mrs. Norton, £250; Lady Charlotte Bury, £200; Grattan, £300; and most other authors below this. Captain Marryat's gross trash sells immensely about Wapping and Portsmouth, and brings him in £500 or £600 the book--but that can scarce be called literature. D'Israeli cannot sell a bookat all, I hear. Is not that odd? I would give more for one of his books than for forty of the common saleable things about town.'
One more description of a literary dinner at Lady Blessington's may be quoted before Willis's account of this, his first and most memorable London season, is brought to an end. Among the company on this occasion were Moore, D'Israeli, and Dr. Beattie, the King's physician, who was himself a poet. Moore had been ruralising for a year at Slopperton Cottage, and, before his arrival, D'Israeli expressed his regret that he should have been met on his return to town with a savage article inFraseron his supposed plagiarisms. Lady Blessington declared that he would never see it, since he guarded himself against the sight and knowledge of criticism as other people guarded against the plague. Some one remarked on Moore's passion for rank. 'He was sure to have five or six invitations to dine on the same day,' it was said, 'and he tormented himself with the idea that he had perhaps not accepted the most exclusive. He would get off from an engagement with a countess to dine with a marchioness, and from a marchioness to accept the invitation of a duchess. As he cared little for the society of men, and would sing and be delightful only for the applause of women, it mattered little whether one circle was more talented than another.' At length Mr. Moore was announced, and the poet, 'sliding his little feet up to Lady Blessington, made his compliments with an ease and gaiety, combined with a kind of worshipping deference, that were worthy of a prime minister at the Court of Love.... His eyes still sparkle like a champagne bubble, though the invader has drawn his pencillings about the corners; and there is a kind of wintry red that seems enamelled on his cheek, the eloquent record of the claret his wit has brightened. His mouth is the most characteristic feature of all. The lips are delicately cut, and as changeable as an aspen; but there is a set-up look about the lower lip--a determination of the muscle to a particular expression, and you fancy that you can see wit astride upon it. It is arch, confident, and half diffident, as if he were disguising his pleasure at applause, while another bright gleam of fancy was breaking upon him. The slightly tossed nose confirms the fun of his expression, and altogether it is a face that sparkles, beams, and radiates.'
The conversation at dinner that night was the most brilliant that the American had yet heard in London. Sir Walter Scott was the first subject of discussion, Lady Blessington having just received from Sir William Gell the manuscript of a volume on the last days of Sir Walter Scott, a melancholy chronicle of ruined health and weakened intellect, which was afterwards suppressed. Moore then described a visit he had paid to Abbotsford, when his host was in his prime. 'Scott,' he said, 'was the most manly and natural character in the world. His hospitality was free and open as the day; he lived freely himself, and expected his guests to do the same.... He never ate or drank to excess, but he had no system; his constitution was Herculean, and he denied himself nothing. I went once from a dinner-party at Sir Thomas Lawrence's to meet Scott at another house. We had hardly entered the room when we were set down to a hot supper of roast chicken, salmon, punch, etc., and Sir Walter ate immensely of everything. What a contrast between this and the last time I saw him in London! He had come to embark for Italy, quite broken down both in mind and body. He gave Mrs. Moore a book, and I asked him if he would make it more valuable by writing in it. He thought I meant that he should write some verses, and said, "I never write poetry now." I asked him to write only his name and hers, and he attempted it, but it was quite illegible.'
O'Connell next became the topic of conversation, and Moore declared that he would be irresistible if it were not for two blots on his character, viz. the contributions in Ireland for his support, and his refusal to give satisfaction to the man he was willing to attack. 'They may say what they will of duelling,' he continued, 'but it is the great preserver of the decencies of society. The old school which made a man responsible for his words was the better.' Moore related how O'Connell had accepted Peel's challenge, and then delayed a meeting on the ground of his wife's illness, till the law interfered. Another Irish patriot refused a meeting on account of the illness of his daughter, whereupon a Dublin wit composed the following epigram upon the two:--