“Night on the market. Through the colonnadeOf red-brick pillars not a sound was heard,Save of some whistling urchin as he strodeWith stamping footfalls, listening to the noiseWhich wore his shoe-soles and the hearer’s patience;Or the low mutter of the drunken man,As his wild song, proclaiming fix’d resolveNot to go home till morning, sank to lowAnd nearly inarticulate murmurs.”
“Night on the market. Through the colonnadeOf red-brick pillars not a sound was heard,Save of some whistling urchin as he strodeWith stamping footfalls, listening to the noiseWhich wore his shoe-soles and the hearer’s patience;Or the low mutter of the drunken man,As his wild song, proclaiming fix’d resolveNot to go home till morning, sank to lowAnd nearly inarticulate murmurs.”
“Night on the market. Through the colonnadeOf red-brick pillars not a sound was heard,Save of some whistling urchin as he strodeWith stamping footfalls, listening to the noiseWhich wore his shoe-soles and the hearer’s patience;Or the low mutter of the drunken man,As his wild song, proclaiming fix’d resolveNot to go home till morning, sank to lowAnd nearly inarticulate murmurs.”
“Night on the market. Through the colonnade
Of red-brick pillars not a sound was heard,
Save of some whistling urchin as he strode
With stamping footfalls, listening to the noise
Which wore his shoe-soles and the hearer’s patience;
Or the low mutter of the drunken man,
As his wild song, proclaiming fix’d resolve
Not to go home till morning, sank to low
And nearly inarticulate murmurs.”
The fishwoman’s son sings a song, whose first stanza runs:—
“I will not go,Like a whipt dog, unto the public school,To wear the cap and tokens of a fool,While MexicoInvites me on to glory and to fame,—Or a cracked crown, which after all’s the same.”
“I will not go,Like a whipt dog, unto the public school,To wear the cap and tokens of a fool,While MexicoInvites me on to glory and to fame,—Or a cracked crown, which after all’s the same.”
“I will not go,Like a whipt dog, unto the public school,To wear the cap and tokens of a fool,While MexicoInvites me on to glory and to fame,—Or a cracked crown, which after all’s the same.”
“I will not go,
Like a whipt dog, unto the public school,
To wear the cap and tokens of a fool,
While Mexico
Invites me on to glory and to fame,—
Or a cracked crown, which after all’s the same.”
Willis was forty when the “Home Journal” was begun—an age at which writers who have thought and studied deeply are often no more than ripe, and have their most productive years before them. But his best work was already done. After 1846 he wrote hardly any more stories or poems—none at all of any value. His pen was devoted more and more steadily to editorial duties, to ephemeræ and paragraphs and fragments of all kinds, and his well-wishers lamented that wit and fancy which, if properly directed, might have produced something thatwould live and delight future generations, were wasted in dissertations upon the cut of a beard or the fashion of a coat. To all remonstrances of his friends over his literary trifling and their exhortations to write for posterity, his invariable answer, in and out of print, was that the public liked trifles, and that posterity would not pay his bills—that he must go on “buttering curiosity with the ooze of his brains.” That this answer satisfied himself, or that he was without those aspirations after a more enduring fame which are natural to all, cannot be believed. It is probable that he sadly acknowledged in his inner consciousness that the best part of his career was over. His talent, as has been said before, was the result of, or was closely dependent upon, his physical temperament. When health began to decay, and youth was over, and his animal spirits had effervesced, life commenced to have a flat taste. The bloom was off. His writing, too, as we have seen, was always closely related to his personal experiences; and as these grew tamer, he had less and less to report, and his writing grew tame in proportion. With some, mere study and contemplation supply, to a degree, the ravages which time makes upon the freshness of young impressions. But it had been Willis’s misfortune in youth that a premature success had deprived him of the disciplineof early rebuffs, and had made a painful self-culture needless. He never drew much inspiration from books, and in later life he read very little. He said that he could not afford to read, partly for want of time, partly from a notion that much reading would be fatal to originality. Neither was it his privilege to command, at this or at any time, the stimulating and bracing association with men of high serious intellects and strenuous aims, such as he might, perhaps, have had if he had remained in Boston. The occasional hasty meetings with men of brains and literary tastes in general society did not at all take the place of that intimate communion with a circle of gifted spirits which has been so stimulating to others. Moreover it should be borne in mind, as accounting largely for the mediocrity of his later work, that for the last fifteen years of his life Willis was a chronic invalid. Indeed, he was never really a well man after his illness of 1845.
Next to Cooper, Willis was the best abused man of letters in America. It is easy to understand how the former, who was pugnacious and struck hard, should have been always in hot water. But why a man of Willis’s urbanity should have been a target for the newspaper critics is more difficult of explanation. “Colonel” William L. Stone of the “CommercialAdvertiser,” and “Colonel” James Watson Webb of the “Courier and Enquirer,” distinguished themselves especially by their stern condemnation of Willis’s literary affectations, and of what they were pleased to consider the weaknesses of his private character and life. It is suggestive, by the way, of the militant disposition of the New York press at that time, that so many editors were generals and colonels—or at least were breveted such by public consent, and graced with titular embellishments of a warlike character. Henry J. Raymond, who joined the “Courier and Enquirer” in 1842, proved his zealous adhesion to the traditions of the paper by an onslaught upon Willis, in which he asserted that the latter had snobbishly represented himself as received in the best circles abroad, “when in truth ’twas no such matter.” Willis replied to this in an editorial which Poe mentions as a clever specimen of skill at fence. An effort was afterwards made by friends of both to bring them together, at a time when Willis was living at Idlewild and Raymond was visiting in the neighborhood. The plan miscarried for some reason or other, though Willis, who seldom cherished a resentment, was quite ready for a reconciliation.
In 1850 Willis became unpleasantly involved in the famous divorce suit between Edwin Forrestand his wife. He had known Forrest as early as 1836, admired his acting, and praised it constantly in the “Mirror” and “Home Journal,” preferring it to the more studied performances of his English rival, Macready. He had seen little of Forrest for a number of years; but after his return to New York, in 1846, the two families grew quite intimate, exchanging visits and dinners. Mrs. Willis and Mrs. Forrest especially became fast friends, and on one occasion, when the former was seriously ill, she sent for Mrs. Forrest to come and stay with her. Mrs. Forrest was the daughter of Sinclair, the great English singer. She was a lady of refinement, beauty, and social accomplishments. Her sister Mrs. Voorhies, who lived with her for a time, had inherited her father’s musical talents, and Mrs. Forrest soon got about her a pleasant circle of friends, which included many persons of literary and artistic tastes, editors, authors, professors, clergymen, and their wives. The Bryants, the Godwins, Dr. Dewey, Henry Wikoff, and Samuel Raymond, the actor, were among the frequenters of the house. When Richard Willis returned from his musical studies in Germany in 1848, his brother introduced him there, and he found so much enthusiasm for his art, that he called repeatedly, to practice his compositions with Mrs. Voorhies.
Edwin Forrest was a tragedian of great natural force and genius, endowed with a wonderful voice and a magnificent physique. But he was a man of passionate and overbearing temper; his education was defective, his language and manners sometimes offensively coarse, and he had little relish for intellectual society. He does not appear, however, to have felt any objection to his wife’s hospitalities, or to have suspected any impropriety in her receiving her friends, during his frequent absences from home on professional engagements, until long after other causes of estrangement had arisen between them. At Cincinnati, in the spring of 1848, he thought that he had discovered evidence of a guilty intimacy between Mrs. Forrest and an actor named Jamieson; and although she solemnly protested her innocence and her husband agreed to accept her oath, his jealousy smouldered and occasionally broke out in scenes of violence. At length, in April, 1849, they agreed to separate. Mrs. Forrest made her home for a time with Mr. and Mrs. Parke Godwin, and Forrest took up his residence in Philadelphia, where in February, 1850, he made an application for divorce to the Pennsylvania legislature, based upon affidavits, charging his wife with adultery. This application was ultimately denied, but meanwhile the lady’s friends in New York had takenthe matter up. She had the sympathy and moral support of such men as William C. Bryant and his son-in-law, Mr. Parke Godwin, and Dr. Orville Dewey, the eminent Unitarian divine. Up to this time Forrest had not implicated Willis in his charges, but hearing that he was among those who were taking sides with Mrs. Forrest, he had stopped him in the street one day in January, 1850, and warned him against intermeddling between him and his wife, denouncing her unfaithfulness in the strongest terms. Willis replied that he did not believe a word of the slanders against her. The next day Mrs. Willis received an anonymous letter, accusing her husband of criminal relations with Mrs. Forrest. On March 28th the “Herald” published extracts from the evidence on which Forrest had based his application to the Pennsylvania legislature, which compromised, among others, Mr. Richard Willis. This drew from his brother a letter of explanation, printed in the “Herald” of the following day.
“It was not my intention,” wrote Willis, “to say a word in this letter upon the merits of the case to which this evidence belongs. To rescue the good name of an absent brother, who, in moral conduct is irreproachably correct, was my only object. A court of justice will soon sift the testimony, and better inform the public as to its credibility on other points.But the mention of my wife’s name, as a friend and visitor of Mrs. Forrest, makes it incumbent on me to add that the description of Mrs. Forrest’s manners and style of hospitality which is given in that evidence is totally at variance with all we have ever seen and known of that dignified, well-bred, and delicate mannered lady.”
“It was not my intention,” wrote Willis, “to say a word in this letter upon the merits of the case to which this evidence belongs. To rescue the good name of an absent brother, who, in moral conduct is irreproachably correct, was my only object. A court of justice will soon sift the testimony, and better inform the public as to its credibility on other points.But the mention of my wife’s name, as a friend and visitor of Mrs. Forrest, makes it incumbent on me to add that the description of Mrs. Forrest’s manners and style of hospitality which is given in that evidence is totally at variance with all we have ever seen and known of that dignified, well-bred, and delicate mannered lady.”
And in the “Home Journal” for April 6th he published a severe review of the “Forrest testimony,” warmly defending Mrs. Forrest, expressing the belief that her husband’s chief motive in the late proceedings had been to rid himself of the expense of her support; that the real cause of their separation had been his jealousy of her intellectual superiority; and condemning indignantly his attempt to “enlist kitchen and brothel against her, and so sully her fair name by cheap and easy falsehood that he can throw her off like a mistress paid up to parting.” The article concluded as follows:—
“We have written the above under the editorial plural, but the facts being mostly of personal knowledge, and wishing to evade no manner of responsibility, we close with the writer’s individual signature,“N. P. Willis.”
“We have written the above under the editorial plural, but the facts being mostly of personal knowledge, and wishing to evade no manner of responsibility, we close with the writer’s individual signature,
“N. P. Willis.”
These two articles, coupled with testimony elicited from Forrest’s household servants, decided him to drag Willis into the case. His bill filed in Philadelphia contained the names ofnine co-respondents, among them a clergyman, Mrs. Forrest’s family doctor, and Forrest’s old friend and traveling companion, Chevalier Wikoff. The last three were afterwards dropped from the case. Mrs. Forrest, having been served with a copy of the application and the process issued by the Pennsylvania legislature, filed a bill in the New York Supreme Court in September, 1850, and obtained an injunction to restrain her husband from proceeding with his suit in Philadelphia. She then began suit against him in New York for a divorce on the ground of adultery, which he defended with cross-accusations; and in New York the case was finally tried and decided. Meanwhile Forrest was prowling about his wife’s lodgings in New York, threatening people who went in or out, and stopping others in the street to warn them against interference.
On the 17th of June, while Willis was walking in Washington Square, near his own residence in Fourth Street, Forrest came up to him quickly and knocked him down with a blow from his fist. He then stood over him, and, holding him down by the coat collar with one hand, beat him with a gutta-percha whip till the police came up and interfered. To the group of spectators which had rapidly assembled, he said, “That is the seducer of my wife.” Willis would at notime have been physically the equal of his antagonist, who was a man of powerful frame; but when this assault was made it was doubly safe from the fact that the victim of it had been ill for months with a rheumatic fever, and was in an unusually feeble condition of body. Two days after this heroic action, Forrest met Bryant and Godwin walking down Broadway and furiously demanded who had put the account of it into the “Evening Post,” in which he was represented as having struck Willis from behind.
“I told him,” said Mr. Godwin, in his testimony, “I was responsible for the article. He then turned round to me in a very ferocious way, and said there were several things that he was going to hold me responsible for; he said the article was a damned lie from beginning to end; he said he meant to attack Mr. Willis, and he believed that he had told me so formerly. I replied that these were not just the terms that he used, and that he told me formerly that he meant to cut his damned heart out; to which Mr. Forrest muttered something in reply—I don’t know what it was distinctly; I think he said something about what he would have done if they had not taken him off.”
“I told him,” said Mr. Godwin, in his testimony, “I was responsible for the article. He then turned round to me in a very ferocious way, and said there were several things that he was going to hold me responsible for; he said the article was a damned lie from beginning to end; he said he meant to attack Mr. Willis, and he believed that he had told me so formerly. I replied that these were not just the terms that he used, and that he told me formerly that he meant to cut his damned heart out; to which Mr. Forrest muttered something in reply—I don’t know what it was distinctly; I think he said something about what he would have done if they had not taken him off.”
Willis brought an action against Forrest for this assault, in the superior court of the city of New York, and secured a verdict in March, 1852, for $2,500 and costs. The case was appealedon exceptions, and, upon the new trial which was ordered, the damages were reduced to one dollar. Forrest sued Willis for libel in the “Home Journal” article, and got $500 damages. But in the mean time the suit for divorce had come to trial, in December, 1851, and had been decided in Mrs. Forrest’s favor. The jury found the defendant guilty of adultery, found the plaintiff innocent, and granted her the decree prayed for with $3,000 a year alimony. This was one of thecauses célèbresof the last generation. The trial occupied the then extraordinarily long period of six weeks, and the printed testimony fills two large volumes. Charles O’Conor, who was Mrs. Forrest’s counsel, dated his great reputation as an advocate from his conduct of this case. For eighteen years he fought the battle for his fair client relentlessly and triumphantly. The case was appealed five times, and judgment affirmed every time with an increase of alimony. It was not till 1868 that the defendant tired of resistance, and paid over to the plaintiff the sum of $64,000. His costs and expenses of litigation, additional to this, were of course enormous. It is unnecessary to review the evidence given at the trial, by which it was sought to incriminate Willis in this affair, further than to say that it consisted almost solely of the testimony of servants, whowere thoroughly discredited in their cross-examination. One of these witnesses was a man who had been discharged from Willis’s employ. Another was an ex-chambermaid in the Forrest household, who was brought all the way from Texas to testify, and who was shown to be a thief, and the mother of an illegitimate child by a friend of the defendant. Public opinion, it is needless to say, was divided about the verdict. Forrest was the idol of the Bowery, and the asserter of the American stage against the “dudes” and “Anglo-maniacs” of that day. “The boys,” who had stuck by him in his quarrel with Macready till its upshot in the bloody Astor Place riot of May 10, 1849, stuck by him now in his domestic tribulations, and gave him a rousing ovation on his first appearance at the Broadway Theatre, following the close of the trial. A number of people in society, too, of those who “demen gladly to the badder end,” made up their minds to Mrs. Forrest’s guilt. But it is not unfair to say that the great majority of the decent people and respectable newspapers greeted the verdict with acclamation. A large party maintained that Forrest was a selfish and licentious brute, who was tired of his wife and wanted to be rid of her; that, knowing he had no valid cause of action against her, he trumped up charges and suborned witnesses. It is notnecessary to go so far as this in order to assert the innocence of Mrs. Forrest and of those who were made parties to the accusations against her. Alger, in his big “Life of Edwin Forrest,” after acknowledging that “the innocence of Mrs. Forrest is publicly accredited, and is not here impugned;” that she “was believed by her intimate and most honored friends to be innocent, was vindicated by a jury after a most searching trial, and is now living in modest and blameless retirement,” simply urges in Forrest’s behalf that he honestly believed himself a wronged man, and acted with his usual fury and unforgivingness upon that conviction. Willis and his brother were both among the witnesses for the plaintiff on the trial, and both, of course, denied peremptorily the charges against them. But the one circumstance which more than all else influenced the decision of the jury was the constant presence in court of Mrs. N. P. Willis, side by side with Mrs. Forrest, and the brave, clear, and simple way in which she testified in her friend’s behalf. No one could believe that a spirited and refined lady, like Mrs. Willis, would have consented, for an instant, to put herself into such a position, without a full assurance of her husband’s innocence; and no one who listened to her testimony could have thought her a woman likely to be deceived. John Van Buren,who was Forrest’s lawyer in all these cases, was quite generally censured for the needlessly abusive way in which he handled the witnesses for the other side. In the trial of the assault and battery case, “Willisv.Forrest,” his personalities went so far beyond the limits usually set to the licensed insolence of the bar, that on the termination of the suit Willis, who was about starting on a trip to the South, and had learned from an item in the “Herald” that Van Buren was going South too, sent him a letter demanding an apology. In case he should decline to make such apology, the letter proposed a hostile meeting at Charleston or any other convenient point in the Southern States. This note the recipient returned (after carefully making a copy of it) with a short reply, describing it as a “silly and scurrilous communication.” This it certainly was not, but, on the other hand, a very dignified and gentlemanly letter; rather too long, it must be owned, for on these occasions Willis’s pen generally ran away with him. However, on the receipt of this answer to it, which was forwarded to him at the South, he replied with sufficient brevity: “I now pronounce you a coward, as well as a proper companion for the blackguards whose attorneyship constitutes your career.”
This challenge was something of a flourish onWillis’s part, and his experience with Marryat might have taught him the folly of such attempts to get “the satisfaction of a gentleman” from railing editors and attorneys. He took little by his motion, which simply gave Van Buren an opportunity to publish the correspondence in a New York morning paper with comments of his own, characteristically ugly and characteristically smart. The fact remained, however, that Van Buren had been challenged to fight and had declined, and the general note made upon the affair by a venal press was to the effect that “Prince John had shown the white feather.” Of the many letters of sympathy and congratulation received by Mr. and Mrs. Willis after the Forrest verdict, the following, from Mr. J. P. Kennedy, the author of “Swallow Barn,” will serve as an example:—
Baltimore,February 2, 1852.My dear Willis,—I have often resolved during the war—thelatewar, I hope I may call it—to assume the privilege of a friend and send you the only succor I could supply, a word of comfort and a cheer or two, to let you see that there was some sympathy abroad for your sufferings, which I know were pungent enough to make a very respectable saint, if your ambition lay in that way. Now that you have got through certainly the worst part of your Iliad in the termination of that horrible trial, I think it a goodtime to redeem my promise to myself, and to say to you that I have felt a friend’s part in the whole progress of your troubles, and the confidence of a friend that the end would bring you a bright sky and a pleasant outlook for the future. I particularly congratulate Mrs. Willis on this result, as I know, or can imagine, the full measure of her griefs. Weall here—I mean our household, with whom Mrs. Willis is associated in so many affectionate remembrances—unite very sincerely in this message to her. Your defense in the “Home Journal” of an injured woman, which I noted and applauded from the first, was, at its least, a manly and generous act, and it became the more worthy of your manhood as it grew to be perilous. I use this word much more in reference to the social clamor than to the ruffian assault it brought you. I trust you are now to triumph very signally over both. Present Mrs. Kennedy and her sister very kindly to your wife, as also Dr. Gray, and believe meVery truly yours,J. P. Kennedy.
Baltimore,February 2, 1852.
My dear Willis,—I have often resolved during the war—thelatewar, I hope I may call it—to assume the privilege of a friend and send you the only succor I could supply, a word of comfort and a cheer or two, to let you see that there was some sympathy abroad for your sufferings, which I know were pungent enough to make a very respectable saint, if your ambition lay in that way. Now that you have got through certainly the worst part of your Iliad in the termination of that horrible trial, I think it a goodtime to redeem my promise to myself, and to say to you that I have felt a friend’s part in the whole progress of your troubles, and the confidence of a friend that the end would bring you a bright sky and a pleasant outlook for the future. I particularly congratulate Mrs. Willis on this result, as I know, or can imagine, the full measure of her griefs. Weall here—I mean our household, with whom Mrs. Willis is associated in so many affectionate remembrances—unite very sincerely in this message to her. Your defense in the “Home Journal” of an injured woman, which I noted and applauded from the first, was, at its least, a manly and generous act, and it became the more worthy of your manhood as it grew to be perilous. I use this word much more in reference to the social clamor than to the ruffian assault it brought you. I trust you are now to triumph very signally over both. Present Mrs. Kennedy and her sister very kindly to your wife, as also Dr. Gray, and believe me
Very truly yours,
J. P. Kennedy.
The result of the Forrest trial was, in a sense, a triumph for Willis. Yet in all affairs of the kind, although the charges are disproved, the very fact that they have been made leaves, illogically and unfairly, perhaps, but still inevitably, a sediment of prejudice in the public mind. It is in the nature of such cases that the inmost truth about them can seldom be known to more than two persons. To all others there remainsnothing beyond inference and suspicion. Hence the uncertainty which survives the judicial decision of the cause and works injustice to the innocent who have been unlucky enough to be drawn into compromising situations. An impression has always obtained in many quarters that Willis was profligate in his relations with women. Rumors to this effect were industriously circulated by his ill-wishers, and, in one instance, they got into print in the shape of an accusation publicly brought against him by his ancient foe, Colonel James Watson Webb of the “Courier and Enquirer.” It is needless to revive this venerable scandal or any of the less tangible, miscellaneous gossip once afloat on the current of New York society. It is no part of a biographer’s duty to “vindicate” his subject from any and all charges of the kind. I have read the published documents in the Webb-Willis affair with a sincere effort to be impartial, and they left upon my mind no impression of anything worse on Willis’s part than vanity and indiscretion in permitting himself to be drawn into a half literary, half sentimental correspondence with a very romantic young woman, without her parents’ knowledge. He was easily flattered by attentions from female worshipers of genius. He maintained in print and in person a constant attitude of gallantry toward thesex, which doubtless stimulated the rumor of his immoralities, and led the reader to identify him with the Lotharios of his tales. Moreover, it is not to be denied that when a young man in Italy, and in the fast set of his London acquaintances, he was exposed to temptations which he did not always resist, and probably had his share of those adventures which the French indulgently callbonnes fortunes, but less liberal shepherds of Anglo-Saxon race give a grosser name; and which always turn out the reverse of good fortunes for everybody concerned. As to his later life, one who knew him well but had quarreled with him and had small cause to like him, writes: “My belief is that N. P. Willis was, as he said, perfectly free from fault in that business [the Forrest affair], and hadnointrigues with women after his marriage.”
The spring of 1852 found him much broken in health. He had a wearing cough, and it was thought that his lungs were diseased. He waited only the termination of his assault and battery case in March, to start on a journey to the South with his father-in-law, Mr. Grinnell. The trip included a cruise to Bermuda and the West Indies, a short stay in Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, a visit to the Mammoth Cave, and a sojourn at the neighboring watering-place of Harrodsburg Springs. His letters to the“Home Journal” from these and other points in the South were reissued in book form as “A Health Trip to the Tropics.” During the years covered by this chapter he published a number of volumes similarly made up of periodical correspondence and miscellaneous contributions to his paper. “Rural Letters” contained his “Invalid Letters from Germany;” a reprint of “Letters from under a Bridge,” with two additional to those in the earlier editions; “Open Air Musings in the City;” letters from Sharon Springs and Trenton Falls in the summer of 1848; and one story, “A Plain Man’s Love.” “Hurrygraphs” comprised a series of letters from Plymouth, New Bedford, Cape Cod, and places on the Delaware and Hudson rivers; besides sketches—often very acute pieces of mental portraiture—of public men, authors, and other celebrities, and a good deal of chit-chat about society, the opera, etc., from the columns of the “Home Journal.”
All that can be said of these traveler’s letters is that they are fairly good reporting. They hardly attain the rank of literature, and were as a whole not worth putting between covers. But Willis sold well and, therefore, found his account in continued book-making, bringing out, usually, simultaneous editions in London and New York. It is instructive to compare his lettersfrom Cape Cod—a journey on which Mr. Grinnell was again his companion—with Thoreau’s book on the same piece of geography. Both men had quick eyes, and had taught themselves the art of observation. But Willis’s letters were the notes of an “amateur casual,” or “here-and-thereian,” on a flying trip over a sand-spit inhabited by queer people, who was always on the lookout for points which would interest the lady readers of a metropolitan journal. Thoreau, on the contrary, was like a palmer on a solemn pilgrimage to one of nature’s peculiar shrines, with loins girt up and staff in hand, tramping along the heavy sands, with the eternal thunder of “The Reverend Poluphloisboio Thalasses” in his ear; in serious and vigilant mood, watching every least token of the ways of the sea, but careless of men and reading publics.
Now and then there is a quaint or poetic fancy in these itineraries of Willis which recalls his youthful manner; as where, speaking of the absence of an atmosphere in the tropic seas, he says: “As to the horizon, it seems so near that, if you were washing your hands on deck, you might try to throw the slops over it, as you would over the ship’s side. The sun goes down, as it were, next door.” In the letters from Trenton Falls—which he had visited twenty years before and described in “Edith Linsey”—occursa startling anticipation of the most admired figure in Tennyson’s “Queen Mary:”—
“As we stood gazing at this, last night, a little after midnight, the moon threw the shadow of the rock slantwise across the face of the fall. I found myself insensibly watching to see whether the delicate outline of the shadow would not vary. There it lay, still as the shade of a church window across a marble slab on the wall, drawing its fine line over the most frenzied tumult of the lashed and agonized waters, and dividing whatever leapt across it, foam, spray, or driving mist, with invariable truthfulness to the rock that lay behind. Now, my song-maker, if you ever have a great man to make famous—a hero who unflinchingly represents a great principle amid the raging opposition, hatred, and malice of mankind—there is your similitude:Calm as the shadow of a rock across the foam of a cataract.”
“As we stood gazing at this, last night, a little after midnight, the moon threw the shadow of the rock slantwise across the face of the fall. I found myself insensibly watching to see whether the delicate outline of the shadow would not vary. There it lay, still as the shade of a church window across a marble slab on the wall, drawing its fine line over the most frenzied tumult of the lashed and agonized waters, and dividing whatever leapt across it, foam, spray, or driving mist, with invariable truthfulness to the rock that lay behind. Now, my song-maker, if you ever have a great man to make famous—a hero who unflinchingly represents a great principle amid the raging opposition, hatred, and malice of mankind—there is your similitude:Calm as the shadow of a rock across the foam of a cataract.”
Willis was induced by Mr. Moore, the proprietor and landlord, to edit a small illustrated guide-book to Trenton Falls; his own contributions to which consisted of descriptions reproduced from these letters and from “Edith Linsey,” and a short biography of the Rev. John Sherman, the first settler and a grandson of Roger Sherman. In the same way and in the same year (1851) he put together a little “Life of Jenny Lind,” for whom he had an ardent admiration, and whom he had been privileged to meetoften and familiarly during her first visit to America. This was, of course, not a formal biography, but was made up from articles that he had written about her from time to time for the “Home Journal,” and extracts from the English papers. He also issued selections from his former volumes under new names. Such were “People I have Met,” and “Life Here and There,” which were stories from “Dashes at Life,” and contained little or nothing new, and “A Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean,” which was a mere reprint of a part of “Pencillings by the Way.”
Mr. and Mrs. Willis, with their children, had passed the summer of 1850 at Cornwall, in the highlands of the Hudson, boarding at the farmhouse of a Mrs. Sutherland. They grew so attached to the beautiful neighborhood that they resolved to make it their home some day, and with this in view, in the fall of the same year, they had bought the fifty acres of land which afterwards became widely known as Idlewild. This little domain lay upon a shelf or terrace on the western bank of the Hudson, lifted some two hundred feet above the level of the river, at the point where its waters received the slender tribute of Moodna Creek. Behind the site chosen for the house was a wild ravine, shaded by hemlocks, at the bottom of which a brook, swollen to sizable rapids and cascades by the spring freshets, but a mere trickle in midsummer, ran down to join the creek. The location seemed destined by nature for a gentleman’scountry seat, from its variety of surface, its contrasting prospects, and its noble timber. The outlook in front was upon a wide bend of the river and the opposite heights and distant mountain perspectives of the eastern shore. Behind the house was a private landscape of glen and forest, sunk away quite out of sight of the sails and steamers that passed continually up and down the watery highway before the front door. To the south, a mile away, was the imposing shape of Storm King, a mountain which owes its baptism to Willis, having previously figured in geography as Butter Hill. Four miles below this were West Point and the gate of the highlands, and on the other bank General Morris’s summer home of Undercliff. Four miles above Idlewild was the considerable town of Newburg, for a market; and only a mile from his door, the post office village of Moodna.
Willis’s trip to the tropics had been of small benefit to his health, and, on his return in the summer of 1852, he joined his family at their boarding place at Cornwall. His doctor warned him that a return to New York would be at the risk of his life. He had grown tired, himself, of the city and of gay society, and longed for the repose of the hills.Levavit oculos ad arces.In the hope that rural quiet and the drier air of the highlands might restore his health, he decidedthat autumn to begin building at once, and to take up his permanent abode in the country. During the winter and spring he remained with his family at the Sutherlands’, and busied himself in superintending the erection of his house, laying out roads and paths, cutting vistas through his trees, building stone walls, constructing a dam for his brook, and reporting progress in gossipy letters to the “Home Journal.” In the spring of 1853 the New York house was sold, and on the 26th of July Idlewild received its tenants.
Willis had a happy knack at inventing names, and if everything that he wrote should become obsolete, he will still have left his sign manual on the American landscape and the English tongue. “Idlewild” was an apt and beautiful name, and like Sunnyside, the place became and remains one of the historic points of the scenery of the Hudson. The story that Willis tells of the origin of the word is this: The old farmer and fisherman who owned the land—uncle of the “Ward boys,” of aquatic fame—was showing him over the property, and Willis, inquiring the price of this particular piece, was answered that it had little value, being “an idle wild of which nothing could ever be made.” I fancy that this little anecdote is in part a myth, invented after the fact to give the name a historyand a justification. Willis was particular, not to say fussy, in such matters, and the title finally chosen was obtained by a process of elimination from a list that I have seen, of several hundred “pretty, fond, adoptious christendoms,” such as Everwild, Mieux-ici, Lodore, Loudwater, Idle-brook, Wanderwild, Up-the-brook, Shadywild, Loiterwild, Demijour-brook, etc.
Thus ten years after the break-up of his home at Glenmary, he had again pitched his pavilion—this time for good—by green pastures and running waters. Henceforth he abjured fashionable life and devoted himself to the domesticities; to the care of his health and his grounds, the entertainment of his guests, and the preparation of his weekly letter to the “Home Journal.” There was little left in him of that dandyism which had distressed his critics. But the old coats and hats which he loved to wear were worn with a certain grace peculiar to the man. He could not put on the seediest garment without straightway imparting to it an air of jauntiness. He was fond of pets and was a most playful and affectionate companion to his children, the number of whom gradually increased to five by the birth of a third daughter, Edith, on September 28, 1853, and a second son, Bailey, on May 31, 1857. All of these survive, but his last child, a daughter, born October 31, 1860, lived only a few minutes.
From early spring till after Christmas the family at Idlewild kept open house, having almost always company staying with them, and in summer constantly receiving transient guests. The place had become celebrated through Willis’s descriptions in the “Home Journal.” Cornwall was growing to be a summer resort, and there were daily visits to the glen and to the house from all manner of people. Willis’s habit was to breakfast in his own room and write till noon. Sometimes he would take a stroll to the post office or the glen before dinner. After dinner he would write letters or do “scissors work” before the afternoon drive or ride. The evening was spent with his guests, or, if the family were alone, he would write again and come down to a nine o’clock supper.
From the trivial incidents of this daily life he wove his correspondence; enough of it, at last, to fill two volumes, “Out Doors at Idlewild” and “The Convalescent;” the former dedicated to Mr. Grinnell, the latter to Doctors William Beattie and John F. Gray, his physicians, and both books addressed more particularly to the author’s “parish of invalids.” These letters have by no means the literary merit of the “Letters from under a Bridge,” and it was, perhaps, presuming too far on their claim to even contemporary respect to bind them up at all afterthey had once done duty in the newspaper column. They were eagerly read, nevertheless, as they appeared from week to week, and a sympathetic public was interested in Willis’s kindly prattle about his landscape gardening, his tree planting, the deluges in his brook, his children, his horses and dogs, the eccentricities of his country neighbors, the humors of his poultry, the daily voyage of the family wagon to Newburg, the sleighing on the frozen Hudson, and the occasional picnics and excursions to Storm King, West Point, Poughkeepsie, or remoter points. Willis found himself not without amusement, becoming something of a country gentleman and public-spirited bulwark of society, taking part in local interests. There was a picturesque little Episcopal church a mile from Idlewild, in which he became a vestryman and used to pass the plate. Once he even made a speech at a public meeting, in favor of dividing the county. LettersXXXIX.andXL.in “Out Doors at Idlewild,” giving a graphic description of the ascent of Storm King, are perhaps the best thing in the volume.
Among the many guests attracted to Idlewild by the hospitalities of its owner and his inviting pictures of his highland retreat were numbers of literary men and artists.[11]Bayard Taylor,Charles A. Dana, De Trobriand, of the “Courrier des États-Unis;” Hicks and Kensett, the painters, came up from New York at various times, and rambled, bathed, or otherwise disported themselves in the glen. Whipple and Fields ran across from Boston and made a pleasant visit of two or three days, of which both afterwards gave reminiscences. Fields loved to recall an anecdote that Willis told him, “of his watching a little ragged girl, one day in London, who was peering through an area railing. A window of a comfortable eating-house gave upon this area, and a man sat at the window taking a good dinner. The child watched his every movement, saw him take a beefsteak and get all things in readiness to begin; then he stopped and looked round. ‘Now a pertaty,’ murmured the child.”
In the summer of 1854, Willis had a call from his down-river neighbor, Washington Irving, and repaid it at Sunnyside in 1859, in company with J. P. Kennedy and Lieutenant Wise, the author of “Los Gringos,” who had both been passing a day or two with him at Idlewild. Irving drove them through Sleepy Hollow, as recounted in “The Convalescent,” in which this visit fills an agreeable chapter; and Willis characteristicallybegged his host to give him his blotting-sheet for memorabilia, as being “the door-mat on which the thoughts of Irving’s last book had wiped their sandals as they went in.” “The Convalescent” (1859) was the last book which Willis published, if we except some late editions of his poems, but there are gleams in it, here and there, of the wit and fancy that never quite forsook him. There was, for instance, a long and very dark covered bridge over Moodna Creek, which he always entered with dread, when on horseback, and which he described as giving “a promise of emergence to light on the other side, which required the faith of a gimlet.” Upon the whole, it would be a very difficult reader who should refuse to admit the plea which the author urges in behalf of books of “The Convalescent” kind. “I learned also, to my comfort, that Nature publishes some volumes with many leaves, which are not intended to be of any posthumous value—the white poplar not lasting three moonlight nights after it is cut down. Even with such speedy decay, however, it throws a pleasant shade while it flourishes; and so, white poplar literature, recognized as a class in literature, should have its brief summer of indulgence.”
Willis found that his best medicine was horseback riding, and spent as many hours as he couldin the saddle. His horses and dogs were a great source of amusement to him. One of his special pets was Cæsar, a superb Newfoundland, that had been with Dr. Kane on one of his Arctic voyages, and was afterwards presented to Willis. When it died its grave at Idlewild was marked by a marble slab, the gift of Brown, the famous Grace Church sexton, with an epitaph of his own composition. The slab was on exhibition for a time, in July, 1862, at Barnum’s museum, and the inscription on it ran as follows:—
CÆSAR,WHO MADE THE VOYAGE TO THE ARCTICREGIONS WITH DR. KANE,AND WAS AFTERWARDS THE FAVORITE DOG OF THE CHILDRENOF IDLEWILD,LIES BURIED BENEATH THIS STONE.
Died December 7, 1861, aged thirteen years.
Thy master’s record of thy worth made thee of great renown,And caused this tribute to thy memory from Sexton Brown.
Thy master’s record of thy worth made thee of great renown,And caused this tribute to thy memory from Sexton Brown.
Thy master’s record of thy worth made thee of great renown,And caused this tribute to thy memory from Sexton Brown.
Thy master’s record of thy worth made thee of great renown,
And caused this tribute to thy memory from Sexton Brown.
In 1854 a book was published which became the occasion of many heart-burnings, and of accusations against Willis that have not yet ceased to go the rounds of the newspapers. This was “Ruth Hall, a Domestic Tale of the Present Time,” by Fanny Fern. The lady who wrote under this pen name was his younger sister, Sarah, the author of much cleverish literature—“Fern Leaves,” and the like—which once enjoyeda prodigious circulation. She was theenfant terribleof the family, a warm-hearted, impulsive woman, but not always discreet. By the death of her husband, Charles Eldridge of Boston, she had been suddenly reduced from comfort to poverty. She afterwards contracted an unfortunate marriage with a Mr. Farrington, from whom she was finally divorced. To support herself and her children, she turned instinctively to literature, in which she at last made a decided hit. Among other things she offered some contributions to the “Home Journal;” but Willis, whose literary taste, though certainly not severe, was fastidious in its way, could not see merit enough in his sister’s writing, and disliked what he regarded as its noisy, rattling style. He felt obliged to decline her articles, but that there was any literary jealousy in this, as is intimated in “Ruth Hall,” will hardly be believed, when his eagerness to welcome and patronize young writers is remembered. It seems to have sprung from an original opposition in character and taste between the two. But it naturally made hard feeling and led to recriminations. Mr. James Parton, who was then sub-editor of the “Home Journal,” took Fanny Fern’s part, and the acquaintance thus begun soon ripened into an engagement of marriage. There was a scene, in consequence, in the officeof the “Home Journal,” and Mr. Parton retired from the paper, his place being supplied by Mr. T. B. Aldrich. Smarting under a sense of neglect by her kinsfolk, Fanny Fern wrote and printed this novel of “Ruth Hall,” in which, under a very thin mask of fiction, she washed a deal of family linen in public. Willis figures therein as Hyacinth, a “heartless puppy,” who worships social position, has married an heiress, inhabits a villa on the Hudson, and is the prosperous editor of the “Irving Magazine.” When Ruth asks him to help her by printing her pieces in this periodical, he coldly assures her that she has no talent, and advises her to seek “some unobtrusive employment.” But when she becomes famous and begins to get letters from college presidents, begging her for her autograph, and from grateful readers, saying, “I am a better son, a better brother, a better husband, and a better father than I was before I commenced reading your articles. God bless you!” then, under these triumphant circumstances, Hyacinth, who had given $100 for a vase when Ruth was starving, is proud to point out to a friend, as they sit together in the porch of his country seat, a beautiful schooner tacking up stream with “Floy,” his sister’snom-de-plume, painted on the bows.
Against this caricature of himself Willis madeno public protest. When a man is wounded in the house of his friends, his only refuge is silence. But in private and to his intimates he asserted that the attack upon him in “Ruth Hall” was most unfair; that hehadhelped his sister in the early days of her widowhood, but that after her second marriage and divorce he had ceased to have any communication with her, and felt justified in letting her alone. Willis was doubtless a man who took his responsibilities lightly. But had he felt called upon to do his utmost for Fanny Fern, even to the end, it is easy to see how his hands were tied in various ways. He had an expensive family of his own, whose support depended upon his pen. His home on the Hudson had been purchased with his wife’s inheritance. As to paying his sister for articles in the “Home Journal,” supposing them to have been otherwise acceptable, the editors were constantly reiterating that the paper did not, as a rule, pay its contributors anything, and could not afford to do so. It paid its own editorial staff, and that was all. Contributors were glad to write for it for the pleasure of seeing themselves in print.
Willis continued to put forth permutations and combinations of old matter under new titles, as long as his books would sell. “Fun Jottings,” “Ephemera,” “Famous Persons and Places,”and “The Rag-Bag” were all made up from the contents of previous volumes, or the teeming sheets of the “Mirror” and “Home Journal.” But in 1857 he published something new, “Paul Fane,” his only novel, and the only book which he wrote as a book, and not as one or more contributions to periodicals. So exclusively afeuilletonistehad he made himself, that any talent for construction on a larger scale which he may once have had was quite frittered away.