NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS
PART I
[Ill.u.s.tration: Nathaniel Parker Willis]
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 pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sisted 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 the _Boston 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 called _The 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 his _Recollections_ Peter 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 pa.s.sed almost unnoticed.
In 1829 Willis started on his own account with the _American 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 j.a.ponica 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 b.u.t.t 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 the _American Monthly Magazine_ ceased to appear, and Willis, leaving Boston and his creditors without regret, obtained the post of a.s.sistant-editor on the _New 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 the _New York Mirror_, which differ in many respects from the version that was published in London after the attack by the _Quarterly 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 antic.i.p.ated, 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 Sh.e.l.ley.
"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 n.o.bler 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 etait 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 attache to his own emba.s.sy, a great social advantage to the young man, who was thereby enabled to obtain the _entree_ into 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" attacheship 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 n.o.bility, 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 the _ornamental_ is 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 attache 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 aegina 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 the _ci-devant_ Maid 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 const.i.tuting 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 the _Pencillings_ had reached London; and at Smyrna Willis found a letter awaiting him from the _Morning 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 his _Letter to an Author_, printed at the end of _Pericles and Aspasia_, Landor describes the transaction (which related to an American edition of the _Imaginary Conversations_), and continues:--
"I regret the appearance of his book (the _Pencillings 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 to _Pericles 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 pa.s.sed 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 grat.i.tude 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 that _would_ ring, doors that _would_ shut, 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 the _Puritani_. 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 an _affectionateness_ in 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 very _soigne_ of his curls, and a bit of a c.o.xcomb. There is no reverse about him, however, and he is the only _joyous_ dandy 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 the _Examiner_; 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 antic.i.p.ated, 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, n.o.body 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 pa.s.sages in the _Pencillings_ is 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. The _Essays of Elia_ are 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sociated 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 your _Confessions of a Drunkard_ very 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 appet.i.te with which I have no sympathy. The only American book I ever read twice was the _Journal 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 of _Elia_ the 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 pa.s.sage, 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 the _Court Magazine_, the _Metropolitan_, and the _New Monthly_, of the first price for my articles. I sent a short tale, written in one day, to the _Court 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 ta.s.sel, and a quant.i.ty 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 a.s.sumes a curl of triumphant scorn that would be worthy of Mephistopheles. A thick, heavy ma.s.s 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, Maca.s.sar."" 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 pa.s.sed to Beckford, of _Vathek_ fame, 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 pa.s.sion, 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 Sh.e.l.ley. 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 of _Pelham_," 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 a.s.semblage 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 att.i.tude; and if there happens to be no dancing, looking at a print, or eating an ice, is for them the most entertaining circ.u.mstance 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 a _bore_! 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 is _knowing_ to let us alone.""