Part 1 (1/2)
Pencillings by the Way.
by N. Parker Willis.
PREFACE.
A word or two of necessary explanation, dear reader.
I had resided on the Continent for several years, and had been a year in England, without being suspected, I believe, in the societies in which I lived, of any habit of authors.h.i.+p. No production of mine had ever crossed the water, and my Letters to the New-York Mirror, were (for this long period, and I presumed would be forever), as far as European readers were concerned, an unimportant and easy secret.
Within a few months of returning to this country, the Quarterly Review came out with a severe criticism on the Pencillings by the Way, published in the New-York Mirror. A London publisher immediately procured a broken set of this paper from an American resident there, and called on me with an offer of 300 for an immediate edition of what he had--rather less than one half of the Letters in this present volume. This chanced on the day before my marriage, and I left immediately for Paris--a literary friend most kindly undertaking to look over the proofs, and suppress what might annoy any one then living in London. The book was printed in three volumes, at about $7 per copy, and in this expensive shape three editions were sold by the original publisher. After his death a duodecimo edition was put forth, very beautifully ill.u.s.trated; and this has been followed by a fifth edition lately published, with new embellishments, by Mr. Virtue. The only American edition (long ago out of print) was a literal copy of this imperfect and curtailed book.
In the present complete edition, the Letters objected to by the Quarterly, are, like the rest, re-published _as originally written_.
The offending portions must be at any rate, harmless, after being circulated extensively in this country in the Mirror, and prominently quoted from the Mirror in the Quarterly--and this being true, I have felt that I could gratify the wish to be put _fairly on trial_ for these alleged offences--to have a comparison inst.i.tuted between my sins, in this respect, and Hamilton's, Muskau's, Von Raumer's, Marryat's and Lockhart's--and so, to put a definite value and meaning upon the constant and vague allusions to these iniquities, with which the critiques of my contemporaries abound. I may state as a fact, that the only instance in which a quotation by me from the conversation of distinguished men gave the least offence in England, was the one remark made by Moore the poet at a dinner party, on the subject of O'Connell. It would have been harmless, as it was designed to be, but for the unexpected celebrity of my Pencillings; yet with all my heart I wished it unwritten.
I wish to put on record in this edition (and you need not be at the trouble of perusing them unless you please, dear reader!) an extract or two from the London prefaces to ”Pencillings,” and parts of two articles written apropos of the book's offences.
The following is from the Preface to the first London edition:--
”The extracts from these Letters which have appeared in the public prints, have drawn upon me much severe censure. Admitting its justice in part, perhaps I may s.h.i.+eld myself from its remaining excess by a slight explanation. During several years' residence in Continental and Eastern countries, I have had opportunities (as _attache_ to a foreign Legation), of seeing phases of society and manners not usually described in books of travel. Having been the Editor, before leaving the United States, of a monthly Review, I found it both profitable and agreeable, to continue my interest in the periodical in which that Review was merged at my departure, by a miscellaneous correspondence.
Foreign courts, distinguished men, royal entertainments, &c.
&c.,--matters which were likely to interest American readers more particularly--have been in turn my themes. The distance of America from these countries, and the ephemeral nature and usual obscurity of periodical correspondence, were a sufficient warrant to my mind, that the descriptions would die where they first saw the light, and fulfil only the trifling destiny for which they were intended. I indulged myself, therefore, in a freedom of detail and topic which is usual only in posthumous memoirs--expecting as soon that they would be read in the countries and by the persons described, as the biographer of Byron and Sheridan, that these fruitful and unconscious themes would rise from the dead to read their own interesting memoirs! And such a resurrection would hardly be a more disagreeable surprise to that eminent biographer, than was the sudden appearance to me of my own unambitious Letters in the Quarterly Review.
”The reader will see (for every Letter containing the least personal detail has been most industriously republished in the English papers) that I have in some slight measure corrected these Pencillings by the Way. They were literally what they were styled--notes written on the road, and despatched without a second perusal; and it would be extraordinary if, between the liberty I felt with my material, and the haste in which I scribbled, some egregious errors in judgment and taste had not crept in unawares. The Quarterly has made a long arm over the water to refresh my memory on this point. There _are_ pa.s.sages I would not re-write, and some remarks on individuals which I would recall at some cost, and would not willingly see repeated in these volumes. Having conceded thus much, however, I may express my surprise that this particular sin should have been visited upon _me_, at a distance of three thousand miles, when the reviewer's own literary fame rests on the more aggravated instance of a book of personalities, published under the very noses of the persons described. Those of my Letters which date from England were written within three or four months of my first arrival in this country.
Fortunate in my introductions, almost embarra.s.sed with kindness, and, from advantages of comparison, gained by long travel, qualified to appreciate keenly the delights of English society, I was little disposed to find fault. Everything pleased me. Yet in one instance--one single instance--I indulged myself in stricture upon individual character, and I _repeat it in this work_, sure that there will be but one person in the world of letters who will not read it with approbation--the editor of the _Quarterly_ himself. It was expressed at the time with no personal feeling, for I had never seen the individual concerned, and my name had probably never reached his ears. I but repeated what I had said a thousand times, and never without an indignant echo to its truth--an opinion formed from the most dispa.s.sionate perusal of his writings--that the editor of that Review was the most unprincipled critic of his age. Aside from its flagrant literary injustice, we owe to the _Quarterly_, it is well known, every spark of ill-feeling that has been kept alive between England and America for the last twenty years. The sneers, the opprobrious epithets of this bravo in literature, have been received in a country where the machinery of reviewing was not understood, as the voice of the English people, and an animosity for which there was no other reason, has been thus periodically fed and exasperated. I conceive it to be my duty as a literary man--I _know_ it is my duty as an American--to lose no opportunity of setting my heel on the head of this reptile of criticism.”
The following is part of an article, written by myself, on the subject of personalities, for a periodical in New York:
”There is no question, I believe, that pictures of living society, where society is in very high perfection, and of living persons, where they are 'persons of mark,' are both interesting to ourselves, and valuable to posterity. What would we not give for a description of a dinner with Shakspeare and Ben Jonson--of a dance with the Maids of Queen Elizabeth--of a chat with Milton in a morning call? We should say the man was a churl, who, when he had the power, should have refused to 'leave the world a copy' of such precious hours. Posterity will decide who are the great of our time--but they are at least _among_ those I have heard talk, and have described and quoted, and who would read without interest, a hundred years hence, a character of the second Virgin Queen, caught as it was uttered in a ball-room of her time? or a description of her loveliest Maid of Honor, by one who had stood opposite her in a dance, and wrote it before he slept? or a conversation with Moore or Bulwer?--when the Queen and her fairest maid, and Moore and Bulwer have had their splendid funerals, and are dust, like Elizabeth and Shakspeare?
”The harm, if harm there be in such sketches, is in the spirit in which they are done. If they are ill-natured or untrue, or if the author says aught to injure the feelings of those who have admitted him to their confidence or hospitality, he is to blame, and it is easy, since he publishes while his subjects are living, to correct his misrepresentations, and to visit upon him his infidelities of friends.h.i.+p.
”But (while I think of it), perhaps some fault-finder will be pleased to tell me, why this is so much deeper a sin in _me_ than in all other travellers. Has Basil Hall any hesitation in describing a dinner party in the United States, and recording the conversation at table? Does Miss Martineau stick at publis.h.i.+ng the portrait of a distinguished American, and faithfully recording all he says in a confidential _tete-a-tete_? Have Captain Hamilton and Prince Pukler, Von Raumer and Captain Marryat, any scruples whatever about putting down anything they hear that is worth the trouble, or of describing any scene, private or public, which would tell in their book, or ill.u.s.trate a national peculiarity? What would their books be without this cla.s.s of subjects? What would any book of travels be, leaving out everybody the author saw, and all he heard? Not that I justify all these authors have done in this way, for I honestly think they have stepped over the line, which I have but trod close upon.”
Surely it is the _abuse_, and not the _use_ of information thus acquired, that makes the offence.
The most formal, unqualified, and severe condemnation recorded against my Pencillings, however, is that of the renowned Editor of the Quarterly, and to show the public the immaculate purity of the forge where this long-echoed thunder is manufactured, I will quote a pa.s.sage or two from a book of the same description, by the Editor of the Quarterly himself. 'Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk,' by Mr. Lockhart, are three volumes exclusively filled with portraits of persons, living at the time it was written in Scotland, their conversation with the author, their manners, their private histories, etc., etc. In one of the letters upon the 'Society of Edinburgh,' is the following delicate pa.s.sage:--
”'Even you, my dear Lady Johnes, are a perfect history in every branch of knowledge. I remember, only the last time I saw you, you were praising with all your might the legs of Col. B----, those flimsy, worthless things that look as if they were bandaged with linen rollers from the heel to the knee. You may say what you will, but I still a.s.sert, and I will prove it if you please by pen and pencil, that, with one pair of exceptions, the best legs in Cardigan are Mrs.
P----'s. As for Miss J---- D----'s, I think they are frightful.'...
”Two pages farther on he says:--
”'As for myself, I a.s.sure you that ever since I spent a week at Lady L----'s and saw those great fat girls of hers, waltzing every night with that odious De B----, I can not endure the very name of the thing.'
”I quote from the second edition of these letters, by which it appears that even these are _moderated_ pa.s.sages. A note to the first of the above quotations runs as follows:
”'A great part of this letter is omitted in the Second Edition in consequence of the displeasure its publication gave to certain ladies in Cardigans.h.i.+re. As for the gentleman who chose to take what I said of him in so much dudgeon, he will observe, that I have allowed what I said to remain _in statu quo_, which I certainly should not have done, had he expressed his resentment in a proper manner.'