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 | LETTER XVII. The prose works of N.P. Willis |  |
17. LETTER XVII.
Do you remember, my dear Doctor, in one of the
Elizabethan dramas (I forget which), the description
of the contention between the nightingale and the
page's lute? Did you ever remark how a bird, sitting
silent in a tree, will trill out, at the first note which
breaks the stillness, as if it had waited for that signal
to begin? Have you noticed the emulation of pigs in
a pasture—how the gallopping by of a horse in the
road sets them off for a race to the limits of the cross-fence?
I have been sitting here with my feet upon the
autumn leaves, portfolio on knee, for an hour. The
shadow of the bridge cuts a line across my breast,
leaving my thinking machinery in shadow, while the
farmer portion of me mellows in the sun; the air is as
still as if we had suddenly ceased to hear the growing
of the grain, and the brooks runs leaf-shod over the
pebbles like a child frightened by the silence into a
whisper. You would say this was the very mark and
fashion of an hour for the silent sympathy of letter-writing.
Yet here have I sat, with the temptation of
an unblotted sheet before me, and my heart and
thoughts full and ready, and by my steady gazing in
the brook, you would fancy I had taken the sun's function
to myself, and was sitting idle to shine. All at
once from the open window of the cottago poured a
passionate outbreak of Beethoven's music (played by
the beloved hand), and with a kind of fear that I should
not overtake it, and a resistless desire (which, I dare
say, you have felt in hearing music) to appropriate
such angelic utterance to the expression of my own
feelings, I forthwith started into a scribble, and have
filled my first page as you see—without drawing nib.
If turning over the leaf break not the charm, you are
likely to have an answer writ to your last before the
shadow on my breast creep two buttons downward.
Your letter was short, and if this were not the commencement
of a new score, I should complain of it
more gravely. Writing so soon after we had parted,
you might claim that you had little to say; yet I
thought (over that broiled oyster after the play) that
your voluble discourse would “put a girdle round the
earth” in less time than Ariel. I listened to you as a
child looks at the river, wondering when it would all
run by. Yet that might be partly disuse in listening—
for I have grown rustic with a year's seclusion, I
found it in other things. My feet swelled with walking
on the pavement. My eyes were giddy with the
multitude of people. My mouth became parched
with the excitement of greetings, and surprises, and
the raising of my tones to the metropolitan pitch. I
was nearly exhausted by mid-day with the “infinite
why “patter versus clatter” did not finish me quite.
Ah! how admirably Charles Matthews played that
night! The papers have well named him the Mercury
of comedians. His playing will probably create
a new school of play-writing—something like what he
has aimed at (without sufficient study) in the pieces he
has written for himself. The finest thing I could imagine
in the dramatic way, would be a partnership (á
la Beaumont and Fletcher) between the stage knowledge
and comic talent of Matthews, and the penetrating,
natural, and observant humor of Boz. The true
“humor of the time” has scarcely been reached, on
the stage, since Molière; and it seems to me, that a
union of the talents of these two men (both very
young) might bring about a new era in high comedy.
Matthews has the advantage of having been from boyhood
conversant with the most polished society. He
was taken to Italy when a boy by one of the most
munificent and gay noblemen of England, an intimate
of his father, and, if I have been rightly informed, was
his companion for several years of foreign residence
and travel. I remember meeting him at a dinner-party
in London three or four years since, when probably
he had never thought seriously of the stage. Yet at
that time it was remarked by the person who sat next
me, that a better actor than his father was spoiled in
the son. He was making no particular effort at humor
on the occasion to which I refer; but the servants, including
a fat butler of remarkable gravity, were forced
to ask permission to leave the room—their laughter
becoming uncontrollable. He would doubtless have
doubled his profits in this country had he come as a single
star; but I trust his success will still be sufficient
to establish him in an annual orbit—from cast to west.
One goes to the city with fresh eyes after a year's
absence, and I was struck with one or two things,
which, in their gradual wax or wane, you do not seem
to have remarked. What Te Deum has been chanted,
for example, over the almost complete disappearance
of the dandies? I saw but two while I was in New-York,
and in them it was nature's caprice. They
would have been dandies equally in fig-leaves or wampum.
The era of (studiously) plain clothes arrived
some years ago in England, where Count D'Orsay,
and an occasional wanderer from Broadway, are the
only freshly-remembered apparitions of excessively
dressed men; and slow as has been its advent to us,
it is sooner come than was predicted. I feared,
for one, that our European reputation of being the
most expensive and showy of nations was based upon
the natural extreme of our political character, and
would last as long as the republic. I am afraid
still, that the ostentation once shown in dress is but
turned into another channel, and that the equipages
of New-York more than supply the showiness abated
in the costume. But even this is a step onward.
Finery on the horse is better than finery on the owner.
The caparison of an equipage is a more manly
study than the toilet of the fine gentleman; and possesses,
besides, the advantage of being left properly to
the saddler. On the whole, it struck me that the
countenance of Broadway had lost a certain flimsy and
tinsel character with which it used to impress me, and
had, in a manner, grown hearty and unpretentious. I
should be glad to know (and none can tell me better
than yourself) whether this is the outer seeming of
deeper changes in our character. Streets have expressive
faces, and I have long marked and trusted
them. It would be difficult to feel fantastic in the
sumptuous gravity of Bond street—as difficult to feel
grave in the bright airiness of the Boulevard. In
these two thoroughfares you are made to feel the distinctive
qualities of England and France. What say
you of the changed expression of Broadway?
Miss Martineau, of all travellers, has doubtless
written the most salutary book upon our manners
(malgré the womanish pique which distorted her
judgment of Everett and others), but there is one reproach
which she has recorded against us, in which I
have felt some patriotic glory, but which I am beginning
to fear we deserve no longer. The text of her
fault-finding is the Quixotic attentions of Americans
to women in public conveyances, apropos of a gentleman's
politeness who took an outside seat upon a
coach to give a lady room for her feet. From what I
could observe in my late two or three days' travel, I
think I could encourage Miss Martineau to return to
America with but a trifling risk of being too particularly
attended to, even were she incognita and young. We
owe this décadence of chivalry to Miss Martineau, I
think it may be safely said. In a country where every
person of common education reads every book of
travels in which his manners are discussed, the most
casual mention of a blemish, even by a less authority
than Miss Martineau, acts as an instant cautery. I
venture to say that a young lady could scarcely be
found in the United States, who would not give you
on demand a complete list of our national faults and
foibles, as recorded by Hall, Hamilton, Trollope, and
Martineau. Why, they form the common staple of
conversation and jest. Ay, and of speculation! Hamilton's
book was scarcely dry from the press before orders
were made out to an immense extent for egg-cups
and silver forks. Mrs. Trollope quite extinguished
the trade in spit-boxes, and made fortunes for the finger-glass
manufacturers; and Captain Marryat, I understand,
is besieged in every city by the importers, to
know upon what deficiency of table furniture he intends
to be severe. It has been more than once suggested
(and his manners aided the idea) that Hamilton
was probably a travelling agent for the plated-fork
manufactories of Birmingham. And a fair caveat to
both readers and reviewers of future books of travels,
would be an inquiry touching their probable bearing
on English manufactures. I would not be illiberal to
Miss Martineau, but I would ask any candid person
whether the influx of thick shoes and cotton stockings,
simultaneously with her arrival in this country, could
have been entirely an unpremediated coincidence?
We are indebted, I think, to the Astor House, for
one of the pleasantest changes that I noticed while
away—and I like it the better, that it is a departure
from our general rule of imitating English habits too
exclusively. You were with us there, and can bear witness
to the delightful society we met at the ladies' ordinary;
while the excellence of the table and service,
and the prevalence of well-bred company, had drawn
the most exclusive from their private parlors, and
given to the daily society of the drawing-room the
character of the gay and agreeable watering-places of
Germany. The solitary confinement of English hotels
always seemed to me particularly unsuited to the
position and wants of the traveller. Loneliness is no
evil at home, where books and regular means of employment
are at hand; but to be abandoned to four
walls and a pormanteau, in a strange city, of a rainy
day, is what nothing but an Englishman would dream
of calling comfortable. It was no small relief to us,
on that drizzly and chilly autumn day, which you remember,
to descend to a magnificent drawing-room,
filled with some fifty or a hundred well-bred people,
and pass away the hours as they would be passed under
similar circumstances in a hospitable country-house
in England. The beautiful architecture of the
Astor apartments, and the sumptuous elegance of the
furniture and table service, make it in a measure a peculiarity
of the house; but the example is likely to be
followed in other hotels and cities, and I hope it will
become a national habit, as in Germany, for strangers
to meet at their meals and in the public rooms. Life
seems to me too short for English exclusiveness in travel.
I determined to come home by Wyoming, after you
left us, and took the boat to Philadelphia accordingly
city, and among other things made an excursion to
Laurel Hill—certainly the most beautiful cemetery in
the world after the Necropolis of Scutari. Indeed,
the spot is selected with something like Turkish feeling,
for it seems as if it were intended to associate the
visits to the resting-places of the departed more with
our pleasures than our duties. The cemetery occupies
a lofty promontory above the Schuylkill, possessing
the inequality of surface so favorable to the object,
and shaded with pines and other ornamental trees
of great age and beauty. The views down upon the
river, and through the sombre glades and alleys of the
burial-grounds, are unsurpassed for sweetness and repose.
The elegance which marks everything Philadelphian,
is shown already in the few monuments
erected. An imposing gateway leads you in from the
high road, and a freestone group, large as life, representing
old Mortality at work on an inscription, and
Scott leaning upon a tombstone to watch his toil, faces
the entrance. I noticed the area of one tomb enclosed
by a chain of hearts, cast beautifully in iron.
The whole was laid out in gravel-walks, and there was
no grave without its flowers. I confess the spirit of
this sweet spot affected me deeply, and I look upon
this, and Mount Auburn at Cambridge, as delightful
indications of a purer growth in our national character
than politics and money-getting. It is a real-life
poetry, which reflects as much glory upon the age as
the birth of a Homer.
The sun has crept down to my paper, dear Doctor,
and the shadow of the bridge falls cooler than is good
for my rheumatism. I wish that the blessing of Ceres
upon Ferdinand and Miranda,
In the very end of harvest,”
comes, but its approach is altogether detestable. It
is delightful to get home, however; for, like Prospero,
in the play I have just quoted, there is a “delicate
Ariel” (content), who only waits on me in solitude. You
will carry out the allegory, and tell me I have Caliban
too, but to the rudeness of country monsters, I take as
kindly as Trinculo. And now I must to the woods,
and by the aid of these same “ancient and fish-like”
monsters, transplant me a tree or two before sunset.
Adieu.
| LETTER XVII. The prose works of N.P. Willis | |