Books: Memories of Hawthorne

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[The diary resumes.] My husband read to me his paper on his visit to
Washington. Dr. George B. Loring and Mr. Pike [of Salem] came to tea
in the evening. Mr. Thoreau died this morning.--The funeral services
were in the church. Mr. Emerson spoke. Mr. Alcott read from Mr.
Thoreau's writings. The body was in the vestibule, covered with
wildflowers. We went to the grave. Thence my husband and I walked to
the Old Manse and Monument. Then I went to see Annie Fields at Mr.
Emerson's.--Fog and sultry. Brobdingnag dropping from eaves.--Superb
morning. My husband transplanted sunflowers [of which he was immensely
fond, though lilies-of-the-valley were his favorites].--My husband and
Julian went to Boston; and Julian walked home in eight and a half
hours [twenty miles].--Una's party took place to-night. Papa
illuminated it with his presence.--Pleasant day. Papa magnanimously
picked some strawberries.--I went on the hilltop with my husband all
the morning [of a Sunday in June].--Our wedding-day. It is very hot
and smoky. We think it the smokes of battles.--Very warm and fine. Mr.
Alcott worked all day, lacking three hours [in constructing a rustic
seat at the foot of our hill]. I went on the hilltop with my husband
for a long time. Ineffable felicity.--A perfectly lovely day. I read
"Christ the Spirit." Rose had a discourse from the Sermon on the
Mount; the four verses about giving alms. We have very nice discourses
[my mother's]. Una went to church.--Mr. George Bradford came to see
us. Una and Julian went to the Emersons' in the evening.--Read again
"Leamington Spa." Inimitable, fascinating.--Thanksgiving Day. We
invited Ellery Channing, but he could not come.--Julian and I went to
Boston. When I came home I found my husband looking very ill. Julian
has gone on a visit to the Fields's.--My husband quite ill.
Everything seems sad, when he is ill. I sewed all day.--My husband
seems much better. He went up on the hill. Papa and the children
played whist in the evening, while I read Charles Reade.--Celia
cleared the old attic to-day. I found my dear hanging astral, that
lighted my husband in his study at the Old Manse, and also Una's baby
socks.--Judge Hoar came to invite my husband to tea with Mr. Eustis
and Mr. Bemis and Mr. Emerson. He would not go.--I read ominous news
of the war, which quite saddened and alarmed me. I read "Christ the
Spirit."--I read about Alchemy and Swedenborg. Ellery Channing came to
tea and spent the evening. He asked me if he might bring General
Barlow to tea on Tuesday.

It was almost immediately after our return home that the first notes
of the requiem about to envelop us fell through the sound of daily
affairs, at long intervals, because my father, from that year, began
to grow less and less vigorous.

There are many references in my mother's diaries and letters to my
father's enforced monotony, and also to his gradually failing health,
which, by the very instinct of loving alarm, we none of us analyzed
as fatal; though, from his expression of face, if for no other reason,
I judge he himself understood it perfectly. Death sat with him, at his
right hand, long before he allowed his physical decline to change his
mode of life. He tried to stem the tide setting against him, because
it is the drowning man's part, even if hopeless. He walked a great
deal upon the high hill-ridge behind the house, his dark, quietly
moving figure passing slowly across the dim light of the mingled sky
and branches, as seen from the large lawn, around which the embowered
terraces rose like an amphitheatre. A friend tells me that, from a
neighboring farm, he sometimes watched my father in an occupation
which he had undertaken for his health. A cord of wood had been cut
upon the hill, and he deliberately dragged it to the lower level of
his dwelling, two logs at a time, by means of a rope. Along the ridge
and down the winding pine-flanked path he slowly and studiously
stepped, musing, looking up, stopping to solve some point of plot or
morals; and meanwhile the cord of wood changed its abiding-place as
surely as water may wear away a stone. But his splendid vigor paled,
his hair grew snowy white, before the end. My mother wrote to him in
the following manner from time to time, when he was away for change of
scene:--

September 9, 1860. My crown of glory. This morning I waked to clouds
and rain, but for myself I did not care, as you were not here to be
depressed by it. There was a clear and golden sunset, making the
loveliest shadows and lights on the meadows and across my straight
path [over the field to the willows, between firs], and now the stars
shine.--The way in which Concordians observe Fast is by loafing about
the streets, driving up and down, and dawdling generally. No
one seems to mourn over his own or his country's sins. Such behavior
must disturb our Puritan fathers even on the other side of the
Jordan.--In the evening Julian brought me a letter. "It is from New
York," said he, "but not from papa." But my heart knew better, though
I did not know the handwriting. I clashed it open, and saw "N. H.,"
and then, "I am entirely well," not scratched out. Thank God! . . .
The sun has not shone to-day, and there is now a stormy wind that
howls like a beast of prey over its dead. It is the most ominous,
boding sound I ever heard.

March 15, 1862. The news of your appetite sends new life into me, and
immediately increases my own.

July. I am afraid you have been in frightful despair at this rainy
day. It has flooded here in sheets, with heavy thunder. But I have
snatched intervals to weed. I could see and hear everything growing
around me in the warm rain. The army corn has hopped up as if it were
parched. The yellow lilies are reeling up to the skies. Pig-weed has
become camelopard weed. . . . Alas that you should be insulted with
dried-apple pie and molasses preserves! Oh, horror! I thought that you
would have fresh fruit and vegetables. Pray go to a civilized house
and have decent fare.--I know it will do you immense good to make this
journey. You should oftener make such visits, and then you would "like
things" better. Your spirits get below concert pitch by staying in one
place so long at a time. I am glad Leutze keeps you on [to paint
Hawthorne's portrait]. Do not come home till the middle of September.
Just remember how hot and dead it is here in hot weather, and how you
cannot bear it.--I do not think I have a purer pleasure and completer
satisfaction, nowadays, than I am conscious of when I get you fairly
away from Concord influences. I then sit down and feel rested through
my whole constitution. All care seems at an end. I would not have had
you here yesterday for all England. It was red-hot from morn to dewy
eve. We burned without motion or sound. But you were in Boston, and
not under this hill. If you wish me to be happy, you must consent to
spend the dog-days at the sea.--After a cool morning followed a
red-hot day. It seemed to me more intolerable than any before. You
could not have borne such dead weather. The house was a refrigerator
in comparison to the outdoor atmosphere.--We have had some intolerably
muggy days. That is, they would have been so, if you had not been at
the sea.--You have been far too long in one place without change, and
I am sure you will get benefit under such pleasant conditions as being
the guest of Mr. and Mrs. [Horatio] Bridge, and a witness of such new
phases of life as those in Washington.--Splendors upon splendors have
been heaped into this day. Loads of silky plumed corn or even sheaves
of cardinal-flowers cannot be compared to the new sunshine and the
magnificent air which have filled the earth from early dawn. The brook
that became a broad river in the flood of yesterday made our landscape
perfect. It seemed to me that I must dance and sing, and now I know
it was because you were writing to me. Rose and I went down the
straight path [called later the Cathedral Aisle] to look at the fresh
river. I delayed to be embroidered with gold sun over and over, and
through and through. At the gate I was arrested by the tower, also
illustrious with the glory of the atmosphere, and very pretty indeed,
lifting its nice, shapely head above the decrepit old ridge-pole of
the ancient house.--I took my saw and went on a lovely wander, with a
fell intent against all dead and confusing branches. How infinitely
sweet it is to have access to this woodland virtue! It does me
measureless good; and I am sure such air as we have on these fine days
must be the effect of heroic and gentle deeds, and is a pledge that
there are not tens only, but tens of thousands of heroes on this
earth, keeping it in life and being.--Your letter has kindled us all
up into lamps of light to-day. But I am wholly dissatisfied with your
boarding-house, so full of deaf women, and violin din, and
schoolgirls! Pray change your residence and have peace. You will curse
your stars if you have to "bellow" for three weeks, when you so hate
to speak even in your natural inward tone.--Mary has just sent me a
note, saying that there is a paragraph in the paper about your being
at Washington, and that the President [Lincoln] received you with
especial graciousness. Stay as long as you can, and get great good. I
cannot have you return yet.--The President has had a delicious palaver
with a deputation of black folk, talking to them as to babies. I
suspect the President is a jewel. I like him very well.--If it were
not such a bore, I could wish thou mightest be President through this
crisis, and show the world what can be done by using two eyes, and
turning each thing upside down and inside out, before judging and
acting. I should not wonder if thy great presence in Washington might
affect the moral air and work good. If you like the President, then
give him my love and blessing.--The President's immortal special
message fills me with unbounded satisfaction. It is so almost
superhumanly wise, moderate, fitting, that I am ready to believe an
angel came straight from heaven to him with it. He must be honest and
true, or an angel would not come to him. Mary Mann says she thinks the
message feeble, and not to the point. But I think a man shows strength
when he can be moderate at such a moment as this. Thou hadst better
give my high regards to the President. I meant to write to him; but
that mood has passed. I wish to express my obligations for the wisdom
of his message.

CHAPTER XV

THE ARTIST AT WORK

I was once asked to write of my father's "literary methods," and the
idea struck me as delightfully impossible. I wish I knew just what
those methods were--I might hope to write a romance. But as the bird
on the tree-bough catches here and there a glimpse of what men are
about, although he hardly aspires to plough the field himself, or
benefit by human labor until the harvest comes, so I have observed
some facts and gathered some notions as to how my father thought out
his literary work.

One method of obtaining his end was to devote himself constantly to
writing, whether it brought him money or not. He might not have seemed
to be working all the time, but to be enjoying endless leisure in
walking through the country or the city streets. But even a bird would
have had more penetration than to make such a mistake as to think
this. Another wise provision was to love and pity mankind more than he
scorned them, so that he never created a character which did not
possess a soul--the only puppet he ever contrived of straw,
"Feathertop," having an excellent soul until the end of the story.
Still another method of gaining his success was to write with a noble
respect for his own best effort, on which account he never felt
satisfied with his writing unless he had exerted every muscle of his
faculty; unless every word he had written seemed to his severest
self-criticism absolutely true. He loved his art more than his time,
more than his ease, and could thrust into the flames an armful of
manuscript because he suspected the pages of weakness and
exaggeration.

One of his methods of avoiding failure was to be rigorous in the care
of his daily existence. A preponderance of frivolous interruption to a
modicum of thorough labor at thinking was a system utterly foreign to
him. He would not talk with a fool; as a usual thing he would not
entertain a bore. If thrown with these common pests, he tried, I
think, to study them. And they report that he did so very silently.
But he did not waste his time, either by politely chattering with
people whom he meant to sneer at after they had turned their backs, or
in indulgences of loafing of all sorts which leave a narcotic
stupidity in their wake. He had plenty of time, therefore, for
thought, and he could think while walking either in the fresh air, or
back and forth in his study. Men of success detest inactivity. It is
a hardship for them to be as if dead for a single moment. So, when my
father could not walk out-of doors during meditation, he moved back
and forth in his room, sturdily alert, his hands clasped behind him,
quietly thinking, his head either bent forward or suddenly lifted
upward with a light in his gray eyes.

He wrote principally in the morning, with that absorption and
regularity which characterize the labor of men who are remembered.
When his health began to show signs of giving way, in 1861, it was
suggested by a relative, whose intellect, strength of will, and
appetite for theories were of equally splendid proportions, that my
father only needed a high desk at which to stand when writing, to be
restored to all his pristine vigor. With his usual tolerance of
possible wisdom he permitted such a desk to be arranged in the
tower-study at The Wayside; but with his inexorable contempt for
mistakes of judgment he never, after a brief trial, used it for
writing. Upon his simple desk of walnut wood, of which he had nothing
to complain, although it barely served its purpose, like most of the
inexpensive objects about him, was a charming. Italian bronze
ink-stand, over whose cover wrestled the infant Hercules in the act of
strangling a goose--in friendly aid of "drivers of the quill." My
father wrote with a gold pen, and I can hear now, as it seems, the
rapid rolling of his chirography over the broad page, as he formed his
small, rounded, but irregular letters, when filling his journals, in
Italy. He leaned very much on, his left arm while writing, often
holding the top of the manuscript book lovingly with his left hand,
quite in the attitude of a boy. At the end of a sentence or two he
would sometimes unconsciously bow his head, as if bidding good-by to a
thought well rid of for the present in its new garb of ink.

In writing he had little care for paper and ink. To be sure, his
large, square manuscript was firmly bound into covers, and the paper
was usually of a neutral blue; and when I say that he had little care
for his mechanical materials I mean that he had no servile anxiety as
to how they looked to another person, for I am convinced that he
himself loved his manuscript books. There was a certain air of
humorous respect about the titles, which he wrote with a flourish, as
compared with the involved minuteness of the rest of the script, and
the latter covers every limit of the page in a devoted way. His
letters were formed obscurely, though most fascinatingly, and he was
almost frolicsome in his indifference to the comfort of the
compositor. Still he had none of the frantic reconsiderations of Scott
or Balzac. If he made a change in a word it was while it was fresh,
and no one could obliterate what he had written with a more fearless
blot of the finger, or one which looked more earnest and interesting.
There was no scratching nor quiddling in the manner with which he
fought for his art. Each day he thought out the problems he had set
himself before beginning to write, and if a word offended him, as he
recorded the result, he thrust it back into chaos before the ink had
dried. I think that the manuscript of "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret" is an
exception, to some extent. There are many written self-communings and
changes in it. My father was declining in health while it was being
evolved. But yet, in "The Dolliver Romance," the last work of all in
process of development, written while he was physically breaking down,
we see the effect of will and heroic attempt. It is the most beautiful
of his compositions, because his mind was greater at that time than
ever, and because death could not frighten him, and in its very face
he desired to complete the proof of his whole power, as the dying
soldier rises to the greatest act of his life, having given his
life-blood for his country's cause. Though the script of this
manuscript is extremely difficult to read, the speculation had
evidently been done before taking up the pen. I am not sure but that
my father sometimes destroyed first drafts, of which his family knew
nothing. Indeed, we have his own word for it that "he passed the day
in writing stories and the night in burning them." Nevertheless, his
tendency we know to have been that of thinking out his plots and
scenes and characters, and transcribing them rapidly without further
change.

Since he did not write anything wholly for the pleasure of creative
writing, but had moral motives and perfect artistic harmony to
consider, he could not have indulged in the spontaneous, passionate
effusions which are the substance of so much other fiction. He was
obliged to train his mind to reflection and judgment, and therefore he
never tasted luxury of any kind. The mere enjoyment of historical
settings in all their charm and richness, rehabilitated for their own
sake or for worldly gain; and that of caricatures of the members of
the human family, because they are so often so desperately funny; the
gloating over realistic pictures of life as it is found, because life
as it is found is a more absorbing study than that of geology or
chemistry; the tasting of redundant scenes of love and intrigue, which
flatter the reader like experiences of his own,--these excesses he was
not willing to admit to his art, a magic that served his literary
palate with still finer food. He wrote with temperateness, and in
pitying love of human nature, in the instinctive hope of helping it to
know and redeem itself. His quality was philosophy, his style
forgiveness. And for this temperate and logical and laconic
work--giving nothing to the world for its mere enjoyment, but going
beyond all that to ennoble each reader by his perfect renunciation of
artistic claptrap and artistic license--for this aim he needed a
mental method that could entirely command itself, and, when necessary,
weigh and gauge with the laborious fidelity of a coal-surveyor, before
the account was rendered with pen and ink upon paper. When he brought
within his art the personality of a human devil, he honored its
humanity, and proved that the real devil is quite another thing. In
fact, perhaps he would not have permitted the above epithet. In one of
her letters my mother remarks, "I think no sort of man can be called a
devil, unless it be a slanderer."

Though he dealt with romance he never gave the advantage of an inch to
the wiles of bizarre witchery, the grotesque masks of wanton caprice
in imagination--those elements which exhibit the intoxication of
talent. His terrors were those of our own hearts; his playfulness had
the merit of the sunlight. In short, he was artistically con-.
secrated, guiding the forces he used with the reins of truth; and he
could do this unbrokenly because he governed his character by
Christian fellowship. If he shrank from unnecessary interruptions,
which jarred the harmony of his artistic life, he nevertheless met
courteously any that were to him inevitable. Could he have written
with the heart's blood of old Hepzibah if he had failed to put his own
shoulder to the domestic wheel, on the plea that it was too deep in
the slough of disaster to command his assistance? He did not dread
besmirching his hands with any affairs sent him by God.

"The heart knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth
not with its joy;" and the joy and the bitterness of creative work are
not intermeddled with as much as one might suppose by the outside
weather of praise or non-comprehension, if the artist is great enough
to keep his private self-respect. I am of the opinion that my father
enjoyed his own indifference to his accomplished work, yet knew its
value to the minutest ray of the diamond; that he had sharply
challenged the enchantment of his first conception, and heard the
right watchword, yet recognized that no human conception can fathom
the marvels of the superhuman. I believe that the men we admire most,
in the small group of great minds, are sufficiently necromantic to
look two ways at once--to appreciate and to condemn themselves. So my
father heard himself praised with composure, and blamed his skill
rejoicingly.

Some passages from a copy of an article in "The North British Review"
of Edinburgh during 1851 were capable of filling a wife's heart with
exultation, and my mother quotes: "'The most striking features in
these tales are the extraordinary skill and masterly care which are
displayed in their composition. . . . It would be difficult to pick out
a page which could be omitted without loss to the development of
the narrative and the idea, which are always mutually illustrative to
a degree not often attained in any species of modern art. . . . His
language, though extraordinarily accurate, is always light and
free. . . . We know of nothing equal to it, in its way [the portrayal
of Dimmesdale], in the whole circle of English literature;' and much
more in the same superlative vein."

But if my father could weigh his artistic success with the precision
of a coal-heaver, who will ever be able to weigh and gauge the genius
which carries methods and philosophies and aims into an atmosphere of
wonderful power, where the sunlight and the color and the lightning
and frowning clouds transfigure the familiar things of life in
glorious haste and inspiration? While following his rules and habits
my father was constantly attended by the rapturous spirit of such a
genius, transmuting swarming reality into a few symbolic types.

Another way in which he effected telling labor was to conserve his
force in the matter of wrangling. He kept his temper. He was not
without the fires of life, but he banked them. He did not permit
disgust at others or at the adverse destiny of the moment to absorb
his vitality, by throwing it off in long harangues of rage, long
seasons of the sulks. There are no such good calculators as men of
consummate genius. They dread the squandering of energy of an Edgar
Allan Poe or of a boiling Walter Savage Landor. Temperateness implies
the control of fierce elements; and in all management of volcanic
power we perceive sweetness and beauty.

When my father handled sin, it became uncontaminating tragedy; when he
handled vulgarity, as in "The Artist of the Beautiful," it became
inevitable pathos; when he handled suspicion, as in "The Birthmark"
and "Rappaccini's Daughter," it evolved devoted trust.

The frequent question as to whether Hawthorne drew from his family or
friends in portraying human nature shows an unfamiliarity with
literary art. Portraiture is not art, in literature, though a great
artist includes it, if he chooses, in the category of his productions.
To any one permeated by the atmosphere of art (though not quite of it)
as I was, it seems strange that a truly artistic work should be
thought to be an imitation of individual models. The distance of
inspiration is the distance of a heavenly fair day, or of a night made
luminous by mystery, giving a new quality and a new species of delight
to facts about us. In reading the sympathetic merriment of the
introduction to "The Scarlet Letter," and then the story itself, we
perceive the difference between the charm of a Dutch-like realism and
the thrill of imaginative creation, which uses material made
incomprehensibly wonderful by God in order to make it comprehensibly
wonderful to men. But, of course, the material thus transmuted by the
distance of inspiration is only new and fine to men who have ears to
hear and eyes to see. My father never imitated the men and women he
met, nor man nor woman, and such conceptions of his way would bring us
to a dense forest of mistake.

In the afternoon my father went, if practicable, into the open spaces
of nature, or at least into the fresh air, to gather inspiration for
his work. He had no better or stronger or more lavish aids than air
and landscape, unless I except his cigar. He never, I think, smoked
but one cigar a day, but it was of a quality to make up for this
self-denial, and I am sure that he reserved his most puzzling literary
involutions for the delicious half-hour of this dainty enjoyment.

In 1861 and thereafter he traversed, as has been said, the wooded
hilltop behind his home, which was reached by various pretty climbing
paths that crept under larches and pines, and scraggy, goat-like
apple-trees. We could catch sight of him going back and forth up
there, with now and then a pale blue gleam of sky among the trees,
against which his figure passed clear. Along this path, made by his
own steps only, he thought out the tragedy of "Septimius Felton," who
buried the young English officer at the foot of one of the large pines
which my father saw at each return. At one end of the hilltop path was
a thicket of birch and maple trees; and at the end towards the west
and the village was the open brow of the hill, sloping rapidly to the
Lexington Road, and overlooking meadows and distant wood-ranges, some
of the cottages of humble folk, and the neighboring huge,
owlet-haunted elms of Alcott's lawn. Along this path in spring huddled
pale blue violets, of a blue that held sunlight, pure as his own eyes.
Masses also of sweet-fern grew at the side of these abundant bordering
violets, and spacious apartments of brown-floored pine groves flanked
the sweet-fern, or receded a little before heaps of blackberry
branches and simple flowers. My father's violets were the wonder of
the year to us. We never saw so many of these broad, pale-petaled ones
anywhere else, until the year of his death, when they greeted him with
their celestial color as he was borne into Sleepy Hollow, as if in
remembrance of his long companionship on The Wayside hill.

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