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.
It is well with those who forget themselves in generous interest for
the hopes, possibilities, and spiritual loftiness of human beings all
over the world. Such men may remain poor, may never in life have the
full praise of their fellows; but they could easily give testimony as
to the delights of praise from God,--that which comes to our lips
after little spiritual victories, like spring water on a hot day, and
of which the workers in noble thought or adventure drink so deep.
These representative men, if they cheer their fancy with fair thoughts
of wide public approbation, choose the undying sort, that blooms like
the edelweiss beyond the dust of sudden success. Hawthorne worked hard
and nobly. Not even the mechanic who toils for his family all day, all
week-days of the year, and never swears at wife or child, toils more
nobly than this sensitive, warm-hearted, brave, recluse, much-seeing
man. He teaches the spiritual greatness of the smallest fidelity, and
the spiritual destruction in the most familiar temptations. The
Butterfly which he describes floats everywhere through his pages, and
it is broken wherever the heart of one of his characters breaks, for
there sin has clutched its victim. It floats about us lovingly to
attract our attention to higher things; and I am sure the radiant
delicacy of the winged creature throbbed on a flower near David Swan,
as he slept honestly through the perils of evil.
Every touch of inner meaning that he gives speaks of his affection,
his desire to bring us accounts of what he has learned of God's
benevolence, in his long walks on the thoroughfares and in the byways,
and over the uncontaminated open country, of human hope. Poverty,
trouble, sin, fraudulent begging, stupidity, conceit,--nothing forced
him absolutely to turn away his observation of all these usual rebuffs
to sympathy, if his inconvenience could be made another's gain. But he
was firm with a manliness that was uncringing before insolence, and
did not shrink from speaking home truths that pruned the injurious
branches of the will; yet he never could be insulting, because he had
no selfish end. As a comrade he led to higher perceptions and moods.
The men who chatted with him in the Salem Custom House, the Liverpool
Consulate, and elsewhere, never forgot that he was the most inspiring
man they had known. All this was work. The idle man, lazy in a drunken
carouse, is in a world of his own. His sphere stretches out no
connecting tendrils to the spheres of others; he seems to Us dead in
spirit; he will tell you he believes in no one's true friendship, and
wishes for no companionship; we do not know how to touch his heart,
nor in what language to make him hear when we call,--he is in Mars.
But the sentinel, still as marble, or moving like a well-adjusted
machine that will not defy law--he stirs us by his energy, his
laboring vigilance. His care for others would make him surrender his
life at once. The trusted soldier has left selfishness and cowardice
on the first tenting-ground, and works hard, though he stands
statue-like. It is his business to be of use, and he is never
useless. So with a great artist. He is brother to gentleman or churl.
Hawthorne had not an atom of the poison of contempt. As I have said
before, if he did not love stupidity, he forgave it.
He was fond of using his hands for work, too; and he had skill in
whatever he did. His activity of this manual sort may be inferred from
the fact that when a young man he gradually whittled away one of the
leaves of his writing-table, while musing over his stories. He did not
know, unpleasantly, that he was doing it. What fun he must have had!
Think of the rich scenery of thought that spread about him, the
people, the subtle motives, the eerie truths, the entrancing outlooks
into divine beauty, that entertained him as his sharp blade carved and
sliced his table, which gladly gave itself up to such destruction!
When he was writing "The Scarlet Letter," as Julian's nurse Dora long
delighted to tell, his wife with her dainty care in sewing was making
the little boy a shirt of the finest linen, and was putting in one
sleeve, while the other lay on the table. Dora saw Hawthorne, who was
reading, lay down his book and take up something which he proceeded to
cut into shreds with some small scissors that exactly suited him.
"Where can the little sleeve be which I finished, and wished to sew in
here, my love?" said his blissful wife. Hawthorne (blissfully thinking
of his novel) only half heard the question; but on the table was a
heap of delicate linen shavings, and the new scissors testified over
them.
His jack-knife was a never-ending source of pleasure, and he was
seldom without the impulse, if a good opportunity offered, to subject
a sapling to it for a whistle, or to make some other amusing trifle,
or to cut a bit of licorice with a slow, sure movement that made the
black lump most acceptable.
His mind was never in a stound. It was either observing, or using
observations. Of course he lost his way while walking, and destroyed
commonplace things while musing; and the world hung just so much the
less heavily upon his moving pinions of thought.
His diligence of mind is reported of him at an early age. His sister,
Ebie Hawthorne, gave me a bust of John Wesley, in clerical white bib,
and of a countenance much resembling Alcott's, even to the long,
white, waving hair. Its very aspect cried out, though never so
mercifully, "My sermon is endless!"
Aunt Ebie, hunching her shoulders in mirthful appreciation, said,
"Nathaniel always hated it!"
Why not? At four years of age he had already had enough of Wesley; and
my aunt, with a rejoicing laugh, described how, not being able to
induce his elders to act upon his abhorrence of the melancholy, tinted
object, at last, in dead of winter, he filled it with water through a
hole in the pedestal, which had revealed its hollowness. He then stood
the bust upside down against the wall in a cold place, confidently
awaiting the freezing of the water, in which event it was to be hoped
that the puppet sermonizer would burst, like a pitcher under similar
odds. But John Wesley never burst, to the disgust of a broader mind
and the offended wonder of childish eyes.