University of Virginia Library

THE WAYS OF STEVENSON AND HAWTHORNE

The meticulous practise of Stevenson is proverbial, but this glimpse of his method is worth catching again. "The first draft of a story," records Mr. Charles D. Lanier, "Stevenson wrote out roughly, or dictated to Lloyd Osbourne. When all the colors were in hand for the complete picture, he invariably penned it himself, with exceeding care. . . . If the first copy did not please him, he patiently made a second or a third draft. In his stern, self-imposed apprenticeship of phrase-making he had prepared himself for these workmanlike methods by the practise of rewriting his trial stories into dramas and then reworking them into stories again."

Nathaniel Hawthorne brought the devoted, one might say, the devotional, spirit of the true artist to all his work, but "The Scarlet Letter" was written at a good pace when once started, though, as usual, the germ had been in Hawthorne's mind for many years. The story of its beginning is one of the many touching anecdotes in that history of authorship which Carlyle compared to the Newgate Calendar. Incidentally, too, it witnesses that an author occasionally meets with a good wife,

One wintry autumn day in Salem Hawthorne returned home earlier than usual from the custom-house. With pale lips, he said to his wife: "I am turned out of office." To which she—God bless her!—cheerily replied: "Very well I now you can write your book!" and immediately set about lighting his study fire and generally making things comfortable for his work.

The book was "The Scarlet Letter," and was completed by the following February, Hawthorne, as his wife said, writing "immensely" on it day after day, nine hours a day. When finished, Hawthorne seems to have been dispirited about the story, and put it away in a drawer; but the good James T. Fields chanced soon to call on him, and asked him if he had anything for him to publish.

"Who," asked Hawthorne gloomily, would risk publishing a book from me, the most unpopular writer in America?"

"I would," was Fields's rejoinder, and after some further sparring, Hawthorne owned up.

"As you have found me out," said he, "take what I have written and tell me if it is good for anything"; and Fields went away with the manuscript of what is, without any question, America's greatest novel.

Turning to the great novelists of France, with one or two exceptions, they all bear out the theory of longevity in literature which I have been endeavoring to support. It must reluctantly be confessed that one of the most fascinatingly vital of them all, Alexandre Dumas, is one of the exceptions, born improvisator as he was; yet immense research, it needs hardly be said, went to the making of his enormous library of romance—even though, it be allowed, that much of that work was done for him by his "disciples."

George Sand was another facile, all too facile, writer. Here is a description of her method: "To write novels was to her only a process of nature. She seated herself before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot and only the slightest acquaintance with her characters, and until five in the evening, while her hand guided

a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day, and the next, it was the same. By and by the novel had written itself in full and another was unfolding."

Whether George Sand is still alive as a novelist, apart from her place as an historic personality, I leave others to decide; but I am very sure that she would be read a great deal more than she is if she had not so confidently left her novels—to write themselves. Different, indeed, was the method of Balzac, toiling year after year at his colossal task of "The Human Comedy," sometimes working eighteen hours a day, and never less than twelve, and that "in the midst of protested bills, business annoyances, the most cruel financial straits in utter solitude and lack of all consolation." But then Balzac was sustained by one of those great dreams, without whose aid no lasting literature is produced, the dream, "by infinite patience and courage, to compose for the France of the nineteenth century, that history of morals which the old civilizations of Rome, Athens, Memphis, and India have left untold."

To fulfil this he was able to live, for a long period, on a daily expenditure of "three sous for bread, two for milk, and three for firing." But doubtless it had been different if his dream had been prize puppies, a garage full of motor-cars, or a translation into the Four Hundred.