The Arkansaw traveler., 1886-01-09

~AS%SS s~ StNG q 0CuuAtG t0S8 Vt tnS pS~0~ liarities of one person alone, he stops, appears to be satisfied, then finds that it is not what he wishes, begins anew, re- jects each new hypothesis until ten or dozen more have been tried and dis missed, and at this point says:
 Here come to a stand-still. What does he mean 10 do with E? etc. To poison him? 'rwont do"
 "Oh, heavensl 1 have not the leas. notion how to get on. never was in such sad predicament before"
 A new character is introduced, ser want, who is to be mischiei-worker, act ing in obedience to the old doctor, men, tioned before, to whom he is bound by indissoluble ties, and here are some points of his character
 "The general features of the old Eng fish serving-man must be preserved, but he must be converted into a devil, etc. A great deal of grotesque fancy must be used in drawing this character. Oh, cer- tainlyl Eheu, Jam satis est. can't positively make this out. though it keeps glimmering before me. Conceive such a man established ia the family. What is wanted to consummate that revenge1 Ma terials and an opportunity. The materi- als must be some long-standing trouble or hereditary predicament of the family What1 A crime which is bequeathed to each generation, and of which this ser want becomes the instrument It would do magni6cently, if it were not an ab- surdity."
 One naturally asks, after reading these notes (" Is this Hawthorne's usual man. ner of composition, or, is this an excep- tional case ?" think, any close obser. yer will say, that this is his usual method of composition and plausibility is added to this supposition from the fact that he says, in his preface to "Scarlet Letter" think, that he had been at work on it for several years, writing it while in the Salem custom-house Call the roll of his books that are to live in the future "Scarlet Letter" House of Seven Gables" "Maible Faun," and Moses from an Old Manse," and you see that they are few in number, but as nearly perfect in their scope as anything ever written. Then recall the fact that he never needed to moil and toll for daily bread, as so many of our American writers have been obliged to do, and one naturally and legitimately concludes that he was a slow and careful composer. When 1 say a slow and careful composer, do not mean one who does clean work, that needs no erasures, but one who blocks out, as in marble, the rough outline, and after that, as he says himself, any strangeness or pretern aturality may be softened down to any extent" After this outline has been roughly drafted, he then cuts down, cuts out. changes, begins anew at the begin ming and, in one instance, finding that after all these changes the work is not satisfactory, the motive not powerful enough to be the incentive of behavior that is to be credited to a certain char. acter, he says:
 "Take him at his death hour and work backward from that"
 One is amazed at the perseverance with which he works out the strange fancies that throng his teeming brain. One is inclined to say in a most decided way, It is all hard work"
 fear that the hard work of the aver age man will never convert him into a genius, and still less likely is the genius to emerge into the light of day withou, hard work, Even in those exceptional cases, where peculiar faculty for some one pursuit seems to have been inborn as Pagannini and Mozart in music Guido and West in painting, Michael Angelo in sculpture, and in other cases too numer- ous to mention, work was necessary, and persevering work at that, for the expres- sion of the inn ate genius, and which, with out it, would have been as ephemeral as the annual flowers and as soon forgotten.
 fit is to hard work alone that Haw- thorne owes his fame, why have we in America no other writer who equals him Others are just as anxious as he, perhaps more anxious, to see their names on fame's eternal bead roll," high engraved, and if work alone could have accom- plished this, others would ere this have earned a fame equal to his. Huxley says we Americans are nation of work CTS, and that we seem to work because we love employment. Surely, Hawthorne is