Collected Prose

have been making him look like the mighty Pan by covering his chin and breast with long grass-blades, that looked like a verdant, venerable beard.” And again to her mother several days later: “Dear little harp-souled Una—whose love for her father grows more profound every day …was made quite unhappy because he did not go at the same time with her to the lake. His absence darkened all the sunshine to her; and when I asked her why she could not enjoy the walk as Julian did, she replied, ‘Ah, he does not love papa as I do!’…. After I put Julian to bed, I went out to the barn to see about the chickens, and she wished to go. There sat papa on the hay, and like a needle to a magnet she was drawn, and begged to see papa a little longer, and stay with him. Now she has come, weary enough; and after steeping her spirit in this rose and gold of twilight, she has gone to bed. With such a father, and such a scene before her eyes, and with eyes to see , what may we not hope of her? I heard her and Julian talking together about their father’s smile, the other day—They had been speaking of some other person’s smile—Mr. Tappan’s, I believe; and presently Una said, ‘But you know, Julian, that there is no smile like papa’s!’ ‘Oh no,’ replied Julian. ‘Not like papa’s !’ “In 1904, many years after Una’s early death at the age of thirty-three, Thomas Wentworth Higginson published a memorial piece about her in The Outlook , a popular magazine of the period. In it, he quoted her as once having said to him about her father: “He was capable of being the gayest person I ever saw. He was like a boy. Never was such a playmate as he in all the world.”
    All this lies behind the spirit of Twenty Days with Julian & Little Bunny. The Hawthornes were a consciously progressive family, and for the most part their treatment of their children corresponds to attitudes prevalent among the secular middle-class in America today. No harsh discipline, no physical punishment, no strident reprimands. Some people found the Hawthorne children obstreperous and unruly, but Sophia, ever inclined to see them as model creatures, happily reported in a letter to her mother that at a local torchlight festival “the children enjoyed themselves extremely, and behaved so beautifully that they won all hearts. They thought that there never was such a superb child as Julian, nor such a grace as Una. ‘They are neither too shy, nor bold,’ said Mrs. Field, ‘but just right.’ “What constitutes “just right,” of course, is a matter of opinion. Hawthorne, who was always more rigorous in his observations than his wife—unable, by force of instinct and habit, to allow love to color his judgments—makes no bones about how annoying Julian’s presence sometimes was to him. That theme is sounded on the first page of the diary, and it recurs repeatedly throughout the twenty days they spent together. The boy was a champion chatterbox, a pint-sized engine of logorrhea, and within hours of Sophia’s departure, Hawthorne was already complaining that “it is impossible to write, read, think, or even to sleep (in the daytime) so constant are his appeals to me in one way or another.” By the second evening, after remarking once again on the endless stream of babble that issued from Julian’s lips, Hawthorne put him to bed and added: “nor need I hesitate to say that I was glad to be rid of him—it being my first relief from his society during the whole day. This may be too much of a good thing.” Five days later, on August third, he was again harping on the same subject: “Either I have less patience to-day than ordinary, or the little man makes larger demands upon it; but it really does seem as if he had baited me with more questions, references, and observations, than mortal father ought to be expected to endure.” And again on August fifth: “He continues to pester me with his inquisitions. For instance, just now, while he is whittling with my jack-knife. ‘Father, if you had bought all the jack-knives at the shop, what would you do for another, when you broke them all?’ ‘I would go somewhere else,’ say I. But there is no stumping him. ‘If you had bought all the jack-knives in the world, what would you do?’ And here my patience gives way, and I entreat him not to trouble me with any more foolish questions. I really think it would do him good to spank him, apropos to this habit.” And once again on August tenth: