Little Women Letters

Chapter 9

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RARE friendships existed among the great minds of that period, when Transcendentalism in America was first talked and lived, a close bond of sympathy uniting Bronson Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau, Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody. Such association made its impress upon the Alcott daughters. Anna's diary is filled with references to visits with the Emersons. Louisa's deal less with the family and more with the intellectual life of the great philosopher, whom she made her idol. Through life he was her stanch and understanding friend.

"The Apostles of the Newness" was the scoffing term applied to these literary giants of New England by those who lacked the mental and spiritual insight to recognize greatness in others.

This attitude of ridicule was largely responsible for the continued attacks upon the Dial, a quarterly issued by the Transcendentalists, edited from 1840 to 1844 by Emerson, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, and Thoreau. Between its modest covers were many of the intellectual masterpieces of the time: its rare volumes are still treasure-houses of literature which to-day command any price. Mr. Alcott selected its title and was to a large extent responsible for its policy. His Orphic Sayings in the Dial, now looked upon as classics, were the butt of the press at the time, and the derision of Boston society.

In these Orphic Sayings, he gave this remarkable definition of Reform: "Reforms are the noblest of facts. Extant in time, they work for eternity: dwelling with men, they are with God."

Conversation among these friends was neither trivial nor useless, and in the Alcott circle, which included Emerson, Thoreau, Theodore Parker, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Elizabeth Peabody, Mrs. Cheney, and other of the early Transcendentalists, later on augmented by James Russell Lowell and Nathaniel Hawthorne, a series of drawing-room symposiums was established, with Alcott, whom Emerson called "serious and superior," as a leader. Much of the substance of these conversations is found in the Alcott journals, and in the unpublished manuscripts of the poet-philosopher.

In Concord, the Alcotts once more enjoyed the literary companionship they craved. Emerson was a near neighbor. Thoreau had his cabin at Walden, where he had established "a community of one." To and from Boston came others of the Transcendental group, and Concord became the center of thought for New England.

Thinking, however, was not the only occupation of Bronson Alcott. Dreamer he was, but he delighted in toil and ever upheld the dignity of labor, not ashamed nor afraid to work for hire as a laborer in his neighbor's field, while nightly conducting drawing-room conversations with a company of peers and students.

When Thoreau built his cabin, Alcott helped him. They cut the trees from Emerson's grove. While Emerson was abroad, they built a summer-house for him on his grounds. It stood for many years, a picturesque temple of friendship. William Henry Channing mentions a morning spent there, reading Margaret Fuller's Italian letters. May Alcott has made drawings of it, which were published in a volume of "Concord Sketches" that also contained her drawing of Hawthorne's house.

Mr. Alcott practically rebuilt Orchard House for his own family. Mrs. Child, a friend of Mrs. Alcott, thus describes this home, which is now preserved as a memorial to Louisa M. Alcott and is visited by thousands every year:

When they bought the place the house was so very old that it was thrown into the bargain, with the supposition that it was fit for nothing but firewood. But Mr. Alcott had an architectural taste, more intelligible than his Orphic Sayings. He let every old rafter and beam stay in its place, changed old ovens and ash holes into Saxon arched alcoves, and added a washerwoman's old shanty to the rear. The result is a house full of queer nooks and corners, with all manner of juttings in and out. It seems as if the spirit of some old architect had dropped it down in Concord.

One of the last of the philosophers, Connecticut gave him to the world. He peddled first her wares, afterwards, as he declares, his brains. These he peddles still, bearing for fruit, only his brain, like the nut its kernel. His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are aquainted with, and he will be the last man to be disappointed when the ages revolve. He has no venture in the present. But though comparatively disregarded now, when his day comes, laws unsuspected by most will take effect, and rulers will come to him for advice.

Emerson, who saw the boy mind beneath the philosopher's dignity, said tenderly of Bronson Alcott: "He is certainly the youngest man of his age we have seen. When I looked at his gray hairs, his conversation sounded pathetic; but I looked again and they reminded me of the gray dawn."

Even his friends, to say nothing of Louisa, occasionally poked fun at him for chronicling so minutely all his thoughts. Ellery Channing called his library, "Encyclopediea de Moi-meme, en cents volumes." Yet these journals and records are now worth more than the fine library he collected and in which he delighted.

On the invitation of James P. Greaves of London, the friend and fellow-laborer of Pestalozzi in Switzerland, Mr. Alcott went to England in 1842. Mr. Greaves died before his arrival, but Mr. Alcott was received cordially by his friends, who had given his name to their school, Alcott House, Ham, near London. He spent several months in making acquaintance with various classes of reformers. On his return to America, he brought with him two of his English friends, Chas. Lane and H. C. Wright; and Mr. Lane having bought a farm which he called Fruitlands, at Harvard, Mass., they all went there to found a new community.

The Fruitlands experiment and its failure have been immortalized by Louisa Alcott in her "Transcendental Wild Oats." The detail of it is thus described by a friend of the Alcott family, who had the story from Bronson Alcott himself:

The crop failures necessitated the community living on a barley diet, as anything animal was not allowed, not even milk and eggs. Now and then they gave a thought as to what they should do for shoes when those they had were gone; for depriving the cow of her skin was a crime not to be tolerated. The barley crop was injured in harvesting, and before long want was staring them in the face. The Alcotts remained at Fruitlands till mid-winter in dire poverty, all the guests having taken their departure as provisions vanished. Friends came to the rescue, and, Mr. Alcott concluded with pathos in his voice, "We put our little women on an ox-sled and made our way to Concord! So faded one of the dreams of my youth. I have given you the facts as they were; Louisa has given the comic side in 'Transcendental Wild Oats'; but Mrs. Alcott could give you the tragic side."

Indeed, it was always Mrs. Alcott who could have given the tragic side, skillfully as she kept her worries hidden. Her own family, indignant because Bronson Alcott could not better provide the material needs for his family, on more than one occasion besought the faithful wife to leave him.

A letter from her brother, urging this step, drew forth from her a defense of Bronson Alcott which the husband enters in his journal as follows:

"If I do not mistake the spirit as well as letter of your remark you would have us believe that a righteous retribution has overtaken us, (or my husband, and we are one,) and that the world is justly punishing him for not having conciliated it, by conforming to its wills and ways.-You say that my husband was told ten years ago, that the world could not understand him. It perhaps fell dead on his ears and ever will. There is no human voice can convince him that the path he has chosen to tread, thorny, bleak, solitary, as it is, is not the right one for him. Just so did that man of Nazareth whom all the world profess to admire and adore, but few to imitate; and these few are the laughing-stock of the Christian Community. They are branded as visionaries and fools. But this little band when alone and disencumbered of idle observation, enjoy the recital of their privations; they have been reviled, but they revile not again; they know sorrow and are acquainted with grief; and yet there is joy in that group of sinless men, such as angels might desire to partake of. I am not writing poetry, but I have tried to place before your mind, in as brief, but clear a manner as I am able, our real condition, and Mr. Alcott's merit as a man, who, though punished and neglected by a wicked world, has much to console and encourage him in the confidence and cooperation of some of the wisest and best men living. Ten such, were they permitted in their several vocations to act as teachers, preachers, and printers, would save our wicked city from the ruin that awaits it. But they are turned, like the Nazarene, into solitary places to lament the blindness and folly of mankind, who are following the vain and fleeting shadow for the real and abiding substance. But to return to Mr. Alcott, is he to sell his soul, or what is the same thing, his principles, for the bread that perisheth? No one will employ him in his way; he cannot work in theirs, if he thereby involve his conscience. He is so resolved in this matter that I believe he will starve and freeze before he will sacrifice principle to comfort. In this, I and my children are necessarily implicated: we make and mean to make all the sacrifices we can to sustain him, but we have less to sustain us in the spirit, and therefore, are more liable to be overcome of the flesh. He has, for a long time gone without everything which he could not produce by labor, from his own place, that no one could in truth reproach him with wantonly eating of the fruits of another's labor.

He was sent for by friends in Hingham to talk with them; which he did two evenings; his expenses were paid and $23. put into his hands as a slight compensation for the benefit they felt he had conferred upon them by his conversations. I should like to copy the note accompanying it, but you never care to see how his fellow fanatics rave on these holy themes, life, duty, destiny of man. Thus he occasionally finds a market for his thoughts and experiences, which, though inadequate to our support, is richly prized as the honest gains of an innocent and righteous labor. You spoke of his "poetical wardrobe" whether in satire or in a worthier spirit, I cannot tell. However spiritual he may have become, there is still enough of the carnal to feel the chills of winter, and the chiller blasts of satire. His tatters are the rags of righteousness and keep him warmer than they would anyone whose spirit was less cheered and warmed by the fires of eternal love and truth.

An appreciative account of Mr. Alcott's famous school in the Masonic Temple, Boston, is found in the "Record of a School," edited by Elizabeth Peabody, published in 1835, republished in 1874. The "Conversations with Children on the Gospels," edited by Mr. Alcott in two volumes, appearing in 1836-1837, caused such a commotion in Boston as to result in the downfall of the Temple School. Reading these conversations to-day, one is impressed with the modern quality of their thought. They were forerunners of that higher criticism, which with the Bible student now supplants the old blind acceptance without reflection of even obscure Biblical passages.

On philosophy and religion Mr. Alcott and Miss Peabody delighted to talk and write. Their discussion of the existence of evil is startlingly modern.

"I do not think that evil should be clothed in form by the imagination," writes Miss Peabody to Mr. Alcott; "I think every effort should be made to strip it of all individuality, all shaping and all coloring. And the reason is, that Evil has in truth no substantial existence, that it acquires all the existence it has from want of faith and soul cultivation, and that this is sufficient reason why all cultivation should be directed to give positiveness, coloring, shaping, to all kinds of good-Good only being eternal truth."

In reply, the philosopher thus comments in his diary: "Evil has no positive existence, I agree with Miss Peabody, but it has usurped a positive place and being in the popular imagination, and by the imagination must it be made to flee away into its negative life. How shall this be done? By shadowing forth in vivid colors the absolute beauty and phenomena of good, by assuming evil not as positive, but as negative."

"I shall always love you for loving Alcott," writes Emerson to his schoolmate and lifelong friend, the Reverend W. H. Furness. "He is a great man, the god with the herdsman of Admetus. His conversation is sublime; yet when I see how he is underestimated by cultivated people, I fancy none but I have heard him talk."

I have been striving to apprehend the real in the seeming, to strip ideas of their adventitious phrases and behold them in their order and powers. I have sought to penetrate the showy terrestrial to find the heavenly things. I have tried to translate into ideas the language and images of spirit, and thus to read God in his works. The outward I have seen as the visage and type of the inward. Ever doth this same nature double its design and stand forth-now before the inner, now before the outer sense of man, at once substance and form, image and idea, so that God shall never slip wholly from the consciousness of the soul.

Emerson, weary of seeing his friend misunderstood, urges him to give up teaching and become an author, picturing as his golden view for Alcott that one day he will leave the impracticable world to wag its own way, sit apart, and write his oracles for its behoof.

"Write! let them hear or let them forbear," he thunders. "The written word abides until, slowly and unexpectedly, and in widely sundered places, it has created its own church."

The unreality of evil, as taught and believed by Alcott nearly a century ago, laughed and scoffed at then, was twenty-five years later practically the foundation of a belief which gained its first foothold in New England, and, with headquarters in Boston, has spread, until to-day its followers and churches circle the civilized globe-a new-old religion, based on the literal acceptance of the teachings of Christ. What to-day is called metaphysical teaching was in the Alcott period scoffed at as Transcendentalism.

Mr. Alcott's strict adherence to a vegetarian diet was also the topic of ridicule from public and press, although the Alcott children seemed to thrive on it, and certainly, as four-year-old Louisa once remarked, "Did pitty well for a wegetable diet."

Vegetable

diet and

sweet repose

Animal food

and nightmare.

Pluck your

body from

the orchard;

do not snatch

it from the

shamble.

Without flesh

diet there

could be no

blood-shedding

war.

Appollo eats no

flesh and has no

beard; his voice is

melody itself.

Snuff is no less snuff

though accepted

from a gold box.

Bronson Alcott constantly sought self-improvement, and the shortcomings of his early education were more than offset by his untiring study. Realizing at one time his lack of a vocabulary, he comments in his journal, that to rectify this he has just bought two books, "A Symposium of Melancholy," and "Hunter on the Blood."

In their memoirs of Bronson Alcott, F. B. Sanborn and W. T. Harris have thus summed up his character: "He was the most filial son, the most faithful lover, the most attached friend, the most generous philanthropist of his time. And when he died, he left fewer enemies than any man of equal age can have provoked or encountered in so long a career."

In his study of childhood, Mr. Alcott sought first to reach the mind, recognizing that as "the God within us." He encouraged individuality in his children, trying in their earliest years to make them think for themselves. All through his teaching runs the boy's friendship with God, and his sense of oneness with his Maker was a part of the divine heritage he passed on to his daughters.

He records in his diary a conversation with Anna, who was four, and Louisa, who was two, after reading to them the story of Jesus, which he made so vital that, given their choice, they asked for it in preference to a fairy tale. Anna remarked that Jesus did not really die. "They killed his body, but not his soul." Her father asked: "What is the soul, Anna?" The little four-year-old replied: "It's this inside of me that makes me feel and think and love." "And," said the father, "what became of Jesus' soul?" Anna replied: "It went back to God." Whereat little two-year-old Louisa asked: "Why, isn't Dod inside of me?"

A note in the father's diary at the birth of Elizabeth records "Anna's first interview with her sister" (Elizabeth a few hours old), and a day later comes this record: "Anna and Louisa interview their sister." Louisa, two years old, wishes to have the baby sister put in her arms, when four-year-old Anna says warningly: "Treat her very carefully, Louisa, she comes from God." What a beautiful thought to give a child of the divine mystery of birth!

Instead of asserting what he intended to make of his children, Alcott encouraged the child to make itself, beginning when it was a small baby, treating it as an individual, giving it opportunity to use its mentality, instilling principles of right and wrong by suggestion. Alcott never commanded. "You don't wish to do that," was his way, not exacting blind obedience, but expressing his conviction that the child wished to do right.

To him, God was love. He had no fear of God, for perfect love had cast out fear. This same spirit was manifested in all his children. To them the change called Death was not to be dreaded; it was a stepping forward and upward.

We sighing said, "Our Pan is dead;

His pipe hangs mute beside the river.

Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,

And Music's airy voice is fled.

Spring mourns as for untimely frost;

The bluebird chants a requiem;

The willow-blossom waits for him;-

The Genius of the wood is lost."

Then from the flute, untouched by hands,

There came a low, harmonious breath;

"For such as he there is no death-

His life the eternal life commands;

Above man's aims his nature rose,

The wisdom of a just content

Made one small spot a continent

And tuned to poetry life's prose.

"Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,

Swallow and aster, lake and pine,

To him grew human or divine,-

Fit mates for this large-hearted child.

Such homage Nature ne'er forgets,

And yearly on the coverlid

'Neath which her darling lieth hid

Will write his name in violets.

"To him no vain regrets belong,

Whose soul, that finer instrument,

Gave to the world no poor lament,

But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.

O lonely friend! he still will be

A potent presence, though unseen;-

Steadfast, sagacious and serene;

Seek not for him-he is with thee."

A visit to Sleepy Hollow suggests life, not death. Giant trees stretch their branches over marble and granite monuments, as if in benediction. "There is no death, for God is life," they seem to say. For them there is no death. Emerson lives to-day, the great philosopher; so do Thoreau, Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, and others of that mighty company. And who shall say that Louisa Alcott is dead? She lives in the hearts of thousands, and will go on living through the love they bear her.

Bronson Alcott was a true disciple of Jesus Christ. He lived the example set by his Master not alone in words and thoughts, but in deeds. He lived through and beyond misunderstanding, ridicule, poverty, to see his teachings respected, his name honored, to see the first glimmer of the new light which was beginning to break over the world, the sunrise at his own sunset.

Dear Pilgrim, waiting patiently,

The long, long journey nearly done,

Beside the sacred stream that flows

Clear shining in the western sun;

Look backward on the varied road

Your steadfast feet have trod,

From youth to age, through weal and woe,

Climbing forever nearer God.

Mountain and valley lie behind;

The slough is crossed, the wicket passed;

Doubt and despair, sorrow and sin,

Giant and fiend, conquered at last.

Neglect is changed to honor now,

The heavy cross may be laid down;

The white head wins and wears at length

The prophet's, not the martyr's crown.

Greatheart and Faithful gone before,

Brave Christiana, Mercy sweet,

Are shining ones who stand and wait

The weary wanderer to greet.

Patience and Love his handmaids are,

And till time brings release,

Christian may rest in that bright room

Whose windows open to the east.

The staff set by, the sandals off,

Still pondering the precious scroll,

Serene and strong he waits the call

That frees and wings a happy soul.

Then beautiful as when it lured,

The boy's aspiring eyes,

Before the pilgrim's longing sight,

Shall the Celestial City rise.

In the 1600s, Balthasar Gracian, a jesuit priest wrote 300 aphorisms on living life called "The Art of Worldly Wisdom." Join our newsletter below and read them all, one at a time.