If the dictagraph had been perfected in Bronson Alcott's time, he might
now be a great writer. As it is, he goes down as Concord's greatest
talker. "Great expecter," says Thoreau; "great feller," says Sam
Staples, "for talkin' big ... but his daughters is the gals
though--always DOIN' somethin'." Old Man Alcott, however, was usually
"doin' somethin'" within. An internal grandiloquence made him melodious
without; an exuberant, irrepressible, visionary absorbed with
philosophy AS such; to him it was a kind of transcendental business,
the profits of which supported his inner man rather than his family.
Apparently his deep interest in spiritual physics, rather than
metaphysics, gave a kind of hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice
when he sang his oracles; a manner something of a cross between an
inside pompous self-assertion and an outside serious benevolence. But
he was sincere and kindly intentioned in his eagerness to extend what
he could of the better influence of the philosophic world as he saw it.
In fact, there is a strong didactic streak in both father and daughter.
Louisa May seldom misses a chance to bring out the moral of a homely
virtue. The power of repetition was to them a natural means of
illustration. It is said that the elder Alcott, while teaching school,
would frequently whip himself when the scholars misbehaved, to show
that the Divine Teacher-God-was pained when his children of the earth
were bad. Quite often the boy next to the bad boy was punished, to show
how sin involved the guiltless. And Miss Alcott is fond of working her
story around, so that she can better rub in a moral precept--and the
moral sometimes browbeats the story. But with all the elder Alcott's
vehement, impracticable, visionary qualities, there was a sturdiness
and a courage--at least, we like to think so. A Yankee boy who would
cheerfully travel in those days, when distances were long and
unmotored, as far from Connecticut as the Carolinas, earning his way by
peddling, laying down his pack to teach school when opportunity
offered, must possess a basic sturdiness. This was apparently not very
evident when he got to preaching his idealism. An incident in Alcott's
life helps confirm a theory--not a popular one--that men accustomed to
wander around in the visionary unknown are the quickest and strongest
when occasion requires ready action of the lower virtues. It often
appears that a contemplative mind is more capable of action than an
actively objective one. Dr. Emerson says: "It is good to know that it
has been recorded of Alcott, the benign idealist, that when the Rev.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, heading the rush on the U.S. Court House in
Boston, to rescue a fugitive slave, looked back for his following at
the court-room door, only the apostolic philosopher was there cane in
hand." So it seems that his idealism had some substantial virtues, even
if he couldn't make a living.
The daughter does not accept the father as a prototype--she seems to
have but few of her father's qualities "in female." She supported the
family and at the same time enriched the lives of a large part of young
America, starting off many little minds with wholesome thoughts and
many little hearts with wholesome emotions. She leaves
memory-word-pictures of healthy, New England childhood days,--pictures
which are turned to with affection by middle-aged children,--pictures,
that bear a sentiment, a leaven, that middle-aged America needs
nowadays more than we care to admit.
Concord village, itself, reminds one of that common virtue lying at the
height and root of all the Concord divinities. As one walks down the
broad-arched street, passing the white house of Emerson--ascetic guard
of a former prophetic beauty--he comes presently beneath the old elms
overspreading the Alcott house. It seems to stand as a kind of homely
but beautiful witness of Concord's common virtue--it seems to bear a
consciousness that its past is LIVING, that the "mosses of the Old
Manse" and the hickories of Walden are not far away. Here is the home
of the "Marches"--all pervaded with the trials and happiness of the
family and telling, in a simple way, the story of "the richness of not
having." Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances of what
imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate children who
have to do for themselves-much-needed lessons in these days of
automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which deaden rather than
stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits the little old
spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth
played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony.
There is a commonplace beauty about "Orchard House"--a kind of
spiritual sturdiness underlying its quaint picturesqueness--a kind of
common triad of the New England homestead, whose overtones tell us that
there must have been something aesthetic fibered in the Puritan
severity--the self-sacrificing part of the ideal--a value that seems to
stir a deeper feeling, a stronger sense of being nearer some perfect
truth than a Gothic cathedral or an Etruscan villa. All around you,
under the Concord sky, there still floats the influence of that human
faith melody, transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or
the cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope--a common interest in
common things and common men--a tune the Concord bards are ever
playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a Beethovenlike
sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and perseverance--for that
part of greatness is not so difficult to emulate.
We dare not attempt to follow the philosophic raptures of Bronson
Alcott--unless you will assume that his apotheosis will show how
"practical" his vision in this world would be in the next. And so we
won't try to reconcile the music sketch of the Alcotts with much
besides the memory of that home under the elms--the Scotch songs and
the family hymns that were sung at the end of each day--though there
may be an attempt to catch something of that common sentiment (which we
have tried to suggest above)-a strength of hope that never gives way to
despair--a conviction in the power of the common soul which, when all
is said and done, may be as typical as any theme of Concord and its
transcendentalists.