I remember being very much impressed--and not a little shocked--when
a friend of mine told me that she had never, in her childhood, been
able to get any real pleasure out of Louisa Alcott’s stories. It had
never occurred to me that being brought up in New York instead of in
New England, or even being of Southern instead of Pilgrim stock, could
make all that difference. Miss Alcott seemed the safe inheritance,
the absolutely inevitable delight, of childhood. _Little Women_
was as universal as _Hamlet_. I remembered perfectly that French
playmates of mine in Paris had loved _Les Quatre Filles du Docteur
March_ (though the French version was probably somewhat expurgated).
If children of a Latin--moreover, of a Royalist and Catholic--tradition
could find no flaw in Miss Alcott’s presentment of young life, I
could not see why any free-born American child should fail to find it
sympathetic.
I questioned my friend more closely. Her answer set me thinking; and it
is probably to her that I owe my later appreciation of Miss Alcott’s
special quality and special documentary value. For what my friend
said was simply that the people in the books were too underbred for
her to get any pleasure out of reading about them. My friend was not,
when I knew her, a snob; and I took it that she had made the criticism
originally at a much earlier age. All children are as snobbish as they
know how to be; and I fancy that the child’s perennial delight in
fairy-tales is not due solely to the epic instinct. One is interested
in princes and princesses, when one is eight, simply because they are
princes and princesses. Of royalty, one is perfectly sure. I have never
known a child who did not prefer the goose-girl to be a princess in
disguise, or who felt any real sympathy with the princess who was only
a disguised goose-girl. You do not have to expound the Divine Right to
any one under twelve. Peasants are an acquired taste; and socialism is
an illusion of age.
Out of such axioms as these, I made my explanation of my friend’s
heterodoxy. I remembered my own reaction, when very young, on a story
that centred in a masked ball to which all the inhabitants of the
kingdom were bidden. All the milkmaids went as court ladies, and all
the court ladies went as milkmaids--a mere rounding out of the Petit
Trianon episode. The moral was obvious; and I recall being frightfully
disturbed by my own absolute certainty that, if I had been going to
a masked ball, I should, without hesitation, have gone as grandly
as I possibly could. I should never have gone as a milkmaid, so long
as the costumer had a court train left. Did it perhaps mean that I
was, on the whole, nearer to the milkmaid than to the court lady? I
did not like the story, but I have never, to this day, forgotten it.
Perhaps my friend had been of the same age when she discriminated
against Miss Alcott. But then, I and my contemporaries had made no
such discrimination. As I say, it set me to thinking. Since then, I
have read Miss Alcott over, not once, but many times, and I think I
understand.
The astounding result of re-reading Miss Alcott at a mature age is a
conviction that she probably gives a better impression of mid-century
New England than any of the more laborious reconstructions, either
in fiction or in essay. The youth of her characters does not hinder
her in this; for childhood, supremely, takes life ready-made. Mr.
Howells’s range is wider, and he is at once more serious and more
detached. Technically, he and Miss Alcott can be compared as little as
_Madame Bovary_ and the _Bibliothèque Rose_. Yet, although
their testimonies often agree, his world does not “compose” as hers
does. It may be his very realism--his wealth of differentiating detail,
his fidelity to the passing moment--that makes his early descriptions
of New England so out of date, so unrecognizable. Miss Alcott is
content to be typical. All her people have the same background, live
in the same atmosphere, profess the same ideals. Moreover, they were
ideals and an atmosphere that imposed themselves widely during their
period. Mr. Howells gives us modern instances in plenty, but nowhere
does he give us clearly the quintessential New England village. It
is precisely the familiar experiences of life in that quintessential
village that Miss Alcott gives us, with careless accuracy, without
_arrière-pensée_. And it must be remembered that, in spite of Dr.
Holmes’s brave and appropriating definitions of aristocracy, and the
urbanity which the descendants of our great New Englanders would fain
persuade us their ancestors possessed, our great New Englanders were
essentially villagers, and that the very best thing to be said of them
is that they wrought out village life to an almost Platonic perfection
of type. “Town” will not do to express the Boston, the Cambridge,
the Salem, the Concord, of an earlier time: it smacks too much of
London--and freedom. The Puritans founded villages; and, spiritually
speaking, the villages that they founded are villages still. The
village that Miss Alcott knew best was Concord; and if, for our present
purpose, we find it convenient to call Concord typical of New England,
we shall certainly not be doing New England any injustice.
As I say, what strikes one on first re-reading her, is the
extraordinary success with which she has given us our typical New
England. Some of her books, obviously, are less successful in this
way than others--_Under the Lilacs_, for example, or _Jack
and Jill_, where (one cannot but agree with her severer critics)
there is an inexcusable amount of love-making. There is an equally
inexcusable amount of love-making, it is interesting to remember, in
much of the earlier Howells. But for contemporary record of manners and
morals, you will go far before you match her masterpiece, _Little
Women_. What Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, and Laurie do not teach us about
life in New England at a certain time, we shall never learn from any
collected edition of the letters of Emerson, Thoreau, or Hawthorne.
The next--and equally astounding--result of re-reading Miss Alcott
was, for me, the unexpected and not wholly pleasant corroboration of
what my friend had said about her characters. They were, in some ways,
underbred. Bronson Alcott (or shall we say Mr. March?) quotes Plato in
his family circle; but his family uses inveterately bad grammar. “Don’t
talk about ‘labelling’ Pa, as if he was a pickle-bottle!”--thus Jo
chides her little sister for a malapropism. Bad grammar we might expect
from Jo, as a wilful freak; but should we expect the exquisite Amy (any
little girl will tell you how exquisite Amy is supposed to be) to
write to her father from Europe, about buying gloves in Paris, “Don’t
that sound sort of elegant and rich?”
The bad grammar, in all the books, is constant. And yet, I know of no
other young people’s stories, anywhere, wherein the background is so
unbrokenly and sincerely “literary.” Cheap literature is unsparingly
satirized; Plato and Goethe are quoted quite as every-day matters; and
“a metaphysical streak had unconsciously got into” Jo’s first novel. In
_The Rose in Bloom_, Miss Alcott misquotes Swinburne, to be sure,
but she does it in the interest of morality; and elsewhere Mac quotes
other lines from the same poet correctly. Of course, we all remember
that Emerson’s _Essays_ helped on, largely, Mac’s wooing--if,
indeed, they did not do the whole trick. And has there ever been an
“abode of learning”--to slip, for a moment, into the very style of
_Jo’s Boys_--like unto Plumfield, crowned by “Parnassus”? After
all, too, we must remember how familiarly even those madcaps, Ted
and Josie, bandied about the names of Greek gods. The boys and girls
who scoff at the simple amusements of Miss Alcott’s young heroes and
heroines are, alack! not so much at home with classical mythology
as the young people they despise. Yet, as I say, the bad grammar is
everywhere--even in the mouths of the educators.
Breeding is, of course, not merely a matter of speech; and I fancy
that my friend referred even more specifically to their manners--their
morals being unimpeachable. Miss Alcott’s people are, as the author
herself says of them, unworldly. They are even magnificently so;
and they score the worldly at every turn. You remember Mrs. March’s
strictures on the Moffats? and Polly’s justifiable criticisms of Fanny
Shaw’s friends? and Rose’s utter lack of snobbishness about Phœbe,
the little scullery-maid, who eventually was brought up with her? Of
course, Archie’s mother objects, at first, to his marrying Phœbe, but
she is soon reconciled--and apologetic.
Granted their unworldliness, their high scale of moral values, where,
then, is the trace of vulgarity that is needed to make breeding bad?
They pride themselves on their separation from all vulgarity. “My
mother is a lady,” Polly reflects, “even if”--even if she is not rich,
like the Shaws. The March girls are always consoling themselves for
their vicissitudes by the fact that their parents are gentle-folk.
Well, they are underbred in precisely the way in which, one fancies,
the contemporaries of Emerson in Concord may well have been underbred.
It is the “plain living” side of the “high thinking.” They despised
externals, and, in the end, externals had their revenge. Breeding,
as such, is simply not a product of the independent village. (Some
one may mention Cranford; but you cannot call Cranford independent,
with its slavish adherence to the etiquette of the Honourable Mrs.
Jamieson, its constant awed reference to Sir Peter Arley and the
“county families.”) The villagers have not--and who supposes that
Bronson Alcott and Thoreau had it?--the gift of civilized contacts. A
contact, be it remembered, is not quite the same thing as a relation.
Manners are a natural growth of courts. Recall any mediæval dwelling
of royalty; then imagine life lived in those cramped chambers, in
the perpetual presence of superiors and inferiors alike--and lived
informally!
In Miss Alcott’s world, all that is changed. According to the older
tradition, a totally unchaperoned youth would mean lack of breeding.
Here, on the contrary, all the heroines are unchaperoned, while the
match-making mamma is anathema. We did not cut off King Charles’s head
for nothing. The reward of the unchaperoned daughter is to make a good
match. In that rigid school, conventions are judged--and nobly enough,
Heaven knows!--from the point of view of morals alone (of absolute, not
of historic or evolutionary morals) and many conventions are thereby
damned. The result is a little like what one has heard of contemporary
Norway. “Underbred” is very likely too strong a word; yet one does
see how the social state described in _Little Women_ might
easily shock any one brought up in a less provincial tradition. There
is too much love-making, for example. Though sweethearting between
five-year-olds is frowned on, sweethearting between fifteen-year-olds
is quite the thing. In real life, it would not always be safe to
marry, very young, your first playmate. Any one who has lived in the
more modern New England village knows perfectly well that people still
marry, very young, their first playmates, and that disaster often
results. Nor can Una always depend on the protection of a lion that is
necessarily invisible. Granted that Jo’s precocious sense was right,
and that it would have been a mistake for her to marry Laurie; which of
us believes that, in real life, she would not have made the mistake?
You cannot depend on young things in their teens to foresee the future
of their temperaments accurately. One cannot but feel that if Mrs.
March really saw the complete unfitness of those two for each other, it
was her duty to put a few conventional obstacles in their path.
Perhaps all this was part of what my friend meant by lack of breeding
in the traditional sense: the social _laissez-aller_ in
extraordinary (and perhaps not eternally maintainable?) combination
with moral purity. But I suspect that she referred, as well, to another
aspect of Miss Alcott’s environment: to the unmistakable lack of the
greater and lesser amenities of life. The plain living is quite as
prominent as the high thinking. The whole tissue of the March girls’
lives is a very commonplace fabric. You know that their furniture was
bad--and that they did not know it; that their æsthetic sense was
untrained and crude--and that they did not care; that the simplicity
of their meals, their household service, their dress, their every day
manners (in spite of the myth about Amy) was simplicity of the common,
not of the intelligent, kind. You really would not want to spend a week
in the house of any one of them. Nor had their simplicity in any wise
the quality of austerity. Remember the pies that the older March girls
carried for muffs (the management whereof was one of the ever unsolved
riddles of my childhood).
No: in so far as breeding is a matter of externals, one must admit that
there is some sense in calling Miss Alcott’s people underbred. Perhaps
we do not choose to call breeding a matter of externals. In that, we
should perfectly agree with Miss Alcott’s people themselves; and to
that we shall presently come. For what is incontrovertible is that Miss
Alcott’s work is a genuine document.
I have spoken of the unimpeachable morality of Miss Alcott’s world.
Charlie lost Rose for having drunk one glass of champagne too much.
That is the worst sin committed in any of the books, so far as I
remember. Of course, the black sheep, Dan, had been in prison; but he
had killed his man inevitably, almost helplessly, in self-defence;
and besides, the treatment of Dan is purely snobbish, from start to
finish. Even Mrs. Jo, while she stands by him, is acutely conscious of
the social difference between him and her own kin. The moment he lifts
his eyes to Bess--! No: the books are quite snobbish enough, in their
way. Nat, foundling and fiddler, is permitted to marry Daisy in the end
(though, really, anybody might have married Daisy!). But Nat, though
a _parvenu_, is a milk-sop, and is quite able to say that he has
never done anything really disgraceful. The fact is that their social
distinctions, while they operate socially, are yet all moral in origin.
And this is a very “special” note: the bequest, it may well be, of
Calvin.
We’re the elect, and you’ll be damned;
Hell, like a wallet, shall be crammed
With God’s own reprobates.
The transcendental Mr. March would never have sung it; but he and his
knew something akin to those resolute discriminations.
Another point is perhaps even more interesting. There are not, I
believe, any other books in the world so blatantly full of morality--of
moral issues, and moral tests, and morals passionately abided by--and
at the same time so empty of religion. The Bible is never quoted;
almost no one goes to church; and they pray only when very young and
in extreme cases. The only religious allusion, so far as I know,
in _Little Women_, is the patronizing mention of the Madonna
provided for Amy by Aunt March’s Catholic maid. And even then, you
can see how broad-minded Mrs. March considers herself, to permit Amy
the quasi-oratory; and Amy does not attempt to disguise the fact that
she admires the picture chiefly for its artistic quality. Yet it is
only fair to remember that, in Miss Alcott’s day, people were reading,
without so much as one grain of salt, the confessions of “escaped”
nuns, and the novels of Mrs. Julia McNair Wright--and that Elsie
Dinsmore developed brain fever when her father threatened to send her
to a convent school. Perhaps Mrs. March had a right to flatter herself.
Again, as I say, these are documents.
There are many other straws to show which way the wind blows. Would
any one but Miss Alcott, for example, have allowed her chief heroine
to marry a Professor Bhaer? No modern child ever quite recovers from
the shock of it. But we must remember that, in Miss Alcott’s time,
German metaphysicians were not without honor in Concord. The breath of
reform, too, is hot upon the pages. “Temperance”--remember Charlie’s
unlucky glass of champagne, and Laurie’s promise to Meg on her
wedding-day; the festivals of the virtuous are a perpetual bath of
lemonade. “Woman Suffrage”--recall the discussions alluded to in “The
Pickwick Portfolio,” and the fate of the few scoffers in co-educational
Plumfield. The children are all passionate little Abolitionists;
and the youths are patriotic with a fervid, unfamiliar patriotism,
which touches, at its dim source, emotions that to us are almost more
prehistoric than historic.
In the minds of Miss Alcott’s world, there is still a lively distrust
of the British. They are wont to oppress their colonies, and they cheat
at croquet. Indeed, Miss Alcott’s characters look a little askance
at all foreigners--except German professors. There is no prophecy of
the Celtic Revival in their condescending charity to poor Irishwomen.
The only people, not themselves, whom they wholly respect, are the
negroes. The rich men are nearly all East India merchants, and their
money goes eventually to endow educational institutions. The young
heroes have a precocious antipathy to acquiring wealth for its own
sake. Demi would rather, he says, sweep door-mats in a publishing-house
than go into business, like “Stuffy” and his kind. “I would rather be a
door-keeper in the house of the Lord”--it would hardly over-emphasize
Demi’s so typical feeling for the sanctity of the printed page; for
the utter desirability of the publisher’s own office, where, as he
says, great men go in and out, with respect. And--to complete the
evidence--the books do not lack the note of New English austerity,
though they come by it indirectly enough. The New English literary
tradition seems to be fairly clear: either passion must be public, or,
if it is private, it must be thwarted. There is a good deal of public
passion--for philanthropy, for education, and what-not--in the books,
after all. There is no private passion at all: though the books brim
with sentiment. Miss Alcott writes as one who had never loved. It would
be difficult to find, anywhere, stories so full of love-making and so
empty of emotion.
Straws show which way the wind blows; and these straws are all borne
in the same direction. Is not this the New England on which, if not
in which, we were all brought up? Any honest New Englander--a New
Englander of the villages, I mean--will admit that the New English are
singularly ungifted for social life and manners. We suspected that long
ago, when we first read Miss Alcott, if we happened to turn, after
_Little Women_, to any one of Mrs. Ewing’s or Mrs. Molesworth’s
stories. Imagine Jo dressed, as Mrs. Molesworth’s heroines all were,
by Walter Crane! The real “old-fashioned girl” was not Polly Milton,
but Griselda, in _The Cuckoo Clock_. Polly was simply of no
fashion at all. There was some (wistful?) sense of this in us, even
then. Yet of course we admitted that, in comparison, Mrs. Molesworth
lacked plot--as Heaven knows she did! Any New Englander of the villages
is familiar, too, with the passion for “education”; a passion that,
I suspect, you can match now only in the Middle West. We all know
that bigoted scholarliness, in combination, precisely, with nasal and
ungrammatical speech, which there is no special point in flattering
with the term “idiomatic.” One or two of Mr. Churchill’s novels have
preserved to us instances of it. We are fortunate if we have come off
quite free of the superstition, so prevalent through the March family,
that a book--“any old” book--is sacred. We scoff heartily at the
_parvenu_ whose books are bound without first being printed; but
I am not sure that any pure-bred villager would not rather have sham
books than no books at all. We cannot help it. No other furniture seems
to us quite so good.
We have all been brought up, too, to be moral snobs. New England
mothers must often be put to it to find purely moral grounds for
discriminating against some of the playmates their children would
ignorantly bring home. They must often yearn to say, without
indirection, “I do not wish you to play with the butcher’s little
girl, and her being in your Sunday-school class makes no difference
whatever.” But the real New England mother never does. She must manage
it otherwise; since the only legitimate basis for her discriminations
would be some sort of proof that butchers’ little girls were apt to be
naughty. The respective fates of Nat and Dan are, I dare to say, as
accurate as if they had been recorded by the official investigators of
the Eugenics Society. The lack of religion, some one may object, is
anything but typically New English. Perhaps, a hundred years ago, it
would not have been. And we have not, to be sure, been transcendental
with impunity: we have the Calvinistic Unitarian. But the average
New England conscience has always had a more natural turn for ethics
than for pure piety. Children in Miss Alcott’s books were brought up
like ourselves, to obey their parents. It was Elsie Dinsmore, on her
Southern plantation, who (like a Presbyterian St. Rose of Lima) defied
her father for religion’s sake. Of course we all had to read about
Elsie surreptitiously. We knew that without asking. There was a good
deal of plain thinking, as well as of high thinking, in our and Miss
Alcott’s world. As for our unworldliness: we have come a long way since
Miss Alcott; yet I verily believe that, even now, almost any bounder
can take us in if he poses as a philosopher. So many have done it!
I have not done more than indicate Miss Alcott’s exceeding fidelity.
Begin recalling her for yourself, and you will agree that she gives us
social life as New Englanders, for decades, have, on the whole, known
it. The relations of parent and child, brother and sister, community
and individual, of playmates, of lovers, of citizens, are all such as
we know them. They are familiar to us, if not positively in our own
experience. Life has grown more complicated everywhere. Yet I doubt if,
even now, any New English child would instinctively call Miss Alcott’s
people underbred. We still understand their code, if we do not practise
it. New England is still something more than a convenient term for
map-makers. These be our own villages.