surface, a basis not to be washed away. A hundred sentences might
be quoted from him which make common observers seem superficial and
professed philosophers trivial, but which, if accepted, place the
realities of life beyond the reach of danger. He was a spiritual ascetic,
to whom the simplicity of nature was luxury enough; and this, in an age
of growing expenditure, gave him an unspeakable value. To him, life
itself was a source of joy so great that it was only weakened by diluting
it with meaner joys. This was the standard to which he constantly held
his contemporaries. “There is nowhere recorded,” he complains, “a simple
and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable
praise of God.... If the day and the night are such that you greet them
with joy, and life emits a fragrance, like flowers and sweet-scented
herbs,—is more elastic, starry, and immortal,—that is your success.” This
was Thoreau, who died unmarried at Concord, Massachusetts, May 6, 1862.
VIII
EMERSON’S “FOOT-NOTE PERSON,”—ALCOTT
EMERSON’S “FOOT-NOTE PERSON,”—ALCOTT
The phrase “foot-note person” was first introduced into our literature
by one of the most acute and original of the anonymous writers in the
“Atlantic Monthly” (July, 1906), one by whose consent I am permitted to
borrow it for my present purpose. Its originator himself suggests, as an
illustration of what he means, the close relation which existed through
life between Ralph Waldo Emerson and his less famous Concord neighbor,
Amos Bronson Alcott. The latter was doubtless regarded by the world
at large as a mere “foot-note” to his famous friend, while he yet was
doubtless the only literary contemporary to whom Emerson invariably and
candidly deferred, regarding him, indeed, as unequivocally the leading
philosophic or inspirational mind of his day. Let this “foot-note,”
then, be employed as the text for frank discussion of what was, perhaps,
the most unique and picturesque personality developed during the
Transcendental period of our American literature. Let us consider the
career of one who was born with as little that seemed advantageous in
his surroundings as was the case with Abraham Lincoln, or John Brown of
Ossawatomie, and who yet developed in the end an individuality as marked
as that of Poe or Walt Whitman.
In looking back on the intellectual group of New England, eighty years
ago, nothing is more noticeable than its birth in a circle already
cultivated, at least according to the standard of its period. Emerson,
Channing, Bryant, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes, Lowell, even Whittier,
were born into what were, for the time and after their own standard,
cultivated families. They grew up with the protection and stimulus of
parents and teachers; their early biographies offer nothing startling.
Among them appeared, one day, this student and teacher, more serene,
more absolutely individual, than any one of them. He had indeed, like
every boy born in New England, some drop of academic blood within
his traditions, but he was born in the house of his grandfather, a
poor farmer in Wolcott, Connecticut, on November 29, 1799. He went to
the most primitive of wayside schools, and was placed at fourteen as
apprentice in a clock factory; was for a few years a traveling peddler,
selling almanacs and trinkets; then wandered as far as North Carolina
and Virginia in a similar traffic; then became a half-proselyte among
Quakers in North Carolina; then a school-teacher in Connecticut; always
poor, but always thoughtful, ever gravitating towards refined society,
and finally coming under the influence of that rare and high-minded
man, the Rev. Samuel J. May, and placing himself at last in the still
more favored position of Emerson’s foot-note. When that took place, it
suddenly made itself clear to the whole Concord circle that there was not
one among them so serene, so equable, so dreamy, yet so constitutionally
a leader, as this wandering child of the desert. Of all the men known
in New England, he seemed the one least likely to have been a country
peddler.
Mr. Alcott first visited Concord, as Mr. Cabot’s memoir of Emerson tells
us, in 1835, and in 1840 came there to live. But it was as early as May
19, 1837, that Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller: “Mr. Alcott is the great
man. His book [‘Conversations on the Gospels’] does him no justice, and
I do not like to see it.... But he has more of the Godlike than any man
I have ever seen and his presence rebukes and threatens and raises. He
_is_ a teacher.... If he cannot make intelligent men feel the presence
of a superior nature, the worse for them; I can never doubt him.”[12]
It is suggested by Dr. W. T. Harris, one of the two joint biographers
of Alcott, that the description in the last chapter of Emerson’s book
styled “Nature,” finished in August, 1836, was derived from a study of
Mr. Alcott, and it is certain that there was no man among Emerson’s
contemporaries of whom thenceforward he spoke with such habitual
deference. Courteous to all, it was to Alcott alone that he seemed to
look up. Not merely Alcott’s abstract statements, but his personal
judgments, made an absolutely unique impression upon his more famous
fellow townsman. It is interesting to notice that Alcott, while staying
first in Concord, “complained of lack of simplicity in A⸺, B⸺, C⸺, and
D⸺ (late visitors from the city).” Emerson said approvingly to his son:
“Alcott is right touchstone to test them, litmus to detect the acid.”[13]
We cannot doubt that such a man’s own judgment was absolutely simple; and
such was clearly the opinion held by Emerson, who, indeed, always felt
somewhat easier when he could keep Alcott at his elbow in Concord. Their
mutual confidence reminds one of what was said long since by Dr. Samuel
Johnson, that poetry was like brown bread: those who made it in their own
houses never quite liked the taste of what they got elsewhere.
And from the very beginning, this attitude was reciprocated. At another
time during that same early period (1837), Alcott, after criticising
Emerson a little for “the picture of vulgar life that he draws with a
Shakespearian boldness,” closes with this fine tribute to the intrinsic
qualities of his newly won friend: “Observe his style; it is full of
genuine phrases from the Saxon. He loves the simple, the natural; the
thing is sharply presented, yet graced by beauty and elegance. Our
language is a fit organ, as used by him; and we hear classic English once
more from northern lips. Shakespeare, Sidney, Browne, speak again to
us, and we recognize our affinity with the fathers of English diction.
Emerson is the only instance of original style among Americans. Who
writes like him? Who can? None of his imitators, surely. The day shall
come when this man’s genius shall shine beyond the circle of his own city
and nation. Emerson’s is destined to be the high literary name of this
age.”[14]
No one up to that time, probably, had uttered an opinion of Emerson
quite so prophetic as this; it was not until four years later, in 1841,
that even Carlyle received the first volume of Emerson’s “Essays” and
said, “It is once more the voice of a man.” Yet from that moment Alcott
and Emerson became united, however inadequate their twinship might
have seemed to others. Literature sometimes, doubtless, makes strange
friendships. There is a tradition that when Browning was once introduced
to a new Chinese ambassador in London, the interpreter called attention
to the fact that they were both poets. Upon Browning’s courteously
asking how much poetry His Excellency had thus far written, he replied,
“Four volumes,” and when asked what style of poetic art he cultivated,
the answer was, “Chiefly the enigmatical.” It is reported that Browning
afterwards charitably or modestly added, “We felt doubly brothers
after that.” It may have been in a similar spirit that Emerson and his
foot-note might seem at first to have united their destinies.
Emerson at that early period saw many defects in Alcott’s style, even so
far as to say that it often reminded him of that vulgar saying, “All stir
and no go”; but twenty years later, in 1855, he magnificently vindicated
the same style, then grown more cultivated and powerful, and, indeed,
wrote thus of it: “I have been struck with the late superiority Alcott
showed. His interlocutors were all better than he: he seemed childish and
helpless, not apprehending or answering their remarks aright, and they
masters of their weapons. But by and by, when he got upon a thought,
like an Indian seizing by the mane and mounting a wild horse of the
desert, he overrode them all, and showed such mastery, and took up Time
and Nature like a boy’s marble in his hand, as to vindicate himself.”[15]
A severe test of a man’s depth of observation lies always in the analysis
he gives of his neighbor’s temperament; even granting this appreciation
to be, as is sometimes fairly claimed, a woman’s especial gift. It is a
quality which certainly marked Alcott, who once said, for instance, of
Emerson’s combination of a clear voice with a slender chest, that “some
of his organs were free, some fated.” Indeed, his power in the graphic
personal delineations of those about him was almost always visible, as
where he called Garrison “a phrenological head illuminated,” or said
of Wendell Phillips, “Many are the friends of his golden tongue.” This
quality I never felt more, perhaps, than when he once said, when dining
with me at the house of James T. Fields, in 1862, and speaking of a
writer whom I thought I had reason to know pretty well: “He has a love of
_wholeness_; in this respect far surpassing Emerson.”
It is scarcely possible, for any one who recalls from his youth the
antagonism and satire called forth by Alcott’s “sayings” in the
early “Dial,” to avoid astonishment at their more than contemptuous
reception. Take, for example, in the very first number the fine saying on
“Enthusiasm,” thus:—
“Believe, youth, that your heart is an oracle; trust her
instinctive auguries; obey her divine leadings; nor listen too
fondly to the uncertain echoes of your head. The heart is the
prophet of your soul, and ever fulfils her prophecies; reason
is her historian; but for the prophecy, the history would not
be.... Enthusiasm is the glory and hope of the world. It is the
life of sanctity and genius; it has wrought all miracles since
the beginning of time.”
Or turn to the following (entitled: “IV. Immortality”):—
“The grander my conception of being, the nobler my future.
There can be no sublimity of life without faith in the soul’s
eternity. Let me live superior to sense and custom, vigilant
alway, and I shall experience my divinity; my hope will be
infinite, nor shall the universe contain, or content me.”
Or read this (“XII. Temptation”):—
“Greater is he who is above temptation, than he who, being
tempted, overcomes. The latter but regains the state from
which the former has not fallen. He who is tempted has sinned.
Temptation is impossible to the holy.”
Or this (“LXXXVIII. Renunciation”):—
“Renounce the world, yourself; and you shall possess the world,
yourself, and God.”
These are but fragments, here and there. For myself, I would gladly see
these “Orphic Sayings” reprinted to-morrow, and watch the astonishment of
men and women who vaguely recall the derision with which they were first
greeted more than sixty years ago.
When it came to putting into action these high qualities, the stories
relating to Mr. Alcott which seem most improbable are those which are
unquestionably true, as is that of his way of dealing with a man in
distress who came to beg of him the loan of five dollars. To this Alcott
replied, after searching his pockets, that he had no such bank-note
about him, but could lend him ten dollars. This offer was accepted, and
Alcott did not even ask the borrower’s name, and could merely endure
the reproach or ridicule of his friends for six months; after which the
same man appeared and paid back the money, offering interest, which was
refused. The debtor turned out to be a well-known swindler, to whom this
trusting generosity had made a novel and manly appeal.
Truth and honesty are apt to be classed in men’s minds together, but
the power of making money, or even of returning it when loaned, is
sometimes developed imperfectly among those who are in other respects
wise and good. A curious illustration of this may be found in the
published memoirs of Mr. Alcott (i, 349), but it is quite surpassed by
the following narrative, hitherto unpublished, of a subsequent interview,
even more picturesque, and apparently with the self-same creditor. I take
it from his MS. Diary, where it appears with the formality of arrangement
and beauty of handwriting which mark that extraordinary work.
(MAMMON)
_April, 1839._ Thursday, 18th.—
Things seem strange to me out there in Time and Space. I am not
familiar with the order and usages of this realm. I am at home
in the kingdom of the Soul alone.
This day, I passed along our great thoroughfare, gliding with
Emerson’s check in my pocket, into State Street; and stepped
into one of Mammon’s temples, for some of the world’s coin,
wherewith to supply bread for this body of mine, and those who
depend upon me. But I felt dishonored by resorting to these
haunts of Idolaters. I went not among them to dig in the mines
of Lucre, nor to beg at the doors of the God. It was the hour
for business on ’Change, which was swarming with worshippers.
Bevies of devotees were consulting on appropriate rites whereby
to honor their divinity.
One of these devotees (cousin-german of my wife) accosted me,
as I was returning, and asked me to bring my oblation with
the others. Now I owed the publican a round thousand, which
he proffered me in days when his God prospered his wits; but
I had nothing for him. That small pittance which I had just
got snugly into my fob (thanks to my friend E⸺) was not for
him, but for my wife’s nurse, and came just in time to save
my wife from distrusting utterly the succors of Providence. I
told my man, that I had no money; but he might have me, if he
wanted me. No: I was bad stock in the market; and so he bid
me good-day. I left the buzz and hum of these devotees, who
represent old Nature’s relation to the Appetites and Senses,
and returned, with a sense of grateful relief, from this sally
into the Kingdom of Mammon, back to my domicile in the Soul.
There was, however, strangely developed in Alcott’s later life an epoch
of positively earning money. His first efforts at Western lectures began
in the winter of 1853-54, and he returned in February, 1854. He was to
give a series of talks on the representative minds of New England, with
the circle of followers surrounding each; the subjects of his discourse
being Webster, Greeley, Garrison, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker,
Greenough, and Emerson; the separate themes being thus stated as seven,
and the number of conversations as only six. Terms for the course were
three dollars. By his daughter Louisa’s testimony he returned late at
night with a single dollar in his pocket, this fact being thus explained
in his own language: “Many promises were not kept and travelling is
costly; but I have opened the way, and another year shall do better.”[16]
At any rate, his daughter thus pathetically described his appearance at
this interview, as her mother wrote to a friend: “He looked as cold and
thin as an icicle; but as serene as God.”[17]
There is an almost dramatic interest in transferring our imaginations
to the later visit he made westward, when he was eighty-one years old,
between October, 1880, and May, 1881. He then traveled more than five
thousand miles, lectured or held conversations at the rate of more than
one a day, Sundays included, and came back with a thousand dollars,
although more than half of his addresses had been gratuitous. For seven
years after this he was the nominal dean of the so-called “School of
Philosophy” in Concord, and for four years took an active part in its
lectures and discussions. His last written works were most appropriately
two sonnets on “Immortality,” this being the only theme remaining
inexhaustibly open.
Perhaps no two persons in the world were in their intellectual method
more antipodal—to use one of Alcott’s favorite phrases—than himself and
Parker, though each stood near to Emerson and ostensibly belonged to
the same body of thinkers. In debate, the mere presence of Parker made
Alcott seem uneasy, as if yielding just cause for Emerson’s searching
inquiry, “Of what use is genius, if its focus be a little too short or
too long?” No doubt, Mr. Alcott might well be one of those to whom such
criticism could fitly be applied, just as it has been used to discourage
the printing of Thoreau’s whole journal. Is it not possible that Alcott’s
fame may yet be brought up gradually and securely, like Thoreau’s, from
those ample and beautifully written volumes which Alcott left behind him?
Alcott doubtless often erred, at first, in the direction of inflation in
language. When the Town and Country Club was organized in Boston, and had
been, indeed, established “largely to afford a dignified occupation for
Alcott,” as Emerson said, Alcott wished to have it christened either the
Olympian Club or the Pan Club. Lowell, always quick at a joke, suggested
the substitution of “Club of Hercules” instead of “Olympian”; or else
that, inasmuch as the question of admitting women was yet undecided, “The
Patty-Pan” would be a better name. But if Alcott’s words were large,
he acted up to them. When the small assaulting party was driven back at
the last moment from the Court House doors in Boston, during the Anthony
Burns excitement, and the steps were left bare, the crowd standing back,
it was Alcott who came forward and placidly said to the ring-leader,
“Why are we not within?” On being told that the mob would not follow,
he walked calmly up the steps, alone, cane in hand. When a revolver
was fired from within, just as he had reached the highest step, and he
discovered himself to be still unsupported, he as calmly turned and
walked down without hastening a footstep. It was hard to see how Plato
or Pythagoras could have done the thing better. Again, at the outbreak
of the Civil War, when a project was formed for securing the defense of
Washington by a sudden foray into Virginia, it appears from his Diary
that he had been at the point of joining it, when it was superseded by
the swift progress of events, and so abandoned.
The power of early sectarian training is apt to tell upon the later
years even of an independent thinker, and so it was with Alcott. In
his case a life-long ideal attitude passed back into something hard to
distinguish from old-fashioned Calvinism. This was especially noticeable
at the evening receptions of the Rev. Joseph Cook, who flattered Alcott
to the highest degree and was met at least halfway by the seer himself.
Having been present at one or two of these receptions, I can testify to
the disappointment inspired in Alcott’s early friends at his seeming
willingness to be made a hero in an attitude quite alien to that of his
former self. The “New International,” for instance, recognizes that
“in later years his manner became more formal and his always nebulous
teaching apparently more orthodox.” Be this as it may, the man whom
Emerson called “the most extraordinary man and highest genius of the
time,” and of whom he says, “As pure intellect I have never seen his
equal,” such a man needed only the fact of his unprotected footsteps
under fire up the stairs of the Boston Court House to establish him in
history as a truly all-round man,—unsurpassed among those of his own
generation even in physical pluck.
IX
GEORGE BANCROFT
GEORGE BANCROFT
George Bancroft, who died in Washington, D. C., on January 17, 1891,
was born at Worcester, Massachusetts, October 3, 1800, being the son of
Aaron and Lucretia (Chandler) Bancroft. His first American ancestor in
the male line was John Bancroft, who came to this country from England,
arriving on June 12, 1632, and settling at Lynn, Massachusetts. There
is no evidence of any especial literary or scholarly tastes in his
early ancestors, although one at least among them became a subject for
literature, being the hero of one of Cotton Mather’s wonderful tales
of recovery from smallpox. Samuel Bancroft, grandfather of the great
historian, was a man in public station, and is described by Savage
as “possessing the gift of utterance in an eminent degree”; and the
historian’s father, Rev. Aaron Bancroft, D. D., was a man of mark. He was
born in 1755, fought at Lexington and Bunker Hill when almost a boy, was
graduated at Harvard College in 1778, studied for the ministry, preached
for a time in Nova Scotia, was settled at Worcester in 1788, and died
there in 1839. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, was an Arminian in theology, and in later life was President
of the American Unitarian Association. He published various occasional
sermons, a volume of doctrinal discourses, and (in 1807) a “Life of
Washington,” which was reprinted in England, and rivaled in circulation
the larger work of Marshall, which appeared at about the same time. He
thus bequeathed literary tastes to his thirteen children; and though
only one of these reached public eminence, yet three of the daughters
were prominent for many years in Worcester, being in charge of a school
for girls, and highly esteemed; while another sister was well known in
Massachusetts and at Washington as the wife of Governor (afterwards
Senator) John Davis.
George Bancroft was fitted for college at Exeter Academy, where he was
especially noted for his fine declamation. He entered Harvard College
in 1813, taking his degree in 1817. He was the classmate of four men
destined to be actively prominent in the great anti-slavery agitation a
few years later,—Samuel J. May, Samuel E. Sewall, David Lee Child, and
Robert F. Wallcut,—and of one prospective opponent of it, Caleb Cushing.
Other men of note in the class were the Rev. Stephen H. Tyng, D. D., the
Rev. Alva Woods, D. D., and Samuel A. Eliot, afterwards Treasurer of the
College and father of its recent President. Mr. Bancroft was younger than
any of these, and very probably the youngest in his class, being less
than seventeen at graduation. He was, however, second in rank, and it
happened that Edward Everett, then recently appointed Professor of Greek
Literature in that institution, had proposed that some young graduate of
promise should be sent to Germany for purposes of study, that he might
afterwards become one of the corps of Harvard instructors. Accordingly,
Bancroft was selected, and went, in the early summer of 1818, to
Göttingen. At that time the University had among its professors Eichhorn,
Heeren, and Blumenbach. He also studied at Berlin, where he knew
Schleiermacher, Savigny, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. At Jena he saw Goethe,
and at Heidelberg studied under Schlosser. This last was in the spring
of 1821, when he had already received his degree of Ph. D. at Göttingen
and was making the tour of Europe. At Paris he met Cousin, Constant, and
Alexander von Humboldt; he knew Manzoni at Milan, and Bunsen and Niebuhr
at Rome. The very mention of these names seems to throw his early career
far back into the past. Such experiences were far rarer then than now,
and the return from them into what was the village-like life of Harvard
College was a far greater change. Yet he came back at last and discharged
his obligations, in a degree, by a year’s service as Greek tutor.