Still footloose, though now married to Abigail May, daughter of a family prominent in New England reform, Alcott eventually accepted the offer of some Philadelphia patrons to start a school in Germantown. His stay in that region was intellectually rewarding but brief. He discovered Plato and read extensively in authors who espoused views of education or developmental psychology comparable to his own. He learned of German Idealist philosophy through Cousin’s works, and his excitement only increased when he discovered Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection with Marsh’s “Preliminary Essay.” But when Alcott faced financial problems at his school, he decided to return to Boston, his wife’s home, where he had many friends of similar interests. When one of these, William Russell, editor of the American Journal of Education, told Alcott that he knew of several families interested in sending their children to a school based on his methods, Alcott moved his family north. In September 1834 he opened a “School for Human Culture” in rooms on the top floor of the Masonic Temple in Boston, the same building in which Brownson soon would commence his Boston ministry.46
At this point, Alcott already was a memorable figure, six feet tall and fair-skinned, with thin, straight reddish hair worn long over his ears and neck and already turning sandy blond (old age would make it white). His forehead was distinctively domed, and his mouth was large and accentuated by a long, thin upper lip. A few long furrows in his face—later very characteristic traits—already were evident. Most striking were his serene azure eyes, always seemingly fixed far in the distance—the “sky-blue man,” Thoreau called him.47 Alcott loved to talk more than listen, and his unusual language and diction were those of a man who spoke as the spirit moved him. In such venues as his Temple School or in his “conversations,” he was magnetic, if also frustratingly enigmatic.
With William Ellery Channing, Boston’s mayor Josiah Quincy, and Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw among its patrons, Alcott’s school began with thirty students. Some of these children, equally divided between boys and girls and ranging in age from three to twelve years, were from the city’s most prominent families. Their classroom was open and spacious, furnished with such items as Alcott believed addressed and cultivated “the imagination and heart.” On pedestals in the four corners were busts of Socrates, Shakespeare, Milton, and Sir Walter Scott. On a table in front of a large gothic window was another, of “the Image of Silence,” and on the opposite wall, Alcott’s own table, with a curved front and small desks around it for students. Behind this stood a large bookcase filled with volumes, and a black tablet for writing. A plaster cast of Christ was set into the bookcase and “made to appear to the scholars to be just over the teacher’s head,” and a bust of Plato sat atop it. Alcott’s assistant occupied a table near the entrance, upon which was a small figure of Atlas with the weight of the world upon his shoulders. Pictures and maps adorned the walls. The students’ desks, placed around the room facing the wall (so that “no scholar need look at another” as he or she worked), had room for books, and black tablets for writing hung over them that could be swung away when other activities beckoned. A sofa near Alcott’s desk, for the accommodation of visitors, completed the furnishings.48
The mental culture practiced at the Temple School was as novel as the room’s physical space. All instruction and discipline had one end: to teach the children that they were spiritual beings closely connected to God. To this end, Alcott spent much time in Socratic dialogue, discussions initiated by either his own questions or readings from literature. He also developed the children’s self-expression, both written and oral, believing that that was how they realized and shared their inherent divinity. Students kept journals in which they recorded not only their daily observations but also their internal thoughts. Grammar and spelling were less important than the flow of each student’s thoughts. The parents of these scholars were also assured, however, that the instructor gave due attention to the basic skills children needed.49
Discipline was not neglected, for Alcott sought to mold not only each student’s conscience but also his or her sense of social obligation. Thus, although he did not spare the rod, he also doled out more subtle, and unusual, punishment. For example, each day he appointed a student superintendent to oversee the conduct of the class. When the superintendent of the day observed an infraction, she reported it to the entire group, who then deliberated on the proper punishment, reinforcing a group sense of right action. If physical punishment had to be administered, with a ferule, Alcott did so outside the room, away from the other students, and only after he had clearly explained the infraction. On some occasions he made offenders administer the punishment to him in front of the class, which brought even the oldest scholars to tears because of their love and respect for their teacher. Particularly obstreperous behavior led to the student’s removal from the class when they were enjoying a group activity such as story reading; as an alternative, Alcott simply stopped the activity so that none of the group could enjoy it, thereby instilling the notion that unacceptable behavior affected all who came into contact with it.
Alcott was fortunate to have as his assistant Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Thirty years old and an experienced schoolteacher, she used her many contacts to forward her employer’s reputation among Boston’s luminaries. She had served as an assistant on Russell’s American Journal of Education and was well known in Boston’s reform circles. At first skeptical of some of Alcott’s innovations, she finally was won over, and early in her tenure she began to keep a journal of the school’s activities, with an eye to publishing it in order to make Alcott’s reforms better known. Her Record of a School appeared in July 1835.
With its publication Alcott’s innovative educational methods—in particular, his emphasis on the cultivation of the child’s spiritual nature—became more widely known, drawing both praise and skepticism and, in some quarters, outright hostility. Channing, long Alcott’s supporter, began to worry that Alcott’s dialogues were too inflexible, so that students merely recited what he wanted to hear without having felt the power of God within. Channing also questioned Alcott’s emphasis on self-analysis, concerned that too much introspection might inhibit rather than encourage a youngster’s spiritual awakening. 50 Other critics were more severe. In the American Annals of Education and Instruction, William C. Woodbridge, once Alcott’s supporter, called the Record of a School a “mingled mass of truth and error” that revealed Alcott’s “strained interpretation of religion.”51 Ominously, the school began to lose income, and Peabody began her second year without yet having received any salary for her first. The new term found only a handful of new students enrolled. Alcott was unbowed, confident enough about the school’s future to hire Elizabeth’s sister, Mary, as another assistant, with responsibilities for the French language.
In the new term Alcott extended his conversations and initiated discussion of the life of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels, an exercise he hoped would expedite the students’ awareness of their inward divinity. Again, Peabody kept a detailed record of the dialogues, which captured Alcott’s habit of making apparent the sort of responses he expected. But his ideas still garnered respect, and the public was enough interested in Record of a School that he had Peabody issue a second edition in 1836, albeit with her clarification of some of the pedagogical methods to which more critical readers had objected.
In the interim Alcott made his way among the young Unitarians beginning to turn their denomination upside down. He was well enough known to receive an invitation to the second meeting of the Transcendental Club when it met at Ripley’s, and he hosted the next meeting, at which the group discussed “American Genius—the causes which hinder its growth, and give us no first rate productions.” 52 Alcott took these opportunities to publicize his students’ remarkable spiritual enlightenment, and he went forward with plans to issue another volume of his dialogues. But he misjudged the suspicion that had arisen about his methods, particularly after people began to associate him with Transcendentalism.
&
nbsp; Elizabeth Peabody had had a premonition that the public was not ready for an inside view of Alcott’s tutorial in the Gospels, particularly his open discussion of physiological facts such as the Virgin birth. She registered her concerns around the same time that she tendered her resignation, in the summer of 1836, not so much over any disapproval of Alcott’s theories, but because he had never paid her for her work. To Alcott’s credit, he heard her objections. Naive in such matters, he took her advice only to a point: he excised potentially problematic passages from the main text but placed them in an appendix, rendering them more conspicuous. Confident in his school’s future, he hired twenty-six-year-old Margaret Fuller, a remarkable young woman making her way in Transcendentalist circles, as Peabody’s replacement and set her to record a second volume of his Conversations.
This compendium appeared at the beginning of the spring term in February 1837, and all hell broke loose. Alcott was roasted in the popular press. In the Boston Daily Advertiser, Nathan Hale objected to his “flippant and off hand conversation” about such serious topics as the Virgin birth and circumcision, and urged him to close his school.53 Joseph T. Buckingham, the testy editor of the Boston Daily Courier, was even less restrained. He had never seen “a more indecent and obscene book,” and would say nothing of its “absurdity.”54 Norton, still exercised about the controversy with his ex-student Ripley, was apoplectic. He pronounced the book “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene.”55
Alcott’s friends tried to buoy his spirits. Emerson defended him publicly in the Courier (the Daily Advertiser would not print his letter), asking readers to give Alcott a fair hearing and not prejudge his book. Emerson also wrote him directly, confiding that he hated “to have all the little dogs barking at you, for you have something better to do than attend to them.” But the public reaction was understandable, he added, for “every beast must do after his kind, and why not these.”56 Despite such support, the controversy ended Alcott’s noble experiment. Over the next year the student population dwindled to the single digits, and he closed the school in June 1837.
Subsequently, Alcott gravitated to Emerson’s orbit in search of support for his ideas, but it was only partially forthcoming. Having devoted much time to the education of his young daughters, for example, Alcott started a long manuscript in which he detailed their spiritual and social development. He let Emerson read it, but Emerson found it unfocused and not meriting publication. Adding fuel to the fire, Alcott’s friend William Ellery Channing weighed in on his pedagogy and objected to Alcott’s identification of the human soul with divinity, a cardinal doctrine at the Temple School. Alcott’s depression only increased when he realized the dire financial straits in which he and his family found themselves. By the late 1830s, his educational experiment in shambles but his faith in Idealist philosophy unshaken, he refocused his agenda.
At the same time as the Temple School began to draw criticism, Ralph Waldo Emerson published, anonymously, a small book called Nature. It was only his second publication, following a Historical Discourse delivered the previous year at the town of Concord’s bicentennial. Nature was his first published contribution to the discourse of emergent Transcendentalism, several years after people like Brownson, Ripley, and Hedge had made their debuts in print with lengthy essays in which they announced their allegiance to European Idealism as well as to a program of radical social reform. The son of William Emerson, a prominent Unitarian clergyman who officiated over Boston’s historic First Church, Waldo had graduated from Harvard in 1821 but taken several years before deciding to follow in his parent’s footsteps. He was ordained in Boston’s Second Church in March 1829 and later that year married Ellen Tucker. What was to have been the beginning of a happy personal life, though, quickly turned tragic. Two years after their wedding, Ellen died of tuberculosis.
Even before her death Emerson had serious doubts about some points of Unitarian doctrine, precipitating his resignation from the ministry in 1832. There followed a trip to Europe, and on his return Emerson decided to make a career as a lecturer, the first Transcendentalist to do so. Tragedy struck again, in 1835, with the sudden death of his brother Edward, followed the next year by the death of his brother Charles. Emerson’s only glimmer of happiness came with marriage to Lidian Jackson, even though he knew (and admitted) that she could never be to him what Ellen had.
During these troubled years Emerson joined his cousin George Ripley, Brownson, Alcott, and Hedge in their criticism of Unitarianism. Like them, he rebelled against the empiricism on which it was based, and he welcomed, via Marsh, Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection. Moreover, on his European sojourn he had made the acquaintance not only of William Wordsworth but of the Scots essayist, historian, and reformer Thomas Carlyle, another popularizer of German thought. The two got along well, and by 1835 Emerson began to function as Carlyle’s American literary agent, expediting the publication of his burlesque philosophical treatise/spiritual autobiography, Sartor Resartus, in the same year in which Nature appeared.
Emerson, however, was less versed in German philosophy and theology than other charter members of the club, for his Idealism originated more in a long-term interest in Plato and Neoplatonism, an immersion in Goethe (whom he had read in German since the 1820s), the mediation of British writers like Carlyle and Coleridge, and Sampson Reed’s redaction of Swedenborgian thought. Emerson knew of Cousin, too, through the translations of the early 1830s; and he learned of Schleiermacher, Herder, and de Wette from the pages of The Christian Examiner as well as from his friends and classmates. Despite coming to Transcendentalism by a different route than others in his cohort, he soon began to contribute, through his writings as well as his personal example, to the group’s varied intellectual program.
Emerson’s difference from many of his peers was apparent from the outset, however, and did not go unnoticed. When Brownson reviewed Nature in the Boston Reformer, for example, he noted presciently that the book was “aesthetical rather than philosophical.” Why then was Emerson of interest to Brownson and his friends? Because his little book touched “some of the gravest problems in metaphysical science,” Brownson wrote, “and perhaps may be called philosophy in its poetical aspect.”57 The conservative Unitarian Francis Bowen, in a critical review in The Christian Examiner, concurred. “What novelty there is in this work,” he wrote, arose “not from the choice or distinction of subject, but from the manner of treatment.”58 Elizabeth Peabody perhaps put it best: “We have said that ‘Nature’ is a poem; but it is written in prose.” 59
Emerson’s distinctive “style” in Nature, this “philosophy in its poetical aspect,” troubled many reviewers, for they attributed it to the influence of Continental philosophers and theologians, particularly those from Germany, whose verbal extravagance they suspected or despised. Ironically, then, Emerson, the Transcendentalist with the least firsthand knowledge of German philosophy, was tarred with the same brush. Bowen, for example, noted that although there was much worth in Emerson’s little book, its effect was “injured by occasional vagueness of expression, and by a vein of mysticism that pervades the writer’s whole course of thought.” To peruse this book, he added, “is often painful, the thoughts excited are frequently bewildering, and the results to which they lead us, uncertain and obscure,” problems that arose from Emerson’s supposed infatuation with German language and thought.60
What did Emerson intend with his small book? When he sent Carlyle a copy within a week of publication, he described it self-deprecatingly as “an entering wedge, I hope, for something more worthy and significant.”61 Indeed, almost until Nature’s publication Emerson had considered it part of a larger whole. In June 1836 he wrote Hedge that he had “in solid prose” a chapter, which he called “Nature,” and he wished to write another chapter “called ‘Spirit.’”62 In early September he decided to issue Nature as it stood.
Some critics lamented what they regarded as the book’s lack of structure and coherence. The conservative Un
itarian Samuel Kirkland Lathrop noted that in Emerson’s writings one found “beautiful thoughts, beautiful passages, but no well-rounded, comprehensive philosophy of religion or life,” no “substantial basis of faith.”63 Despite such criticism, though, Emerson clearly had a plan for his book: he deployed philosophical Idealism to open peoples’ eyes to their spiritual inheritance. Hence, his pervasive metaphors of sight and blindness, which received their archetypal expression in the famous “transparent eye-ball” passage in Nature’s opening pages. There Emerson described the merger of the “Me” and the “Not-Me” (terms Carlyle used in Sartor Resartus, derived from Fries) in an ecstatic experience: “Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Emerson began with the observation that “our age is retrospective,” for, while “the foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face,” rather than having “an original relation to the universe,” contemporaries saw “through their eyes.” As a result, we live in a fallen world, even as “the ruin or blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye.” The book ends with the promise that if man views nature rightly, he will inhabit a new world, which “he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.”64
Another organizing metaphor is that of the doctrine of correspondence, an attestation of Swedenborg’s continuing influence on Emerson a decade after he had read Sampson Reed’s Observations on the Growth of the Mind. Swedenborg’s thought is most obvious in the fourth section of the book, where Emerson offers the following propositions to explain one of the most important uses of nature, that of “Language.”
1. Words are signs of natural facts.
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