However, Bronson’s native element was gentleness and reason, and the tools he thought of using against a stormy temper felt awkward in his hands. No matter how violently Louisa fought against him, Bronson refused to use the rod on her. And yet, when all else failed, he did resort to spanking, even though he knew that every blow he directed at her bottom was a ringing slap against his own theories of child rearing.30 The spankings did not seem to work anyway. When possible, Bronson continued his practice of letting the punishment fit the crime. If, for example, Louisa threw away her food and treated Anna unkindly, he would send her to bed without supper and without the customary bedtime story and good-night kiss, explaining that children who misused their food or failed to love their sisters must be denied access to them. On one occasion, when Louisa had pinched Anna and pulled her hair, Bronson called Louisa to him and said, “Anna says that you took hold of her hair so,” and pulled her hair. He then continued, “And, that you pinched her cheek so.” After braving the pain for a moment, Louisa’s fortitude gave way, and she admitted, “Father, I was naughty to hurt Anna so.”31 If Louisa could not comprehend the pain she gave to others, then she must experience it herself.
Much of Louisa’s misbehavior probably stemmed from sibling rivalry, and when Anna’s foot sprain made it harder for her to stand her ground, Louisa pressed her advantage. Bronson wrote, “Anna seems to fear her sister’s approaches; and so alarming has she become to her, that some discipline will be necessary to reduce Louisa to tameness.”32 The best solution, he discovered, was to keep the sisters apart for a portion of the day. Bronson started taking Anna with him to the Temple School during the day and left Louisa at home with Abba. Yet this plan had a significant drawback, since each child now moved more exclusively under the influence of the parent to whom she was already closer. By taking Anna with him to school and leaving Louisa behind, Bronson purchased some domestic peace, but only at the cost of reaffirming that Anna was his child and Louisa was her mother’s. With time, these attachments grew stronger. Once solidified, they never entirely changed.
Although he was most concerned with curbing Louisa’s excesses of temper and will, Bronson was by no means indifferent to her admirable qualities. He felt that Louisa’s understanding was more acute and her ability to imitate was better than her sister’s.33 He took early notice of the verve with which she acted out the dramas of the stories he read to her. He recorded with pride her “rapid progress in spoken language” and her extensive, choice vocabulary.34 He also wrote of her “sturdiness of purpose,” her “deep and affluent nature,” and the exuberance of her powerful character.35 He firmly believed that his dark daughter possessed “noble elements,” and he only prayed that he might be able to tame and direct those elements to an equally noble purpose.36
What is most remarkable in all of this is the aptness of Bronson’s perceptions. He saw in his infant daughter the salient character traits by which people came to know the adult Louisa May Alcott: a powerful will; a temper that she labored to control; an innate flair for the dramatic; and, of course, a superb command of language. Why did her father’s early observations of her show such prophetic accuracy? It was certainly due in part to Bronson’s gifts of perception and the earnestness with which he strove to see things in their right proportions. Yet one may perhaps argue that Bronson’s prophecies were also self-fulfilling. Louisa was certainly made to know what her parents thought of her. Being continually told that she was willful, temperamental, and gifted in all things verbal, she probably became all the more so. In describing his daughter, Bronson also cast her more firmly in the mold in which she had begun.
Bronson seems never to have thought much about the possible effects of the exaggerated self-consciousness that he was instilling in his children. It seems impossible to deny, however, that, by ceaselessly calling on Louisa and her sisters to inspect their motives and to compare their conduct to a standard of saintly perfection, Bronson conferred on them a deeply mixed blessing. On the one hand, he shaped them into acutely thoughtful, generous beings whose lives were filled with acts of kindness and charity. On the other, he imposed a regimen of moral self-criticism that only a rare person, adult or child, could assume without flinching.
Although life under the Alcott roof was sometimes turbulent, Bronson remained more or less elated with fatherhood. In January 1835, while he was recording his “Researches,” he told his own journal, “I am more interested in the domestic and parental relations than I have been at any former period. Life is fuller of serene joy and steady purpose. I am happier, have more of the faith that reposes on Providence and the love that binds me to human nature, more of the assurance of progression, than I have been wont to enjoy.” He added that his children were “objects of great delight” and the charm of his domestic life, moving before him “in the majestic dignity of human nature.” He was certain that, the more he shared his life with theirs, the more he saw that was worthy of reverence, the better he understood the words of the Gospel, “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”37
The summer of 1835 was extraordinary in every possible respect. A series of happy events began on June 24, when another daughter was born. In gratitude to his assistant, Alcott named the baby Elizabeth Peabody Alcott—the only one of his children not named after a blood relative. Elizabeth was fairer than her elder sisters and, apparently from the outset, was the model of serenity that Bronson had vainly hoped Anna and Louisa would be. Bronson immediately began a chronicle of Lizzie’s life, this time with the clear ambition of publishing his findings. No longer content with mundane titles, he gave this work the poetic name of “Psyche, or, The Breath of Childhood.” His goal this time was to give “some representation to the inner life as it is enacted in the spirit of childhood.” Believing now that the spiritual kingdom of the soul could not be approached through mere external facts, he proposed to “enter within and find of what spiritual laws these phenomena are the exponents and signs.”38 With naive eagerness, he plunged into his impossible task.
Simultaneously, the Temple School continued to gain momentum. In July, only weeks after the birth of her namesake, Elizabeth Peabody published her Record of a School, to a radiant critical reception. Reviewers called the book “strikingly original” and “one of the most interesting books” that had passed beneath their notice. The Portland Magazine ventured to call Alcott “one of the best men that ever drew the breath of life.” The Eastern Magazine averred “We are in love with this little volume,” and the Western Messenger proclaimed “There is not a man or woman in our land, but may rise wiser and better” from having read Peabody’s Record.39 Record of a School was the fairest fruit of a brilliant partnership, reaching a popular audience while setting forth an original vision of education and the life of the spirit. Peabody even dared to hope that the book’s sales might supply a financial cushion for herself and her sisters—a dream that sadly evaporated when a warehouse fire destroyed more than half the book’s first printing. Nevertheless, without precisely meaning to, Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody had combined to produce the first classic of American transcendentalism.
Alcott was now a significant figure among Boston’s intelligentsia. It was possible for him to meet almost whomever he wished, and he especially wanted to meet two men. The first was a stocky, gray-eyed Unitarian minister named Frederic Henry Hedge. A man of superior intellect, Hedge had graduated from Harvard after spending his adolescence at a German Gymnasium. Alcott admired Hedge’s article on Coleridge in the Christian Examiner, one of the first publications to herald the rise of transcendental philosophy. Likening its effect to that of inhaling “an exhilarating gas,” Hedge offered the transcendental intoxicant to those with “minds that seek with faith and hope a solution of questions which [materialism] meddles not with, questions which relate to spirit and form. Substance and life, free will and fate.”40 In later years, Hedge remained one of the handful of persons whom Alcott honored with the title “Living Men…the free men and the brave, b
y whom great principles are to be honored among us.”41 Hedge, however, was cooler in his assessment of Alcott. The portly minister placed too much value on formal academic training and logical rigor to regard Bronson as anything more than an exceptionally gifted amateur.
By contrast, Bronson’s meeting with the second man on his list was to be a pivotal moment in both his career and personal life. With Elizabeth Peabody’s assistance, he secured an interview with a former Unitarian minister whose preaching he had once admired—a thin, six-foot-tall man whose blue eyes could either assure one of their possessor’s infinite kindness or could call one to attention “like the reveille of a trumpet.”42 This second man was Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Recently turned thirty-two, Emerson had not yet published anything of lasting consequence. Nevertheless, he had been preparing himself for an unusual career. He had been born in 1803 into a minister’s family, which eventually counted eight children. Of these, a quintet of brothers lived to adulthood. Ralph, the second oldest of the five, preferred to be called Waldo. When he was not yet eight, his father died, leaving his widow scant means for raising the family. By carefully scrimping and taking in boarders, however, Ruth Emerson managed to send four of her sons to Harvard. Unlike his brothers William, Edward, and Charles Emerson, who all became lawyers, Waldo continued a long-standing family tradition by entering the ministry.43 In 1829, the same year he became the junior pastor of Boston’s Second Church, Emerson married his first wife, Ellen Tucker, with the knowledge that his bride had tuberculosis and was unlikely to live long. Eighteen months after they married, she was dead.
The following year, Emerson discovered that he no longer believed in the sacrament of Communion; if he were to find oneness with God, he would do so by seeking a higher, more spiritual relation to divinity. Having concluded that “Religion in the mind is not credulity and in the practice is not forms,” Emerson resigned from the ministry in September 1832.44 Three months later, seeking distance from death and professional disappointment, he sailed for Europe. His travels eventually led him to England, where he met Coleridge, Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill, and, most importantly for him, Thomas Carlyle, with whom he began a lifelong friendship. Emerson returned to Boston in October 1833, soon to be fired with a new confidence that, in the contemplation of nature, man could find a fit knowledge of himself and of God. “Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new world,” he wrote. “I wish to learn this language.”45
Ralph Waldo Emerson found Bronson Alcott both “a God-made priest” and a “tedious archangel.” Their friendship lasted more than forty-five years.
(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
Thanks to the inheritance left him by his first wife, Emerson commanded a modest income of twelve hundred dollars a year, which he supplemented by lecturing. In the late summer 1835, he married Lidian Jackson and purchased the house in Concord where he was to live for the rest of his life. The preceding February, in the same building that held the Temple School, Alcott had heard Emerson lecture on “The Character of Michelangelo.” “Few men among us,” Alcott wrote afterward, “take nobler views of the mission, powers, and destinies of man than Mr. E.”46 However, he had to wait until July to make Emerson’s acquaintance. He was not disappointed.
The meeting took place on a busy evening in the Alcott family’s rented rooms at 3 Somerset Court. Alcott received a number of visitors that evening, including Abba’s friend the famous novelist and reformer Lydia Maria Child. Emerson, for his part, brought along his favorite brother, Charles, and his aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, a woman of sharp wit and sprightly perceptions who exerted profound influence on her nephew’s thinking. When Emerson departed, Alcott felt that he had been in the presence of a “revelation of the divine spirit.”47 Mary Moody Emerson was “dazzled” by Alcott’s ideas, and her nephew Waldo promptly hailed him as “a wise man, simple, superior to display.”48
In October, Emerson welcomed Alcott to Concord and showed him the white, L-shaped home into which he and Lidian had moved only five weeks earlier. The house boasted a spacious front room, looking out on the intersection of the two main roads that led eastward from Concord. Emerson made this room his study, and it was likely here that the two men passed a Saturday evening and the following Sunday discoursing on “various interesting topics of an intellectual and spiritual character.” Although he thought that Emerson’s fine literary taste sometimes interfered with his metaphysical consciousness, Alcott was delighted to find that, on most subjects, they shared a “striking conformity of taste and opinion.” Emerson proudly showed Alcott his portrait of Carlyle, whom Emerson considered his ideal. Alcott also spoke again with Charles Emerson and marveled at the fact that both brothers were scholarly, “and yet the man is not lost in the scholar.” Making Lidian Emerson’s acquaintance crowned the weekend; Alcott thought the couple represented nothing less than “a new idea of life.”49 A powerful bond had been formed.
Emerson showed the full measure of his respect for his new friend when Harvard College celebrated its Phi Beta Kappa day. Emerson brought Alcott with him to mark the occasion. It was the latter’s first visit to the campus. As the members of the Phi Beta Kappa society formed into lines for their procession into the college chapel, Alcott held back, thinking it best to enter only after the formally anointed scholars had found their seats. Guessing Alcott’s sense of exclusion, Emerson took him by the arm. “We will not mince matters,” he told his guest lightly. “You are a member by right of genius.” To Alcott’s surprise and gratitude, Emerson guided him to a seat near the orator.50
Fortunately for Alcott, the thinkers who now surrounded him were, for Harvard men, unusually skeptical of the necessity of formal education. Many of them, Emerson included, had faint praise for the sterile formality of university life, holding that “Colleges and books only copy the language which the field and the work-yard made.”51 Revering the notion of a natural, intuitive genius, they received Alcott into their midst; he was the closest person to this ideal that they had ever seen. Still, the standard-bearers of the transcendentalist movement were not without their prejudices. When, in 1836, Hedge, Emerson, and a group of like thinkers were preparing to form the intellectual society eventually known as the Transcendental Club, a number of them, Hedge included, wanted to restrict membership to ministers and former ministers, a stipulation that would have excluded Alcott. For one of the first of many times, Emerson came to Alcott’s aid, asserting, “You must admit Mr. Alcott over the professional limits, for he is a God-made priest.”52
In truth, Alcott probably could have benefited from a circle of friends that demanded more in the way of broad influence and eclectic training. Even Alcott’s staunchest defenders, like his early biographer Odell Shepard, confess that he read not to absorb new ideas but to be confirmed in what he already knew.53 He had no ability whatever to set aside his own personality and enter into the lives and situations of others.54 In the same letter in which he praised Alcott as a “God-made priest,” Emerson admitted his friend’s refusal to place himself anywhere other than the center of the universe. Alcott, Emerson observed, was “so resolute to force all thought & things to become rays from his centre, that, for the most part, they come.”55 Yet Emerson also realized that Alcott’s confidence in his own authority was blinding him to a great deal of truth and beauty. For Shakespeare’s plays and any other art that one could truly enjoy only by setting aside one’s ego, Alcott had no use. All too enthusiastically, he embodied Emerson’s maxim, “Trust thyself.”
Around this time, Louisa was starting to show signs of overconfidence as well. One day, she came uncomfortably close to reducing the trio of Alcott sisters to a twosome. On a visit to the Frog Pond on Boston Common, Louisa rolled her hoop too near to the water’s edge and fell in. Seized by panic as the waters closed over her, she felt a pair of hands grasp her. A young boy had seen her going under, and he reached her in time to pull her to safety. Remembering the event more than fifty years
later, Louisa deemed only one feature of her rescuer worth recording: the boy was black. His deed left a lifelong impression. Louisa became, as she remembered, “a friend to the colored race then and there.” In Abba’s words, Louisa became “an abolitionist at the age of three.”56
Not all of her earliest permanent memories concerned such dire moments. Despite her closeness to Abba, one of her first recollections was of building towers and bridges out of the great tomes in her father’s library. Louisa also showed a precocious interest in looking into the books. She mulled over the pictures, pretended to read the pages, and scribbled in their margins. Her activities, she later observed, were an apt foreshadowing of her life to come: a life in which books were her most constant comfort; in which building castles—out of air, at least—never failed to entertain her; and in which scribbling became “a most profitable diversion.”57
While Bronson and Abba admonished their girls to resist every selfish, worldly impulse, they encouraged them to indulge every creative and intellectual one. Even as she entered adulthood, their later-born daughter May, who showed artistic talent, would be allowed to draw on her bedroom walls. However, mere bodily appetites were rigorously checked. When Louisa was not yet three, Bronson decided to reenact the Fall of Man in the children’s nursery. Humbly taking upon himself the role of God, he placed an apple atop his daughters’ wardrobe and explained that the fruit belonged to him. After prompting them to agree that it was wrong for “little girls to take things [from] their fathers or mothers,” he left the room. When he came back, he found that Anna and Louisa had acted perfectly their unsuspected roles as Adam and Eve. Only the core of the apple remained. Louisa, Anna reported, had gotten to the apple first. “I told her she must not,” said Anna, “but she did, and then we eat some of it.” Anna repented; Louisa seemed less sorry. The next day, Bronson left Louisa alone in the nursery with a second forbidden apple. Abba watched unseen as Louisa picked up the object of her desire and put it down several times, saying, “No. No, father’s. Me not take father’s apple. Naughty! Naughty!” Finally, she lost the struggle. Asked to explain the presence of another apple core, she explained, “Me could not help it! Me must have it!”58
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