It is impossible to know the extent of the contact that took place between Louisa and Emerson. However, Louisa received some memorable lessons during this time from Anna’s teacher Henry Thoreau. Since graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau, now twenty-two years old, was taking the first steps in his career as a writer. The previous September, he and John had gone on the boating excursion that was to supply the basis for Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. In addition to teaching at the academy, Thoreau was trying to become a poet and was exchanging manuscripts with Emerson. He was also at work on some pieces, both poetry and prose, that he hoped might be included in the first issue of a literary journal on which Emerson and Margaret Fuller were collaborating. Nevertheless, he found time to lead bands of local children through the woods and meadows near the town, pausing to point out the native birds and flora, which he knew like members of his family. When the season was right, Thoreau transformed his young followers into a crew of blackberry and huckleberry hunters, armed with empty baskets and a zeal for discovery.
Thoreau was not a handsome man. More than twenty years later, when she transformed Thoreau into the fictitious Mr. Warwick in her novel Moods, Louisa made note of his “massive head, covered with waves of ruddy brown hair, gray eyes that seemed to pierce through all disguises, [and] an eminent nose.” But the ungainly features expressed a rare character; over the years, Louisa came to discern “power, intellect, and courage” stamped upon his face and figure.10 Thoreau was not an inexhaustible talker like Louisa’s father, but he put meanings into silences that others struggled to put into words. In the book about his river journey with his brother, Thoreau would later write, “The language of Friendship is not words, but meanings. It is an intelligence above language.”11 This intelligence, along with knowledge of nature, he shared with Louisa and her friends.
Unlike Emerson and Louisa’s father, who appreciated nature principally as a collection of visible symbols of moral truth and the human spirit, Thoreau took a scientific and technical interest in nature. Still, he knew how to capture the imaginations of a young audience, and he fueled the fantasies of Concord’s children by telling them that tanagers set the woods afire and by likening goldenrod to the banners of medieval crusaders. An anecdote much favored among Alcott enthusiasts tells of how Thoreau called young Louisa’s attention to a cobweb and told her it was a handkerchief dropped by a fairy. He sometimes invited Louisa and the other children onto his boat and took them for cruises across the placid river. When the mood struck him, he played a flute, choosing a melody to harmonize with his feelings or the beauties of the landscape. During the first summer that the Alcotts spent in Concord, Thoreau wrote entries in his journal that might well have been apropos of his journeys with the children: “Any melodious sound apprises me of the infinite wealth of God.” “Floating in still water, I too am a planet, and have my orbit, in space, and am no longer a satellite of the earth.” On their excursions, Louisa likely felt in her heart what her mentor wrote one August day: “Surely joy is the condition of life.”12
Never a model of feminine propriety, Louisa climbed elm trees, clambered over fences, and readily accepted dares from neighborhood boys to leap from the highest beam of a nearby barn. Her exuberant rambles contrasted with the discipline on which her father insisted at home, where a stimulating spirit of inquiry existed side by side with a solemn sense of duty. Always determined to make learning imaginative, Bronson contorted his body to represent letters of the alphabet for the edification of his daughters. With his silvery voice, he read aloud from the Bible and The Pilgrim’s Progress. However, he promptly withheld enjoyment if the girls had not faithfully prepared their lessons. Still persuaded that the most effective punishment lay in knowing that one had caused another person to suffer, he would sometimes go without his own dinner if his daughters had not satisfied his expectations.
Louisa’s life was already assuming the contours that were to characterize it for the next twenty-five years or more: an almost impossibly dissonant combination of superior intellectual opportunities and frightful worldly deprivation. A typical day for Louisa began with a trip to Emerson’s house and might continue with a nature walk with Thoreau, only to end with a homeward trudge to a cottage where there was sometimes insufficient food, where the father wore the mantle of a social outcast, and where the mother tried to bear up under the weight of mounting debts and disappointments. Louisa’s life was in one sense lavishly wealthy. In another, it was perilously poor.
Bronson had not ceased trying to check Louisa’s discordant impulses, and he still did not fully accept the fact that she was fundamentally not like him. A poem that he wrote for her on her birthday in Concord encapsulates the struggle he perceived in her: “Two Passions strong divide our Life / Meek gentle Love, or boisterous strife.”13 It was all too clear which passion appeared to be winning. That same year, Emerson gave a lecture titled “Education,” which offered some advice that Bronson might have profitably heeded in his relations with Louisa. Nature, Emerson said, had no love for repetitions. Nevertheless, he added, “a low self-love in the parent desires that his child should repeat his character…an expectation which the child, if justice is done him, will nobly disappoint.” The father who insisted on re-creating himself through his offspring was unconsciously doing his utmost “to defeat [the child’s] proper promise and produce the ordinary and mediocre.”14 Alcott may well have heard this lecture. Very likely, he supported its sentiments. But to agree philosophically is easier than to act accordingly.
As Louisa’s awareness of both good and evil broadened and deepened, her father chopped wood and cut straight furrows through the uneven ground. When he was not working for himself, he hired himself out to neighbors. In good weather, he was always at work outdoors. On inclement days, he wrote or found some task in his modest woodshop. The children went to school in the village, while he and Abba did “all that farmers and farmers’ wives find necessary.” By the first day of summer, he boasted of a fine growing crop of vegetables, more than enough to supply the family. He felt that his labors were giving him a primeval dignity, and that God had been kind, not severe, when He had sent Adam “into the fields to earn his Bread in the sweat of his face.”15 But Alcott’s hiatus from moral teaching was already over. He told his mother that he meant to go back to a classroom as soon as the public realized the good he could do them. In the meantime, a handful of young men and women found their way to his cottage for conversation and enlightenment.16
For now, though, the visual poetry of his new rustic life enchanted him. “My garden shall be my poem,” he rhapsodized. “My spade and hoe the instruments of my wit and skill, my family and the Soul, my world of reality and faerie.”17 Self-consciously, Bronson was striving to epitomize the spirit that people were learning to call “transcendental”: agrarian, antiurban, and individualistic to the point of indifference to the outside world. William Ellery Channing, from whom much of the new consciousness had first emanated, responded enthusiastically to Alcott’s bucolic retreat, which realized one of the minister’s most dearly held ideas: the union of labor and culture. In Channing’s judgment, Alcott, “hiring himself out for day-labor and at the same time living in a region of high thought” was very likely the most interesting sight in Massachusetts. “Orpheus at the plough,” Channing added, “is after my own heart.”18 Emerson also quietly applauded Alcott’s agrarian impulse. He wrote in his journal, “I see with great pleasure this growing inclination in all persons who aim to speak the truth, for manual labor and the farm.”19 Curiously, moving to Concord and taking up the implements of a farmer were the most popular steps Bronson had taken in years.20
Ironically, one of Alcott’s severest critics was the other man of his generation who, though a minor philosopher in his own right, was to be chiefly remembered for the writings of his famous offspring. It was around this time that Emerson introduced Alcott to Henry James Sr., who would father not only the renowned novelist but al
so the great psychologist William James and the incandescent diarist Alice James. The son of one of the wealthiest men in New York State, James possessed the financial independence that would have been required to render Alcott’s disdain for commerce respectable. James was an amputee, having lost a leg in a tragic childhood accident. Whereas Alcott never fully accepted the existence of evil, James maintained that evil was endemic in the world and experiencing it essential to the formation of moral character. They may have differed most profoundly, however, as to the value of educating women. Alcott favored the strongest possible cultivation of the feminine mind. James, to the contrary, utterly dismissed the appropriateness of educating women. He once wrote, “The very virtue of woman…disqualifies her from all didactic dignity. Learning and wisdom do not become her.”21 Given the two men’s philosophic differences, it is not surprising that their discussions were often volatile. In one of their early conversations, Alcott casually asserted that, like Jesus, he had never sinned. Astonished, James inquired whether Alcott had ever proclaimed, “I am the Resurrection and the Life.” “Yes, often,” came the calm reply. James fired back, “And has anyone ever believed you?”22
The credibility that Alcott most desired, however, was not as a saint but as a writer. During that first spring in Concord, Alcott, Emerson, Fuller, and fellow transcendentalist George Ripley were deeply absorbed in creating a magazine intended, as Fuller and Emerson were to say in its first issue, “to reprobate that rigor of our conventions of religion and education which is turning us to stone, which renounces hope, which looks only backward, which asks only such a future as the past.”23 The magazine was to stand for an unkempt but noble love of truth and a dedication to the beauties of the unseen. It would propose an antidote to narrowness.
Alcott’s first contribution to the proposed journal was its name, The Dial. Just as a sundial marked the movement of the sun, Alcott thought, the soul was a dial reflecting the greater movements of the spirit.24 This, too, was to be the work of the new magazine: to offer a visible index of the mightier and more mysterious motions of the heart and mind. Throughout the spring of 1840, Alcott toiled over his contribution to the maiden issue: fifty prophetic, aphoristic observations on topics ranging from prudence to Prometheus. He gave his work the grand title of “Orphic Sayings.” Recognizing that some of his previous work had failed because of its verbosity, Alcott limited each of his observations to a single paragraph, sometimes even to a single sentence. By doing so, he evidently hoped to achieve the energetic concentration that distinguished Emerson’s best prose.
Not long after he had settled in Concord, Alcott proudly handed the manuscript of his sayings to Emerson. At a few points, Emerson found incisive, well-crafted observations; at many more places, however, he cringed. With foreboding, he wrote to Fuller, “You will not like Alcott’s papers;…I do not like them;…Mr. Ripley will not.” As a whole Alcott’s sayings were “open to the same fault as his former papers.” Instead of boiling his thought down to its refined essence, Alcott had strayed into “cold vague generalities.” In contrast to the other contributions to the first issue of The Dial, all of which appeared either anonymously or under initials, Emerson thought it essential for “Orphic Sayings” to be printed with the author’s name. “Give them his name,” Emerson suggested, “& those who know him will have his voice in their ear whilst they read, & the sayings will have a majestical sound.” Despite his reservations, Emerson recommended publishing Alcott’s aphorisms “pretty much as they stand.”25 Abba, at least, was confident. She wrote to her brother Samuel that Bronson had been writing a series of “Delphic letters” that, if people would only read them, would do “more for their souls than Paul or Pliny.”26
Name and sound, however, were not enough to rescue “Orphic Sayings.” At their best, they have a kindly, hortatory quality, encouraging readers to make themselves into better, spiritually larger beings. For instance, Alcott writes, “Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you. Your first duty is self-culture, self-exaltation: you may not violate this high trust. Your self is sacred, profane it not…. Your influence on others is commensurate with the strength that you have found in yourself.”27 He is also memorable, when, in a saying he later added to the original fifty, he speaks of one of the things he knew best, the liberating nature of the ideal teacher: “The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples.”28 Read with patience, Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” speak confidently of the nobility of the soul, the ultimate unreality of death, and the vital, miraculous omnipresence of God.
However, far too many of Alcott’s pronouncements are turgid and obscure, heavy and ponderous. His musings on “Aspiration” read like a vocabulary bee gone mad: “The insatiableness of her desires is an augury of the soul’s eternity…. Intact, aspirant, she feels the appulses of both spiritual and material things; she would appropriate the realm she inherits by virtue of her incarnation: infinite appetencies direct all her members.”29 Still more baffling was his one-sentence statement on “Calculus”:
We need, what Genius is unconsciously seeking, and, by some daring generalization of the universe, shall assuredly discover, a spiritual calculus, a novum organon, whereby nature shall be divined in the soul, the soul in God, matter in spirit, polarity resolved into unity; and that power which pulsates in all life, animates and builds all organizations, shall manifest itself as one universal deific energy present alike at the outskirts and centre of the universe, whose centre and circumference are one; omniscient, omnipotent, self-subsisting, uncontained, yet containing all things in the unbroken synthesis of its being.30
The contemporary critics chose to bypass the uplifting message of “Orphic Sayings” and to concentrate on their pompous hilarities. The Boston Transcript published a parody titled “Gastric Sayings.” The Boston Post printed a letter that likened Alcott’s work to “a train of fifteen railroad cars with one passenger.” Emerson’s own brother William complained that the magazine had been marred by “Alcott’s unintelligibles.”31 The Dial as a whole was off to a shaky beginning; Emerson wrote to Carlyle that the first issue, a “poor little thing,” had been “honoured by attacks from almost every newspaper & magazine.”32 But Alcott suffered most of all. The inclusion of his full name, far from improving the reception given his “Sayings,” made him the most identifiable target of ridicule. Undaunted, Alcott continued to turn out Orphic Sayings for inclusion in The Dial, and Emerson and Fuller bravely printed them. Numbering one hundred altogether, they stand as an incarnation of transcendentalism at its most ebullient and its most fatuous. They so severely damaged Alcott’s reputation as a writer that no editor went near another important piece of his writing for a quarter century. In 1842, the publisher of Conversations with Children on the Gospels sold 750 copies of that book, at five cents a pound, for trunk lining.33
Despite such setbacks, Alcott had the comfort of knowing that country life was bringing health and happiness to his children. Fresh air and open space seemed to enliven the high-spirited Louisa more than ever. At the age of seven, she was, in her father’s view, a “noisy little girl” who made “house and garden, barn and field, ring with her footsteps.” Bronson sometimes had to ask Louisa to “step lightly, and speak soft, about the house” and to remind her that her “sober Father, and other grown people,” cherished quiet. Still, he marveled at the way the little girl and her landscape appeared to harmonize. The “Garden, Flowers, Fields, Woods, and Brooks” all seemed able “to see and answer the voice and footsteps, the eye and hand” of the child who wandered past them. While she was in Boston visiting Abba’s father, even the hens and chicks seemed to miss her. Bronson wrote, “[W]e find how much we love now we are separated.”34
On July 26, the same month that the first Dial saw daylight, a fourth daughter joined the family. The “quiet little lady,” whom her parents named Abigail May Alcott, was bo
rn at dawn on a Sunday morning. In her childhood, people called this youngest daughter Abby. When she was old enough to choose for herself, she preferred to be known by her middle name. Bronson may have felt a twinge of disappointment as he faced the likelihood that he was destined never to have a son. Nevertheless, he wrote to Sam May that he would “joyfully acquiesce” in the Providence that had given him “daughters of Love instead of sons of Light.” Fully aware that responsibility for the fate of reform in America would fall on both genders, he welcomed the chance to “rear Women for the new order of things.”35 Despite this revolutionary sentiment, Bronson decided not to keep a journal chronicling the new baby’s development. Unlike her three older sisters, Abby did not live her early childhood as the subject of an experiment. Louisa later called her “the flower of the family” and maintained that her youngest sister had been born under a lucky star.
Far more than his infant daughter, Bronson was in need of such a star. His efforts as a day laborer could not meet the needs of a family of six. Yet he was far from idle. Chopping wood for others and tending his own vegetables occupied him more than ten hours each day. Remarkably, he also managed a handful of speaking engagements. What stood between Bronson Alcott and solvency was not a want of effort but the utter strictness of his conscience. He was more firmly committed than ever to refusing any work that offended his moral principles. Abba observed her husband’s rigidity with mounting concern. She wrote to her brother Samuel:
No one will employ him in his way; he cannot work in theirs, if he thereby involve his conscience. He is so resolved in this matter that I believe he will starve and freeze before he will sacrifice principle to comfort. In this, I and my children are necessarily implicated.36
Eden's Outcasts Page 12