Eden's Outcasts
Page 50
The scenes restored to Moods in 1882 make explicit what the 1864 edition left obscure: that Sylvia Yule is a heroine determined to feel, even if her forays into sensation and emotion threaten to annihilate her. Implicit in the 1882 edition of Moods is a critique of the romantic notions of the transcendentalist movement, particularly its faith in nature as a benevolent and restorative influence. Louisa believed that nature is a fitful, savage force and that sympathetic conformity with its energies can physically and psychologically shatter a human being.
The 1882 Moods is also more candid as to the precarious nature of Sylvia’s mental health, making clear that her excesses of emotion raise continual threats to her well-being. The revised text also comments more frankly on her mercurial personality, calling her “a changeful thing,” haunted by “the melancholy of a temperament too mixed to make life happy.”4 With a directness of voice only partially developed in the earlier edition, Sylvia is now free to say, “I know that I need something to lean upon, believe in, and love; for I am not steadfast, and every wind blows me about…. I ask all whom I dare to help me, yet I am not helped…. So Is tumble to and fro, longing, hoping, looking for the way to go, yet never finding it.”5
Along with the broader elaboration of Sylvia’s condition come new reflections on how her suffering might be eased. In another restored passage, Sylvia entertains Warwick, Moor, and her brother by acting a series of scenes from Shakespeare. Warwick intuits that performance and imagination are therapeutic tools for Sylvia, noting that “pent-up emotions can find a safer vent in this way than in melancholy dreams or daring action.” He also adds that less restraint, not more, is likelier to change Sylvia for the better: “Let her alone, give her plenty of liberty, and I think time and experience will make a noble woman of her.”6 He turns out to be only partly right. Sylvia needs not only freedom but a good talking to.
This she receives when, as in the original version, she seeks advice from her cousin Faith after telling Moor of her love for Warwick. Faith’s basic prescription does not change; she still believes that Sylvia should give her love to neither of the two men who have sought it. In the revised text, however, she adds a stirring injunction; Sylvia can, and must, achieve a fundamental change in character: “You have been the victim of moods, now live by principle, and hold fast by the duty you see and acknowledge.”7 The 1882 Sylvia heeds this advice with a will that the 1864 Sylvia could not have mustered. Moor returns, not to watch his beloved but erring wife slip tragically into the grave, but to discover that she has, indeed, learned to become a good and devoted wife. Now no longer marred by the moods that nearly wrecked her youth, Sylvia prepares for a future in which love and duty will go hand in hand. Despite this happy ending, it is easy to regret the reform of the younger, more impulsive Sylvia, who, for all her mental disturbance, was a good deal more fun.
In the 1864 Moods, Sylvia dies, the judgment of her doctor being that she “had lived too fast, wasted health ignorantly, and was past help.” Sylvia converts this diagnosis into a cosmic judgment, claiming, “It is I, who, by wasting life, have lost the right to live.”8 By 1882, Louisa had revised not only her novel but also her thoughts about one’s ability to overcome emotional distress. The 1882 text reflects peace of mind and a firm confidence in the power of self-control. In the first published text of Moods, the reconciliation between Mr. Yule and his daughter, while indicative of a moral rebirth on Sylvia’s part, is not sufficient to save the latter from death, and Sylvia’s father blames himself for his daughter’s downfall. In the later text, however, when Sylvia rescues her relationship with her father, she also saves herself. In the 1882 text, the sentimentalized death in the family at the end of the novel is Mr. Yule’s, not Sylvia’s. Instead of an edifying sermon, Mr. Yule’s last gift to Sylvia is a kiss, and his last words to her are a simple blessing. They have learned to communicate, not with lectures, but with love.
Bronson also began 1882 with an impressive flourish of literary creativity. Finished now with transcendental prose, he had turned his efforts to poetry. That winter, he authored forty sonnets that Louisa regarded as “remarkable.”9 In April they were published under the title Sonnets and Canzonets. As Frank Sanborn conceded in the essay that introduces the volume, Bronson had made little effort to keep up with the changing poetic styles and conventions of his time, and the verses generally reflect a certain quaintness of expression. Taken as a group, however, the poems are a fitting retrospective of Alcott’s life, and they illustrate the extent to which Bronson, in old age, had exchanged the transcendental for the personal. Virtually all of the poems are versified reminiscences, including a charming series of lyrics that tell the story of Bronson’s courtship of Abba—some from his perspective, and others from hers. In later poems, Bronson recollects many of his famous friends, including Hawthorne, “Romancer, far more coy than that coy sex” Thoreau, “Masterful of genius…and unique” and Margaret Fuller, “Sibyl rapt, whose sympathetic soul / Infused the myst’ries [her] tongue failed to tell.”10 Bronson also wrote at least one poem for each of his four daughters. Elizabeth receives honor as a “dear child of grace, so patient and so strong.”11 The grief is still fresh in “Love’s Morrow,” a poem for the recently departed May that contains the poignant couplet, “Ah! gentle May / couldst thou not stay?”12
The collection also contains a sonnet inspired by Louisa. The aspects of his famous daughter that Bronson chose to emphasize reveal much about his sense of her value as a person. The poem deals with Louisa’s nursing service, the act of self-sacrifice by which she finally secured her father’s respect. He has relatively little to say about her career as an author or about her popular success. The poem, which bears similarities to Milton’s sonnet on his blindness, is expressed in a single sentence, a sentence barely sufficient to contain the deep emotions it exudes:
When I remember with what buoyant heart,
Midst war’s alarms and woes of civil strife,
In youthful eagerness, thou didst depart,
At peril of thy safety, peace, and life,
To nurse the wounded soldier, swathe the dead—
How piercèd soon by fever’s poisoned dart,
And brought unconscious home, with wildered head—
Thou, ever since, mid languor and dull pain,
To conquer fortune, cherish kindred dear,
Hast with grave studies vexed a sprightly brain,
In myriad households kindled love and cheer;
Ne’er from thyself by Fame’s loud trump beguiled,
Sounding in this and the farther hemisphere:—
I press thee to my heart, as Duty’s faithful child.13
Louisa worried that, between his writing and his work at the Concord School of Philosophy, her father was driving himself too hard. She sometimes had to remind him that he was eighty-two. Whether or not Bronson appreciated Louisa’s fretting, he shrugged it off. In the proem to Sonnets and Canzonets, Bronson boasted that he had been “long left unwounded by the grisly foe / Who sometime pierces all with fatal shaft.”14 He continued to believe that, in his vegetarian diet and other moderate habits, he had discovered a fountain of youth. As early as 1870, he had written hopefully of living to see one hundred.15 Six years later, he took an informal inventory of his hereditary ills and was delighted to report that they were few. Given his long practice of temperance, he still saw no reason why he might not “possibly reach my hundredth birthday, and retire with the century, (1899).”16
Emerson, however, was almost gone. Some said that he had never recovered from the shock of a fire in his house in 1872. Modern retrospection has raised the likelihood of Alzheimer’s disease. Louisa and Bronson both found his decline pathetic to witness. The previous fall, a week before Bronson’s and Louisa’s birthday, a young man named Edward Bok called on Louisa in hopes that she might gain him an audience with Emerson. Although she cautioned him against expecting too much, Bok insisted that he would rather meet the great man in his weakened state than not at all
. When he and Louisa were ushered into Emerson’s study, the initial impression was by no means disappointing. Wearing a long black coat, Emerson rose from behind his desk and decorously took the younger man’s hand. However, he said nothing. Without explanation, he turned away from his guests and walked toward the window. There he stood, gazing outside as if no one were in the room with him. At length, still without a word, he walked back to his desk, bowed to Mr. Bok, and took his seat. To break the oppressive silence, Louisa asked her old friend if he had read a new book by John Ruskin. With calm surprise, Emerson turned his eyes upon her, trying to recall something. Finally, he spoke: “Did you speak to me, madam?” Louisa replied with tears.17
Even though Emerson was no longer the man they had known, neither Louisa nor Bronson abandoned him. Bronson kept up his frequent visits until the end. Despite Emerson’s illness, his parlor remained a gathering place for the intellectuals of Concord. Emerson still presided over these social functions, although he was mostly silent now.18
Early in the spring of 1882, Bronson presented his old companion with a copy of Sonnets and Canzonets, several of whose verses honored a friendship that had now endured for more than forty-five years. Recalling the literary liaison in which he had been the lesser but in some ways more devoted partner, he looked back on the times when Emerson had patiently striven, without great success, to translate Alcott’s flights of inspiration into readable form:
If I from Poesy could not all abstain,
He my poor verses oft did quite undress,
New wrapt in words my thought’s veiled nakedness
Or kindly clipt my steed’s luxuriant mane.19
Editing is not often so sensual.
Another sonnet devoted to Emerson warmly evokes memories of mornings when he and Alcott “did toss / From lip to lip, in lively colloquy, / Plato, Plotinus, or some schoolman’s gloss.”20 It also recalls leisurely swims in Walden Pond where the two men raised “deeper ripples” and concludes by imagining Emerson gazing fondly at the stars before pressing his head on his pillow. Bronson’s lines reveal the depth of the two men’s friendship, stated in words that, in another context, might even be taken as erotic. In his friendship and intellectual engagement with Emerson, Alcott found a pleasure that was both intense and entirely chaste—a pleasure that, while not sexual, could be expressed only in the language of Eros.
It seemed to Bronson that his old friend was pleased with Sonnets and Canzonets. Although he sometimes failed to recognize old friends, Emerson was still responsive to poetry, and he pleased Bronson by reading several of the sonnets aloud with emphasis and evident delight.21 Emerson himself had written nothing of consequence since his eulogy for Thoreau, some twenty springs before. At that time, Bronson had yet to taste a single publishing success, and Louisa had been grubbing along, a story here and a poem there. Now both enjoyed reputations fit to be considered alongside Emerson’s own. Emerson had always maintained that each life had its unique value. The difference in circumstance between one destiny and another was, in his view, merely costume. “Heaven,” he had written, “is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude.”22 Before his own powers fell into deep decline, Emerson had had the satisfaction of knowing that Bronson and Louisa had found their places too.
One day in mid-April, Emerson forgot his overcoat and caught a chill. On the twenty-first, he closed up his study and walked upstairs to bed. He did not come down the next day. Five days later, on a cloudless Wednesday morning, Bronson came to Emerson’s door. Ellen conducted him upstairs to the sickroom, where he went to the bedside and took the hand of his friend. Emerson ventured to ask, “You are quite well?”23 Bronson replied that he was but that it was strange to find Emerson in bed. Emerson tried to say more, but his words were broken and indistinct. After an interval, Bronson thought he should go. Before he could leave, however, the dying man indicated that he had something more to say. Bronson told Louisa what happened next, and she wrote it in her journal:
E. held [my father’s] hand, looking up at the tall, rosy old man, & saying with that smile of love that has been father’s sunshine for so many years, “You are very well. Keep so, keep so.” After Father left he called him back & grasped his hand again as if he knew it was for the last time, & the kind eyes said, “Good by [sic], my friend.”24
Bronson felt shaken as he made his way home. When Lulu met him at the door, overflowing with childish babble and joy, he felt a wave of gratitude.25
The next day, April 27, 1882, Emerson passed away. Louisa, who had once complained of having been entirely isolated in her strivings for literary glory, now freely admitted that she had not been alone. Not only had Emerson been the best friend that her father had ever had; he was also “the man who has helped me most by his life, his books, his society. I can never tell all he has been to me.”26 In a piece for The Youth’s Companion, with an openness that she had never expressed in print when Emerson was alive, Louisa now recollected how, at fifteen, she had ventured into his library and bravely asked for recommendations. Her father’s friend had patiently led her around the book-lined room, introducing her to Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe. When she expressed interest in books well beyond her comprehension, he had smiled indulgently and advised her to wait. For many of these books, Louisa confessed, she was still waiting, “because in his own I have found the truest delight, the best inspiration of my life.”27
On Sunday the thirtieth of April, Emerson was laid to rest. Louisa fashioned a golden lyre out of jonquils, which she placed in the church for the funeral. The private ceremony at Emerson’s house was followed by an impressive public service, attended by a large crowd. Bronson read the sonnet in which he had proclaimed his affection for the deceased. Then he and Louisa again made the now familiar journey to the remote corner of Sleepy Hollow. The hilltop under the pines was filling up with heroes, family members, and friends, and their world was becoming correspondingly emptied.
Yet paradoxically, with each new departure, Bronson’s stature seemed to increase. He was essentially the last man of the generation that had made Concord a center of the American intellect. He was a living link between minds and moments now past and new listeners eager to ask “What was it like?” By the same token, he had outlasted his critics. He had won followers among those who were too young to remember him either as a troublesome outcast or a ridiculed pariah, but knew him only as a kindly sage. Strangely, although he had devoted so much of his life to cultivating his inward existence, he had arguably succeeded much more notably as a friend than as a philosopher.
That summer, Bronson opened the Concord School of Philosophy for its fourth year. By Louisa’s count, he gave fifty lectures during the session, an astonishing total for a man of his years.28 Louisa arranged flowers and oak branches to adorn the school but made herself scarce when the reporters came. A highlight of the program was Emerson Day on July 22, which Louisa called “a regular scrabble.”29 Bronson’s school was now firmly established, not only having won credibility among metaphysicians, but also having gained respect from the many Concord townspeople who respected dollars more than dogmas. As Louisa wrote in her journal, “The School is pronounced a success because it brings money to the town. Even philosophers can’t do without food, beds, & washing, so all rejoice & the new craze flourishes.”30 Bronson would surely have tried to meet everyone who came if Anna had not cooled his ardor by showing him a list of some four hundred callers. Bronson Alcott, aged eighty-two, had become a profitable tourist attraction.
The acclaim had its drawbacks. Bronson, who had long hoped for public attention, was not always at ease now that it had finally come. He was besieged by reporters, who, it seemed to him, were determined to miss the true flavor of his remarks. Whenever a newspaperman came to report on one of his discourses at the school, Bronson felt himself being exposed to “misconception and frequent mortification.” Although his conversational style might have been expected to find favor with lay listeners, Bronson found it hard to
win over the gentlemen of the press, who seemed to come prepared for something more elaborate and imposing. It seemed that his “finest and subtle transitions” never made their way into the reporters’ notebooks. The full sense of his observations was invariably lost, and the resulting transcriptions were “hardly more than a medley of incoherent thoughts, a jumble of sentences.” The good news, of course, was that people were no longer calling him crazy, and the misunderstandings he now had to endure, while frustrating, had no undertones of malice. Also, he was now wise enough to know that misinformed publicity was publicity all the same. “Let it pass,” he told himself.31
When he was not busy giving conversations and chatting with the school’s attendees, Bronson had time to take a step back and look at the loveliness he had helped to create. The rustic chapel and the foliage entwined about its door were beautiful to his eyes. Someone was thoughtful enough to photograph Bronson sitting on those steps. He holds a cane, looking as if he had just arrived after walking a long distance, and his smile is one of a satisfaction beyond price. The distance he had come to sit on these steps was indeed incredible. One rarely sees an image of a man more precisely in his proper place.
A delight of Bronson’s old age was his Concord School of Philosophy. Here he sits proudly at the entrance to the Hillside Chapel.
(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
On September 30, 1882, Bronson and his one surviving sister made a pilgrimage to the old family farm at Spindle Hill. The two passed the day walking down the roads and wood-paths that had once defined their world. The fields no longer yielded any harvest. The fences had vanished, as had the simple farmhouse where Bronson had been born. Sweet fern now grew in wild abundance where he had once labored to sow the seeds of his father’s crops. The trees in the orchard had become leggy and unproductive and then had mostly died away. Bronson struggled to call up recollections of the old neighbors, their descendants now scattered. Most of the houses were abandoned. At the others, unknown faces appeared in answer to a hopeful knock. As Bronson wrote, “all [was] gone to ruin.”32