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IV--"THE ALCOTS"
If the dictagraph had been perfected in Bronson Alcott's time, he
might now be a great writer. As it is, he goes down as Concord's
greatest talker. "Great expecter," says Thoreau; "great feller,"
says Sam Staples, "for talkin' big...but his daughters is the
gals though--always DOIN' somethin'." Old Man Alcott, however,
was usually "doin' somethin'" within. An internal grandiloquence
made him melodious without; an exuberant, irrepressible,
visionary absorbed with philosophy AS such; to him it was a kind
of transcendental business, the profits of which supported his
inner man rather than his family. Apparently his deep interest in
spiritual physics, rather than metaphysics, gave a kind of
hypnotic mellifluous effect to his voice when he sang his
oracles; a manner something of a cross between an inside pompous
self-assertion and an outside serious benevolence. But he was
sincere and kindly intentioned in his eagerness to extend what he
could of the better influence of the philosophic world as he saw
it. In fact, there is a strong didactic streak in both father and
daughter. Louisa May seldom misses a chance to bring out the
moral of a homely virtue. The power of repetition was to them a
natural means of illustration. It is said that the elder Alcott,
while teaching school, would frequently whip himself when the
scholars misbehaved, to show that the Divine Teacher-God-was
pained when his children of the earth were bad. Quite often the
boy next to the bad boy was punished, to show how sin involved
the guiltless. And Miss Alcott is fond of working her story
around, so that she can better rub in a moral precept--and the
moral sometimes browbeats the story. But with all the elder
Alcott's vehement, impracticable, visionary qualities, there was
a sturdiness and a courage--at least, we like to think so. A
Yankee boy who would cheerfully travel in those days, when
distances were long and unmotored, as far from Connecticut as the
Carolinas, earning his way by peddling, laying down his pack to
teach school when opportunity offered, must possess a basic
sturdiness. This was apparently not very evident when he got to
preaching his idealism. An incident in Alcott's life helps
confirm a theory--not a popular one--that men accustomed to
wander around in the visionary unknown are the quickest and
strongest when occasion requires ready action of the lower
virtues. It often appears that a contemplative mind is more
capable of action than an actively objective one. Dr. Emerson
says: "It is good to know that it has been recorded of Alcott,
the benign idealist, that when the Rev. Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, heading the rush on the U.S. Court House in Boston, to
rescue a fugitive slave, looked back for his following at the
court-room door, only the apostolic philosopher was there cane in
hand." So it seems that his idealism had some substantial
virtues, even if he couldn't make a living.
The daughter does not accept the father as a prototype--she seems
to have but few of her father's qualities "in female." She
supported the family and at the same time enriched the lives of a
large part of young America, starting off many little minds with
wholesome thoughts and many little hearts with wholesome
emotions. She leaves memory-word-pictures of healthy, New England
childhood days,--pictures which are turned to with affection by
middle-aged children,--pictures, that bear a sentiment, a leaven,
that middle-aged America needs nowadays more than we care to
admit.
Concord village, itself, reminds one of that common virtue lying
at the height and root of all the Concord divinities. As one
walks down the broad-arched street, passing the white house of
Emerson--ascetic guard of a former prophetic beauty--he comes
presently beneath the old elms overspreading the Alcott house. It
seems to stand as a kind of homely but beautiful witness of
Concord's common virtue--it seems to bear a consciousness that
its past is LIVING, that the "mosses of the Old Manse" and the
hickories of Walden are not far away. Here is the home of the
"Marches"--all pervaded with the trials and happiness of the
family and telling, in a simple way, the story of "the richness
of not having." Within the house, on every side, lie remembrances
of what imagination can do for the better amusement of fortunate
children who have to do for themselves-much-needed lessons in
these days of automatic, ready-made, easy entertainment which
deaden rather than stimulate the creative faculty. And there sits
the little old spinet-piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott
children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at
the Fifth Symphony.
There is a commonplace beauty about "Orchard House"--a kind of
spiritual sturdiness underlying its quaint picturesqueness--a
kind of common triad of the New England homestead, whose
overtones tell us that there must have been something aesthetic
fibered in the Puritan severity--the self-sacrificing part of the
ideal--a value that seems to stir a deeper feeling, a stronger
sense of being nearer some perfect truth than a Gothic cathedral
or an Etruscan villa. All around you, under the Concord sky,
there still floats the influence of that human faith melody,
transcendent and sentimental enough for the enthusiast or the
cynic respectively, reflecting an innate hope--a common interest
in common things and common men--a tune the Concord bards are
ever playing, while they pound away at the immensities with a
Beethovenlike sublimity, and with, may we say, a vehemence and
perseverance--for that part of greatness is not so difficult to
emulate.
We dare not attempt to follow the philosophic raptures of Bronson
Alcott--unless you will assume that his apotheosis will show how
"practical" his vision in this world would be in the next. And so
we won't try to reconcile the music sketch of the Alcotts with
much besides the memory of that home under the elms--the Scotch
songs and the family hymns that were sung at the end of each
day--though there may be an attempt to catch something of that
common sentiment (which we have tried to suggest above)-a
strength of hope that never gives way to despair--a conviction in
the power of the common soul which, when all is said and done,
may be as typical as any theme of Concord and its
transcendentalists.
Content of IV--"THE ALCOTS" [Charles Ives' essays: Essays Before a Sonata]
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