Eden's Outcasts (10 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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
.
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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.”
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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, by whom great principles are to be honored among us.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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Mary Moody Emerson was “dazzled” by Alcott's ideas, and her nephew Waldo promptly hailed him as “a wise man, simple, superior to display.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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He had no ability whatever to set aside his own personality and enter into the lives and situations of others.
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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.”
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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.”
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