Henry Beers - The Connecticut Wits and Other Essays

Oh, no: the best has been: youth is the best. So answers general, if not universal, experience. Old age doubtless has its compensations, and Cicero has summed them up ingeniously. But the “De Senectute” is, at best, a whistling to keep up one’s courage.

Upon the whole, Matthew Arnold holds the balance more evenly than either optimist or pessimist.

Spite of all impersonality, there is much interesting personal mention in these journals. Emerson’s kindly regard for his Concord friends and neighbors is quite charming. He had need of much patience with some of them, for they were queer as Dick’s proverbial hatband: transcendentalists, reformers, vegetarians, communists – the “cranks” of our contemporary slang. The figure which occurs oftenest in these memoranda is – naturally – Mr. A. Bronson Alcott. Of him Emerson speaks with unfailing reverence, mingled with a kind of tender desperation over his unworldliness and practical helplessness. A child of genius, a deep-thoughted seer, a pure visionary, living, as nearly as such a thing is possible, the life of a disembodied spirit. If earth were heaven, Alcott’s life would have been the right life. “Great Looker! Great Expecter!” says Thoreau. “His words and attitude always suppose a better state of things than other men are acquainted with… He has no venture in the present.”

Emerson is forced to allow that Alcott was no writer: talk was his medium. And even from his talk one derived few definite ideas; but its steady, melodious flow induced a kind of hypnotic condition, in which one’s own mind worked with unusual energy, without much attending to what was being said. “Alcott is like a slate-pencil which has a sponge tied to the other end, and, as the point of the pencil draws lines, the sponge follows as fast, and erases them. He talks high and wide, and expresses himself very happily, and forgets all he has said. If a skilful operator could introduce a lancet and sever the sponge, Alcott would be the prince of writers.” “I used to tell him that he had no senses… We had a good proof of it this morning. He wanted to know ‘why the boys waded in the water after pond lilies?’ Why, because they will sell in town for a cent apiece and every man and child likes to carry one to church for a cologne bottle. ‘What!’ said he, ‘have they a perfume? I did not know it.’ ”

And Ellery Channing, who had in him brave, translunary things, as Hawthorne testifies no less than Emerson; as his own poems do partly testify – those poems which were so savagely cut up by Edgar Poe. Channing, too, was no writer, no artist. His poetry was freakish, wilfully imperfect, not seldom affected, sometimes downright silly – “shamefully indolent and slovenly,” are Emerson’s words concerning it.

Margaret Fuller, too, fervid, high aspiring, dominating soul, and brilliant talker: (“such a determination to eat this huge universe,” Carlyle’s comment upon her; disagreeable, conceited woman, Lowell’s and Hawthorne’s verdict). Margaret, too, was an “illuminator but no writer.” Miss Peabody was proposing to collect anecdotes of Margaret’s youth. But Emerson throws cold water on the project: “Now, unhappily, Margaret’s writing does not justify any such research. All that can be said is that she represents an interesting hour and group in American cultivation; then that she was herself a fine, generous, inspiring, vinous, eloquent talker, who did not outlive her influence.”

This is sound criticism. None of these people could write. Thoreau and Hawthorne and Emerson, himself, were accomplished writers, and are American classics. But the collected works of Margaret Fuller, in the six-volume “Tribune Memorial Edition” are disappointing. They do not interest, are to-day virtually unreadable. A few of Channing’s most happily inspired and least capriciously expressed verses find lodgment in the anthologies. As for Alcott, he had no technique at all. For its local interest I once read his poem “New Connecticut,” which recounts his early life in the little old hilltop village of Wolcott (Alcott of Wolcott), and as a Yankee pedlar in the South. It is of a winning innocence, a more than Wordsworthian simplicity. I read it with pleasure, as the revelation of a singularly pure and disinterested character. As a literary composition, it is about on the level of Mother Goose. Here is one more extract from the journals, germane to the matter:

“In July [1852] Mr. Alcott went to Connecticut to his native town of Wolcott; found his father’s farm in possession of a stranger; found many of his cousins still poor farmers in the town; the town itself unchanged since his childhood, whilst all the country round has been changed by manufactures and railroads. Wolcott, which is a mountain, remains as it was, or with a still less population (ten thousand dollars, he said, would buy the whole town, and all the men in it) and now tributary entirely to the neighboring town of Waterbury, which is a thriving factory village. Alcott went about and invited all the people, his relatives and friends, to meet him at five o’clock at the schoolhouse, where he had once learned, on Sunday evening. Thither they all came, and he sat at the desk and gave them the story of his life. Some of the audience went away discontented, because they had not heard a sermon, as they hoped.”

Some sixty years after this entry was made, I undertook a literary pilgrimage to Wolcott in company with a friend. We crossed the mountain from Plantsville and, on the outskirts of the village, took dinner at a farmhouse, one wing of which was the little Episcopal chapel in which the Alcott family had worshipped about 1815. It had been moved over, I believe, from the centre. The centre itself was a small green, bordered by some dozen houses, with the meeting-house and horse sheds, on an airy summit overlooking a vast open prospect of farms and woods, falling away to the Naugatuck. We inquired at several of the houses, and of the few human beings met on the road, where was the birthplace of A. Bronson Alcott? In vain: none had ever heard of him, nor of an Alcott family once resident in the town: not even of Louisa Alcott, whose “Little Women” still sells its annual thousands, and a dramatized version of which was even then playing in New York to crowded houses. The prophet and his country! We finally heard rumors of a certain Spindle Hill, which was vaguely connected with traditions of the Alcott name. But it was getting late, and we availed ourselves of a passing motor car which set us some miles on our way towards the Waterbury trolley line. This baffled act of homage has seemed to me, in a way, symbolical, and I have never renewed it.

It was Emerson’s belief that the faintest promptings of the spirit are also, in the end, the practical rules of conduct. A paragraph written in 1837 has a startling application to the present state of affairs in Europe: “I think the principles of the Peace party sublime… If a nation of men is exalted to that height of morals as to refuse to fight and choose rather to suffer loss of goods and loss of life than to use violence, they must be not helpless, but most effective and great men: they would overawe their invader and make him ridiculous: they would communicate the contagion of their virtue and inoculate all mankind.”