Here now prepares A B A to go to England after so
long & strict acquaintance as I have had with him for seven years. I saw
him for the first time in Boston in 1835. What shall we say of him to the wise
Englishman?
He is a man of ideas, a man of faith. Expect contempt for usages which are
simply such. His social nature & his taste for beauty & magnificence
will betray him into tolerance & indulgence, even, to men & to magnificence, but a statute or a
practice he is condemned to measure by its essential wisdom or folly.
He delights in speculation, in nothing so much and is very well endowed &
weaponed for that with a copious, accurate, & elegant vocabulary; I may say
poetic; so that I know no man who speaks such good English as he, and so
inventive withal. He speaks truth truly; or the expression is adequate. Yet he
knows only this one language. He hardly needs an antagonist, - he needs only an
intelligent ear. Where he is greeted by loving & intelligence persons his
discourse soars to a wonderful height, so regular, so lucid, so playful, so new
& disdainful of all boundaries of tradition & experience, that the
hearers seem no longer to have bodies or material gravity, but almost they can
mount into the air at pleasure, or leap at one bound out of this poor solar
system.
I say this of his speech exclusively, for when he attempts to write, he loses,
in my judgment, all his power, & I derive more pain than pleasure from the
perusal. The Boston Post expressed the feeling of most readers in its rude joke
when it said of his Orphic Sayings that they ‘resembled a train of 15 railroad
cars with one passenger.’
He has moreover the greatest possession both of mind & of temper in his
discourse, so that the mastery & moderation & foresight, & yet
felicity, with which he unfolds his thoughts, are not to be surpassed. This is
of importance to such a broacher of novelties as he, & to one baited, as he
is very apt to be, by the sticklers for old books or old institutions. He takes
such delight in the exercise of this faculty, that he will willingly talk the
whole of a day, and most part of the night, & then again tomorrow, for days
successively, and if I, who am inpatient of much speaking, draw him out to walk
in the woods or fields, he will stop at the first fence & very soon propose
either to set down or to return. He seems to think society exists for this
function, & that literature is good or bad as it approaches colloquy, which
is its perfection. Poems & histories
may be good, but only as adumbrations of this; and the only true manner of
writing the literature of a nation would be to convene the best heads in the
community, set them talking, & then introduce stenographers to record what
they say. He so swiftly & naturally plants himself on the moral; sentiment
in any conversation that no man will ever get any advantage of him unless he be
a saint as Jones Very* was. Every one else Alcott will put into the wrong.
It must be conceded that it is speculation which he loves & not action.
Therefore he dissatisfies everybody & disgusts many. When the conversation
is ended, all is over. He lives tomorrow as he lived today for further
discourse, not to begin, as he seemed pledged to do, A New Celestial life. The
ladies fancied that he loved cake; very likely; most people do. Yet in the last
two years he has changed his way of living which was perhaps a little easy
& self indulgent for such a Zeno, so far as to become ascetically temperate.
He has no vocation to labor, and, although he strenuously preached it for a
time, & a made some effort to practice it, he soon found he had no genius
for it, and that it was a cruel waste of his time. It depressed his spirits
even to tears.
He is very noble in his carriage to all men, of a serene & lofty aspect
& deportment in the street & in the house, of simple but graceful &
majestic manners, having a great sense of his own worth, so that not
unwillingly will he give his hand to a merchant, though he be never so rich, -
yet with a strong love of men, and an insatiable curiosity concerning all who
are distinguished either by their intellect or by their character. He is the
most generous & hospitable of men, so that he has been munificent in his
long poverty, as Mr. Perkins in his wealth, or I should say more munificent. AS
for his hospitality, every thing in tye form of man that entered his door as a
suppliant would be made master of all the house contained. Moreover every man
who converses with him is presently made sensible that although this person has
no faculty or patience for our trivial hodiernal labors, yet if there were
a great courage , a great sacrifice, a
self immolation to be made, this & no other is the man for a crisis, - and
with such grandeur, yet such temperance in his mien.
(Such a man with no talent for household uses, none for action, and whose taste
is precisely that which is most rare & unobtainable, could not be popular,
he could never be a doll, nor a beau, nor a bestower of money or presents, nor
even a model of good daily life to propose to virtuous young persons. His
greatness consists in his attitude merely; of course he found very few to
relish or appreciate him; and very many to dispraise him.) Somebody called him
a ‘Moral Sam Patch.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Patch
Another circumstance marks this extreme love of speculation. He carries all his
opinions & all his condition & manner of life in his hand, &,
whilst you talk with him, it is plain he has put out no roots, but is an
air-plant, which can readily & without any ill consequences be transported
to any place. He is quite ready at any moment to abandon his present residence
& employment, his country, nay, his wife & children, on very short
notice, to put any new dream into practice which has bubbled up in the
effervescence of discourse. If it is so with his way of living, much more so is
it with his opinions. He never remembers. He never affirms anything today
because he has affirmed it before. You are rather astonished, having left him
in the morning with one set of opinions, to find him in the evening totally
escaped from all recollection of them, as confident of a new line of conduct,
& heedless of his old advocacy. Sauve
qui peut (run for your life!).
Another effect of this speculation is that he is preternaturally acute &
ingenious to the extent sometimes of a little jesuitry in his action. He
contemns the facts so far that his poetic representations have the effect of a
falsehood, & and those who are deceived by them ascribe the falsehood to
him: and sometimes he plays with actions unimportant to him in a manner not
justifiable to any observers but those who are competent to do justice to his
real magnanimity & conscience.
Like all virtuous persons he is destitute of the appearance of virtue, and so
shocks all [persons of decorum by the imprudence of his behavior & the
enormity of his expressions. . . .
This man in his spirit entertained all vast & magnificent problems. None
came to him so much as the most universal. He delighted in the fable of
Prometheus; in all the gigantic pictures of the most ancient mythologies; in
the Indian & Egyptian traditions, in the history of magic, of palmistry, of
temperament, of astrology, of whatever showed any impatience of custom &
limits, any impulse to dare the solution of the total problem of man’s nature,
finding in every such experiment an implied pledge & prophesy of worlds of
Science & Power yet unknown to us. He seemed often to realize the pictures
of the old Alchemists; for he stood brooding on the edge of discovery of the
Absolute from month to month, ever & anon affirming that it was within his
reach, & nowise discomforted by uniform short comings.
The other tendency of his mind was to realize a reform in the Life of Man.
This was the steadily returning, the monotonous topic of years of conversation.
This drew him to a constant intercourse with the projectors & saints of all
shades who preached or practiced any part or particle of reform, & to
continual coldness, quarrel, & non-intercourse with the scholars & men
of refinement who are usually found in the ranks of Conservatism. Very soon the
Reformers whom he had joined would disappoint him; they were pitiful
persons, & , in their coarseness
& ignorance, he began to pine again for literary society. In these oscillations
from the Scholars to the Reformers, & back again, he spent his days.
His vice, an intellectual vice, grew out of this constitution, & was that
to which almost all spiritualists have been liable, - a certain brooding on the
private thought which produces monotony in the conversation, & egotism in
the character. Steadily subjective himself, the variety of facts which seem
necessary to the health of most minds, yielded him no variety of meaning, &
he quickly quitted the play on objects, to come to the Subject, which was always the same, viz. Alcott in reference to the World of Today.
From a stray leaf I copy this: Alcott sees the law of man truer &
farther than any one ever did. Unhappily, his conversation never loses sight of
his on personality. He never quotes; he never refers; his only illustration is
his own biography. His topic yesterday is Alcott on the 17th of October; today,
Alcott on the 18th of October; tomorrow, on the 19th. So it will always be. The
poet rapt into future times or into deeps of nature admired for themselves,
lost in their laws, cheers us with a lively charm; but this noble genius
discredits genius to me. I do not any more such persons to exist. Part of this
egotism in him is a certain comparing eye which seems to sour his view of
persons prosperously place, & to make his conversation accusing &
minatory. He is not self-sufficing & serene.
* Jones Very (1813-1880) was the oldest of six children of Jones Very, a ship’s captain, and Lydia Very. He entered Harvard his sophomore year and finished second in his class in 1836, then served as a tutor in Greek while he studied at Harvard Divinity School. In April 1838, he met Emerson through Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Emerson took an instant liking to him, and wrote to Peabody that he felt ‘anew’ in his company. In the fall of 1838, college authorities decided that Very- overcome with religious enthusiasm – had gone insane, relieved him of his duties, and committed him to the McLean Asylum for a month.. Over the next year and a half Very would produce a unique body of religious poetry – all the product, he would claim, of the ‘holy spirit.’ In 1839, Emerson selected and edited these poems and saw them through the press; Very’s Essays and Poems received almost no critical attention at the time but was highly regarded by Emerson and his circle. By the mid-1840s, Very’s religious enthusiasm had waned, he moved back in with his family in Salem, filling temporarily vacant pulpits in the neighboring towns when need arose, and continued to write poetry.
The Garden
I saw the spot where our first parents dwelt;
And yet it wore to me no face of change,
For while amid its fields and groves, I felt
As if I had not sinned, nor thought it strange;
My eye seemed but a part of every sight,
My ear heard music in each sound that rose;
Each sense forever found a new delight,
Such as the spirit’s vision only knows;
Each act some new and ever-varying joy
Did my Father’s love for me prepare;
To dress the spot my ever fresh employ,
And in the glorious whole with Him to share;
No more without the flaming gate to stray,
No more for sin’s dark stain the debt of death to
pay.
………………………………………………………………..
Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), the
son of poor Connecticut farmers, was largely self-educated. He began working in
a local clock factory at age 14, and left home at 17, earning a living as an
itinerant peddler in the Carolinas and Virginia. He returned to Connecticut in
1823, and accepted several teaching positions. Soon after his marriage to
Abigail May in 1830, he began to set up experimental schools, doing away with
rote leaning and corporal punishment. The most successful of these, his Temple School
(where he was assisted by Elizabeth Peabody and Margaret Fuller),operated from 1835
to 1839; it closed amid controversies over his heretical methods and his
admission of an African-American girl. Emerson met Alcott in 1835 and soon
after called him ‘the most extraordinary man, and the highest genius of the
time.’ After the failure of his experiment in communal living, Fruitlands, in
1844, Alcott and his family barely managed to make ends meet (in the mid-1850s,
Emerson helped to raise money from local citizens to help support them). Those circumstances
were relieved in 1859, with his appointment as Concord’s superintendent of
schools. Though Emerson was sometimes irritated by Alcott’s egotism ( he ‘never
loses sight of his own personality,’ he noted) they remained close friends throughout
their lives; the day Emerson died, Bronson’s daughter Louisa May Alcott wrote
in her journal that Emerson had been ‘the nearest and dearest Friend father has
ever had.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Journals
1841-1877; Lawrence Rosenwald, editor; The Library of America, 2010;
Journal K, 1841, page 91-95/ Biographical Sketches.
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