Chapter XXIV: A Half-Century of American Literature 367 (2)

When, in 1834, the historian Jared Sparks undertook the publication of a “Library of American Biography,” he included in the very first volume—with a literary instinct most creditable to one so absorbed in the severer paths of history—a memoir of Charles Brockden Brown by W. H. Prescott. It was an appropriate tribute to the first imaginative writer worth mentioning in America,—he having been born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 17, 1771, and died there of consumption on February 22, 1810,—and to one who was our first professional author. He was also the first to exert a positive influence, across the Atlantic, upon British literature, laying thus early a few modest strands towards an ocean-cable of thought. As a result of this influence, concealed doors opened in lonely houses, fatal epidemics laid cities desolate, secret plots were organized, unknown persons from foreign lands died in garrets, usually leaving large sums of money; the honor of innocent women was constantly endangered, though usually saved in time; people were subject to somnambulism and general frenzy; vast conspiracies were organized with small aims and smaller results. His books, published between 1798 and 1801, made their way across the ocean with a promptness that now seems inexplicable; and Mrs. Shelley, in her novel of “The Last Man,” founds her whole description of an epidemic which nearly destroyed the human race, on “the masterly delineations of the author of ‘Arthur Mervyn.’”

Shelley himself recognized his obligations to Brown; and it is to be remembered that Brown himself was evidently familiar with Godwin’s philosophical writings, and that he may have drawn from those of Mary Wollstonecraft his advanced views as to the rights and education of women, a subject on which his first book, “Alcuin,” offered the earliest American protest. Undoubtedly his books furnished a point of transition from Mrs. Radcliffe, of whom he disapproved, to the modern novel of realism, although his immediate influence and, so to speak, his stage properties, can hardly be traced later than the remarkable tale, also by a Philadelphian, called “Stanley; or the Man of the World,” first published in 1839 in London, though the scene was laid in America. This book was attributed, from its profuse literary quotations, to Edward Everett, but was soon understood to be the work of a very young man of twenty-one, Horace Binney Wallace. In this book the influence of Bulwer and Disraeli is palpable, but Brown’s concealed chambers and aimless conspiracies and sudden mysterious deaths also reappear in full force, not without some lingering power, and then vanish from American literature forever.

Brown’s style, and especially the language put by him into the mouths of his characters, is perhaps unduly characterized by Professor Woodberry as being “something never heard off the stage of melodrama.” What this able critic does not sufficiently recognize is that the general style of the period at which they were written was itself melodramatic; and that to substitute what we should call simplicity would then have made the picture unfaithful. One has only to read over the private letters of any educated family of that period to see that people did not then express themselves as they now do; that they were far more ornate in utterance, more involved in statement, more impassioned in speech. Even a comparatively terse writer like Prescott, in composing Brown’s biography only sixty years ago, shows traces of the earlier period. Instead of stating simply that his hero was a born Quaker, he says of him: “He was descended from a highly respectable family, whose parents were of that estimable sect who came over with William Penn, to seek an asylum where they might worship their Creator unmolested, in the meek and humble spirit of their own faith.” Prescott justly criticises Brown for saying, “I was _fraught with the apprehension_ that my life was endangered”; or “his brain seemed to swell beyond its _continent_”; or “I drew every bolt that _appended_ to it”; or “on recovering from _deliquium_, you found it where it had been dropped”; or for resorting to the circumlocution of saying, “by a common apparatus that lay beside my head I could produce a light,” when he really meant that he had a tinder-box. The criticism on Brown is fair enough, yet Prescott himself presently takes us halfway back to the florid vocabulary of that period, when, instead of merely saying that his hero was fond of reading, he tells us that “from his earliest childhood Brown gave evidence of studious propensities, being frequently noticed by his father on his return from school poring over some heavy tome.” If the tome in question was Johnson’s dictionary, as it may have been, it would explain both Brown’s style of writing and the milder amplifications of his biographer. Nothing is more difficult to tell, in the fictitious literature of even a generation or two ago, where a faithful delineation ends and where caricature begins. The four-story signatures of Micawber’s letters, as represented by Dickens, go but little beyond the similar courtesies employed in a gentlewoman’s letters in the days of Anna Seward. All we can say is that within a century, for some cause or other, English speech has grown very much simpler, and human happiness has increased in proportion.

In the preface to his second novel, “Edgar Huntley,” Brown announces it as his primary purpose to be American in theme, “to exhibit a series of adventures growing out of our own country,” adding, “That the field of investigation opened to us by our own country should differ essentially from those which exist in Europe may be readily conceived.” He protests against “puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras,” and adds: “The incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of the western wilderness are far more suitable.” All this is admirable, but unfortunately the inherited thoughts and methods of the period hung round him to cloy his style, even after his aim was emancipated. It is to be remembered that almost all his imaginative work was done in early life, before the age of thirty, and before his powers became mature. Yet with all his drawbacks he had achieved his end, and had laid the foundation for American fiction.

With all his inflation of style, he was undoubtedly, in his way, a careful observer. The proof of this is that he has preserved for us many minor points of life and manners which make the Philadelphia of a century ago now more familiar to us than is any other American city of that period. He gives us the roving Indian; the newly arrived French musician with violin and monkey; the one-story farmhouses, where boarders are entertained at a dollar a week; the gray cougar amid caves of limestone. We learn from him “the dangers and toils of a midnight journey in a stage coach in America. The roads are knee deep in mire, winding through crags and pits, while the wheels groan and totter and the curtain and roof admit the wet at a thousand seams.” We learn the proper costume for a youth of good fortune and family,—“nankeen coat striped with green, a white silk waistcoat elegantly needle-wrought, cassimere pantaloons, stockings of variegated silk, and shoes that in their softness vie with satin.” When dressing himself, this favored youth ties his flowing locks with a black ribbon. We find from him that “stage boats” then crossed twice a day from New York to Staten Island, and we discover also with some surprise that negroes were freely admitted to ride in stages in Pennsylvania, although they were liable, half a century later, to be ejected from street-cars. We learn also that there were negro free schools in Philadelphia. All this was before 1801.

It has been common to say that Brown had no literary skill, but it would be truer to say that he had no sense of literary construction. So far as skill is tested by the power to pique curiosity, Brown had it; his chapters almost always end at a point of especial interest, and the next chapter, postponing the solution, often diverts the interest in a wholly new direction. But literary structure there is none: the plots are always cumulative and even oppressive; narrative is inclosed in narrative; new characters and complications come and go, while important personages disappear altogether, and are perhaps fished up with difficulty, as with a hook and line, on the very last page. There is also a total lack of humor, and only such efforts at vivacity as this: “Move on, my quill! wait not for my guidance. Reanimated with thy master’s spirit, all airy light. A heyday rapture! A mounting impulse sways him; lifts him from the earth.” There is so much of monotony in the general method, that one novel seems to stand for all; and the same modes of solution reappear so often,—somnambulism, ventriloquism, yellow fever, forged letters, concealed money, secret closets,—that it not only gives a sense of puerility, but makes it very difficult to recall, as to any particular passage, from which book it came.

VII

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

There has been in America no such instance of posthumous reputation as in the case of Thoreau. Poe and Whitman may be claimed as parallels, but not justly. Poe, even during his life, rode often on the very wave of success, until it subsided presently beneath him, always to rise again, had he but made it possible. Whitman gathered almost immediately a small but stanch band of followers, who have held by him with such vehemence and such flagrant imitation as to keep his name defiantly in evidence, while perhaps enhancing the antagonism of his critics. Thoreau could be egotistical enough, but was always high-minded; all was open and aboveboard; one could as soon conceive of self-advertising by a deer in the woods or an otter of the brook. He had no organized clique of admirers, nor did he possess even what is called personal charm,—or at least only that piquant attraction which he himself found in wild apples. As a rule, he kept men at a distance, being busy with his own affairs. He left neither wife nor children to attend to his memory; and his sister seemed for a time to repress the publication of his manuscripts. Yet this plain, shy, retired student, who when thirty-two years old carried the unsold edition of his first book upon his back to his attic chamber; who died at forty-four still unknown to the general public; this child of obscurity, who printed but two volumes during his lifetime, has had ten volumes of his writings published by others since his death, while four biographies of him have been issued in America (by Emerson, Channing, Sanborn, and Jones), besides two in England (by Page and Salt).

Thoreau was born in Boston on July 12, 1817, but spent most of his life in Concord, Massachusetts, where he taught school and was for three years an inmate of the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson, practicing at various times the art of pencil-making—his father’s occupation—and also of surveying, carpentering, and housekeeping. So identified was he with the place that Emerson speaks of it in one case as Thoreau’s “native town.” Yet from that very familiarity, perhaps, the latter was underestimated by many of his neighbors, as was the case in Edinburgh with Sir Walter Scott, as Mrs. Grant of Laggan describes.

When I was endeavoring, about 1870, to persuade Thoreau’s sister to let some one edit his journals, I invoked the aid of Judge Hoar, then lord of the manor in Concord, who heard me patiently through, and then said: “Whereunto? You have not established the preliminary point. Why should any one wish to have Thoreau’s journals printed?” Ten years later, four successive volumes were made out of these journals by the late H. G. O. Blake, and it became a question if the whole might not be published. I hear from a local photograph dealer in Concord that the demand for Thoreau’s pictures now exceeds that for any other local celebrity. In the last sale catalogue of autographs which I have encountered, I find a letter from Thoreau priced at $17.50, one from Hawthorne valued at the same, one from Longfellow at $4.50 only, and one from Holmes at $3, each of these being guaranteed as an especially good autograph letter. Now the value of such memorials during a man’s life affords but a slight test of his permanent standing,—since almost any man’s autograph can be obtained for two postage-stamps if the request be put with sufficient ingenuity;—but when this financial standard can be safely applied more than thirty years after a man’s death, it comes pretty near to a permanent fame.

It is true that Thoreau had Emerson as the editor of four of his posthumous volumes; but it is also true that he had against him the vehement voice of Lowell, whose influence as a critic was at that time greater than Emerson’s. It will always remain a puzzle why it was that Lowell, who had reviewed Thoreau’s first book with cordiality in the “Massachusetts Quarterly Review,” and had said to me afterwards, on hearing him compared to Izaak Walton, “There is room for three or four Waltons in Thoreau,” should have written the really harsh attack on the latter which afterwards appeared, and in which the plain facts were unquestionably perverted. To transform Thoreau’s two brief years of study and observation at Walden, within two miles of his mother’s door, into a life-long renunciation of his fellow men; to complain of him as waiving all interest in public affairs when the great crisis of John Brown’s execution had found him far more awake to it than Lowell was,—this was only explainable by the lingering tradition of that savage period of criticism, initiated by Poe, in whose hands the thing became a tomahawk. As a matter of fact, the tomahawk had in this case its immediate effect; and the English editor and biographer of Thoreau has stated that Lowell’s criticism is to this day the great obstacle to the acceptance of Thoreau’s writings in England. It is to be remembered, however, that Thoreau was not wholly of English but partly of French origin, and was, it might be added, of a sort of moral-Oriental, or Puritan Pagan temperament. With a literary feeling even stronger than his feeling for nature,—the proof of this being that he could not, like many men, enjoy nature in silence,—he put his observations always on the level of literature, while Mr. Burroughs, for instance, remains more upon the level of journalism. It is to be doubted whether any author under such circumstances would have been received favorably in England; just as the poems of Emily Dickinson, which have shafts of profound scrutiny that often suggest Thoreau, had an extraordinary success at home, but fell hopelessly dead in England, so that the second volume was never even published.

Lowell speaks of Thoreau as “indolent”; but this is, as has been said, like speaking of the indolence of a self-registering thermometer. Lowell objects to him as pursuing “a seclusion that keeps him in the public eye”; whereas it was the public eye which sought him; it was almost as hard to persuade him to lecture (_crede experto_) as it was to get an audience for him when he had consented. He never proclaimed the intrinsic superiority of the wilderness, as has been charged, but pointed out better than any one else has done its undesirableness as a residence, ranking it only as “a resource and a background.” “The partially cultivated country it is,” he says, “which has chiefly inspired, and will continue to inspire, the strains of poets such as compose the mass of any literature.” “What is nature,” he elsewhere says, “unless there is a human life passing within it? Many joys and many sorrows are the lights and shadows in which she shines most beautiful.” This is the real and human Thoreau, who often whimsically veiled himself, but was plainly enough seen by any careful observer. That he was abrupt and repressive to bores and pedants, that he grudged his time to them and frequently withdrew himself, was as true of him as of Wordsworth or Tennyson. If they were allowed their privacy, though in the heart of England, an American who never left his own broad continent might at least be allowed his privilege of stepping out of doors. The Concord school-children never quarreled with this habit, for he took them out of doors with him and taught them where the best whortleberries grew.

His scholarship, like his observation of nature, was secondary to his function as poet and writer. Into both he carried the element of whim; but his version of the “Prometheus Bound” shows accuracy, and his study of birds and plants shows care. It must be remembered that he antedated the modern school, classed plants by the Linnæan system, and had necessarily Nuttall for his elementary manual of birds. Like all observers, he left whole realms uncultivated; thus he puzzles in his journal over the great brown paper cocoon of the _Attacus Cecropia_, which every village boy brings home from the winter meadows. If he has not the specialized habit of the naturalist of to-day, neither has he the polemic habit; firm beyond yielding, as to the local facts of his own Concord, he never quarrels with those who have made other observations elsewhere; he is involved in none of those contests in which palæontologists, biologists, astronomers, have wasted so much of their lives.

His especial greatness is that he gives us standing-ground below the surface, a basis not to be washed away. A hundred sentences might be quoted from him which make common observers seem superficial and professed philosophers trivial, but which, if accepted, place the realities of life beyond the reach of danger. He was a spiritual ascetic, to whom the simplicity of nature was luxury enough; and this, in an age of growing expenditure, gave him an unspeakable value. To him, life itself was a source of joy so great that it was only weakened by diluting it with meaner joys. This was the standard to which he constantly held his contemporaries. “There is nowhere recorded,” he complains, “a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God.... If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance, like flowers and sweet-scented herbs,—is more elastic, starry, and immortal,—that is your success.” This was Thoreau, who died unmarried at Concord, Massachusetts, May 6, 1862.

VIII

EMERSON’S “FOOT-NOTE PERSON,”—ALCOTT

EMERSON’S “FOOT-NOTE PERSON,”—ALCOTT

The phrase “foot-note person” was first introduced into our literature by one of the most acute and original of the anonymous writers in the “Atlantic Monthly” (July, 1906), one by whose consent I am permitted to borrow it for my present purpose. Its originator himself suggests, as an illustration of what he means, the close relation which existed through life between Ralph Waldo Emerson and his less famous Concord neighbor, Amos Bronson Alcott. The latter was doubtless regarded by the world at large as a mere “foot-note” to his famous friend, while he yet was doubtless the only literary contemporary to whom Emerson invariably and candidly deferred, regarding him, indeed, as unequivocally the leading philosophic or inspirational mind of his day. Let this “foot-note,” then, be employed as the text for frank discussion of what was, perhaps, the most unique and picturesque personality developed during the Transcendental period of our American literature. Let us consider the career of one who was born with as little that seemed advantageous in his surroundings as was the case with Abraham Lincoln, or John Brown of Ossawatomie, and who yet developed in the end an individuality as marked as that of Poe or Walt Whitman.

In looking back on the intellectual group of New England, eighty years ago, nothing is more noticeable than its birth in a circle already cultivated, at least according to the standard of its period. Emerson, Channing, Bryant, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes, Lowell, even Whittier, were born into what were, for the time and after their own standard, cultivated families. They grew up with the protection and stimulus of parents and teachers; their early biographies offer nothing startling. Among them appeared, one day, this student and teacher, more serene, more absolutely individual, than any one of them. He had indeed, like every boy born in New England, some drop of academic blood within his traditions, but he was born in the house of his grandfather, a poor farmer in Wolcott, Connecticut, on November 29, 1799. He went to the most primitive of wayside schools, and was placed at fourteen as apprentice in a clock factory; was for a few years a traveling peddler, selling almanacs and trinkets; then wandered as far as North Carolina and Virginia in a similar traffic; then became a half-proselyte among Quakers in North Carolina; then a school-teacher in Connecticut; always poor, but always thoughtful, ever gravitating towards refined society, and finally coming under the influence of that rare and high-minded man, the Rev. Samuel J. May, and placing himself at last in the still more favored position of Emerson’s foot-note. When that took place, it suddenly made itself clear to the whole Concord circle that there was not one among them so serene, so equable, so dreamy, yet so constitutionally a leader, as this wandering child of the desert. Of all the men known in New England, he seemed the one least likely to have been a country peddler.

Mr. Alcott first visited Concord, as Mr. Cabot’s memoir of Emerson tells us, in 1835, and in 1840 came there to live. But it was as early as May 19, 1837, that Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller: “Mr. Alcott is the great man. His book [‘Conversations on the Gospels’] does him no justice, and I do not like to see it.... But he has more of the Godlike than any man I have ever seen and his presence rebukes and threatens and raises. He _is_ a teacher.... If he cannot make intelligent men feel the presence of a superior nature, the worse for them; I can never doubt him.”[12] It is suggested by Dr. W. T. Harris, one of the two joint biographers of Alcott, that the description in the last chapter of Emerson’s book styled “Nature,” finished in August, 1836, was derived from a study of Mr. Alcott, and it is certain that there was no man among Emerson’s contemporaries of whom thenceforward he spoke with such habitual deference. Courteous to all, it was to Alcott alone that he seemed to look up. Not merely Alcott’s abstract statements, but his personal judgments, made an absolutely unique impression upon his more famous fellow townsman. It is interesting to notice that Alcott, while staying first in Concord, “complained of lack of simplicity in A⸺, B⸺, C⸺, and D⸺ (late visitors from the city).” Emerson said approvingly to his son: “Alcott is right touchstone to test them, litmus to detect the acid.”[13] We cannot doubt that such a man’s own judgment was absolutely simple; and such was clearly the opinion held by Emerson, who, indeed, always felt somewhat easier when he could keep Alcott at his elbow in Concord. Their mutual confidence reminds one of what was said long since by Dr. Samuel Johnson, that poetry was like brown bread: those who made it in their own houses never quite liked the taste of what they got elsewhere.

And from the very beginning, this attitude was reciprocated. At another time during that same early period (1837), Alcott, after criticising Emerson a little for “the picture of vulgar life that he draws with a Shakespearian boldness,” closes with this fine tribute to the intrinsic qualities of his newly won friend: “Observe his style; it is full of genuine phrases from the Saxon. He loves the simple, the natural; the thing is sharply presented, yet graced by beauty and elegance. Our language is a fit organ, as used by him; and we hear classic English once more from northern lips. Shakespeare, Sidney, Browne, speak again to us, and we recognize our affinity with the fathers of English diction. Emerson is the only instance of original style among Americans. Who writes like him? Who can? None of his imitators, surely. The day shall come when this man’s genius shall shine beyond the circle of his own city and nation. Emerson’s is destined to be the high literary name of this age.”[14]

No one up to that time, probably, had uttered an opinion of Emerson quite so prophetic as this; it was not until four years later, in 1841, that even Carlyle received the first volume of Emerson’s “Essays” and said, “It is once more the voice of a man.” Yet from that moment Alcott and Emerson became united, however inadequate their twinship might have seemed to others. Literature sometimes, doubtless, makes strange friendships. There is a tradition that when Browning was once introduced to a new Chinese ambassador in London, the interpreter called attention to the fact that they were both poets. Upon Browning’s courteously asking how much poetry His Excellency had thus far written, he replied, “Four volumes,” and when asked what style of poetic art he cultivated, the answer was, “Chiefly the enigmatical.” It is reported that Browning afterwards charitably or modestly added, “We felt doubly brothers after that.” It may have been in a similar spirit that Emerson and his foot-note might seem at first to have united their destinies.

Emerson at that early period saw many defects in Alcott’s style, even so far as to say that it often reminded him of that vulgar saying, “All stir and no go”; but twenty years later, in 1855, he magnificently vindicated the same style, then grown more cultivated and powerful, and, indeed, wrote thus of it: “I have been struck with the late superiority Alcott showed. His interlocutors were all better than he: he seemed childish and helpless, not apprehending or answering their remarks aright, and they masters of their weapons. But by and by, when he got upon a thought, like an Indian seizing by the mane and mounting a wild horse of the desert, he overrode them all, and showed such mastery, and took up Time and Nature like a boy’s marble in his hand, as to vindicate himself.”[15]

A severe test of a man’s depth of observation lies always in the analysis he gives of his neighbor’s temperament; even granting this appreciation to be, as is sometimes fairly claimed, a woman’s especial gift. It is a quality which certainly marked Alcott, who once said, for instance, of Emerson’s combination of a clear voice with a slender chest, that “some of his organs were free, some fated.” Indeed, his power in the graphic personal delineations of those about him was almost always visible, as where he called Garrison “a phrenological head illuminated,” or said of Wendell Phillips, “Many are the friends of his golden tongue.” This quality I never felt more, perhaps, than when he once said, when dining with me at the house of James T. Fields, in 1862, and speaking of a writer whom I thought I had reason to know pretty well: “He has a love of _wholeness_; in this respect far surpassing Emerson.”

It is scarcely possible, for any one who recalls from his youth the antagonism and satire called forth by Alcott’s “sayings” in the early “Dial,” to avoid astonishment at their more than contemptuous reception. Take, for example, in the very first number the fine saying on “Enthusiasm,” thus:—

“Believe, youth, that your heart is an oracle; trust her
instinctive auguries; obey her divine leadings; nor listen too
fondly to the uncertain echoes of your head. The heart is the
prophet of your soul, and ever fulfils her prophecies; reason
is her historian; but for the prophecy, the history would not
be.... Enthusiasm is the glory and hope of the world. It is the
life of sanctity and genius; it has wrought all miracles since
the beginning of time.”

Or turn to the following (entitled: “IV. Immortality”):—

“The grander my conception of being, the nobler my future.
There can be no sublimity of life without faith in the soul’s
eternity. Let me live superior to sense and custom, vigilant
alway, and I shall experience my divinity; my hope will be
infinite, nor shall the universe contain, or content me.”

Or read this (“XII. Temptation”):—

“Greater is he who is above temptation, than he who, being
tempted, overcomes. The latter but regains the state from
which the former has not fallen. He who is tempted has sinned.
Temptation is impossible to the holy.”

Or this (“LXXXVIII. Renunciation”):—

“Renounce the world, yourself; and you shall possess the world,
yourself, and God.”

These are but fragments, here and there. For myself, I would gladly see these “Orphic Sayings” reprinted to-morrow, and watch the astonishment of men and women who vaguely recall the derision with which they were first greeted more than sixty years ago.

When it came to putting into action these high qualities, the stories relating to Mr. Alcott which seem most improbable are those which are unquestionably true, as is that of his way of dealing with a man in distress who came to beg of him the loan of five dollars. To this Alcott replied, after searching his pockets, that he had no such bank-note about him, but could lend him ten dollars. This offer was accepted, and Alcott did not even ask the borrower’s name, and could merely endure the reproach or ridicule of his friends for six months; after which the same man appeared and paid back the money, offering interest, which was refused. The debtor turned out to be a well-known swindler, to whom this trusting generosity had made a novel and manly appeal.

Truth and honesty are apt to be classed in men’s minds together, but the power of making money, or even of returning it when loaned, is sometimes developed imperfectly among those who are in other respects wise and good. A curious illustration of this may be found in the published memoirs of Mr. Alcott (i, 349), but it is quite surpassed by the following narrative, hitherto unpublished, of a subsequent interview, even more picturesque, and apparently with the self-same creditor. I take it from his MS. Diary, where it appears with the formality of arrangement and beauty of handwriting which mark that extraordinary work.

(MAMMON)

_April, 1839._ Thursday, 18th.—

Things seem strange to me out there in Time and Space. I am not
familiar with the order and usages of this realm. I am at home
in the kingdom of the Soul alone.

This day, I passed along our great thoroughfare, gliding with
Emerson’s check in my pocket, into State Street; and stepped
into one of Mammon’s temples, for some of the world’s coin,
wherewith to supply bread for this body of mine, and those who
depend upon me. But I felt dishonored by resorting to these
haunts of Idolaters. I went not among them to dig in the mines
of Lucre, nor to beg at the doors of the God. It was the hour
for business on ’Change, which was swarming with worshippers.
Bevies of devotees were consulting on appropriate rites whereby
to honor their divinity.

One of these devotees (cousin-german of my wife) accosted me,
as I was returning, and asked me to bring my oblation with
the others. Now I owed the publican a round thousand, which
he proffered me in days when his God prospered his wits; but
I had nothing for him. That small pittance which I had just
got snugly into my fob (thanks to my friend E⸺) was not for
him, but for my wife’s nurse, and came just in time to save
my wife from distrusting utterly the succors of Providence. I
told my man, that I had no money; but he might have me, if he
wanted me. No: I was bad stock in the market; and so he bid
me good-day. I left the buzz and hum of these devotees, who
represent old Nature’s relation to the Appetites and Senses,
and returned, with a sense of grateful relief, from this sally
into the Kingdom of Mammon, back to my domicile in the Soul.

There was, however, strangely developed in Alcott’s later life an epoch of positively earning money. His first efforts at Western lectures began in the winter of 1853-54, and he returned in February, 1854. He was to give a series of talks on the representative minds of New England, with the circle of followers surrounding each; the subjects of his discourse being Webster, Greeley, Garrison, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, Greenough, and Emerson; the separate themes being thus stated as seven, and the number of conversations as only six. Terms for the course were three dollars. By his daughter Louisa’s testimony he returned late at night with a single dollar in his pocket, this fact being thus explained in his own language: “Many promises were not kept and travelling is costly; but I have opened the way, and another year shall do better.”[16] At any rate, his daughter thus pathetically described his appearance at this interview, as her mother wrote to a friend: “He looked as cold and thin as an icicle; but as serene as God.”[17]

There is an almost dramatic interest in transferring our imaginations to the later visit he made westward, when he was eighty-one years old, between October, 1880, and May, 1881. He then traveled more than five thousand miles, lectured or held conversations at the rate of more than one a day, Sundays included, and came back with a thousand dollars, although more than half of his addresses had been gratuitous. For seven years after this he was the nominal dean of the so-called “School of Philosophy” in Concord, and for four years took an active part in its lectures and discussions. His last written works were most appropriately two sonnets on “Immortality,” this being the only theme remaining inexhaustibly open.

Perhaps no two persons in the world were in their intellectual method more antipodal—to use one of Alcott’s favorite phrases—than himself and Parker, though each stood near to Emerson and ostensibly belonged to the same body of thinkers. In debate, the mere presence of Parker made Alcott seem uneasy, as if yielding just cause for Emerson’s searching inquiry, “Of what use is genius, if its focus be a little too short or too long?” No doubt, Mr. Alcott might well be one of those to whom such criticism could fitly be applied, just as it has been used to discourage the printing of Thoreau’s whole journal. Is it not possible that Alcott’s fame may yet be brought up gradually and securely, like Thoreau’s, from those ample and beautifully written volumes which Alcott left behind him?

Alcott doubtless often erred, at first, in the direction of inflation in language. When the Town and Country Club was organized in Boston, and had been, indeed, established “largely to afford a dignified occupation for Alcott,” as Emerson said, Alcott wished to have it christened either the Olympian Club or the Pan Club. Lowell, always quick at a joke, suggested the substitution of “Club of Hercules” instead of “Olympian”; or else that, inasmuch as the question of admitting women was yet undecided, “The Patty-Pan” would be a better name. But if Alcott’s words were large, he acted up to them. When the small assaulting party was driven back at the last moment from the Court House doors in Boston, during the Anthony Burns excitement, and the steps were left bare, the crowd standing back, it was Alcott who came forward and placidly said to the ring-leader, “Why are we not within?” On being told that the mob would not follow, he walked calmly up the steps, alone, cane in hand. When a revolver was fired from within, just as he had reached the highest step, and he discovered himself to be still unsupported, he as calmly turned and walked down without hastening a footstep. It was hard to see how Plato or Pythagoras could have done the thing better. Again, at the outbreak of the Civil War, when a project was formed for securing the defense of Washington by a sudden foray into Virginia, it appears from his Diary that he had been at the point of joining it, when it was superseded by the swift progress of events, and so abandoned.

The power of early sectarian training is apt to tell upon the later years even of an independent thinker, and so it was with Alcott. In his case a life-long ideal attitude passed back into something hard to distinguish from old-fashioned Calvinism. This was especially noticeable at the evening receptions of the Rev. Joseph Cook, who flattered Alcott to the highest degree and was met at least halfway by the seer himself. Having been present at one or two of these receptions, I can testify to the disappointment inspired in Alcott’s early friends at his seeming willingness to be made a hero in an attitude quite alien to that of his former self. The “New International,” for instance, recognizes that “in later years his manner became more formal and his always nebulous teaching apparently more orthodox.” Be this as it may, the man whom Emerson called “the most extraordinary man and highest genius of the time,” and of whom he says, “As pure intellect I have never seen his equal,” such a man needed only the fact of his unprotected footsteps under fire up the stairs of the Boston Court House to establish him in history as a truly all-round man,—unsurpassed among those of his own generation even in physical pluck.

IX

GEORGE BANCROFT

GEORGE BANCROFT

George Bancroft, who died in Washington, D. C., on January 17, 1891, was born at Worcester, Massachusetts, October 3, 1800, being the son of Aaron and Lucretia (Chandler) Bancroft. His first American ancestor in the male line was John Bancroft, who came to this country from England, arriving on June 12, 1632, and settling at Lynn, Massachusetts. There is no evidence of any especial literary or scholarly tastes in his early ancestors, although one at least among them became a subject for literature, being the hero of one of Cotton Mather’s wonderful tales of recovery from smallpox. Samuel Bancroft, grandfather of the great historian, was a man in public station, and is described by Savage as “possessing the gift of utterance in an eminent degree”; and the historian’s father, Rev. Aaron Bancroft, D. D., was a man of mark. He was born in 1755, fought at Lexington and Bunker Hill when almost a boy, was graduated at Harvard College in 1778, studied for the ministry, preached for a time in Nova Scotia, was settled at Worcester in 1788, and died there in 1839. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was an Arminian in theology, and in later life was President of the American Unitarian Association. He published various occasional sermons, a volume of doctrinal discourses, and (in 1807) a “Life of Washington,” which was reprinted in England, and rivaled in circulation the larger work of Marshall, which appeared at about the same time. He thus bequeathed literary tastes to his thirteen children; and though only one of these reached public eminence, yet three of the daughters were prominent for many years in Worcester, being in charge of a school for girls, and highly esteemed; while another sister was well known in Massachusetts and at Washington as the wife of Governor (afterwards Senator) John Davis.

George Bancroft was fitted for college at Exeter Academy, where he was especially noted for his fine declamation. He entered Harvard College in 1813, taking his degree in 1817. He was the classmate of four men destined to be actively prominent in the great anti-slavery agitation a few years later,—Samuel J. May, Samuel E. Sewall, David Lee Child, and Robert F. Wallcut,—and of one prospective opponent of it, Caleb Cushing. Other men of note in the class were the Rev. Stephen H. Tyng, D. D., the Rev. Alva Woods, D. D., and Samuel A. Eliot, afterwards Treasurer of the College and father of its recent President. Mr. Bancroft was younger than any of these, and very probably the youngest in his class, being less than seventeen at graduation. He was, however, second in rank, and it happened that Edward Everett, then recently appointed Professor of Greek Literature in that institution, had proposed that some young graduate of promise should be sent to Germany for purposes of study, that he might afterwards become one of the corps of Harvard instructors. Accordingly, Bancroft was selected, and went, in the early summer of 1818, to Göttingen. At that time the University had among its professors Eichhorn, Heeren, and Blumenbach. He also studied at Berlin, where he knew Schleiermacher, Savigny, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. At Jena he saw Goethe, and at Heidelberg studied under Schlosser. This last was in the spring of 1821, when he had already received his degree of Ph. D. at Göttingen and was making the tour of Europe. At Paris he met Cousin, Constant, and Alexander von Humboldt; he knew Manzoni at Milan, and Bunsen and Niebuhr at Rome. The very mention of these names seems to throw his early career far back into the past. Such experiences were far rarer then than now, and the return from them into what was the village-like life of Harvard College was a far greater change. Yet he came back at last and discharged his obligations, in a degree, by a year’s service as Greek tutor.

It was not, apparently, a satisfactory position, for although he dedicated a volume of poems to President Kirkland, “with respect and affection,” as to his “early benefactor and friend,” yet we have the testimony of George Ticknor (in Miss Ticknor’s Life of J. G. Cogswell) that Bancroft was “thwarted in every movement by the President.” Mr. Ticknor was himself a professor in the college, and though his view may not have been dispassionate, he must have had the opportunity of knowledge. His statement is rendered more probable by the fact that he records a similar discontent in the case of Professor J. G. Cogswell, who was certainly a man of conciliatory temperament. By Ticknor’s account, Mr. Cogswell, who had been arranging the Harvard College Library and preparing the catalogue, was quite unappreciated by the Corporation, and though Ticknor urged both him and Bancroft to stay, they were resolved to leave, even if their proposed school came to nothing. The school in question was the once famous “Round Hill” at Northampton, in which enterprise Cogswell, then thirty-six, and Bancroft, then twenty-three, embarked in 1823. The latter had already preached several sermons, and seemed to be feeling about for his career; but it now appeared as if he had found it.

In embarking, however, he warbled a sort of swan-song at the close of his academical life, and published in September, 1823, a small volume of eighty pages, printed at the University Press, Cambridge, and entitled “Poems by George Bancroft. Cambridge: Hilliard & Metcalf.” Some of these were written in Switzerland, some in Italy, some, after his return home, at Worcester; but almost all were European in theme, and neither better nor worse than the average of such poems by young men of twenty or thereabouts. The first, called “Expectation,” is the most noticeable, for it contains an autobiographical glimpse of this young academical Childe Harold setting forth on his pilgrimage:—

“’Twas in the season when the sun
More darkly tinges spring’s fair brow,
And laughing fields had just begun
The summer’s golden hues to show.
Earth still with flowers was richly dight,
And the last rose in gardens glowed;
In heaven’s blue tent the sun was bright,
And western winds with fragrance flowed;
’Twas then a youth bade home adieu;
And hope was young and life was new,
When first he seized the pilgrim’s wand
To roam the far, the foreign land.

“There lives the marble, wrought by art.
That clime the youth would gain; he braves
The ocean’s fury, and his heart
Leaps in him, like the sunny waves
That bear him onward; and the light
Of hope within his bosom beams,
Like the phosphoric ray at night
That round the prow so cheerly gleams.
But still his eye would backward turn,
And still his bosom warmly burn,
As towards new worlds he ’gan to roam,
With love for Freedom’s Western home.”

This is the opening poem; the closing words of the book, at the end of the final “Pictures of Rome,” are in a distinctly patriotic strain:—

“Farewell to Rome; how lovely in distress;
How sweet her gloom; how proud her wilderness!
Farewell to all that won my youthful heart,
And waked fond longings after fame. We part.
The weary pilgrim to his home returns;
For Freedom’s air, for Western climes he burns;
Where dwell the brave, the generous, and the free,
O! there is Rome; no other Rome for me.”

It was in order to train these young children of the Republic—“the brave, the generous, and the free”—that Bancroft entered upon the “Round Hill” enterprise.

This celebrated school belonged to that class of undertakings which are so successful as to ruin their projectors. It began in a modest way; nothing could be more sensible than the “Prospectus,”—a pamphlet of twenty pages, issued at Cambridge, June 20, 1823. In this there is a clear delineation of the defects then existing in American schools; and a modest promise is given that, aided by the European experience of the two founders, something like a French _collège_ or a German _gymnasium_ might be created. There were to be not more than twenty pupils, who were to be from nine to twelve on entering. A fine estate was secured at Northampton, and pupils soon came in.

Then followed for several years what was at least a very happy family. The school was to be in many respects on the German plan: farm life, friendly companionship, ten-mile rambles through the woods with the teachers, and an annual walking tour in the same company. All instruction was to be thorough; there was to be no direct emulation, and no flogging. There remain good delineations of the school in the memoirs of Dr. Cogswell, and in a paper by the late T. G. Appleton, one of the pupils. It is also described by Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar in his “Travels.” The material of the school was certainly fortunate. Many men afterwards noted in various ways had their early training there: J. L. Motley, H. W. Bellows, R. T. S. Lowell, F. Schroeder, Ellery Channing, G. E. Ellis, Theodore Sedgwick, George C. Shattuck, S. G. Ward, R. G. Shaw, N. B. Shurtleff, George Gibbs, Philip Kearney, R. G. Harper. At a dinner given to Dr. Cogswell in 1864, the most profuse expressions of grateful reminiscence were showered upon Mr. Bancroft, though he was then in Europe. The prime object of the school, as stated by Mr. Ticknor, was “to teach _more thoroughly_ than has ever been taught among us.” How far this was accomplished can only be surmised; what is certain is that the boys enjoyed themselves. They were admirably healthy, not having a case of illness for sixteen months, and they were happy. When we say that, among other delights, the boys had a large piece of land where they had a boy-village of their own, a village known as Cronyville, a village where each boy erected his own shanty and built his own chimney, where he could roast apples and potatoes on a winter evening and call the neighbors in,—when each boy had such absolute felicity as this, with none to molest him or make him afraid, there is no wonder that the “old boys” were ready to feast their kindly pedagogues forty years later.

But to spread barracks for boys and crony villages over the delightful hills of Northampton demanded something more than kindliness; it needed much administrative skill and some money. Neither Cogswell nor Bancroft was a man of fortune. Instead of twenty boys, they had at one time one hundred and twenty-seven, nearly fifty of whom had to be kept through the summer vacation. They had many Southern pupils and, as an apparent consequence, many bad debts, Mr. Cogswell estimating a loss of two thousand dollars from this cause in a single year; and sometimes they had to travel southward to dun delinquent parents. The result of it all was that Bancroft abandoned the enterprise after seven years, in the summer of 1830; while Cogswell, who held on two years longer, retired with health greatly impaired and a financial loss of twenty thousand dollars. Thus ended the Round Hill School.

While at Round Hill, Mr. Bancroft prepared some text-books for his pupils, translating Heeren’s “Politics of Ancient Greece” (1824) and Jacobs’s Latin Reader (1825),—the latter going through several editions. His first article in the “North American Review,” then the leading literary journal in the United States, appeared in October, 1823, and was a notice of Schiller’s “Minor Poems,” with many translations. From this time forward he wrote in almost every volume, but always on classical or German themes, until in January, 1831, he took up “The Bank of the United States,” and a few years later (October, 1835), “The Documentary History of the Revolution.” These indicated the progress of his historical studies, which had also begun at Round Hill, and took form at last in his great history. The design of this monumental work was as deliberate as Gibbon’s, and almost as vast; and the author lived, like Gibbon, to see it accomplished. The first volume appeared in 1834, the second in 1837, the third in 1840, the fourth in 1852, and so onward. Between these volumes was interspersed a variety of minor essays, some of which were collected in a volume of “Literary and Historical Miscellanies,” published in 1855. Bancroft also published, as a separate work, a “History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States” (1882).

While at Northampton, he was an ardent Democrat of the most theoretic and philosophic type, and he very wisely sought to acquaint himself with the practical side of public affairs. In 1826 he gave an address at Northampton, defining his position and sympathies; in 1830 he was elected to the Legislature, but declined to take his seat, and the next year refused a nomination to the Senate. In 1835 he drew up an address to the people of Massachusetts, made many speeches and prepared various sets of resolutions, was flattered, traduced, caricatured. From 1838 to 1841 he was Collector of the Port of Boston; in 1844 he was Democratic candidate for Governor of Massachusetts, but was defeated,—George N. Briggs being his successful antagonist,—although he received more votes than any Democratic candidate before him. In 1845 he was Secretary of the Navy under President Polk. In all these executive positions he may be said to have achieved success. It was, for instance, during his term of office that the Naval Academy was established at Annapolis; it was he who gave the first order to take possession of California; and he who, while acting for a month as Secretary of War, gave the order to General Taylor to march into Texas, thus ultimately leading to the annexation of that state. This, however, identified him with a transaction justly censurable, and indeed his whole political career occurred during the most questionable period of Democratic subserviency to the slave power, and that weakness was never openly—perhaps never sincerely—resisted by him. This left a reproach upon his earlier political career which has, however, been effaced by his literary life and his honorable career as a diplomatist. In 1846 he was transferred from the Cabinet to the post of Minister Plenipotentiary to Great Britain, where he contrived to combine historical researches with public functions. In 1849 he returned to this country—a Whig administration having been elected—and took up his residence in New York. In February, 1866, he was selected by Congress to pronounce a eulogy on President Lincoln, and in the following year he was appointed Minister to Prussia, being afterwards successively accredited to the North German Confederation and the German Empire. In these positions he succeeded in effecting some important treaty provisions in respect to the rights of naturalized German citizens residing in Germany. He was recalled at his own request in 1874, and thenceforward resided in Washington in the winter, and at Newport, Rhode Island, in summer.

Dividing his life between these two abodes, he passed his later years in a sort of existence more common in Europe than here,—the well-earned dignity of the scholar who has also been, in his day, a man of affairs, and who is yet too energetic to repose upon his laurels or waste much time upon merely enjoying the meed of fame he has won. In both his winter and summer abodes he had something of the flattering position of First Citizen; he was free of all sets, an honored member of all circles. His manners were often mentioned as “courtly,” but they never quite rose to the level of either of the two classes of manner described by Tennyson:—

“Kind nature is the best, those manners next
That fit us like a nature second-hand;
Which are indeed the manners of the great.”