Hawthorne in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life,Drawn from Recollections,Interviews, and Memoirs by Family,Frie

From Concord Days (1872)

From Concord Days (1872) A[mos] Bronson Alcott Educator, philosopher, lecturer, and author, Amos Bronson Alcott (1799– 1888) lived one of the purer—albeit, at times, wholly impractical—versions of Transcendentalism. After an unsuccessful stint as a teacher in Philadelphia, Alcott, who lived in Boston in the 1820s, returned there in 1834 to operate the progressive Temple School with the assistance of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. An early defender of Emersonian idealism, an original member of the Transcendental Club founded in 1836, cofounder with Charles Lane of the utopian community Fruitlands in 1843, and the organizer of the short-lived “Town and Country Club” in 1849, Alcott was both praised and ridiculed as a conversationalist and reformer by his contemporaries, as several narratives included in this volume show. With his wife, Abigail (Abba) May, and growing family of daughters, in the 1840s he settled in various places in Concord, including the Hillside, which he sold to Hawthorne in 1852. After a series of dislocations, the Alcotts returned to Concord permanently in 1857, purchasing Orchard House next to the Wayside, which made them the Hawthornes’ neighbors. Perhaps the signal success of Alcott’s career was his founding of the Concord School of Philosophy in 1879, where scholarly meetings often arranged as conversations convene to this day. In 1848, Emerson expressed the sentiment that best characterizes Alcott’s centrality to the Transcendentalist movement: “Alcott is a . . . fluid in which men of a certain spirit can easily expand themselves & swim at large, they who elsewhere found themselves confined. He gives them nothing but themselves. . . . Me he has served . . . in that way; he was the reasonable creature to speak to, that I wanted” ( JMN, 11:19). Sharing a number of friends and acquaintances, Hawthorne and Alcott met in the late 1830s. The Hawthornes and Alcotts were on cordial terms while Nathaniel and Sophia lived at the Old Manse, but when both families later settled in Concord permanently, Hawthorne tolerated Alcott’s company, but he did not seek it. Whether Alcott considered Hawthorne’s attitude toward him a personal slight is unclear; what is clear from occasional letters and jottings in his journals is that Alcott considered Hawthorne a great author and a decent but elusive person. For instance, writing to James T. Fields in 1870, [151] [151] XZ hawthorne in his own time [152] Alcott expressed admiration for “Hawthorne’s English Note Books” as “pleasant reading for these June days. We can never have too much England from any lover of it. . . . Few of his contemporaries have observed with finer eyes than did our American Romancer. His facts are better facts than most historians, since he dealt with life and living things as only poets can” (Letters ABA, 515–16). Earlier , when Hawthorne decided to renovate and expand the Wayside upon his return from England, he asked Alcott for his “suggestions and counsels.” Rejoicing at the overture, Alcott wrote, “I shall delight to assist him and build for him in my rustic way, restoring his arbours if he wishes” (28 June 1860; Journals ABA, 328). But within a few months Alcott decided that Europe had not moderated Hawthorne’s antisocial impulse. On 17 February 1861 he observed, The snow is melting fast and the ground beginning to appear. I get glimpses of Hawthorne as I walk up the sled paths, he dodging about amongst the trees on his hilltop as if he feared his neighbor’s eyes would catch him as he walked. A coy genius, and to be won as a maid is, by some bashful strategem , and as difficult of approach as Channing, only less capricious, and having nothing of impudence in his bearing. His avoidances have a certain reasonableness, nothing sullen or morose about them, and excite a pitying affection, as if he were their unwilling victim and would gladly meet you if he dared disobey the impulse that dogs him to solitude and study. ( Journals ABA, 335–36) The selection that follows grew out of this last journal entry, which Alcott rewrote and expanded on several occasions: in 1864 for a sentimental obituary on Hawthorne that appeared in the Boston Commonwealth (“Hawthorne,” 3 June 1864, 1:6–7), and then in a journal entry dated 10 June 1870 (Journals ABA, 411–12), prior to expanding it once more for Concord Days. The “Southern guest at [Hawthorne’s] table” whom Alcott describes here is Rebecca Harding Davis; her recollection of the same dinner is printed above. Hawthorne was of the darker...