An American philosophical writer and educator, one of the founders of the transcendental school of philosophy in New England; born at Wolcott, Conn., Nov. 29, 1799; died at Boston, March 4, 1888. From 1834–37 his private school in Boston, conducted on the plan of adapting the instruction to the individuality of each pupil, attracted attention. He was on terms of friendship with Emerson, Hawthorne, Channing, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and many other noted persons. After 1840 he lived in Concord, Mass., and was the projector and dean of the Concord school of philosophy. Lectures on speculative and practical subjects occupied his later years. His chief works are: “Orphic Sayings,” contributed to the Dial (1840); “Tablets” (1868); “Concord Days” (1872); “Table Talk” (1877); “Sonnets and Canzonets” (1882); “Ralph Waldo Emerson, his Character and Genius” (1882); “New Connecticut” (1886).

Personal

  He has been twice here, at considerable length; the second time, all night. He is a genial, innocent, simple-hearted man, of much natural intelligence and goodness, with an air of rusticity, veracity, and dignity withal, which in many ways appeals to one. The good Alcott: with his long, lean face and figure, with his gray worn temples and mild radiant eyes; all bent on saving the world by a return to acorns and the golden age; he comes before one like a kind of venerable Don Quixote, whom nobody can even laugh at without loving!

  He is a great man and was made for what is greatest, but I now fear that he has already touched what best he can, and through his more than a prophet’s egotism, and the absence of all useful reconciling talents, will bring nothing to pass, and be but a voice in the wilderness. As you do not seem to have seen him in his pure and noble intellect, I fear that it lies under some new and denser clouds.

  I had a good talk with Alcott this afternoon. He is certainly the youngest man of his age we have seen,—just on the threshold of life. When I looked at his gray hairs, his conversation sounded pathetic; but I looked again, and they reminded me of the gray dawn. He is getting better acquainted with Channing, though he says that if they were to live in the same house, they would soon sit with their backs to each other.

  To establish a school of philosophy had been the dream of Alcott’s life; and there he sat as I entered the vestry of a church on one of the hottest days in August. He looked full as young as he did twenty years ago, when he gave us a “conversation” in Lynn.

  I remember one morning that Mr. Alcott spent with my husband and myself, many years ago, when his swift fancy, and slow speech, his uplifting habit of mind, his large charity, his beautiful benignity, all brought into play by the brilliant and chivalric spirit that met him, made it seem as if we had been visited by an angel in our Eden; and I have often thought since then what it was to her to have been bred and taught by such a being as that, to have lived in the daily receipt of such high thoughts, to have inherited something of such a nature. Possibly Louisa was indebted to her father in quite another fashion also; since she may have made the rebound into the practical and the successful through the pressure of exigencies arising from his life in the impractical.

  He was in some aspects at the level of Plato; yet in others hardly more than a crank: singulary gifted in speculative insight, in ethical refinement and in flawless integrity, but as empty of practical sense, as destitute of practical energy, and as wild in fantastic whims and worthless in every day work, as any mere tramp on the high road of modern culture…. Of his fine spirit, his beautiful simplicity and purity of character, his deep wisdom in things of the spirit, and his measurably conservative temper among radical thinkers who regarded him as a leader, there could be no doubt. But very much that he said rose so far into the air of vague speculation as to lose all value and even lack all interest, and there remains little result of his long and singular life, except a name as perhaps a Yankee Pythagoras, who, for some rare thoughts and fine words, will have the fame of a philosopher with very little philosophy to show for it. His practical daughter did a work and made a mark a hundred fold better and deeper than that of her speculative and unpractical father.

  The most adroit soliloquizer I ever listened to, who delivered in a vestry-room a series of those remarkable “conversations”—versations with the con left out—for which he was celebrated.

  At Concord I saw and spoke with Bronson Alcott, a strange, mystical, gentle old philosopher, very gracious, very wordy, rather incomprehensible.

  I clearly understood that Mr. Alcott was admirable; but he sometimes brought manuscript poetry with him, the dear child of his own Muse, and a guest more unwelcome than the enfant terrible of the drawing-room. There was one particularly long poem which he had read aloud to my mother and father; a seemingly harmless thing, from which they never recovered. Out of the mentions made of this effusion I gathered that it was like a moonlit expanse, quiet, somnolent, cool, and flat as a month of prairies. Rapture, conviction, tenderness, often glowed upon Alcott’s features and trembled in his voice. I believe he was never once startled from the dream of illusive joy which pictured to him all high aims as possible of realization through talk. Often he was so happy that he could have danced like a child; and he laughed merrily like one; and the quick, upward lift of his head, which his great height induced him to hold as a rule, slightly bent forward,—this rapid, playful lift, and the glance, bright and eager though not deep, which sparkled upon you, were sweet and good to see. Yet I have noticed his condition as pale and dolorous enough, before the event of his noble daughter’s splendid success. But such was not his character; circumstances had enslaved him, and he appeared thin and forlorn by incongruous accident, like a lamb in chains. He might have been taken for a centenarian when I beheld him one day slowly and pathetically constructing a pretty rustic fence before his gabled brown house, as if at the unreasonable command of some latter-day Pharaoh. Ten years afterward he was, on the contrary, a Titan: gay, silvery-locked, elegant, ready to begin his life over again.

  Although Emerson had a high opinion of Alcott, he seemed to me a shallow and illogical thinker, and I have always felt that the good opinion of Emerson was due rather to the fact that Alcott presented him with his own ideas served up in forms in which he no longer recognized them, and so appeared to Emerson as original. Such originality as he had was rather an oracular and often incomprehensible verbiage than a profundity of thought, but, as no one attempted to bring him to book, bewildered as his audience generally was by the novelty of the propositions he made or by their absurdity, he used to go on until suggestion, or breath, failed him…. Alcott was a drawing-room philosopher, the justice of whose lucubrations had no importance whatever, while his manner and his individuality gave to wiser people than I, the pleasure which belongs to the study of such a specimen of human nature. He amused and superficially interested, and he no doubt enjoyed his distorted reflections of the wisdom of wiser men as much as if he had been an original seeker.

General

  Mr. Alcott is the great man, and Miss Fuller has not seen him. His book does him no justice, and I do not like to see it. I had not fronted him for a good while, and was willing to revise my opinion. But he has more of the god-like than any man I have ever seen, and his presence rebukes, and threatens, and raises. He is a teacher. I shall dismiss for the future all anxiety about his success. If he cannot make intelligent men feel the presence of a superior nature, the worse for them; I can never doubt him. His ideal is beheld with such unrivalled distinctness that he is not only justified but necessitated to condemn and to seek to upheave the vast actual, and cleanse the world.

  He is a Yankee seer, who has suppressed every tendency in his Yankee nature toward “argufying” a point.

  Mr. Alcott was a teacher more than a man of letters. There is little system in his writings. They are mainly notes of thought but of such a kind as to charm and also stimulate to a high degree…. His was an original nature and self-poised. He sought for guidance within himself, not from his fellow men. He was not a disciple or follower of any one. At one time he was regarded as the leader of the “Transcendental” movement, but he lacked the practical qualities of which Emerson had so large a measure; yet he received and needed less influence from Emerson than, perhaps, any other member of that circle.

  The “Orphic Sayings,” which he contributed to “The Dial” (under Miss Fuller’s administration) are perhaps most characteristic of him; he was rather mystical than profound; he delighted in forays into regions of the unknown—with whatever tentative or timid steps—and although he may have put a vehemence into his expression that would seem to imply that he was drifting in deep waters—one cannot forbear the conviction that ’twould be easy for this man of the explorative mentalities to touch ground with his feet (if he chose)—in all the bays where he swims.

  In Alcott’s “Tablets” and “Concord Days” and papers reminiscent of “The Dial” period may be found interesting records—and echoes—of his great friend and spiritual master.

  Alcott, as we have seen, attempted education for his profession, but found the world unready where his capacity lay, and himself incapable where the world’s readiness was. Like Channing, although not quite so willing to accept the unobserved pathway of life, Alcott yielded to his lot with tolerable patience, and constantly sought that career of studious leisure and friendly companionship which should be the ideal of scholars. His gift of expression was not so much for writing as for speech, and conversation was his fine art; but at intervals during his whole life, he had written verses worthy of notice; and when his career was closing, he stood forth, at the age of eighty, as a poet of no mean rank. His theme was friendship; and his best skill was to draw the portraits of his friends in a series of sonnets.

  Lately it has come to me that Alcott’s style is not literary because it continually harps on one string, that of genesis. All remarks are made, all reflections initiated, with the doctrine of Lapse in the background; a constant spectacle needed by the reader if he will interpret aright the most trivial of Alcott’s utterances. He is a theological idealist intoxicated with the One, as every good theologian must be. Hence all his utterances have the form of philosophemes, and he has furnished them of the best quality both in prose and poetry…. But if we deny him the merit of literary art, we are yet compelled to concede rare philosophical merit. In the days of his earlier conversations, and before he had printed his works, Mr. Alcott used to read, in the course of the evening, from a red-covered book that he carried, certain poems which had his character of philosophemes. They puzzled one at first, resembling in this respect, indeed, the most of Emerson’s poems as well as Browning’s. But on getting familiar with them, they seemed to be very felicitous in expression, and to have an infinite depth of suggestion, as all true philosophemes should have…. I think, therefore, that Mr. Alcott’s books wherein he has recorded his deepest and sincerest convictions are to be resorted to and studied along with the works of Plotinus and Proclus, inasmuch as they present this world-historic theory as a “survival” in a person born in our own age.

  He was a beautiful and inspiring presence in the community where he lived, and his influence was broadening and uplifting always.

  Tradition has remembered about it [“Dial”] chiefly such oddities as the “Orphic Sayings” of Bronson Alcott,—“awful sayings,” they have since been called, in days when the adjective “awful” had attained its cant meaning. There is room for grave doubt whether Alcott ever knew what some of them meant; certainly no one else ever knew, and for many years no one has wanted to know.

  Whether in his capacity of philosopher or religious idealist he was much more than an aspiring soul is a question that need not be discussed here. As an educational reformer he was a good deal more, and he was probably something more as a writer, although this is not the usual opinion. His “Orphic Sayings” contributed to The Dial brought him harsh criticism and ridicule, at which his admirers have expressed a not justifiable indignation. Orphic literature is to-day best adapted to private circulation, as Emerson, who was sometimes scarcely less guilty than Alcott, seems to have thought when he advised against the publication of his friend’s philosophical romance entitled “Psyche.” Emerson, indeed, was constantly regretting that a man who talked so well wrote so ill, and taking their cue from Emerson, Lowell and other critics have treated Alcott the author with scant courtesy. Yet while it would be absurd to attribute great power or charm to Alcott’s scraps of speculation or to his jottings upon social and literary topics gathered in his “Tablets” and his “Table Talk,” or even to his reminiscential “Concord Days,” it would be unjust to deny that these books contain suggestive pages worthy of the attention of those who do not read as they run.