:

was

was desultory, and confined to a few subjects. It is almost a wonder that Mr. Alcott, being deeply conscientious, and taking the world and himself so seriously, did not go mad. A sense of humor, it is frequently said, will save a man from madness, and so, very often, will a knowledge of "the best that has ever been said and done," for such knowledge tends to keep the judgment within bounds. But Mr. Alcott had neither sense of humor nor wide knowledge; and, naturally, he fell into absurdities which during the Fruitlands episode, at least, were near akin to madness. The late Mr. Robert Carter wrote - with some exaggeration, Mr. Sanborn says of that experiment as follows: "No animal substance neither flesh, fish, butter, cheese, eggs, nor milk allowed to be used at Fruitlands. They were all denounced as pollution, and as tending to corrupt the body, and through that the soul. Tea and coffee, molasses and rice, were also proscribed, the last two as foreign luxuries, — and only water was used as a beverage. Mr. Alcott would not allow the land to be manured, which he regarded as a base and corrupting and unjust mode of forcing Nature. He made also a distinction between vegetables which aspired or grew into the air, as wheat, apples and other fruits, and the base products which grew downwards into the earth, such as potatoes, beets, radishes, and the like. These latter he would not allow to be used. The bread of the community he himself made of unbolted flour, and sought to render it palatable by forming the loaves into the shape of animals and other pleasant images."

Was there, then, no element of greatness in the man? Were they right who in his lifetime derided him as a “crank ”? Was there no such Alcott as Emerson imagined? To believe that would be to make a worse mistake than is made by putting him upon the false pedestal which Messrs. Sanborn and Harris have

constructed. Mr. Alcott's character was in some important respects so good as to make him great. None but a pure and single-minded man could have loved truth so passionately and pursued it so unceasingly as Mr. Alcott did. He had, in fact, the same passion for truth and high knowledge that some men have for wine, some for women, and some for horses. It puts a stamp on a man to be a pawnbroker all his life; to spend all one's energies in low dissipation imposes another indelible brand; and can it be thought that a man may devote his waking hours to a search after truth, moral and intellectual, without some reflex action upon his own character?

Moreover, nature as well as habit gave Mr. Alcott certain great qualities. He possessed the three cardinal virtues of courage, sincerity, and charity. In his early days, when traveling as a peddler in Virginia, he used to astonish the planters by passing, fearless and unharmed, through the ring of fierce mastiffs which guarded their gates. Colonel Higginson tells a very interesting story, too long to be quoted here, of the courageous part that Mr. Alcott played in the unsuccessful attempt to rescue the fugitive slave Burns. Those who knew Mr. Alcott at Concord testify that he had in the highest degree both moral and physical courage: and this, indeed, is evident from the whole course of his life.

None but a brave and sincere man could have impressed others as Mr. Alcott impressed them; only of such a man could it be said that "his presence rebukes and threatens and raises." Only a brave and sincere man, again, could have stuck to his principles so absolutely as Mr. Alcott did. Whenever, in the course of his checkered life, a question arose between duty, as he conceived it, and self-interest, he did not hesitate about the decision. Thus, for example, he gave the finishing blow to his Boston school by admitting to it a negro scholar, well knowing what would be the result.

con

Once, when a stranger suddenly appeared at his house begging the loan of five dollars, Mr. Alcott lent him ten, not having the smaller bill in his pocket. He did not even take the man's name, but trusted him utterly, that being the way, according to his theory, in which one human being ought to treat another human being. It turned out that the stranger was a swindler, a noted " fidence man; but in his case (to the honor of all thieves be it said) the theory worked. Touched by Mr. Alcott's confiding generosity, he came back six months afterward, returned the money, and offered to pay interest. This was no isolated incident in Mr. Alcott's life. It could be said of him, as of few others, I was hungry, and ye fed me; naked, and ye clothed me; sick and in prison, and ye

came unto me.

It is true that Mr. Alcott was rather lax in his notions about money, and his family suffered from his improvidence.1 Emerson aptly termed him "a haughty beneficiary." He was vain, but in a simple, childlike way; and perhaps we shall have to admit that he was lazy. This completes the catalogue of faults visible in one whose whole life is open to our inspection. There is a memorable sentence of Louisa Alcott's which describes her father as he appeared when she met him at the cars, after a long and fruitless journey in the West: "His dress was neat and poor. He looked cold and thin as an icicle, but serene as God." Coming from the lips of an indifferent person, this would have seemed almost blasphemous; but the words were spoken by his daughter, whose heart was wrung because her father was poor and worn and thin, yet who felt a daughter's pride in the fact that fate could not quell his courage nor disturb his serenity.

Many and many a clever, well-fed

1 But this laxity was genuine, not of the Harold Skimpole type, and usually it operated against Mr. Alcott's interest. Once, in making out a circular for a series of his conversa

66

man, the finished product of school and university, could riddle Mr. Alcott's psychology; could give him "points," as the vulgar phrase is, on Plato and Plotinus, and even on his favorite Jamblichus; could lay down a philosophy more rational and coherent than that of which Mr. Alcott was master. But how many of these clever, successful men could have endured with cheerful serenity what Mr. Alcott endured; could have retained inviolate their faith in God and man despite personal failure and humiliation?

some

"That is failure," he nobly declared, in a passage of his diary written after new defeat, "that is failure when a man's idea ruins him, when he is dwarfed and killed by it; but when he is ever growing by it, ever true to it, and does not lose it by any partial or immediate failures, that is success, whatever it seems to the world."

Perhaps the crowning humiliation of Mr. Alcott's life occurred when, after his return from the disastrous experiment at Fruitlands, broken in purse and almost broken in spirit, he applied for the humble post of district school teacher in a corner of Concord, and the application was rejected. But even this rebuff, administered by his townspeople and neighbors, did not embitter his spirit. "Blessed be poverty," he wrote, when at this very time Mr. Emerson saved his family and him from starvation, — "blessed be poverty, if it makes me rich in gratitude and thankfulness and a temper that rails at none!'

After all, if the true object of philosophy be to possess the philosophic spirit, then indeed we can assert that Bronson Alcott was Alcott was a great philosopher. He practiced what he preached. Socrates himself did not bear the stings of life with more serenity or good humor. And tions," he put the price of single tickets for each conversation so low that it was cheaper to buy them than a course ticket.

Mr. Alcott gave sufficient proof that, had destiny required it of him, he would have drunk the fatal hemlock as calmly as Socrates did; not indeed with a jest upon his lips, for Mr. Alcott made no jokes, but with an equal spirit of forgiveness and good will toward those who had persecuted him. It is on this ground that his reputation must rest. He was not, as Mr.

Sanborn seems to think, a second Plato ; nor need we fondly linger with Professor Harris upon "the insights which he had at the time of his illumination." Mr. Alcott's true epitaph and epitome will be found in those burning words of his famous daughter: "His dress was neat and poor. He looked cold and thin as an icicle, but serene as God."

To a looker-on at life Chicago suggests an admirable background for fictitious art. Its individuality is so marked as to fuse the complexities of life into a certain singleness of character, so that the novelist is helped in his effort to secure a unity of effect in persons and scenes. Moreover, this individuality implies so headlong a rush that the novelist, even when dealing with persons presenting no very dramatic opportunities, could scarcely fail to have them swept along to some crisis. All this, supposing the writer himself caught in the stream of activity, however native to him might be a more reflective habit of mind. We are tempted into this bit of speculation by taking up Mr. Fuller's The CliffDwellers,1 after knowing the author through his half - whimsical studies of life as seen through the lorgnette of a traveler. In his previous books Mr. Fuller had shown himself, if we may say so, a character - fancier; he had sauntered through such slight scenes as he constructed with an amused air which covered much insight and not a little shrewd, even profound observation of life. What would he do, we asked ourselves, when he stepped from under the protection of foreign forms, and essayed

1 The Cliff-Dwellers. A Novel. By HENRY B. FULLER. Illustrated by T. DE THULSTRUP. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1893.

to reproduce in miniature a life which was frankly young and American?

The introduction to The Cliff-Dwellers raises very high expectations. One feels the touch of an artist in every line. The bright conceit which lies in the title, and finds its humorous amplification in this sketch of one of the lofty buildings in the heart of the business world of Chicago, does not conceal the artistic possibilities which present themselves in this conception of a microcosm; and the ease with which the author thus outlines the scene of his drama gives the reader a confidence in the story to come. This confidence does not depart at once; indeed, it is reinforced from time to time by the felicity with which scenes are managed, and especially by the keen, epigrammatic sentences which disclose how well the author has penetrated to the heart of his subject. Yet, little by little, disappointment creeps in, and the reader at last lays the book down with regret, not at having finished it, but at having been invited to hear a symphony, we will say, and compelled to listen to the tuning of instruments.

There is a curious failure of the author to make good his promises. The frontispiece of the book offers to the eye the person of Cecilia Ingles; and on the last page, as the several characters who survive appear at the opera-house, the

hero and heroine of the story see in one of the boxes a tall, brownish man, a Mr. Ingles, who owns the Clifton, the lofty building which forms the main scene of the story. The heroine asks who a cer

tain lady is who is by him.

"She indicated a radiant, magnificent young creature, splendid, like all her mates, with the new and eager splendor of a long-awaited opportunity. This newcomer had nodded smilingly to many. persons on entering, to her neighbors. to her neighbors on either side, to a large dinner party that filled three boxes across the house. She seemed pleased to have so many persons to bow to so publicly; and everybody whom she favored seemed equally glad of an opportunity to return her attention. "Ogden looked at her, and turned his

eyes away.

"I-I have never seen her before,' he said. 'I don't know who she is,' he appeared to imply.

"But he knew perfectly well who she

was.

He knew that she was Cecilia Ingles, and his heart was constricted by the sight of her. It is for such a woman that one man builds a Clifton, and that a hundred others are martyred in it."

No one who has not read the book would perceive the subtle stroke with which every line in this little closing scene is drawn, and no one who has read the book but will resent the implication that it contains the secret spring of the whole story. Cecilia Ingles, sketched by the artist before the story opens, and introduced to sight by the author as he closes the story, flits now and then by name across the page. She leaves Og den's drawing-room just before he enters, in what might be called the middle passage of the book, so far as the hero's career is concerned; and the references to her which sparsely mark the movements of the story are light, unmeaning at the moment, but intended, one perceives when he has read all, to be full of significance. The subtlety scarcely

justifies itself. When one discovers, as we have pointed out, that Mr. Fuller has been poising his whole story on this shadow of a balancing pole, one demands that the incidents and characters shall have some real relation to so important a figure, and it requires all his sympathy with the author to make him satisfied with any such "moral" as he may formulate in the words, Woman, ambitious to possess power, place, riches, compels man to turn all his faculties into a splendid machine capable of producing the result she aims at, or drives him into dishonor to secure honor for her.

This, we apprehend, is roughly the argument of The Cliff-Dwellers, and is symbolized by Cecilia Ingles, the Fata Morgana of the tale; and we repeat that Mr. Fuller, by thus removing the spring of the story out of the reader's sight, has weakened his own construction. He has been compelled to bring in the furies by the hair of their heads. Ogden, wrought up to a nervous passion, brains the man who has wronged him, and the reader is left by the very calm author entirely ignorant of the consequences of the act. He does not know whether McDowell was or was not killed, and Ogden goes his way unmolested. All the violence is huddled together, but after all it seems scarcely more than an every-day incident in life. The marriages, with the exception of the last, half-expiatory one, are almost humorously without preliminary notice, and at last one is almost driven to the conclusion that the author intended his novel to emulate architecturally the Clifton itself, an aggregation of stories, with an elevator for the central column. But after he has given up the book as a story he may take very great pleasure in certain passages, especially those which give the story-teller room for the play of his penetrating wit; and as an illustration we commend the conversation which takes place in Walworth's library the last evening of Winthrop Floyd's stay in Chicago, when Fair

child—an interesting personage lightly sketched in, like most of the characters

hints at the ideal which hovers be

fore the Chicagoan. "Does it seem unreasonable," this man asks thoughtfully, "that the State which produced the two greatest figures of the greatest epoch in our history, and which has done most within the last ten years to check alien excesses and un-American ideas, should also be the State to give the country the final blend of the American character and its ultimate metropolis?" Perhaps - Mr. Fuller's subtlety is contagious—the extremely subordinate part played by Mr. Fairchild and his Sentiment in the story typifies the author's sense of the tremendous overweight of that dominance of the material which is the theme of the novel.

"In

If one cannot get all the contrasts he wants in one book, he should call in the aid of another; and after one has found the atmosphere of the Clifton a little too highly oxygenized, let him regale himself with such whiffs of the Gulf as he will find in Miss King's Balcony Stories.1 A baker's dozen of sketches, or tales, follow upon a prelude which seeks to account for the title of the book. those long-moon countries" (of the South), the author says, "life is open and accessible, and romances seem to be furnished real and gratis, in order to save, in a languor-breeding climate, the ennui of reading and writing books. Each woman has a different way of picking up and relating her stories, as each one selects different pieces, and has a personal way of playing them on the piano." By other graceful phrases Miss King manages to put her readers into the proper mood for reading her stories; for the fiction of the balcony ceases to trouble writer or reader after it has once done its work of pitching the note of the book. For the most

1 Balcony Stories. By GRACE KING. New York: The Century Co. 1893.

part, these sketches are mere hints of stories; sometimes one has but the fringe, and no garment at all, but now and then the story-teller rises to dramatic power as in Grandmother's Grandmother, or passes into pathetic beauty as in The Little Convent Girl and A Crippled Hope, or discloses a fine irony as in The Old Lady's Restoration; but always the stories conform to one artistic type, and that a very noticeable one, because it has the note of personality without being insistently individual. Miss King, in a word, moves among her people and scenes as one who has drawn from like sources of life, and simply has this apart from her characters, that she is gifted with the power of giving them independent existence. With a careless ease born of familiarity with her material, she seems to take this or that bit of stuff, and, running her needle lightly through it, embroider some half-disclosed design, send some thread of color across a commonplace fact, and turn what would have been a disregarded scrap into a revelation of beauty. Her dexterity possibly betrays her occasionally into indirectness, and now and then into so elaborate a piece of artifice as A Delicate Affair; but the reader can forgive these errancies with the thought that they are simply fancies which have strayed somewhat beyond bounds, since Miss King's fancies are of the straying kind.

We are never so out of conceit with pictures intended to illustrate stories as when the writer is so much of a painter as to convey, without direct intention, strong impressions of the characters presented. Mrs. Catherwood, for example, has made the heroine of her tale The White Islander so impressive by the setting which she has given her that the reader who finds her twice offered to his attention as an isolated figure by the draughtsman has a sense of being de

2

2 The White Islander. By MARY HARTWELL CATHERWOOD. New York: The Century Co. 1893.