Miss Alcott's New England

I REMEMBER being very much impressed — and not a little shocked — when a friend of mine told me that she had never, in her childhood, been able to get any real pleasure out of Louisa Alcott’s stories. It had never occurred to me that being brought up in New York instead of in New England, or even being of Southern instead of Pilgrim stock, could make all that difference. Miss Alcott seemed the safe inheritance, the absolutely inevitable delight, of childhood. Little Women was as universal as Hamlet. I remembered perfectly that. French playmates of mine in Paris had loved Les Quatre Filles du Docteur March (though the French version was probably somewhat expurgated). If children of a Latin — moreover, of a Royalist and Catholic — tradition could find no flaw in Miss Alcott’s presentment of young life, I could not see why any free-born American child should fail to find it sympathetic.

I questioned my friend more closely. Her answer set me thinking; and it is probably to her that I owe my later appreciation of Miss Alcott’s special quality and special documentary value. For what my friend said was simply that the people in the books were too underbred for her to get any pleasure out of reading about them. My friend was not, when I knew her, a snob; and I took it that she had made the criticism originally at a much earlier age. All children are as snobbish as they know how to be; and I fancy that the child’s perennial delight in fairy-tales is not due solely to the epic instinct. One is interested in princes and princesses, when one is eight, simply because they are princes and princesses. Of royalty, one is perfectly sure. I have never known a child who did not prefer the goose-girl to be a princess in disguise, or who felt any real sympathy with the princess who was only a disguised goose-girl. You do not have to expound the Divine Right to any one under twelve. Peasants are an acquired taste; and Socialism is an illusion of age.

Out of such axioms as these, I made my explanation of my friend’s heterodoxy. I remembered my own reaction, when very young, on a story that centred in a masked ball to which all the inhabitants of the kingdom were bidden. All the milkmaids went as court ladies, and all the court ladies went as milkmaids — a mere rounding out of the Petit Trianon episode. The moral was obvious; and I recall being frightfully disturbed by my own absolute certainty that, if I had been going to a masked ball, I should, without hesitation, have gone as grandly as I possibly could. I should never have gone as a milkmaid, so long as the costumer had a court train left. Did it perhaps mean that I was, on the whole, nearer to the milkmaid than to the court lady? I did not like the story, but I have never, to this day, forgotten it. Perhaps my friend had been of the same age when she discriminated against Miss Alcott. But then, I and my contemporaries had made no such discrimination. As I say, it set me to thinking. Since then, I have read Miss Alcott over, not once, but many times, and I think I understand.

The astounding result, of rereading Miss Alcott at a mature age is a conviction that she probably gives a better impression of mid-century New England than any of the more laborious reconstructions, either in fiction or in essay. The youth of her characters does not hinder her in this; for childhood, supremely, takes life readymade. Mr. Howells’s range is wider, and he is at once more serious and more detached. Technically, he and Miss Alcott can be compared as little as Madame Bovary and the Bibliothèque Rose. Yet, although their testimonies often agree, his world does not ‘compose ’ as hers does. It may be his very realism — his wealth of differentiating detail, his fidelity to the passing moment — that makes his early descriptions of New England so out of date, so unrecognizable. Miss Alcott is content to be typical. All her people have the same background, live in the same atmosphere, profess the same ideals. Moreover, they were ideals and an atmosphere that imposed themselves widely during their period. Mr. Howells gives us modern instances in plenty, but nowhere does he give us clearly the quintessential New England village. It is precisely the familiar experiences of life in that quintessential village that Miss Alcott gives us, with careless accuracy, without arrière-pensée. And it must be remembered that, in spite of Dr. Holmes’s brave and appropriating definitions of aristocracy, and the urbanity which the descendants of our great New Englanders would fain persuade us their ancestors possessed, our great New Englanders were essentially villagers, and that the very best thing to be said of them is that they wrought out village life to an almost Platonic perfection of type.

‘Town’ will not do to express the Boston, the Cambridge, the Salem, the Concord, of an earlier time: it smacks too much of London — and freedom. The Puritans founded villages; and, spiritually speaking, the villages that they founded are villages still. The village that Miss Alcott knew best was Concord; and if, for our present purpose, we find it convenient to call Concord typical of New England, we shall certainly not be doing New England any injustice.

As I say, what strikes one on first rereading her, is the extraordinary success with which she has given us our typical New England. Some of her books, obviously, are less successful in this way than others — Under the Lilacs, for example, or Jack and Jill, where (one cannot but agree with her severer critics) there is an inexcusable amount of love-making. There is an equally inexcusable amount of lovemaking, it is interesting to remember, in much of the earlier Howells. But for contemporary record of manners and morals, you will go far before you match her masterpiece, Little Women. What Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, and Laurie do not teach us about life in New England at a certain time, we shall never learn from any collected edition of the letters of Emerson, Thoreau, or Hawthorne.

The next — and equally astounding — result of rereading Miss Alcott was, for me, the unexpected and not wholly pleasant corroboration of what my friend had said about her characters. They were, in some ways, underbred. Bronson Alcott (or shall we say Mr. March?) quotes Plato in his family circle; but his family uses inveterately bad grammar. ‘Don’t talk about “ labelling ” Pa, as if he was a pickle-bottle!’ — thus Jo chides her little sister for a Malapropism. Bad grammar we might expect from Jo, as a willful freak; but should we expect the exquisite Amy (any little girl will tell you how exquisite Amy is supposed to be) to write to her father from Europe, about buying gloves in Paris, ‘Don’t that sound sort of elegant and rich?’

The bad grammar, in all the books, is constant. And yet, I know of no other young people’s stories, anywhere, wherein the background is so unbrokenly and sincerely ‘literary.’ Cheap literature is unsparingly satirized; Plato and Goethe are quoted quite as everyday matters; and ‘a metaphysical streak had unconsciously got into ’ Jo’s first novel. In The Rose in Bloom, Miss Alcott misquotes Swinburne, to be sure, but she does it in the interest of morality; and elsewhere Mac quotes other lines from the same poet correctly. Of course, we all remember that Emerson’s Essays helped on, largely, Mac’s wooing — if, indeed, they did not do the whole trick. And has there ever been an ‘abode of learning’ — to slip, for a moment, into the very style of Jo’s Boys — like unto Plumfield, crowned by ‘Parnassus’? After all, too, we must remember how familiarly even those madcaps, Ted and Josie, bandied about the names of Greek gods. The boys and girls who scoff at the simple amusements of Miss Alcott’s young heroes and heroines are, alack! not so much at home with classical mythology as the young people they despise. Yet, as I say, the bad grammar is everywhere — even in the mouths of the educators.

Breeding is, of course, not merely a matter of speech; and I fancy that my friend referred even more specifically to their manners — their morals being unimpeachable. Miss Alcott’s people are, as the author herself says of them, unworldly. They are even magnificently so; and they score the worldly at every turn. You remember Mrs. March’s strictures on the Moffats, and Polly’s justifiable criticisms of Fanny Shaw’s friends? and Rose’s utter lack of snobbishness about Phœbe, the little scullerv-maid, who eventually was brought up with her? Of course, Archie’s mother objects, at first, to his marrying Phœbe, but she is soon reconciled — and apologetic.

Granted their unworldiness, their high scale of moral values, where, then, is the trace of vulgarity that is needed to make breeding bad? They pride themselves on their separation from all vulgarity. ‘My mother is a lady,’ Polly reflects, ‘even if’ — even if she is not rich, like the Shaws. The March girls are always consoling themselves for their vicissitudes by the fact that their parents are gentlefolk. Well, they are underbred in precisely the way in which, one fancies, the contemporaries of Emerson in Concord may well have been underbred. It is the ‘ plain-living’ side of the ‘high thinking.’ They despised externals, and, in the end, externals had their revenge. Breeding, as such, is simply not a product of the independent village. (Some one may mention Cranford; but you cannot call Cranford independent, with its slavish adherence to the etiquette of the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson, its constant awed reference to Sir Peter Arley and the ‘county families.’) The villagers have not — and who supposes that Bronson Alcott and Thoreau had it? —the gift of civilized contacts. A contact, be it remembered, is not quite the same thing as a relation. Manners are a natural growth of courts. Recall any mediæval dwelling of royalty; then imagine life lived in those cramped chambers, in the perpetual presence of superiors and inferiors alike—and lived informally!

In Miss Alcott’s world, all that is changed. According to the older tradition, a totally unchaperoned youth would mean lack of breeding. Here, on the contrary, all the heroines are unchaperoned, while the match-making mamma is anathema. We did not cut off King Charles’s head for nothing. The reward of the unchaperoned daughter is to make a good match. In that rigid school, conventions are judged — and nobly enough, Heaven knows! —from the point of view of morals alone (of absolute, not of historic or evolutionary morals) and many conventions are thereby damned. The result is a little like what one has heard of contemporary Norway. ‘Underbred’ is very likely too strong a word; yet one does see how the social state described in Little Women might easily shock any one brought up in a less provincial tradition. There is too much love-making, for example. Though sweethearting between fiveyear-olds is frowned on, sweethearting between fifteen-year olds is quite the thing. In real life, it would not always be safe to marry, very young, your first, playmate. Any one who has lived in the more modern New England village knows perfectly well that people still marry, very young, their first playmates, and that disaster often results. Nor can Una always depend on the protection of a lion that is necessarily invisible. Granted that Jo’s precocious sense was right, and that it would have been a mistake for her to marry Laurie; which of us believes that, in real life, she would not have made the mistake? You cannot depend on young things in their teens to foresee the future of their temperaments accurately. One cannot but feel that if Mrs. March really saw the complete unfitness of those two for each other, it was her duty to put a few conventional obstacles in their path.

Perhaps all this was part of what my friend meant by lack of breeding in the traditional sense: the social laissez-aller in extraordinary (and perhaps not eternally maintainable?) combination with moral purity. But I suspect that she referred, as well, to another aspect of Miss Alcott’s environment: to the unmistakable lack of the greater and lesser amenities of life. The plain living is quite as prominent as the high thinking. The whole tissue of the March girls’ lives is a very commonplace fabric. You know that their furniture was bad — and that they did not know it; that their æsthetic sense was untrained and crude — and that they did not care; that the simplicity of their meals, their household service, their dress, their everyday manners (in spite of the myth about Amy) was simplicity of the common, not of the intelligent, kind. You really would not want to spend a week in the house of any one of them. Nor has their simplicity in any wise the quality of austerity. Remember the pies that the older March girls carried for muffs (the management whereof was one of the ever-unsolved riddles of my childhood).

No: in so far as breeding is a matter of externals, one must admit that there is some sense in calling Miss Alcott’s people underbred. Perhaps we do not choose to call breeding a matter of externals. In that, we should perfectly agree with Miss Alcott’s people themselves; and to that we shall presently come. For what is incontrovertible is that Miss Alcott’s work is a genuine document.

I have spoken of the unimpeachable morality of Miss Alcott’s world. Charlie lost Rose for having drunk one glass of champagne too much. That is the worst sin committed in any of the books, so far as I remember. Of course, the black sheep, Dan, had been in prison; but he had killed his man inevitably, almost helplessly, in self-defense; and, besides, the treatment of Dan is purely snobbish, from start to finish. Even Mrs. Jo, while she stands by him, is acutely conscious of the social difference between him and her own kin. The moment he lifts his eyes to Bess —! No: the books are quite snobbish enough, in their way. Nat, foundling and fiddler, is permitted to marry Daisy in the end (though, really, anybody might have married Daisy!), But Nat, though a parvenu, is a milksop, and is quite able to say that he has never done anything really disgraceful. The fact is that their social distinctions, while they operate socially, are yet all moral in origin. And this is a very ‘special’ note: the bequest, it may well be, of Calvin.

The transcendental Mr. March would never have sung it; but he and his knew something akin to those resolute discriminations.

Another point is perhaps even more interesting. There are not, I believe, any other books in the world so blatantly full of morality — of moral issues, and moral tests, and morals passionately abided by — and at the same time so empty of religion. The Bible is never quoted; almost no one goes to church; and they pray only when very young and in extreme cases. The only religious allusion, so far as I know, in Little Women, is the patronizing mention of the Madonna provided for Amy by Aunt March’s Catholic maid. And even then, you can see how broad-minded Mrs. March considers herself, to permit Amy the quasioratory; and Amy does not attempt to disguise the fact that she admires the picture chiefly for its artistic quality. Yet it is only fair to remember that, in Miss Alcott’s day, people were reading, without so much as one grain of salt, the confessions of ‘escaped’ nuns, and the novels of Mrs. Julia McNair Wright — and that Elsie Dinsmore developed brain fever when her father threatened to send her to a convent school. Perhaps Mrs. March had a right to flatter herself. Again, as I say, these are documents.

There are many other straws to show which way the wind blows. Would any one but Miss Alcott, for example, have allowed her chief heroine to marry a Professor Bhaer? No modem child ever quite recovers from the shock of it. But we must remember that, in Miss Alcott’s time, German metaphysicians were not without honor in Concord. The breath of reform, too, is hot upon the pages. ‘Temperance’ — remember Charlie’s unlucky glass of champagne, and Laurie’s promise to Meg on her wedding-day; the festivals of the virtuous are a perpetual bath of lemonade. ‘Woman Suffrage’ — recall the discussions alluded to in ‘The Pickwick Portfolio,’ and the fate of the few scoffers in coeducational Plumfield. The children are all passionate little Abolitionists; and the youths are patriotic with a fervid, unfamiliar patriotism, which touches, at its dim source, emotions that to us are almost more prehistoric than historic.

In the minds of Miss Alcott’s world, there is still a lively distrust of the British. They are wont to oppress their colonies, and they cheat at croquet. Indeed, Miss Alcott’s characters look a little askance at all foreigners — except German professors. There is no prophecy of the Celtic Revival in their condescending charity to poor Irishwomen. The only people, not themselves, whom they wholly respect, are the Negroes. The rich men are nearly all East India merchants, and their money goes eventually to endow educational institutions. The young heroes have a precocious antipathy to acquiring wealth for its own sake. Demi would rather, he says, sweep door-mats in a publishing-house than go into business, like ‘Stuffy’ and his kind. ‘I would rather be a door-keeper in the house of the Lord,’ — it would hardly over-emphasize Demi’s so typical feeling for the sanctity of the printed page; for the utter desirability of the publisher’s own office, where, as he says, great men go in and out, with respect. And — to complete the evidence — the books do not lack the note of New English austerity, though they come by it indirectly enough. The New English literary tradition seems to be fairly clear: either passion must be public, or, if it is private, it must be thwarted. There is a good deal of public passion

— for philanthropy, for education, and what-not — in the books, after all. There is no private passion at all: though the books brim with sentiment ,

— sentiment, which is eternally manifest, being perhaps a safer guess for the outsider, — Miss Alcott writes as one who had never loved. It would be difficult to find, anywhere, stories so full of love-making and so empty of emotion.

Straws show which way the wind blows; and these straws are all borne in the same direction. Is not this the New England on which, if not in which, we were all brought up? Any honest New Englander — a New Englander of the villages, I mean — will admit that the New English are singularly ungifted for social life and manners. We suspected that long ago, when we first read Miss Alcott, if we happened to turn, after Little Women, to any one of Mrs. Ewing’s or Mrs. Molesworth’s stories. Imagine Jo dressed, as Mrs. Molesworth’s heroines all were, by Walter Crane! The real ’oldfashioned girl’ was not Polly Milton, but Griselda, in The Cuckoo Clock. Polly was simply of no fashion at all. There was some (wistful?) sense of this in us, even then. Yet of course we admitted that, in comparison, Mrs. Molesworth lacked plot — as Heaven knows she did! Any New Englander of the villages is familiar, too, with the passion for ‘ education a passion that, I suspect, you can match now only in the Middle West. We all know that bigoted scholarliness, in combination, precisely, with nasal and ungrammatical speech, which there is no special point in flattering with the term ‘ idiomatic.’ One or two of Mr. Churchill’s later novels have preserved to us instances of it. We are fortunate if we have come off quite free of the superstition, so prevalent through the March family, that a book —‘any old ’ book — is sacred. We scoff heartily at the parvenu whose books are bound without first being printed; but I am not sure that any pure-bred villager would not rather have sham books than no books at all. We cannot help it. No other furniture seems to us quite so good.

We have all been brought up, too, to be moral snobs. New England mothers must often be put to it to find purely moral grounds for discriminating against some of the playmates their children would ignorantly bring home. They must often yearn to say, without indirection, ‘I do not wish you to play with the butcher’s little girl, and her being in your Sunday-school class makes no difference whatever.’ But the real New England mother never does. She must manage it otherwise; since the only legitimate basis for her discriminations would be some sort of proof that butchers’ little girls were apt to be naughty. The respective fates of Nat and Dan are, I dare to say, as accurate as if they had been recorded by the official investigators of the Eugenics Society. The lack of religion, some one may object, is anything but typically New English. Perhaps, a hundred years ago, it would not have been. And we have not, to be sure, been transcendental with impunity: we have the Calvinistic Unitarian. But the average New England conscience has always had a more natural turn for ethics than for pure piety. Children in Miss Alcott’s books were brought up, like ourselves, to obey their parents. It was Elsie Dinsmore, on her Southern plantation, who (like a Presbyterian St. Rose of Lima) defied her father for religion’s sake. Of course we all had to read about Elsie surreptitiously. We knew that without asking. There was a good deal of plain thinking, as well as of high thinking, in our and Miss Alcott’s world. As for our unworldliness: we have come a long way since Miss Alcott; yet I verily believe that, even now, almost any bounder can take us in if he poses as a philosopher. So many have done it!

I have not done more than indicate Miss Alcott’s exceeding fidelity. Begin recalling her for yourself, and you will agree that she gives us social life as New Englanders, for decades, have, on the whole, known it. The relations of parent and child, brother and sister, community and individual, of playmates, of lovers, of citizens, are all such as we know them. They are familiar to us, if not positively our own experience. Life has grown more complicated everywhere. Yet I doubt if, even now, any New English child would instinctively call Miss Alcott’s people underbred. We still understand their code, if we do not practice it. New England is still something more than a convenient term for map-makers. These be our own villages.