Pedlar's Progress
by [Little Brown, $3.50]
IN 1929 Professor Shepard published an elaborate historical study, The Lore of the Unicorn If he was looking later for another extreme of individuality, he could not have chosen a better topic than Amos Bronson Alcott. In these later days of debunking, Alcott could hardly have found a more sympathetic biographer. The warmth of his appreciation of the best in Alcott’s philosophy and life might even excite an occasional suspicion of rebunking. This, however, would be a distortion of what after all is a matter of approach and emphasis.
Note, for example, the uses to which Professor Shepard puts Louisa May Alcott’s story of the Fruitlands experiment in her ‘Transcendental Wild Oats.’ Freely as he draws upon it at many points, he does not employ its concluding anecdote — the story of Alcott’s remarking as a frostbitten apple fell from a tree while he and his shivering family were quitting their forlorn red farmhouse, ‘Poor Fruitlands! The name was as great a failure as the rest!‘ — and of his wife’s antiphonal word, ‘Don’t you think Apple Slump would be a better name for it?’
Now ‘Apple Slump’ would have been as good a title for an ironic account of Alcott as Pedlar’s Progress is for this more sanguine recital. Professor Shepard chose — perhaps by his very nature was bound to choose — the sympathetic approach to his subject. He had, among Alcott’s contemporaries, such fellow partisans as Emerson and Thoreau. For another ‘school of thought the elder Henry James spoke with his customary directness when he told Alcott to his face, ‘You are an egg half hatched. The Shells are yet sticking about your head.’ On the Exchange of Transcendentalism, Alcott could never have been quoted merely at par: be would have stood at least at 150. Had Professor Shepard held him at quite so high a valuation he would not have provided the skeptical with so many missiles for critical target practice. The absurdities and humors of an astonishing existence might have been turned to formidable account. Here the benign sway of Alcott’s nature has tempered judgment with mercy. It must be felt, besides, that the example of prolixity in Alcott’s interminable talk and journalizing has had its effect in a diffuseness of narration that carries the book beyond its essential length.
Such, in general, are one’s reservations with regard to the book. Its merits call for even more definite recognition. One of them lies in the success with which Professor Shepard has illustrated, by means of the Alcott story, the ‘assured conviction’ which he declares in his opening sentence — ‘that America has always been, is now, and throughout her coming centuries will continue to be, profoundly idealistic.’ With recurring emphasis he keeps the reader aware that Alcott was precisely as typical of one aspect of American character as Franklin and John D. Rockefeller were of others. He is equally successful in reconstructing that strange background of American society in the three decades before the Civil War, from which an Alcott could step, quite naturally, into the foreground of Transcendentalism. His impulses towards the planting of Edens seem to have sprung from a purity and simplicity of spirit worthy almost of Adam before the fall. The reconciliation of theory and practice troubled him not in the very least. His two attempts at dealing with practical matters — at his Temple School and in the Fruitlands experiment — met with failure so disastrous that nothing but Alcott’s total lack of humor could have rendered his recovery possible. There was an accompanying lack of responsibility in financial matters which would have been unbelievable in a world of fact had not Wilkins Micawber and Harold Skimpole, in the world of fiction, been Alcott’s contemporaries.
It is the virtue of Professor Shepard’s narrative that all these incredibilities are made to seem credible. He takes his ‘Pedlar’ more nearly at his own valuation as a philosopher than many others can be expected to do. If he had quoted Alcott’s self-confident question to Emerson, ‘If Pythagoras came to Concord, whom would he ask to see?’ his case would have been no easier to make. Yet in his unhurried offering and interpreting of a vast garnering of information he does bring Alcott, his contemporaries, and their ideas to life, and gives them a distinctive place in the true picture of nineteenth-century America. In this achievement alone there is abundant occasion for gratitude.
M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE