“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.”
In speaking of the Fruitlands experiment Mr. Sanborn says:—
“It brought its own compensations, and left the whole Alcott family richer and not poorer for this romantic experience with its sad termination. It prepared Alcott to face more patiently the storms of later life, and to train his daughter, who was his best single gift to the world, better for her conspicuous service. And ‘Fruitlands’ will be remembered, perhaps longer than most of the adventures that awaited this romantic household in its voyage of life....
“There was some foundation for Alcott’s despair at ‘Fruitlands,’ and with the ill success that followed him after the flourishing Temple School in Boston. Emerson, the gentlest and least exacting of men, looking at his friend’s situation a few years after the ‘Fruitlands’ experiment, wrote in his private journal—
THE BEDROOM
Where Mr. Alcott nearly succumbed to his despair at the failure of his “New Eden”
“‘The plight of Mr. Alcott! The most refined and the most advanced soul we have had in New England; who makes all other souls appear slow and cheap and mechanical; a man of such courtesy and greatness that in conversation all others, even the intellectual, seem sharp, and fighting for victory and angry,—while he has the unalterable sweetness of a muse! Yet because he cannot earn money by his talk or his pen, or by school-keeping, or bookkeeping, or editing, or any kind of meanness,—nay, for this very cause that he is ahead of his contemporaries, is higher than they, and keeps himself out of the shop condescensions and arts which they stoop to,—or, unhappily, need not stoop to, but find themselves, as it were, born to; therefore it is the unanimous opinion of New England judges that this man must die! We do not adjudge him to hemlock or garroting,—we are much too hypocritical and cowardly for that. But we not less surely doom him by refusing to protest against this doom, or combine to save him, and to set him in employments fit for him and salutary for the State.’”
The poem written by Mr. Alcott, with the title “The Return,” may fittingly close this chapter:—