Indeed, it was always Mrs. Alcott who could have given the tragic side, skillfully as she kept her worries hidden. Her own family, indignant because Bronson Alcott could not better provide the material needs for his family, on more than one occasion besought the faithful wife to leave him.
A letter from her brother, urging this step, drew forth from her a defense of Bronson Alcott which the husband enters in his journal as follows:
November
1840
Passages of a letter from my wife to one who misapprehends and perverts my life and purposes.
"If I do not mistake the spirit as well as letter of your remark you would have us believe that a righteous retribution has overtaken us, (or my husband, and we are one,) and that the world is justly punishing him for not having conciliated it, by conforming to its wills and ways.—You say that my husband was told ten years ago, that the world could not understand him. It perhaps fell dead on his ears and ever will. There is no human voice can convince him that the path he has chosen to tread, thorny, bleak, solitary, as it is, is not the right one for him. Just so did that man of Nazareth whom all the world profess to admire and adore, but few to imitate; and these few are the laughing-stock of the Christian Community. They are branded as visionaries and fools. But this little band when alone and disencumbered of idle observation, enjoy the recital of their privations; they have been reviled, but they revile not again; they know sorrow and are acquainted with grief; and yet there is joy in that group of sinless men, such as angels might desire to partake of. I am not writing poetry, but I have tried to place before your mind, in as brief, but clear a manner as I am able, our real condition, and Mr. Alcott's merit as a man, who, though punished and neglected by a wicked world, has much to console and encourage him in the confidence and cooperation of some of the wisest and best men living. Ten such, were they permitted in their several vocations to act as teachers, preachers, and printers, would save our wicked city from the ruin that awaits it. But they are turned, like the Nazarene, into solitary places to lament the blindness and folly of mankind, who are following the vain and fleeting shadow for the real and abiding substance. But to return to Mr. Alcott, is he to sell his soul, or what is the same thing, his principles, for the bread that perisheth? No one will employ him in his way; he cannot work in theirs, if he thereby involve his conscience. He is so resolved in this matter that I believe he will starve and freeze before he will sacrifice principle to comfort. In this, I and my children are necessarily implicated: we make and mean to make all the sacrifices we can to sustain him, but we have less to sustain us in the spirit, and therefore, are more liable to be overcome of the flesh. He has, for a long time gone without everything which he could not produce by labor, from his own place, that no one could in truth reproach him with wantonly eating of the fruits of another's labor.
He was sent for by friends in Hingham to talk with them; which he did two evenings; his expenses were paid and $23. put into his hands as a slight compensation for the benefit they felt he had conferred upon them by his conversations. I should like to copy the note accompanying it, but you never care to see how his fellow fanatics rave on these holy themes, life, duty, destiny of man. Thus he occasionally finds a market for his thoughts and experiences, which, though inadequate to our support, is richly prized as the honest gains of an innocent and righteous labor. You spoke of his "poetical wardrobe" whether in satire or in a worthier spirit, I cannot tell. However spiritual he may have become, there is still enough of the carnal to feel the chills of winter, and the chiller blasts of satire. His tatters are the rags of righteousness and keep him warmer than they would anyone whose spirit was less cheered and warmed by the fires of eternal love and truth.
An appreciative account of Mr. Alcott's famous school in the Masonic Temple, Boston, is found in the "Record of a School," edited by Elizabeth Peabody, published in 1835, republished in 1874. The "Conversations with Children on the Gospels," edited by Mr. Alcott in two volumes, appearing in 1836-1837, caused such a commotion in Boston as to result in the downfall of the Temple School. Reading these conversations to-day, one is impressed with the modern quality of their thought. They were forerunners of that higher criticism, which with the Bible student now supplants the old blind acceptance without reflection of even obscure Biblical passages.
On philosophy and religion Mr. Alcott and Miss Peabody delighted to talk and write. Their discussion of the existence of evil is startlingly modern.
"I do not think that evil should be clothed in form by the imagination," writes Miss Peabody to Mr. Alcott; "I think every effort should be made to strip it of all individuality, all shaping and all coloring. And the reason is, that Evil has in truth no substantial existence, that it acquires all the existence it has from want of faith and soul cultivation, and that this is sufficient reason why all cultivation should be directed to give positiveness, coloring, shaping, to all kinds of good—Good only being eternal truth."
In reply, the philosopher thus comments in his diary: "Evil has no positive existence, I agree with Miss Peabody, but it has usurped a positive place and being in the popular imagination, and by the imagination must it be made to flee away into its negative life. How shall this be done? By shadowing forth in vivid colors the absolute beauty and phenomena of good, by assuming evil not as positive, but as negative."