and his tub would have been Alcott’s ideal if he had carried it out.  But he never carried it out.”  Diogenes himself, it may be supposed, had his ideal included a family and an audience as well as a tub, might finally have come to hold that the finding of the latter was a mere detail, which could be entrusted indifferently to either of the two former or to both combined.  Somebody once described Fruitlands as a place where Mr. Alcott looked benign and talked philosophy, while Mrs. Alcott and the children did the work.  Still, to look benign is a good deal for a man to do persistently in an adverse world, indifferent for the most part to the charms of “divine philosophy,” and Mr. Alcott persevered in that exercise until his latest day.  “He was unquestionably one of those who like to sit upon a platform,” wrote, at the time of his death, one who knew Alcott well, “and he may have liked to feel that his venerable aspect had the effect of a benediction.”  But with this mild criticism, censure of him is well-nigh exhausted.  There was nothing of the Patriarch of Bleeding Heart Yard about him except that “venerable aspect,” for which nature was responsible, and not he.

Fruitlands was the caricature of Brook Farm.  Just as the fanatic is the caricature of the true reformer, so was Alcott the caricature of Ripley.  This is not meant as disparaging either Alcott’s sincerity or his intelligence, but to affirm that he lacked judgment, that he miscalculated means and ends, that he jumped from theory to practice without a moment’s interval, preferred to be guided by instinct rather than by processes of reasoning, and deemed this to be the philosopher’s way.

In the memoranda of private conversations with Father Hecker we find several references to Mr. Alcott.  The first bears date February 4, 1882, and occurs in a conversation ranging over the whole of his experience between his first and second departures from home.  We give it as it stands: 

“Fruitlands was very different from Brook Farm—­far more ascetic.”

“You didn’t like it?”

“Yes; but they did not begin to satisfy me.  I said to them:  ‘If you had the Eternal here, all right.  I would be with you.’”

“Had they no notion of the hereafter?”

“No; nothing definite.  Their idea was human perfection.  They set out to demonstrate what man can do in the way of the supremacy of the spiritual over the animal.  ‘All right,’ I said, ’I agree with you fully.  I admire your asceticism; it is nothing new to me; I have practised it a long time myself.  If you can get the Everlasting out of my mind, I’m yours.  But I know’ (here Father Hecker thumped the table at his bedside) ‘that I am going to live for ever.’”

“What did Alcott say when you left?”

“He went to Lane and said, ’Well, Hecker has flunked out.  He hadn’t the courage to persevere.  He’s a coward.’  But Lane said, ’No; you’re mistaken.  Hecker’s right.  He wanted more than we had to give him.’”