Ladies whose names she had never
heard, came in fine carriages and sent in their cards to her. This
amused her very much. "I don't care who their grandfathers and
grandmothers were," she said. "John Hancock was my great-great-grandfather,
but nobody ever came to see me on his account." If she had leisure she
received them: otherwise not. In her next novel, the "Old Fashioned Girl,"
she introduces herself with the name of Katie King, and says to her young
friends: "Beware of popularity; it is a delusion and a snare; it puffeth
up the heart of man, and just as one gets to liking the taste of this
intoxicating draught, it suddenly faileth."
When "Little Men" was published a rather censorious critic complained
that Miss Alcott's boys and girls had no very good manners, and made
some inquiry after the insipid "Rollo" books which were in circulation
forty years ago. It is true their manners are not of the best, but they
are the Concord manners of that period. Were they otherwise they would
not be true to life. Very few boys and girls of sixteen have fine
manners; and even after they have acquired the art of good behavior in
company they continue to act in quite a different fashion towards each
other. What else can we expect of them? Exactly the same objection has
been made to "School Days at Rugby"; and when some one complained of
Goethe that the characters in "Wilhelm Meister" did not belong to good
society he replied in verse, "I have often been in society called
'good,' from which I could not obtain an idea for the smallest poem.
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