Well, to get away from these dismal experiences, and come back to our
travels, with their perpetual novelty, and the constantly varying beauty
of the country!
The human interest of the landscape, that is always the great interest of
it, and I wish I could make you feel it as I have felt it in this
wonderful journey of ours. It is like the New England landscape at times,
in its kind of gentle wildness, but where it has been taken back into the
hand of man, how different the human interest is! Instead of a rheumatic
old farmer, in his clumsy clothes, with some of his gaunt girls to help
him, or perhaps his ageing wife, getting in the hay of one of those sweet
meadows, and looking like so many animated scarecrows at their work; or
instead of some young farmer, on the seat of his clattering mower, or
mounted high over his tedder, but as much alone as if there were no one
else in the neighborhood, silent and dull, or fierce or sullen, as the
case might be, the work is always going on with companies of mowers or
reapers, or planters, that chatter like birds or sing like them.
It is no use my explaining again and again that in a country like this,
where everybody works, nobody over works, and that when the few hours of
obligatory labor are passed in the mornings, people need not do anything
unless they choose. Their working-dresses are very simple, but in all
sorts of gay colors, like those you saw in the Greek play at Harvard,
with straw hats for the men, and fillets of ribbon for the girls, and
sandals for both. I speak of girls, for most of the married women are at
home gardening, or about the household work, but men of every age work in
the fields. The earth is dear to them because they get their life from it
by labor that is not slavery; they come to love it every acre, every
foot, because they have known it from childhood; and I have seen old men,
very old, pottering about the orchards and meadows during the hours of
voluntary work, and trimming them up here and there, simply because they
could not keep away from the place, or keep their hands off the trees and
bushes. Sometimes in the long, tender afternoons, we see far up on some
pasture slope, groups of girls scattered about on the grass, with their
sewing, or listening to some one reading. Other times they are giving a
little play, usually a comedy, for life is so happy here that tragedy
would not be true to it, with the characters coming and going in a grove
of small pines, for the _coulisses_, and using a level of grass for the
stage. If we stop, one of the audience comes down to us and invites us to
come up and see the play, which keeps on in spite of the sensation that I
can feel I make among them.
Everywhere the news of us has gone before us, and there is a universal
curiosity to get a look at Aristides' capitalistic wife, as they call me.
I made him translate it, and he explained that the word was merely
descriptive and not characteristic; some people distinguished and called
me American. There was one place where they were having a picnic in the
woods up a hillside, and they asked us to join them, so we turned our
van into the roadside and followed the procession. It was headed by two
old men playing on pipes, and after these came children singing, and then
all sorts of people, young and old. When we got to an open place in the
woods, where there was a spring, and smooth grass, they built fires, and
began to get ready for the feast, while some of them did things to amuse
the rest. Every one could do something; if you can imagine a party of
artists, it was something like that. I should say the Altrurians had
artists' manners, free, friendly, and easy, with a dash of humor in
everything, and a wonderful willingness to laugh and make laugh.
Aristides is always explaining that the artist is their ideal type; that
is, some one who works gladly, and plays as gladly as he works; no one
here is asked to do work that he hates, unless he seems to hate every
kind of work. When this happens, the authorities find out something for
him that he had _better_ like, by letting him starve till he works. That
picnic lasted the whole afternoon and well into the night, and then the
picnickers went home through the starlight, leading the little ones, or
carrying them when they were too little or too tired. But first they came
down to our van with us, and sang us a serenade after we had disappeared
into it, and then left us, and sent their voices back to us out of the
dark.
One morning at dawn, as we came into a village, we saw nearly the whole
population mounting the marble steps of the temple, all the holiday dress
of the Voluntaries, which they put on here every afternoon when the work
is done. Last of the throng came a procession of children, looking
something like a May-Day party, and midway of their line were a young man
and a young girl, hand in hand, who parted at the door of the temple, and
entered separately. Aristides called out, “Oh, it is a wedding! You are
in luck, Eveleth,” and then and there I saw my first Altrurian wedding.
Within, the pillars and the altar and the seats of the elders were
garlanded with flowers, so fresh and fragrant that they seemed to have
blossomed from the marble overnight, and there was a soft murmur of
Altrurian voices that might very well have seemed the hum of bees among
the blossoms. This subsided, as the young couple, who had paused just
inside the temple door, came up the middle side by side, and again
separated and took their places, the youth on the extreme right of the
elder, and the maiden on the extreme left of the eldresses, and stood
facing the congregation, which was also on foot, and joined in the hymn
which everybody sang. Then one of the eldresses rose and began a sort of
statement which Aristides translated to me afterwards. She said that the
young couple whom we saw there had for the third time asked to become man
and wife, after having believed for a year that they loved each other,
and having statedly come before the marriage authorities and been
questioned as to the continuance of their affection. She said that
probably every one present knew that they had been friends from
childhood, and none would be surprised that they now wished to be united
for life. They had been carefully instructed as to the serious nature of
the marriage bond, and admonished as to the duties they were entering
into, not only to each other, but to the community. At each successive
visit to the authorities they had been warned, separately and together,
against the danger of trusting to anything like a romantic impulse, and
they had faithfully endeavored to act upon this advice, as they
testified. In order to prove the reality of their affection, they had
been parted every third month, and had lived during that time in
different Regions where it was meant they should meet many other young
people, so that if they felt any swerving of the heart they might not
persist in an intention which could only bring them final unhappiness. It
seems this is the rule in the case of young lovers, and people usually
marry very young here, but if they wish to marry later in life the rule
is not enforced so stringently, or not at all. The bride and groom we saw
had both stood these trials, and at each return they had been more and
more sure that they loved each other, and loved no one else. Now they
were here to unite their hands, and to declare the union of their hearts
before the people.
Then the eldress sat down and an elder arose, who bade the young people
come forward to the centre of the line, where the elders and eldresses
were sitting. He took his place behind them, and once more and for the
last time he conjured them not to persist if they felt any doubt of
themselves. He warned them that if they entered into the married state,
and afterwards repented to the point of seeking divorce, the divorce
would indeed be granted them, but on terms, as they must realize, of
lasting grief to themselves through the offence they would commit against
the commonwealth. They answered that they were sure of themselves, and
ready to exchange their troth for life and death. Then they joined hands,
and declared that they took each other for husband and wife. The
congregation broke into another hymn and slowly dispersed, leaving the
bride and groom with their families, who came up to them and embraced
them, pressing their cheeks against the cheeks of the young pair.
This ended the solemnity, and then the festivity began, as it ended, with
a wedding feast, where people sang and danced and made speeches and drank
toasts, and the fun was kept up till the hours of the Obligatories
approached; and then, what do you think? The married pair put off their
wedding garments with the rest and went to work in the fields! Later,
I understood, if they wished to take a wedding journey they could freely
do so; but the first thing in their married life they must honor the
Altrurian ideal of work, by which every one must live in order that
every other may live without overwork. I believe that the marriage
ceremonial is something like that of the Quakers, but I never saw a
Quaker wedding, and I could only compare this with the crazy romps with
which our house-weddings often end, with throwing of rice and old shoes,
and tying ribbons to the bridal carriage and baggage, and following the
pair to the train with outbreaks of tiresome hilarity, which make them
conspicuous before their fellow-travellers; or with some of our ghastly
church weddings, in which the religious ceremonial is lost in the social
effect, and ends with that everlasting thumping march from “Lohengrin,”
and the outsiders storming about the bridal pair and the guests with the
rude curiosity that the fattest policemen at the canopied and carpeted
entrance cannot check.