We had very young people with us, it is true--downy lads, rosy girls
in their first teens, and children of all heights above one's knee;
but these had chiefly been sent hither for education, which it was one
of the objects and methods of our institution to supply. Then we had
boarders from town and elsewhere, who lived with us in a familiar way,
sympathized more or less in our theories, and sometimes shared in our
labors.
[Footnote 78: From "The Blithedale Romance," published by Houghton,
Mifflin Company. Hawthorne was a member of the Brook Farm Community of
Roxbury, Mass., and from it derived at least suggestions for the scene
and action of this story.]
On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor,
perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long.
Persons of marked individuality--crooked sticks, as some of us might
be called--are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot. But,
so long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling,
with a free nature in him, might have sought far and near without
finding so many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward.
We were of all creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on
every imaginable subject. Our bond, it seems to me, was not
affirmative, but negative. We had individually found one thing or
another to quarrel with in our past life, and were pretty well agreed
as to the inexpediency of lumbering along with the old system any
further. As to what should be substituted there was much less
unanimity. We did not greatly care--at least, I never did--for the
written constitution under which our millennium had commenced. My hope
was that, between theory and practise, a true and available mode of
life might be struck out; and that, even should we ultimately fail,
the months or years spent in the trial would not have been wasted,
either as regarded passing enjoyment, or the experience which makes
men wise.
Arcadians tho we were, our costume bore no resemblance to the
beribboned doublets, silk breeches and stockings, and slippers
fastened with artificial roses, that distinguish the pastoral people
of poetry and the stage. In outward show, I humbly conceive, we looked
rather like a gang of beggars, or banditti, than either a company of
honest laboring-men, or a conclave of philosophers. Whatever might be
our points of difference, we all of us seemed to have come to
Blithedale with the one thrifty and laudable idea of wearing out our
old clothes. Such garments as had an airing whenever we strode afield!
Coats with high collars and with no collars, broad-skirted or
swallow-tailed, and with the waist at every point between the hip and
the armpit; pantaloons of a dozen successive epochs, and greatly
defaced at the knees by the humiliations of the wearer before his
lady-love--in short, we were a living epitome of defunct fashions, and
the very raggedest presentment of men who had seen better days. It was
gentility in tatters. Often retaining a scholarlike or clerical air,
you might have taken us for the denizens of Grub street, intent on
getting a comfortable livelihood by agricultural labor; or,
Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full experiment; or Candide and
his motley associates, at work in their cabbage-garden; or anything
else that was miserably out at elbows, and most clumsily patched in
the rear. We might have been sworn comrades to Falstaff's ragged
regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other points of husbandry,
every mother's son of us would have served admirably to stick up for a
scarecrow. And the worst of the matter was that the first energetic
movement essential to one downright stroke of real labor was sure to
put a finish to these poor habiliments. So we gradually flung them all
aside, and took to honest homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable,
on the whole, to the plan recommended, I think, by Virgil--"_Ara
nudus; sere nudus_,"--which, as Silas Foster remarked, when I
translated the maxim, would be apt to astonish the women-folks.
After a reasonable training, the yeoman life throve well with us. Our
faces took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and our
shoulders in breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked as
if they had never been capable of kid gloves. The plow, the hoe, the
scythe, and the hay-fork grew familiar to our grasp. The oxen
responded to our voices. We could do almost as fair a day's work as
Silas Foster himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake at
daybreak with only a little stiffness of the joints, which was usually
quite gone by breakfast-time.
To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as to our
real proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand. They told
slanderous fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or to
drive them afield when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from their
conjugal bond at nightfall. They had the face to say, too, that the
cows laughed at our awkwardness at milking-time, and invariably kicked
over the pails; partly in consequence of our putting the stool on the
wrong side, and partly because, taking offense at the whisking of
their tails, we were in the habit of holding these natural
fly-flappers with one hand, and milking with the other. They further
averred that we hoed up whole acres of Indian corn and other crops,
and drew the earth carefully about the weeds; and that we raised five
hundred tufts of burdock, mistaking them for cabbages; and that, by
dint of unskilful planting, few of our seeds ever came up at all, or,
if they did come up, it was stern-foremost; and that we spent the
better part of the month of June in reversing a field of beans, which
had thrust themselves out of the ground in this unseemly way. They
quoted it as nothing more than an ordinary occurrence for one or other
of us to crop off two or three fingers, of a morning, by our clumsy
use of the hay-cutter. Finally, and as an ultimate catastrophe, these
mendacious rogues circulated a report that we communitarians were
exterminated, to the last man, by severing ourselves asunder with the
sweep of our own scythes!--and that the world had lost nothing by this
little accident.