to New Haven. All the money that had been contributed by Mrs. Newcomb
and her friends had gone, but that did not trouble the philosophers.
They boarded the boat quite serenely and when it started sat on deck
enjoying the breeze. The ticket-man came to each passenger for his
ticket, and when he came to Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane, sitting there in
their linen suits, he asked them for theirs. Quite undisturbed Mr.
Alcott replied that they had no money or scrip, but they would quite
willingly pay their way by addressing the passengers and crew with a
little conversation in the saloon. It is said that in reply the language
of the ticket-man was not as civil as it should have been.
It was all very pleasant, this wandering off and showing their linen
tunics to the world and holding conversations to enlighten people in
regard to the future wonders of the New Eden, but the day they left
Fruitlands Joseph Palmer was off attending to his cattle at No Town, and
the crop of barley had been cut and was waiting to be harvested. Poor
Mrs. Alcott looked at it with anxious eyes. The granary was almost empty
and this barley meant food. She could forget herself, but she could not
ignore the needs of her children. Christopher Greene and Larned and
Bower were also away. The barley lay there with no one to bring it in to
a safe shelter. The next day she looked at it again with a sinking
heart. As the afternoon waned, black clouds covered the sky and flashes
of lightning rent seams through them with terrifying rapidity. Then Mrs.
Alcott made a quick decision. Gathering all the baskets she could find,
she carried them to the barley-field with the help of the children, and
in hot haste they gathered the barley into the baskets and dragged them
to the granary, and then ran back as fast as they could for more. Thus
they worked with all their strength, and when the storm broke, they had
saved enough to last them for at least a few weeks.
So if Mrs. Alcott lacked, as Lane said, spiritual insight, she
fortunately for them had practical foresight, from which they all reaped
a benefit.
* * * * *
The following letter to Mr. Oldham is suggestive of the trend of affairs
in the community:—
* * * * *
FRUITLANDS, HARVARD, MASS.,
September 29, 1843.
On our arrival at home we learnt that in our absence several friends and
strangers had called, amongst them S. Bower, Parker Pillsbury, and an
acquaintance, Mr. Hamond of New Ipswich in New Hampshire State. Thinking
the latter worth seeing we went to visit him, a distance of about
twenty-five miles. He is married to an exoteric wife of some good
household qualities; he has built with his own hands a smart cottage,
being an expert workman, and has moreover a respectable talent for
portrait painting which he estimates humbly without a consciousness of
humility. Next to Edward Palmer, he is a person who, I should think,
would make one with us. He introduced us at two houses to four females
who vitally considered constitute with himself the whole of the town.
Our visit there will do some good, for though they have read my letters
printed last winter in the newspapers, yet the presence of a living
person is much more real a thing. I saw their good intentions were
greatly encouraged. I could not dissuade the oldest from promising never
to taste flesh again, which I was rather inclined to on account of her
years....
On Saturday last Anna Alcott most magnanimously walked her little legs
fourteen miles in about five hours down to old Concord, where our
friends appear to have been pretty somnolent since our departure. On
Tuesday we returned on foot, and accomplished somewhat towards the
liberation of the animals by a heroine of thirteen. Mr. Emerson is, I
think, quite stationary: he is off the Railroad of Progress, and merely
an elegant, kindly observer of all who pass onwards, and notes down
their aspect while they remain in sight; of course, when they arrive at
a new station they are gone from and for him. I see Mr. John Sterling
dedicates his new tragedy of “Strafford” to him: no very alarming honor!
I suppose that Thomas Carlyle, with all his famous talking, does not yet
_actually_ lead the people out of their troubles. These worthy and
enlightened scribblers will do little to save the nation. Some there are
I hope of more real solid metal....
[Illustration:
THE OUTER KITCHEN
]
Samuel Bower has not yet had your note, as I am not sure where he is. He
could not, it seems, long endure Joseph Palmer’s offer of land, etc., it
was so solitary. He called here when we were on our long journey on his
way to Lowell, the Manchester of New England. If his aims are high and
his head clear, or his hands effective, he will not be able to wander
far from us; but a wanderer it is certain he must be allowed to be.
Abraham [Abram Everett] comes and goes with some regard to the law
within him; he is now busy with our latter hay, the maize, buckwheat,
etc.
What is to be our destiny I can in no wise guess. Mr. Alcott makes such
high requirements of all persons that few are likely to stay, even of
his own family, unless he can become more tolerant of defect. He is an
artist in human character requiring every painter to be a Michael
Angelo. He also does not wish to keep a hospital, nor even a school, but
to be surrounded by Masters—Masters of Art, of the one grand Art of
human life. I suppose such a standard would soon empty your Concordium
as well as every other house, which I suppose you call by insinuation
“Discordiums,” or, more elegantly, “Discordia.” I propose to pass at
least another winter in New England to know more averagingly what they
are, as the last was particularly severe. I have gone about on these
several journeys in the simple tunic and linen garments and mean to keep
them on as long as I can. We have had a fine summer of three months, and
a fine autumn seems on hand. Sharp frost this morning, yet we took our
bath as usual out-of-doors in the gray of the morn at one-half past
five. Health, the grand external condition, still attends me, every
stranger rating me ten or twelve years younger than I am; so that if
such are the effects of climate I may indeed be happy, for my
youthfulness is not all appearance—I _feel_ as buoyant and as boyish as
I look, which I find a capital endorsement to my assertions about diet,
etc. It staggers the sceptical and sets their selfish thoughts to
work....
Hoping that all minds are thus laboring, let us, my dear friend, act as
if all good progress depended upon us and unfailingly present a clean
breast to Eternal Love, shedding forth our full measure in the clearest
Light; in which I am
Thine truly,
CHAS. LANE.
Abraham just notifies me there is work in the field, so I must go.
* * * * *
Joseph Palmer had offered his old house at No Town to Samuel Bower as a
refuge in which to test his theory of the benefits to be derived from
accustoming the body to live without the enervating burden of clothing.
Bower’s experiences in this line at Fruitlands had not been satisfactory
or convincing, as it was only at night that he could make the
experiment, and then they insisted on his donning a white garment for
his peregrinations in the open. Even this caused agitation in the
neighborhood, and tales of a white ghost wandering over the hillside
caused much alarm, and several times a posse went out from the village
to look into the matter. At No Town he could be in solitude. While there
he wrote a number of articles for the _Liberator_, in one of which he
predicted the full regeneration of man, “if we can rid the kitchen of
its horrors and keep our tables free from the mangled corse.”
* * * * *
In another letter Lane writes to Oldham:—
* * * * *
... At present I am situated thus. All the persons who have joined us
during the summer have from some cause or other quitted, they say in
consequence of Mr. Alcott’s despotic manner, which he interprets as
their not being equal to the Spirit’s demands. Joseph Palmer, who has
done, and is doing our farmwork for love, still remains in the same
relation as he ever did.
Palmer says that having once declared this land free we should never go
back, at least until the work has been fairly tested. Under all this it
should be stated that Mrs. Alcott has no spontaneous inclination towards
a larger family than her own natural one, of spiritual ties she knows
nothing, though to keep all together she does and would go through a
good deal of exterior and interior toil. I hoped I had done with
pecuniary affairs, but it seems I am not to be let off. The crops, I
believe, will not discharge all the obligations they were expected to
liquidate, and against going further into debt I am most determinately
settled.... You will perceive that I have, like yourself, a small peck
of troubles; not quite heavy enough to drive me to a juncture with our
friends, the Shakers, but sufficiently so to put the thought into one’s
head, as you perceive. In the midst of all these events and of William’s
illness, who is in bed eight or ten days with a sort of bilious fever, I
am not without the consolatory hope that some measure of Spirit
utilitary is bound up with our obscure doings.
Yours most affectionately,
CHARLES LANE.
At a late visit on foot to Roxbury, I found the numbers at Brook Farm
considerably diminished. I don’t know what they will say to my letter if
they see it in _The New Age_, but never mind.
* * * * *
From now on clashing of wills disturbed the serenity of Fruitlands.
Charles Lane, despondent over the course of events and the sense of
failure, and seeing further financial complications in store for him,
began seriously to consider the plan of life adopted by the Shakers
whose well-filled corn-bins and full-rigged haylofts bespoke a system
which provided plenty for man and beast, and gave time for alternate
work and meditation. He began to talk of this to Mr. Alcott and urged
him toward a more monastic life, and then suggested that they should
join them. That he had great influence with Mr. Alcott is evident, and
Mrs. Alcott, who fully realized this, grew restless and then alarmed.
In writing to Oldham, Lane kept dwelling upon Mrs. Alcott. Once he
wrote: “Mrs. Alcott has passed from the ladylike to the industrious
order, but she has much inward experience to realize. Her pride is not
yet eradicated and her peculiar maternal love blinds her to all
else—whom does it not so blind for a season?”[11]
Footnote 11:
Sanborn’s _Bronson Alcott_.
And he ascribes the failure of other persons to join the experiment
largely to Mrs. Alcott, “who vows that her own family are all that she
lives for.” No such narrow purpose, Lane adds, has inspired him; and he
blames Mr. Alcott for listening too much to his family affections, and
regarding too much what that guardian angel of middle-class England,
Mrs. Grundy, will say.
In speaking of Mr. Alcott, he complains that “constancy to his wife and
inconstancy to the Spirit have blurred over his life forever.”
Poor Mrs. Alcott, poor “Marmee,” as her daughters called her!—in her
loyalty she had almost worked her fingers to the bone with no thanks for
it. Her days had passed without any help to lighten the manual labor. At
first they said that not a lamp could lighten Fruitlands because the oil
contained animal fat, and only bayberry candles could be used, and only
a few of them. But Mrs. Alcott then rebelled. How could she sew and mend
the clothes with such poor light? There seemed some sense in this, so
one small lamp was brought to Fruitlands just for her. The philosophers
tried sitting in the dark, but one by one would try to find some pretext
to join her at the sewing-table, and Mrs. Alcott’s lamp burned bright
and steady, an emblem of her own true and faithful heart.
Ellery Channing said: “Mrs. Alcott was one of the most refined persons
of my acquaintance. She told me years afterwards that in 1843–44 she
feared for her husband’s sanity; he did such strange things without
seeming to know how odd they were; wearing only linen clothes and canvas
shoes, and eating only vegetables.”
* * * * *
November 26, 1843, Lane wrote to Oldham from Fruitlands:—
“What with agitations of mind and ills of body, I have passed a less
happy time than usual. William was ill a whole month with a low fever so
that he could not even sit up in bed for one minute. I had to nurse him
while plagued with hands so chapped and sore that I was little more
capable than the patient. Then came Mr. [Samuel J.] May’s announcement
that he should not pay the note to which he had put his hand; so that
money affairs and individual property come back again upon me for a
season. Thereupon ensued endless discussions, doubts, and anticipations
concerning our destiny. These still hang over us. But in the midst of
them Mrs. Alcott gives notice that she concedes to the wishes of her
friends and shall withdraw to a house which they will provide for
herself and her four children. As she will take all the furniture with
her, this proceeding necessarily leaves me alone and naked in a new
world. Of course Mr. A. and I could not remain together without her. To
be ‘that devil come from Old England to separate husband and wife,’ I
will not be, though it might gratify New England to be able to say it.
So that you will perceive a separation is possible. Indeed, I believe
that under the circumstances it is now inevitable.”
* * * * *
Mr. Sanborn says in his “Memoirs of Bronson Alcott”:—
“Those who read Louisa’s ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ will see by her
names ‘Timon Lion’ for Lane, and ‘Abel Lamb’ for Alcott, that she looked
on her father as rather the victim of Lane in the ‘Fruitlands’ failure.
Without conceding this, the impartial observer will say that Lane had
the stronger will, and the far more prosaic nature; that he decided most
of the questions for his associates in both countries, and that he was
rather a hard person to get on with. Neither his first wife, nor Wright,
nor Mrs. Alcott, nor Alcott himself, nor the Harvard Shakers, nor
finally Oldham, could quite suit him. He over-persuaded Alcott, who was
a good farmer and mechanic, to adopt impossible modes of working the
‘Fruitlands’ farm, and much of their whimsies in dress and food seem to
have come from Lane and his English friends. Mrs. Alcott, when
reëstablished in a home of her own at Concord, early in 1845, offered
Lane a home there, and he tried it for a time in the next summer, but
still complained, as he had at ‘Fruitlands,’ that she wished to keep her
family small, and made it uncomfortable for guests. Knowing Mrs.
Alcott’s character well, in the last twenty years of her life, I cannot
believe that this was ever true of her. She was hospitality itself,
whether poor or rich; and it must have been Lane’s own individualism
that made him dissatisfied.
[Illustration:
CHARLES LANE’S ROOM
The old cowhide trunk, in which some of the most valuable of the books
were shipped from London; also the old chest in which the linen was
kept. The spinning-wheel belonged to a former owner.
]
“The rigors of a New England winter promoted the dissolution of the
‘Fruitlands’ Community, but did not alone break it up. A lack of
organizing power to control the steady current of selfishness, as well
as the unselfish vagaries of his followers, was the real cause. Nothing
in fact could be more miserable than the failure of this hopeful
experiment.”
* * * * *
Mr. Alcott had written in his diary of Emerson:—“It is much to have the
vision of the seeing eye. Did most men possess this, the useful hand
would be empowered with new dexterity also. Emerson sees me, knows me,
and more than all others helps me,—not by noisy praise, not by low
appeals to interest and passion, but by turning the eye of others to my
stand in reason and the nature of things. Only men of like vision can
apprehend and counsel each other. A man whose purpose and act demand but
a day or an hour for their completion can do little by way of advising
him whose purposes require years for their fulfilment. Only Emerson, of
this age, knows me, of all that I have found. Well, every one does not
find _one_ man, one _very man through and through_. Many are they who
live and die alone, known only to their survivors of an after-century.”
* * * * *
How he recalled that now! He was tossed in mind and troubled beyond
measure. All his beautiful dreams were melting away one by one.
Everything seemed to be falling from his grasp. Most of the crops had
failed;—the enthusiastic lovers of “The Newness” had proved themselves
false and had slipped away as the cold weather approached. All his
wonderful plans had come to naught. He had promised to the world the
vision of a new Eden: he had believed it could exist: he had worked for
it with his whole soul: he had nothing to show for it but failure. Would
his friend Emerson stay by him in his anguish? He believed he would, and
yet how meet his friend? How face the world?
The cold penetrated the old house. William Lane lay ill in his room and
his father watched over him. All were heavy-hearted. It was as late as
January that Charles Lane and his son moved to the Shakers. After that
Mr. Alcott retired to his room, as he thought, to face the end. Mr.
Sanborn tells us: “The final expulsion from this Paradise nearly cost
Mr. Alcott his life. He retired to his chamber, refused food, and was on
the point of dying from grief and abstinence, when his wife prevailed on
him to continue longer in this ungrateful world.”
This prayer was written in his diary after leaving Fruitlands: “Light, O
source of light! give Thou unto thy servant, sitting in the perplexities
of this surrounding darkness. Hold Thou him steady to Thee, to truth,
and to himself; and in Thine own due time give him clearly to the work
for which Thou art thus slowly preparing him, proving his faith
meanwhile in Thyself and in his kind.”
* * * * *
“Shall I say with Pestalozzi that I was not made by this world, nor for
it,—wherefore am I placed in it if I was found unfit? And the world that
found him thus asked not whether it was his fault or that of another;
but it bruised him with an iron hammer, as the bricklayer breaks an old
brick to fill up a crevice.”
* * * * *
“That is failure when a man’s idea ruins him, when he is dwarfed and
killed by it; but when he is ever growing by it, ever true to it, and
does not lose it by any partial or immediate failures,—that is success,
whatever it seems to the world.”
In speaking of the Fruitlands experiment Mr. Sanborn says:—
“It brought its own compensations, and left the whole Alcott family
richer and not poorer for this romantic experience with its sad
termination. It prepared Alcott to face more patiently the storms of
later life, and to train his daughter, who was his best single gift to
the world, better for her conspicuous service. And ‘Fruitlands’ will be
remembered, perhaps longer than most of the adventures that awaited this
romantic household in its voyage of life....
“There was some foundation for Alcott’s despair at ‘Fruitlands,’ and
with the ill success that followed him after the flourishing Temple
School in Boston. Emerson, the gentlest and least exacting of men,
looking at his friend’s situation a few years after the ‘Fruitlands’
experiment, wrote in his private journal—
[Illustration:
THE BEDROOM
Where Mr. Alcott nearly succumbed to his despair at the failure of his
“New Eden”
]
“‘The plight of Mr. Alcott! The most refined and the most advanced soul
we have had in New England; who makes all other souls appear slow and
cheap and mechanical; a man of such courtesy and greatness that in
conversation all others, even the intellectual, seem sharp, and fighting
for victory and angry,—while he has the unalterable sweetness of a muse!
Yet because he cannot earn money by his talk or his pen, or by
school-keeping, or bookkeeping, or editing, or any kind of
meanness,—nay, for this very cause that he is ahead of his
contemporaries, is higher than they, and keeps himself out of the shop
condescensions and arts which they stoop to,—or, unhappily, need not
stoop to, but find themselves, as it were, born to; therefore it is the
unanimous opinion of New England judges that this man must die! We do
not adjudge him to hemlock or garroting,—we are much too hypocritical
and cowardly for that. But we not less surely doom him by refusing to
protest against this doom, or combine to save him, and to set him in
employments fit for him and salutary for the State.’”
* * * * *
The poem written by Mr. Alcott, with the title “The Return,” may
fittingly close this chapter:—
“As from himself he fled
Outcast, insane,
Tormenting demons drove him from the gate:
Away he sped,
Casting his joys behind,
His better mind:
Recovered,
Himself again,
Over his threshold led,
Peace fills his breast,
He finds rest,
Expecting angels his arrival wait.”
X
IN AFTER YEARS
More than thirty years after the Fruitlands failure, Mrs. Caroline
Sherman, of Chicago, heard from Mr. Alcott its story as he came to view
it in later years. She says:—
“One day at Concord Mr. Alcott consented to give his experience at
Fruitlands, and for two hours he entertained the little company with the
happiest of humor, as he told the story of his effort to realize an
ideal community. Together with Charles Lane, he purchased a location on
the north side of a sandy hill in Harvard, and started out with the idea
of welcoming hospitably to their community any human being who sought
admission. Mr. Alcott described the various sorts of quaint characters
who came to live with them, lured by the charms of Utopia and Arcadia
combined. Only a vegetable diet was allowed; for the rights of animals
to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness formed a fundamental
principle in their constitution. This not only cut them off from beef,
but from milk and eggs. The milk belonged to the calf, and the chicken
had a right to its existence as well as the infant. Even the
canker-worms that infested the apple trees were not to be molested. They
had as much right to the apples as man had. Unfortunately farm
operations were not started until well into June, and the only crop
raised that was of value as dependence was barley; but the philosophers
did not flinch at the thought of an exclusively barley diet. Now and
then they gave a thought as to what they should do for shoes when those
they now had were gone; for depriving the cow of her skin was a crime
not to be tolerated. The barley crop was injured in harvesting, and
before long actual want was staring them in the face. This burden fell
heaviest upon Mrs. Alcott, for, as housewife, it was her duty to prepare
three meals a day. They remained at Fruitlands till mid-winter in dire
poverty, all the guests having taken their departure as provisions
vanished. Friends came to the rescue, and, concluded Mr. Alcott, with a
tone of pathos in his voice: ‘We put our four little women on an
ox-sled,[12] and made our way to Concord. So faded one of the dreams of
my youth. I have given you the facts as they were; Louisa has given the
comic side in “Transcendental Wild Oats”; but Mrs. Alcott could give you
the tragic side.’”
Footnote 12:
As a matter of fact they did not go to Concord on the ox-sled, but to
Still River, where they lived for a year in the house called the
“Brick Ends,” belonging to the Lovejoy family. They then moved to
Concord where Orchard House now stands as a memorial to the later
years.
* * * * *
The odes addressed to Alcott by Thoreau and Lowell should be recalled in
connection with these reminiscences of his later years:—
THE HILLSIDE HOUSE
BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Here Alcott thought,—respect a wise man’s door!
No kinder heart a mortal form e’er held;
Its easy hinges ope forevermore
At touch of all,—or fervid Youth or Eld.
A mounting sage was he, and could essay
Bold flights of hope, that softly fed his tongue
With honey; then flew swift that happy day,
As tranced in joy on his pure themes we hung.
He knew the Scholar’s art; with insight spent
On Plato’s sentence, that best poesy,
And calm philosophy, his soul intent
Cleared the grey film of Earth and Air and Sea.
He might have lapsed,—but Heaven him held along,—
Or splendrous faded like some sunset dream;
But long shall live! though this bare, humble song
Gains not his dignity,—nor rounds its theme.
He’ll dwell (doubt not) in that fond, wished-for Land,
Where the broad Concave’s stars unquailing bloom;
The guest of angels, that consolers stand,—
Sweetly forgot in light Earth’s lowly tomb.