“J.’s whole manner is sensational. He talks for effect and walks for effect, he flourishes his handkerchief for effect; takes out his letters and watch for effect. When he talks at the table it is not for fellowship, but to make an impression on the whole table. A little simplicity would improve him very much. His business character is excellent. We never had a young man in his place that did better, and he is thoroughly loyal. He is very fond of liberty—likes a great sweep, but I never heard of his wanting to leave the Community.”
“I am bored sometimes with his making a long conversation about a little matter that could be disposed of with a few words.”
“I have heard him express some discontent that he was not sent to college; he thinks he has not had the opportunity for education that he should have had. I think he has had a great deal of opportunity that he has not improved. He is not a natural student; he loves active life and a thousand excitements that interfere with study. C. will get an education here in our library and not ask any favors of the colleges, because he loves books.”
“J. has naturally a good deal of what I should call the high-toned Southern tendency in him. It is one of the hardest elements in the world to take criticism and surrender itself to the meekness and gentleness of Christ. It is masculinity carried to excess. There is not woman enough about him.”
Criticism at Oneida represented the organized force of public opinion and it was based on another of Noyes’ wise principles, that of sympathy. There was no check in general social relations on what a communist could do but, if he wished to do it at Oneida, it had to fall in with the general wish. The group was considered higher and, in a sense, more perfect than the individual. Thus if one wished to change his occupation, or another to take a holiday, or a third to have a new hat, he made these wishes known through the proper channel and, if his wish was sympathetic to the general good, it was gratified. In most cases the committee would have no need to refer the question beyond themselves. In order that perfect sympathy should be uninterrupted, the little irritations of life had to be swiftly put out of mind; there could be no injuries and no rasping of one man’s nerves by the tics and idiosyncrasies of another man’s character. Mutual criticism improved the victim, made each man more subtle in estimating his fellows, and provided relief for the critic’s emotions. The victim never replied until the following meeting and then only in writing. The young Sydney Jocelyn having been somewhat severely criticized for laziness, sensuality, sauciness, and ostentation, and moderately defended for certain good qualities, addressed the community on the following evening as follows:
“I take this occasion to express my thanks for the criticism and advice I received last evening, and for the sincerity that was manifested.
“I wish to thank Mr. Noyes for his sincerity, especially in regard to times long past. I well remember when I felt very near him and used to converse freely with him; and I consider those my happiest days. . . .
“I confess Christ the controller of my tongue and a spirit of humility.”
On one occasion at least the system of criticism was used in a special way—to cure a cold. The psychology of the cure is excellent. “The operation was not particularly agreeable—there is no method of cure that is; but it was short and speedily efficacious. One secret of its efficacy is, it stops the flow of thought toward the seat of difficulty, and so tends directly to reduce inflammation. At the same time it has a very bracing invigorating effect. In the present case, it went right to the cause of the disease, which was discovered to be a spirit of fear, throwing open the pores and predisposing the subject to the attack. S. P. had been brought up in a bad habit in this respect, expecting with every exposure to take cold—and then expecting to have it go on to a serious cough, and so on—fear realizing itself. Criticism stopped this false action, and not only made her well in the first instance, but by breaking up this fear it has given her comparative security against future attacks. It requires some fortitude and self-denial in the patient, when he thinks he needs sympathy and nursing, to take criticism instead; but it is well known that to rouse the will to strong exertion is more than half a cure. The criticism remedy professes to be universal, and is recommended for trial to all the afflicted.”
There was a decided tendency toward faith healing, religions of the will, and spiritualism in the Oneida community. Noyes himself was interested in animal magnetism and said of one practitioner, whose experiments he recommends as “not differing in kind from Christ’s miracles,” that “Dr. Buchanan . . . will never approach equality with Christ, as a practical neurologist, until he establishes communion with God, the great vital energy . . . so long as mere human life is the fountain of magnetic influence its effects will only be proportionate to the weakness of human nature.” And he considered that when such a man as Greeley gives serious attention, and at least qualified endorsement, to the spiritualism of the rapping Fox sisters, “it is a thing in favor of the kingdom of God.” Dr. Theodore R. Noyes, the eldest son of the founder, was a trained scientist. He was therefore considered the most appropriate man to investigate spiritualism in the community and it was under his direction that séances were held with mediums who had been brought up at Oneida from childhood “and were of such character that there was no possibility of deception.” The results differed in no essential from any other séance. After the death of the founder, some of the mediums received communications from him, but they were generally discredited in the community. In fact, all the vagaries of the time were practiced indifferently at Oneida. They used Graham bread but were not Grahamites and, although meat was sparingly used, they were not vegetarians. Tea, coffee, tobacco, and liquor were not used and it was a trial to the communists when visitors came and, in accordance with the custom of the country, spat. “The ‘Bees’ descended as the Vandals had left and soon not a spot of tobacco juice remained in all the mansion to tell a tale of filthy invaders.” The Perfectionists of Oneida took most things calmly; they did not dissipate their forces in a hundred fads and fanaticisms. Instead, they concentrated them in one elaborate and fundamental experiment—the experiment of complex marriage.
It is obvious that in his complex marriages, Noyes created a system which corresponded to his own social and sexual needs; he tells us so himself in regard to some particulars, and the others are subject to parallel columns. He was sexually timid and his system broke down certain reserves while it raised new barriers against promiscuity. It exalted desire and put a check on lust. He was capable of exceptional restraint, and the full development of his system called for an exceptional continence. He had passed the hot flush of youth and his system was the ideal of all middle-aged men and women, since it supplied them with lovers young in years and without experience. He was tremendously virile and a born varietist, and his system allowed almost infinite change of lovers. He was unsentimental and sentiment was the one thing, after licentiousness, which complex marriage did not tolerate. At its simplest we see a tall pale man, with sandy hair and beard, extremely impressive, dominating without ever being domineering, with gray dreamy eyes and a firm mouth, a high light on his temples, a fine forehead, looking rather like the familiar pictures of Carlyle, but unlike that tortured soul, successful with woman. And around him we see his disciples—men and women—living under a sexual régime which is eminently satisfactory to the master and is imposed on the others by religious mummery.
This picture is largely false. There is no question that Noyes worked out a sexual relation pleasing to men and women, that they accepted it with eagerness and continued to practice it until outsiders managed to interfere. These outsiders tell us that there was much unhappiness, that many of the Bible Communists resented the necessity of complicating their love affairs; but nothing in the history of Oneida justifies this charge. In the community, Noyes’ version of free love was a success. It stood somewhere between ordinary marriage and polygamy and, strangely enough, its religious basis was almost exactly the same as that of ascetic Shakerism. The t
emperament of the hysterical Ann Lee, brought up in Toad Lane in Manchester, a victim of convulsions and hallucinations, married in childhood, bearing four children in quick succession and seeing them almost as quickly die, worked on the same hypothesis— that Christ had become one with human beings. But she created, by a logical revulsion from all that concerned sex, an ascetic cult, which reasoned that, as men are born in sin, there can be no sin if none are born and so, out of distaste for birth, rejected the union of the sexes. The commotion of sexual impulses which came with the revivals brought converts and money to the Shakers. The same revivals sent disordered souls to follow Joseph Smith whose undisciplined temperament had brought him, with a parallel religious bias, to polygamy. Noyes having the hard temper of the common man and the discipline of intellectual energy, avoided all excess; at the same time, he gave a peculiar exaltation to the sexual nature of man.
Like many theorists of the supremacy of sex, Noyes was always a little uneasy about it. When Dixon accused him of drunkenness and wantoning in the flesh, Noyes gave his own account of one unhappy winter in New York, when he “descended into cellars where abandoned men and women were gathered and talked familiarly with them about their ways of life, beseeching them to believe in Christ, that they might be saved from their sins. They listened to me without abuse. One woman seemed much affected. I gave her a Bible. To another I gave a Testament. Sometimes when I had money, I gave that to the wretches whom I found in those dark places. These were the only dealings I had with them.” At Brim-field, he fled from a kiss of peace. All familiarity made him uncomfortable until his religious ideas had sanctified the relation. It was his concept of perfection which released his sexual energy and saved him from debauchery and from abhorring his own impulses. To the end, he remained in equilibrium between his two fears: license and frigidity; and he recognized them as two forms of the same thing. He detested the purity which comes of impotence or fear, as much as he detested unbridled passion:
“Animalism in the sexual department works in the two extremes of action and reaction. On the one hand, it is sensual and fiery, and on the other, dead. Both these forms are equally disgusting. The second form of animalism, that of amativeness in its reactive state, is considered a high state of grace in the world. There is a seeming continence in it, which actually passes for virtue. But it is repulsive to real purity. It is antagonistic to the spirit that makes truth supreme. A person under its influence is virtuously horror-struck whenever sexual matters are alluded to. His mind revolts from the study of an important branch of human nature, and the Spirit of Truth can not be at home with him.
“This reactive form of amativeness, so much commended, is really a disease. A person can not be in health who has lost the natural activity of amativeness. The devil’s oxidation is at work in him.
“Fix your attention on animalism, and don’t be deceived with regard to the identity of these two forms of it, but learn to hate it in both forms. Abhor this touchy kind of virtuosity that the world is so full of, as much as you abhor the sin of harlots. It is the same thing in another form. . . . The trouble is that we cannot talk on sexual matters without making the waters turbid. We must be able to think on this subject and speak of it in a way that is really natural. We can judge what is natural by little children; their minds are full of curiosity about sex. This subject is the vital center of society. It is the soul of the fine arts. It will be foolish for us to undertake to cultivate music or poetry or painting or sculpture, until we set the center and soul of them in its place.”
In this sense, Noyes accepted sex as a fundamental natural impulse. He rejoiced in his cohabitative strength, and he found “nothing very horrible in the idea” of sex and its gratification existing among the angels. But in his composition there was totally lacking the feeling of selection. That a man should cleave to one woman, should love her exclusively, was a displeasing thought; or perhaps it was displeasing only that a woman should give herself exclusively to one man, and so deny herself to another—to him. He rebelled against the idea that one man could possess a woman and forbid her to others. He meant to keep for himself the theoretical possibility of being the lover of every woman who would have him. In the imagination behind the theory we find a Vermont Casanova; in practice, rather a patriarch.
Ten years before complex marriage had been given a fair trial, and a year or so before his own marriage, Noyes, having “walked in the ordinances of the law blameless,” wrote a letter which became notorious. It is known as the Battle-Axe letter from the name of the journal in which it first appeared:
“I will write all that is in my heart on one delicate subject, and you may judge for yourself whether it is expedient to show this letter to others. When the will of God is done on earth as it is in heaven, there will be no marriage. The marriage supper of the Lamb is a feast at which every dish is free to every guest. Exclusiveness, jealousy, quarreling, have no place there, for the same reason as that which forbids the guests at a thanksgiving dinner to claim each his separate dish, and quarrel with the rest for his rights. In a holy community there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be; and there is as little occasion for shame in the one case as in the other. God has placed a wall of partition between the male and the female during the apostasy, for good reasons which will be broken down in the resurrection for equally good reasons; but woe to him who abolishes the law of apostasy before he stands in the holiness of the resurrection. The guests of the marriage supper may have each his favorite dish. I call a certain woman my wife— she is yours; she is Christ’s, and in Him she is the bride of all saints. She is dear in the hand of a stranger and according to my promise to her I rejoice. My claim upon her cuts directly across the marriage covenant of this world, and God knows the end.”
For ten years following he developed his theory, and out of his marriage grew complementary doctrines. The story of his marriage is a queer one. Dixon in his New America and in Spiritual Wives accuses Noyes of marrying Harriet Holton, in 1838, for her money alone, and of using it freely for his own experimental purposes. His proposal was by a letter which Dixon and Noyes both print; the versions differ, but nothing in the enemy’s account is inconsistent with Noyes’ teaching. He asks his “beloved sister” not to call his proposed partnership a marriage before he has defined it, and then proceeds to define free love in such terms as are hardly lover-like in any accepted sense:
“At first I designed to set before you many weighty reasons for this proposal; but upon second thought, I prefer the attitude of a witness to that of an advocate, and shall therefore, only suggest briefly, a few matter-of-fact considerations, leaving the advocacy of the case to God, the customary persuasions and romance to your own imagination, and more particular explanations to a personal interview.
“1. In the plain speech of a witness, not of a flatterer, I respect and love you for many desirable qualities, spiritual, intellectual, moral, and personal; and especially for your faith, kindness, simplicity, and modesty.
“2. I am confident that the partnership I propose will greatly promote our mutual happiness and improvement.
“3. It will also set us free, at least myself, from much reproach, and many evil surmisings, which are occasioned by celibacy in present circumstances.
“4. It will enlarge our sphere, and increase our means of usefulness to the people of God.
“5. I am willing at this particular time, to testify by example, that I am a follower of Paul, in holding that ‘marriage is honorable in all.’
“6. I am also willing to testify practically against that ‘bondage of liberty’ which utterly sets at naught the ordinances of men, and refuses to submit to them even for the Lord’s sake. I know that the immortal union of hearts, the everlasting honeymoon which alone is worthy to be called marriage, can never be made by a ceremony; and I know equally well that such a marriage can never be marred by a ceremony. William Penn first bought Pennsylvania of the Briti
sh King, and then he paid the Indians for it, ‘Thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness. . . .’”
It is after this that, in Noyes’ own version, he acknowledges having God’s permission and good will in the business. In Dixon’s longer version we proceed to a sentimental quotation about the watchman, after his wanderings, “hieing himself to his quiet home.”
The letter with its allusion to the torments of the flesh, its frankness about an extended sphere, and its honesty, was effective. Harriet married Noyes and was one of the great workers of the community. Her unhappy experiences in child-bearing resulted in Noyes working out a system of voluntary parenthood which was neither exactly contraception, nor abstention, and which he neatly worked into his complete sexual system.
The purpose was to “make love safe and edifying,” and the first step was in the “ascending fellowship.” Perhaps memories of his own adolescent fervors and qualms accounted for Noyes’ tenderness about virginity. Perhaps the absence in his youth of a great passion led him to underestimate the force of young love. Perhaps the reason I have already suggested, that he had passed the first flush of young manhood, is to be held responsible. In any case, Noyes laid down the principle that the introduction to sexual love ought to be confided to an elder person of the opposite sex. The girls, especially, were instructed to regard their first sexual experience as more momentous than that of men, and to seek, as companions, elder men, under the discipline of self-control, who would “elevate them with the consciousness of having innocently exercised a pure and natural function on the spiritual plane” (and avoid impregnation), whereas the hot ardor of youth might make their entrance into sexual experience a mere exercise in the gratification of lust and lead to “unplanned” offspring.
The Stammering Century Page 24
