“Our other domestic habits are in harmony with those of diet. We rise with early dawn, begin the day with cold bathing, succeeded by a music lesson, and then a chaste repast. Each one finds occupation until the meridian meal, when usually some interesting and deep-searching conversation gives rest to the body and development to the mind. Occupation, according to the season and the weather, engages us out of doors or within, until the evening meal,—when we again assemble in social communion, prolonged generally until sunset, when we resort to sweet repose for the next day’s activity.”
There was a great deal more to this manifesto. The last paragraph of it is put in Alcott’s mouth in his daughter’s story and it has the unmistakable ring of his style:
“In these steps of reform we do not rely as much on scientific reasoning or physiological skill, as on the Spirit’s dictates. The pure soul, by the law of its own nature, adopts a pure diet and cleanly customs; nor needs detailed instruction for daily conduct. On a revision of our proceedings it would seem, that if we were in the right course in our particular instance, the greater part of man’s duty consists in leaving alone much that he is in the habit of doing. It is a fasting from the present activity, rather than an increased indulgence in it, which, with patient watchfulness, tends to newness of life. ‘Shall I sip tea or coffee?’ the inquiry may be. No; abstain from all ardent, as from alcoholic drinks. ‘Shall I consume pork, beef, or mutton?’ Not if you value health or life. ‘Shall I stimulate with milk?’ No. ‘Shall I warm my bathing water?’ Not if cheerfulness is valuable. ‘Shall I clothe in many garments?’ Not if purity is aimed at. ‘Shall I prolong my dark hours, consuming animal oil and losing bright daylight in the morning?’ Not if a clear mind is an object. ‘Shall I teach my children the dogmas inflicted on myself, under the pretense that I am transmitting truth?’ Nay, if you love them intrude not these between them and the Spirit of all Truth. ‘Shall I subjugate cattle?’ ‘Shall I trade?’ ‘Shall I claim property in any created thing?’ ‘Shall I interest myself in politics?’ To how many of these questions could we ask them deeply enough, could they be heard as having relation to our eternal welfare, would the response be ‘Abstain’? Be not so active to do, as sincere to be. Being in preference to doing, is the great aim and this comes to us rather by a resigned willingness than a willful activity;—which is indeed a check to all divine growth. Outward abstinence is a sign of inward fullness; and the only source of true progress is inward. We may occupy ourselves actively in human improvements;—but these unless inwardly well-impelled, never attain to, but rather hinder, divine progress in man.”
“A mild snore seemed to echo the last word,” says the undutiful daughter. But Alcott talked on. He was to talk on to the end of his life.
Characteristically, Fruitlands, which relied implicitly upon nature’s promises, refused to conform to nature’s system, for Miss Alcott is not romancing when she notes the date. It was actually at the beginning of June that Alcott and Lane went to Fruitlands, much too late for the early planting. They had agreed that “ordinary secular farming was not their object.” According to one who knew them, they intended to “evolve orchards out of their inner consciousnesses”—but it is quite impossible to parody an enterprise which is always a parody of itself. “Chaste supplies for the bodily needs” and ample manual occupation were to be afforded by assiduous attention to fruit, grain, pulse, herbs, and flax, and “consecrated to human freedom the land awaits the sober culture of devout men. . . . This enterprise must be rooted in a reliance on the succors of an ever-bounteous Providence, whose vital affinities being secured by this union with uncorrupted fields and unworldly persons, the cares and injuries of a life of gain are avoided. The inner nature of every member of the family is at no time neglected. A constant leaning on the living spirit within the soul should consecrate every talent to holy uses, cherishing the widest charities. The choice library is accessible to all who are desirous of perusing these records of piety and wisdom. Our plan contemplates all such disciplines, cultures, and habits as evidently conduce to the purifying and edifying of the inmates.”
There were a few halcyon days when everyone worked and was well, when long summer twilights let Mrs. Alcott sew without bringing in the pernicious oil lamp which offended Lane’s sense of justice, when three mulberry trees had been planted—so close to the front door that the growing roots eventually threatened to undermine the foundation—and fruit trees were set out—just where they could not thrive—and “they all had gotten their linen suits designed by Mr. Lane: loose trousers, tuniced coats and broad-brimmed linen hats like Southern planters’. The Alcott girls, Anna, Beth, Louisa, and three-year-old baby May were in linen bloomers, and so were Mrs. Alcott (protesting!) and poor Miss Page, who was summarily dismissed from Fruitlands for having eaten fish.”
It was hardly fish that poor Miss Page had eaten—only a little bit of the tail. She was stout and mature and sentimental and lazy and wrote verses and yearned for the unknown and, having been a school teacher, believed herself fitted for a higher sphere. She wanted to sleep and eat and dream of writing poetry. The idea of helping Mrs. Alcott with washing or cooking or harvesting never entered her head. Like all the other adults at Fruitlands she took a turn at instructing the young, adding her bit to the chaos in their minds, but she could not help slipping out of Fruitlands and borrowing a glass of milk or a bit of cheese from a neighbor and, when her transgression was reported home, Lane was inexorable. The consumers of flesh meat (which oddly included fish) nourished the wolf or tiger in their bosoms and Anna Page, having sinned, was banished from the community.
It seems only proper that she should have gone, for her fancies lacked imagination. She left behind a strange group. Samuel Larned had lived one whole year on crackers and the next exclusively on apples. One Fruitlander believed that clothes hindered spiritual growth and that the light of day was pernicious. Another crowed like a cock at midnight if a happy thought struck him. One, holding that words only betrayed the true spirit, greeted the rest with “Good morning, damn you.” Samuel Bower went into the wilderness to walk naked and eat huckleberries. When the communists of Fruitlands dined out they discussed the horrors of “shambles,” ate nothing but apples and bread, and advised their hosts to serve “bowls of sunrise” and “solar seeds of the sphere.” At the spare dining table at Fruitlands, there were vegetarian wafers to encourage the fainting flesh. Some of them have been saved for us. They were in Alcott’s own style, a little mysterious, but brief, and dramatic. First the practical Yankee:
Vegetable diet
and sweet repose.
Animal food and
nightmare.
Then the uplifted lover of animals:
Pluck your body
from the orchard;
do not snatch it from
the shamble.
Surprisingly the moralist appears:
Snuff is no less snuff
though accepted from a
gold box.
And the fanatic who sees in his single remedy the universal panacea:
Without flesh diet
there could be no
bloodshedding war.
And finally the crackbrained mystic:
Apollo eats no flesh and has no beard;
his voice is melody itself.
The reference to beardless Apollo is an instance of shocking ingratitude, for a certain Joseph Palmer who was a martyr to his beard was a friend in need to Fruitlands. In an age of ingenious safety razors, when the game of beaver lasts only a fortnight, it is hard to understand the passion which beards aroused in the 1830’s and ’40’s. Just as Matthias, the prophet, lost his beard to a mob, Joseph Palmer, a sober Yankee farmer, lost his freedom when he defended his beard against lawless attacks upon its integrity; he was actually jailed. His epitaph reads, “persecuted for wearing the Beard.” But meanwhile he remained bearded and sensible, continued to live in an unclaimed spot, which lay between two townships and was therefore named “N
o Town” and, when Fruitlands was abandoned, bought land and buildings from Charles Lane. Later, although tempted, he avoided joining Lane and the naked-going Samuel Bower in founding a new community.
Palmer and his wife Nancy were perhaps the most obscure of American communists, for their house was their community which had no name and no permanent recruits. But there were always two iron pots, one of baked beans and the other of potatoes, and any passer-by was welcome to partake of them and stay as long as he pleased. On account of his beard, he was called “old Jew Palmer” and neighbors said his house was a refuge for tramps. The last earthly view we have of him is on the day after a heavy snow storm when he started to shovel a path to the highway. The right of way crossed a neighbor’s farm and, as soon as Palmer cleared the path, the neighbor shoveled the snow back again. All day long the two obstinate and angry old men tossed the snow about and, in the dusk, had to send for Ralph Waldo Emerson to settle their dispute with his transcendental wisdom. Palmer was much too hard-headed to be a Fruitlands communist. He had those rules of thumb and instinctive feelings about farming which the true peasant has and, although, as we shall see, he was always coming to the rescue of Fruitlands, he knew that the experiment was destined to failure.
Whenever there was work to be done at the farm, the spirit moved the men residents to attend a reform convention where they might meet Spiritualists, and Muggletonians, and Abolitionists, and Perfectionists, and the followers of every fad. They would start out penniless and get on a train or boat and offer to deliver a short talk to the passengers in lieu of paying their fare. Once when Lane and Alcott both talked on a steamboat, a collection was taken up for them, but this they refused and “went serenely on their way with their linen blouses flapping airily in the cold October wind.” Their way was anywhere except to Fruitlands when work had to be done. In the planting, they had refused to have a plow because that involved beasts of burden, but after the hoe had worn through Lane’s tender hands, a compromise was effected and Joseph Palmer came over from No Town with an ox and a cow yoked together. But no provision had been made for the harvest and the Oversoul had not reckoned with an easterly storm. Mrs. Alcott hitched herself, her three eldest girls, and Charles Lane’s son to clothes-baskets, and with these got in the grain. “Mrs. Alcott,” wrote Lane, “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?” She was to blame, according to him, for the failure of others to come to Fruitlands and whatever she did annoyed the philosophers. The lamp she insisted upon contained animal fat and was offensive but, one after another, the philosophers came out from their dark rooms and joined her where she sat sewing. The days were drawing in and there was not enough food to meet the winter. “What shall you do?” Mrs. Alcott asked. And Lane answered that he would wait until the way had been made clear to him, inasmuch as being was the great aim in life, not doing. With the first frost, Lane found the way; it led him to the more successful Shaker colonies near by.
“Then the tragedy began for the forsaken little family. Desolation and despair fell upon Abel.[1] As his wife said, his new beliefs had alienated many friends. Some thought him mad, some unprincipled. Even the most kindly thought him a visionary, whom it was useless to help till he took more practical views of life. All stood aloof, saying: ‘Let him work out his own ideas, and see what they are worth. . . .’
“Deep waters now for Abel, and for a time there seemed no passage through. Strength and spirits were exhausted by hard work and too much thought. Courage failed when, looking about for help, he saw no sympathizing face, no hand outstretched to help him, no voice to say cheerily,
“‘We all make mistakes, and it takes many experiences to shape a life. Try again, and let us help you.’
“Every door was closed, every eye averted, every heart cold, and no way open whereby he might earn bread for his children. His principles would not permit him to do many things that others did; and in the few fields where conscience would allow him to work, who would employ a man who had flown in the face of society, as he had done?
“Then this dreamer, whose dream was the life of his life, resolved to carry out his idea to the bitter end. There seemed no place for him here,—no work, no friend. To go begging conditions was as ignoble as to go begging money. Better perish of want than sell one’s soul for the sustenance of his body. Silently he lay down upon his bed, turned his face to the wall, and waited with pathetic patience for death to cut the knot which he could not untie. Days and nights went by, and neither food nor water passed his lips. Soul and body were dumbly struggling together, and no word of complaint betrayed what either suffered.”
This was the end of Fruitlands, but not the end of Alcott. Hawthorne, so merciless at Brook Farm, could not resist this visionary. In his Hall of Fame he wrote:
“Here also was Mr. Alcott, with two or three friends, whom his spirit has assimilated to itself, and drawn to his New England home, though an ocean rolled between. There was no man in the enchanted Hall whose mere presence, the language of whose look and manner, brought such an impression as this mystic innovator; so quiet in the utterance of what his soul brooded over, that one might readily conceive his Orphic Sayings to well up from a fountain in his breast which communicated with the infinite Abyss of Thought. ‘Here is a prophet,’ cried my friend, with enthusiasm,— ‘a dreamer, a bodiless idea amid our actual existence. Another age may recognize him as a man; or perhaps his misty apparition may vanish into sunshine. It matters little; for his influence will have impregnated the atmosphere, and will be imbibed by generations that know not the original apostle of the ideas which they shall shape into earthly business. Such a spirit cannot pass through human life, yet leave mankind entirely as he found them.’”
Alcott was a much greater person than the experiment at Fruitlands might indicate. When Anthony Burns, a runaway slave, was held by the authorities under the Fugitive Slave Law in Boston, the greatest northern bulwark of the slave power, a mob gathered to free him but was driven back from the courthouse. Alcott arrived then and said calmly to the ringleader, “Why are we not within?” He was told that the mob would not follow. Thereupon he walked deliberately up the steps alone with his cane in his hand and, when a revolver was fired at him as he came to the highest step, he looked about for supporters and finding none walked deliberately down again. Thomas Wentworth Higginson who was there says, “It was hard to see how Plato or Pythagoras could have done the thing better.” In all his crankiness, in all his passing from one cult and one fad to another, Alcott remained incorruptibly true to himself. “He makes all other souls appear slow and cheap and mechanical,” wrote Emerson. And Ellery Channing said of him, “I never see that man without being cheered.” Thoreau, whom he most resembles, calls him “the best-natured man I ever met,” and characteristically adds, “The rats and mice make their nests in him.” Isaac Thomas Hecker, who was at Brook Farm and Fruitlands both and, finding that they did not concern themselves sufficiently with eternity, became a Catholic priest, makes the only disparaging remarks about Alcott’s character. He thought that Alcott wanted him at Fruitlands because he had money and says that “he was unquestionably one of those who liked to sit upon a platform.” These comparative trifles exhaust his censure on a man whom others thought easily the peer of Emerson.
Alcott was a true radical and his dealings with individuals and groups were always inspired by his singular sense of confidence in nature. This made him an impossible citizen and a strange husband and father. Although Lane complains that “constancy to his wife and inconstancy to the Spirit have blurred over his life forever,” no one who knew “Marmee” Alcott could imagine that her hardworking and devoted life was an easy one.
It is extraordinary how Alcott managed to put from him all trace of Yankee smartness. He was born in the house of his grandfather, a poor Connecticut farmer, just before
the new century began. At fourteen, he was an apprentice in a clock factory and afterward traveled through North Carolina and Virginia as a peddler with almanacs and trinkets. Later, he was a school teacher and, after experiencing contact with a fine spirit, that of the Reverend Samuel A. May, placed himself at last “in the still more favored position of Emerson’s footnote.” Emerson was already famous but, according to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “it suddenly made itself clear to the old Concord circle that there was not one among them so serene, so equable, so dreamy, yet so constitutionally a leader as this wandering child of the desert.” It never seems to have entered his head that he ought to make money, and his dealings in which money was involved are almost incredible. A notorious swindler asked him for the loan of five dollars. The impoverished Alcott happened to have only a ten dollar bill, so lent that without even asking the borrower’s name. Half a year later the money was returned with an offer of interest. From his diary there has been quoted a passage which recounts in mystic phrases a typical financial transaction on the Alcott model:
The Stammering Century Page 28
