Mammon
April, 1839, Thursday, 18th—
“Things seems strange to me out there in Time and Space. I am not familiar with the order and usages of this realm. I am at home in the kingdom of the Soul alone.
“This day, I passed along our great thoroughfare, gliding with Emerson’s check in my pocket, into State Street; and stepped into one of Mammon’s temples, for some of the world’s coin, wherewith to supply bread for this body of mine, and those who depend upon me. But I felt dishonored by resorting to these haunts of Idolaters. I went not among them to dig in the mines of Lucre, nor to beg at the doors of the God. It was the hour for business on ’Change, which was swarming with worshipers. Bevies of devotees were consulting on appropriate rites whereby to honor their divinity.
“One of these devotees (cousin-german of my wife) accosted me, as I was returning, and asked me to bring my oblation with the others. Now I owed the publican a round thousand, which he proffered me in days when his God prospered his wits; but I had nothing for him. That small pittance which I had just got snugly into my fob (thanks to my friend E—) was not for him, but for my wife’s nurse, and came just in time to save my wife from distrusting utterly the succors of Providence. I told my man, that I had no money; but he might have me, if he wanted me. No: I was bad stock in the market; and so he bid me good day. I left the buzz and hum of these devotees, who represent old Nature’s relation to the Appetites and Senses, and returned, with a sense of grateful relief, from this sally into the Kingdom of Mammon, back to my domicile in the Soul.”
He was at home in the soul and the object of Fruitlands was to make a home for the soul of mankind. One fancies that Alcott alone could be comfortable in any place so removed from actuality. He had a strange communication with the spirit of things and occasionally the thoughts which he drew from nature expressed themselves in odd ways. He was always holding conversations, rivaling Margaret Fuller in his capacity for talk at any length on any subject, for his conversations were only broken monologues and, even when James Russell Lowell and the bright Fredrika Bremer were present, he swept over interruptions and discoursed on any topic he chose. In the house of a friend in Boston, he developed his favorite theory that a dark complexion indicated the remainder of a brutish nature:
“The Greeks held that a brown complexion betokened courage, and those who had fair skins were called children of light and favorites of the gods. And the gods themselves were demonic or divine, as tempered by darkness or light,—the gods Infernal, the Midgods, the Celestials. So Christian art has painted Satan dark and Christ fair. And late experiments on the sunbeam showed that dark substances imprison the rays, these absorbing more and delivering less. The more of sun, so much the more of soul; the less of sun, of passion more, and the strange fire. He [Alcott] fancied black eyes were of Oriental descent,—were tinged less or more with fairer hues in crossing West. People of sandy hair and florid complexions were of Northern ancestry. The fusion of the various races was now taking place, blending all, doubtless, into a more harmonious and beautiful type. He asked if there did not lurk in the fancy, if not in our atoms, a persuasion that complexion, like features, voice, gait, typified and emblazoned personal traits of their possessors,—if the rhetoric of morals and religion did not revel in like distinctions. ‘Handsome is that handsome does.’ Beauty was the birthright of all, if not their inheritance. It was shame that brought deformity into the world. Every child accused he knew not whom for any blemish of his. ‘Why not mine the happy star, too?’ Still some trait was insinuated and stamped upon the embryonic clay. Ebony, alabaster, indigo, vermillion,—the pigments were all mingled as purity or passion decreed. Types were persistent, family features standing strong for centuries, and perpetuating themselves from generation to generation. Place the portraits of a long line of ancestors on the walls, one’s features were all there, with the slight variations arising from intermarriage, degrees of culture, calling, climate.”
This is a typical transcendental mode of thought. “The more of sun so much the more of soul; the less of sun, of passion more, and the strange fire”—set that sentence before the student of American literature and unless he knows Alcott he will say Emerson, and wonder a little that the first half of the sentence should have the sharp quality of Emerson’s style and the second a dying fall which Emerson rarely achieves. In the whole passage we find leading ideas of the time, curiosity about nature and a sense of the correspondence, the implicit relationship, in all of nature’s movements; the presumption of a moral order underlying all the phenomena of nature, the arrangement of branches on a tree, the patches of color on a wooded upland, the turn of the seasons and pigment of the skin. He had the old romantic feeling of contrast, as Hugo had it, in his continual struggles between light and dark and between love and death. “Antipodal” was one of Alcott’s favorite words as “polarity” was one of Emerson’s favorite ideas. And as to the other romantics and the transcendentalists, the moment came to Alcott when his communication ceased to be in the ordinary mode, when he drew out of Pythagoras, Boehme, and other philosophers a totally mystical conception of life. Until his death, he wanted to publish a mystical manuscript called Psyche. From an earlier manuscript we get something of its spirit. He had written out several series of questions and we guess from them the turn of his mind.
“Which is the older, the memory, the thing remembered, or the person remembering?
“Can you remember when you did not remember?
“Which is predecessor, Time or the memory?
“Are moments born of the memory, or memory of the moments?
“How old is your Person?
“What measures age,—the memory of times or of eternities?
“Are the veils hidings or findings?
“What discovers us?
“Is the doubling in all things around singles, or the singling around doubles . . .?
“Is the single content and complemented without the double?
“Which feeds the curiosity and draws us on to discovery?
“Which is the pursuer, which the pursued?
Before these questions he quotes a characteristic quatrain of Emerson at which a physicist might smile, but not a mystic:
“Through a thousand voices
Spoke the universal dame:
‘Who telleth one of my meanings,
Is master of all I am.’”
He was a sage and he was a saint; one of the singular people who instantly took possession of the friendship of others; more far-reaching in his thought and often more far-seeing than Thoreau, but much less inspiring than Emerson because he had so much in him of the fabled Diogenes with his lantern and his tub. Yet Thoreau adored him:
“Then may I wait, dear Alcott on thy court
Or bear a mace in thy Platonic reign!”
and Lowell wrote an ode to him calling him “less of iconoclast than shaper.”
In an odd way, Alcott was justified of his faith. Sheer desperation had driven Louisa to write, and good fortune at last came to the Alcott family. Alcott could now talk as much as he wished and began again to publish books. In all, he was the author of ten, and Louisa wrote nearly thirty. The name of Alcott had magic and, almost thirty years after his disastrous lecture tour, he went West again at the age of 81. For eight months, he lectured or held conversations at least once a day and, although many of them were free, he returned to Concord with a thousand dollars. He was no longer cold as an icicle, but his serenity remained. For seven years longer, he was associated with the Concord School of Philosophers and only a few traces of orthodoxy in the rather narrow Calvinistic mode, and an old man’s gratification at being the center of interest, marred the picture of his last days. He remained what he had been and he knew that the words success and failure are much too hastily applied. Long after the disaster at Fruitlands he wrote his epitaph:
“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 i
t, ever true to it, and does not lose it by any partial or immediate failures,— that is success, whatever it seems to the world.”
[1] Abel is Louisa’s name for Alcott in Transcendental Wild Oats.
† Thirty-nine thousand persons were bankrupt and $741,000,000 were lost in the great panic. † Four hundred railroad stocks were listed and the express business was started by Adams. † Brooks and Company and Lord and Taylor were lining Broadway with marble and nearly 50,000 strangers came over the ocean and passed through New York each year. † Johnson’s Negro Brass Band was very popular in Philadelphia. † School books began to be covered with cloth. † The preaching of the Reverend Mr. Douglas, a Negro, was highly thought of, and Francis Scott Key, a lawyer in Washington, was extremely doubtful about the advisability of abolishing slavery. † President Van Buren was interested in steam navigation, O’Connell’s progress in Ireland, and the Chartist rising. † Wise travelers sat as far away as possible from the stove in each railway carriage. † It was generally understood that John Quincy Adams was the only man who had saved money out of the presidential salary. † There was threat of war with England over the Maine boundary and the standing army consisted of 12,539 men of all ranks. † American doctors complained that our women were hypochondriac, had too little fresh air, too many pastries and no exercise. Bath-tubs existed but Americans, “from some misapprehension of their influence, do not remain long enough in them to enjoy their full benefit.” † The West was stricken with ague. † In March there was eighteen inches of mud between Easton and Philadelphia. † A duel between two rival editors at Vicksburg was witnessed by a thousand persons who laid bets on the outcome. † The wages of day laborers were higher than those of school teachers. † Nearly everybody lectured in New England, for $40 or $50 a lecture, and, in Boston alone, 6,000 men and women attended lectures each winter.
† There was one fire every two days in New York City. † Firemen brayed on a tin trumpet as they ran and often rival engine companies would brawl over the possession of a hydrant while houses burned; zinc was being used on roofs to insure safety from sparks. † Ten thousand dollars was the highest life insurance written. † The Great Western sailed from Bristol to New York in twenty-three days and the trip by rail from New York to Philadelphia took six and a half hours except when the Delaware was frozen and passengers walked across. † The scavengers of New York streets were swine and it was no part of the police duty to hunt for criminals; no newspapers could be sold on the streets on Sunday. † The Tontine system of insurance left its mark in the name of hotels and halls.
XIII. Sweetness and Light.
THE name of Adin Ballou, who founded the Hopedale Community, links the middle of the nineteenth century with an earlier era of reform. Mathurin Ballou, an ancestor of Adin, was associated with Roger Williams in the beginnings of Rhode Island. Liberal theology was, thereby, assured in the family. The Ballous became the royal line of Universalists; so that it seems unkind of the young preacher, Adin, to reject one of their doctrines. He did this in a sermon delivered in April, 1830. The actual heresy it involved does not seem important. Ballou rejected the particular type of Universalism which teaches that death suddenly transforms all men into angels and preached, instead, the doctrine of a final restoration at an appropriate time. This departure caused a temporary break in the ranks of Universalism but the Restorationists managed, before they died, to insinuate their chief tenets into both Universalism and Unitarianism. Ballou was from that moment a man marked for courage and for heresy. Within a month after he had organized his sect, he was dismissed from the church at Milford; but it was not his fate ever to suffer physically for his beliefs. Within the week of his dismissal, he was installed as minister in the first parish of Mendon with a higher salary, $400 a year. At the end of ten years at Mendon, Ballou gathered some thirty people into Fraternal Community Number One and, within a short time, bought the Jones farm, called the Dale, at Milford. “This estate they named Hopedale—joining the word ‘hope’ to its ancient designation, as significant of the great things they hoped for from a very humble and unpropitious beginning.” By that time, Ballou had become an ardent propagandist for temperance; had helped to break up his own Restorationist following by a declaration in favor of abolition; and (after twelve years of service as chaplain to a militia brigade) had begun to advocate the doctrine of Christian Non-resistance and to urge non-cooperation with any government which employed force. When spiritualism swept over the country, he embraced it and spoke and wrote in its behalf. It coincided with his restorationist ideas of life after death. He remained, however, essentially a Christian, believing in all seriousness that there was but one duty for every man and that it could only be fulfilled in “an order of Human Society based on the sublime ideas of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man as taught and illustrated in the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Hopedale was an attempt to create in the world, “under the limitations of time and sense,” the scriptural ideal of the kingdom of God on earth.
The organization of Hopedale was simple. “We are all here in one household, professionals, mechanics, farmers, ordinary laborers, male and female, agreeing alike to serve the Community if able, eight hours per day for fifty cents, and to pay for our board, lodging, etc., one dollar per week. Also to pay cost prices for clothing, livery, and other necessaries not included in the above.”
At the end of a decade, there were thirty-six families of adults at Hopedale and a total population of about 175, living on 500 acres of land, in some thirty houses, with mechanics, shops, a chapel and school, and the other necessities of life. Particularly, there was Ebenezer D. Draper, who was originally in charge of the farming and eventually became the industrial genius of Hopedale. The external life of the community as a whole is almost without interest. It struggled, it improved, and Draper and his brother, who controlled the majority of the joint stock, eventually turned it into a business enterprise. But internally, Hopedale is a tragi-comedy, not dismal and not exalted, but a little heartbreaking. The brothers Draper established the Hopedale machine works and, after a time, developed the famous Northrop loom for spinning cotton. As they became more interested in this work and less in Hopedale, the community lacked management and, from year to year, sank more capital into its small affairs. When Ebenezer Draper had bought up three-fourths of the stock and still saw no hope of improvement, he told Ballou that “this thing must not go any further.” Draper paid the debts of the community and so it ended. Ballou remained for a long time as minister of the Hopedale parish, and the manufacturing community, which succeeded the “Universal Religious Moral, Philanthropic and Social Reform Association,” was long known as an exceptional experiment in industrial relations.
In the small community of Hopedale, Ballou promulgated no theoretical dogmas and insisted upon no ceremonies. It was in practical Christianity that he was strict. No man was to work ill to another man and there was to be abstention from every word or deed which did not honor God. In Hopedale, there was to be no unchastity, no intoxication, no taking of oaths, no holding of slaves and no compromises with slave-holding, no preparation for war and no support of war, no capital or other vindictive punishment, and no violence. It aimed, as so many other communities did, at a restoration of the conditions of primitive Christianity. Its method was moral suasion, not militant temperance, or violent anti-slavery, or belligerent pacificism. It rejected tobacco and was, both in theory and practice, based on the equal rights of women. From time to time, Ballou and Draper would announce “a call to the friends of social reform in New England . . . to cheer each other’s hearts by taking note of the advance of the social scheme discovered by Charles Fourier.” Occasionally, they would go into Associational conferences with delegates from Northampton and Brook Farm, with which communities they exchanged statistics and information. Sometimes they, with James Boyle and George Ripley and William Lloyd Garrison, would respond to a call published in all the reformatory journals, “to the Friends of a Reorganization
of Society that shall Substitute Fraternal Cooperation for Antagonistic Selfishness; a Religious Consecration of Life and Labor, Soul and Body, Time and Eternity, in Harmony with the laws of God and Life, instead of Fragmentary, Spasmodic Piety.”
Meanwhile there were other activities at Hopedale. A water cure was established at the cost of $600.00 and, at the rate of from $4 to $5 a week exclusive of laundry, patients were accepted under the care of Dr. Butler Wilmarth. Ballou also founded a juvenile community of which “The great desideratum was to exclude all enervating frivolity, all unseemly vulgarity, all rough and brutal conduct, and to so combine physical, intellectual, and moral exercises and gratifications as to promote and not subvert the great ends of personal improvement and social order. We succeeded in this particular fairly well; not as perfectly as we wished, but about as we did in other departments of activity pertaining to our comprehensive undertaking.” And in the interest of morality, all parents and guardians were required to see that the children refrained from profanity and obscene utterances and that “they retire from their sports to their respective homes by eight o’clock P.M.” In 1848, there was a May Day festival, “as innocent as any meeting and far more improving and Christianizing than those in which a pro-war, pro-slavery brutalizing religion is instilled into men’s minds and hearts.” The children, dressed in white and carrying bouquets in their hands, sang the verses and the congregation sang the chorus of a hymn written especially for the occasion:
The Stammering Century Page 29
