Chương Chương 7 · A MODERN ARCADIA

May-day--I forget whether by Zenobia's sole decree, or by the unanimous

vote of our community--had been declared a movable festival. It was

deferred until the sun should have had a reasonable time to clear away

the snowdrifts along the lee of the stone walls, and bring out a few of

the readiest wild flowers. On the forenoon of the substituted day,

after admitting some of the balmy air into my chamber, I decided that

it was nonsense and effeminacy to keep myself a prisoner any longer.

So I descended to the sitting-room, and finding nobody there, proceeded

to the barn, whence I had already heard Zenobia's voice, and along with

it a girlish laugh which was not so certainly recognizable. Arriving

at the spot, it a little surprised me to discover that these merry

outbreaks came from Priscilla.

The two had been a-maying together. They had found anemones in

abundance, houstonias by the handful, some columbines, a few

long-stalked violets, and a quantity of white everlasting flowers, and

had filled up their basket with the delicate spray of shrubs and trees.

None were prettier than the maple twigs, the leaf of which looks like a

scarlet bud in May, and like a plate of vegetable gold in October.

Zenobia, who showed no conscience in such matters, had also rifled a

cherry-tree of one of its blossomed boughs, and, with all this variety

of sylvan ornament, had been decking out Priscilla. Being done with a

good deal of taste, it made her look more charming than I should have

thought possible, with my recollection of the wan, frost-nipt girl, as

heretofore described. Nevertheless, among those fragrant blossoms, and

conspicuously, too, had been stuck a weed of evil odor and ugly aspect,

which, as soon as I detected it, destroyed the effect of all the rest.

There was a gleam of latent mischief--not to call it deviltry--in

Zenobia's eye, which seemed to indicate a slightly malicious purpose in

the arrangement.

As for herself, she scorned the rural buds and leaflets, and wore

nothing but her invariable flower of the tropics.

"What do you think of Priscilla now, Mr. Coverdale?" asked she,

surveying her as a child does its doll. "Is not she worth a verse or

two?"

"There is only one thing amiss," answered I. Zenobia laughed, and flung

the malignant weed away.

"Yes; she deserves some verses now," said I, "and from a better poet

than myself. She is the very picture of the New England spring;

subdued in tint and rather cool, but with a capacity of sunshine, and

bringing us a few Alpine blossoms, as earnest of something richer,

though hardly more beautiful, hereafter. The best type of her is one

of those anemones."

"What I find most singular in Priscilla, as her health improves,"

observed Zenobia, "is her wildness. Such a quiet little body as she

seemed, one would not have expected that. Why, as we strolled the

woods together, I could hardly keep her from scrambling up the trees,

like a squirrel. She has never before known what it is to live in the

free air, and so it intoxicates her as if she were sipping wine. And

she thinks it such a paradise here, and all of us, particularly Mr.

Hollingsworth and myself, such angels! It is quite ridiculous, and

provokes one's malice almost, to see a creature so happy, especially a

feminine creature."

"They are always happier than male creatures," said I.

"You must correct that opinion, Mr. Coverdale," replied Zenobia

contemptuously, "or I shall think you lack the poetic insight. Did you

ever see a happy woman in your life? Of course, I do not mean a girl,

like Priscilla and a thousand others,--for they are all alike, while on

the sunny side of experience,--but a grown woman. How can she be

happy, after discovering that fate has assigned her but one single

event, which she must contrive to make the substance of her whole life?

A man has his choice of innumerable events."

"A woman, I suppose," answered I, "by constant repetition of her one

event, may compensate for the lack of variety."

"Indeed!" said Zenobia.

While we were talking, Priscilla caught sight of Hollingsworth at a

distance, in a blue frock, and with a hoe over his shoulder, returning

from the field. She immediately set out to meet him, running and

skipping, with spirits as light as the breeze of the May morning, but

with limbs too little exercised to be quite responsive; she clapped her

hands, too, with great exuberance of gesture, as is the custom of young

girls when their electricity overcharges them. But, all at once, midway

to Hollingsworth, she paused, looked round about her, towards the

river, the road, the woods, and back towards us, appearing to listen,

as if she heard some one calling her name, and knew not precisely in

what direction.

"Have you bewitched her?" I exclaimed.

"It is no sorcery of mine," said Zenobia; "but I have seen the girl do

that identical thing once or twice before. Can you imagine what is the

matter with her?"

"No; unless," said I, "she has the gift of hearing those 'airy tongues

that syllable men's names,' which Milton tells about."

From whatever cause, Priscilla's animation seemed entirely to have

deserted her. She seated herself on a rock, and remained there until

Hollingsworth came up; and when he took her hand and led her back to

us, she rather resembled my original image of the wan and spiritless

Priscilla than the flowery May-queen of a few moments ago. These

sudden transformations, only to be accounted for by an extreme nervous

susceptibility, always continued to characterize the girl, though with

diminished frequency as her health progressively grew more robust.

I was now on my legs again. My fit of illness had been an avenue

between two existences; the low-arched and darksome doorway, through

which I crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, on my hands and

knees, as it were, and gained admittance into the freer region that lay

beyond. In this respect, it was like death. And, as with death, too,

it was good to have gone through it. No otherwise could I have rid

myself of a thousand follies, fripperies, prejudices, habits, and other

such worldly dust as inevitably settles upon the crowd along the broad

highway, giving them all one sordid aspect before noon-time, however

freshly they may have begun their pilgrimage in the dewy morning. The

very substance upon my bones had not been fit to live with in any

better, truer, or more energetic mode than that to which I was

accustomed. So it was taken off me and flung aside, like any other

worn-out or unseasonable garment; and, after shivering a little while

in my skeleton, I began to be clothed anew, and much more

satisfactorily than in my previous suit. In literal and physical

truth, I was quite another man. I had a lively sense of the exultation

with which the spirit will enter on the next stage of its eternal

progress after leaving the heavy burden of its mortality in an early

grave, with as little concern for what may become of it as now affected

me for the flesh which I had lost.

Emerging into the genial sunshine, I half fancied that the labors of

the brotherhood had already realized some of Fourier's predictions.

Their enlightened culture of the soil, and the virtues with which they

sanctified their life, had begun to produce an effect upon the material

world and its climate. In my new enthusiasm, man looked strong and

stately,--and woman, oh, how beautiful!--and the earth a green garden,

blossoming with many-colored delights. Thus Nature, whose laws I had

broken in various artificial ways, comported herself towards me as a

strict but loving mother, who uses the rod upon her little boy for his

naughtiness, and then gives him a smile, a kiss, and some pretty

playthings to console the urchin for her severity.

In the interval of my seclusion, there had been a number of recruits to

our little army of saints and martyrs. They were mostly individuals

who had gone through such an experience as to disgust them with

ordinary pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so

deeply, as to lose their faith in the better time to come. On comparing

their minds one with another they often discovered that this idea of a

Community had been growing up, in silent and unknown sympathy, for

years. Thoughtful, strongly lined faces were among them; sombre brows,

but eyes that did not require spectacles, unless prematurely dimmed by

the student's lamplight, and hair that seldom showed a thread of

silver. Age, wedded to the past, incrusted over with a stony layer of

habits, and retaining nothing fluid in its possibilities, would have

been absurdly out of place in an enterprise like this. Youth, too, in

its early dawn, was hardly more adapted to our purpose; for it would

behold the morning radiance of its own spirit beaming over the very

same spots of withered grass and barren sand whence most of us had seen

it vanish. 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.

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 practice, 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 though 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 arm-pit; 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 plough, 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 offence 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.

But this was pure envy and malice on the part of the neighboring

farmers. The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail

in becoming practical agriculturists, but that we should probably cease

to be anything else. While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had

pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of

labor. It was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship.

Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom,

heretofore hidden from the sun. Pausing in the field, to let the wind

exhale the moisture from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and

catch glimpses into the far-off soul of truth. In this point of view,

matters did not turn out quite so well as we anticipated. It is very

true that, sometimes, gazing casually around me, out of the midst of my

toil, I used to discern a richer picturesqueness in the visible scene

of earth and sky. There was, at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted

aspect, on the face of Nature, as if she had been taken by surprise and

seen at unawares, with no opportunity to put off her real look, and

assume the mask with which she mysteriously hides herself from mortals.

But this was all. The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored

and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our

thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor

symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the

evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of

bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar--the yeoman and the man of

finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and

integrity--are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or

welded into one substance.

Zenobia soon saw this truth, and gibed me about it, one evening, as

Hollingsworth and I lay on the grass, after a hard day's work.

"I am afraid you did not make a song today, while loading the

hay-cart," said she, "as Burns did, when he was reaping barley."

"Burns never made a song in haying-time," I answered very positively.

"He was no poet while a farmer, and no farmer while a poet."

"And on the whole, which of the two characters do you like best?" asked

Zenobia. "For I have an idea that you cannot combine them any better

than Burns did. Ah, I see, in my mind's eye, what sort of an

individual you are to be, two or three years hence. Grim Silas Foster

is your prototype, with his palm of sole-leather, and his joints of

rusty iron (which all through summer keep the stiffness of what he

calls his winter's rheumatize), and his brain of--I don't know what his

brain is made of, unless it be a Savoy cabbage; but yours may be

cauliflower, as a rather more delicate variety. Your physical man will

be transmuted into salt beef and fried pork, at the rate, I should

imagine, of a pound and a half a day; that being about the average

which we find necessary in the kitchen. You will make your toilet for

the day (still like this delightful Silas Foster) by rinsing your

fingers and the front part of your face in a little tin pan of water at

the doorstep, and teasing your hair with a wooden pocket-comb before a

seven-by-nine-inch looking-glass. Your only pastime will be to smoke

some very vile tobacco in the black stump of a pipe."

"Pray, spare me!" cried I. "But the pipe is not Silas's only mode of

solacing himself with the weed."

"Your literature," continued Zenobia, apparently delighted with her

description, "will be the 'Farmer's Almanac;' for I observe our friend

Foster never gets so far as the newspaper. When you happen to sit

down, at odd moments, you will fall asleep, and make nasal proclamation

of the fact, as he does; and invariably you must be jogged out of a

nap, after supper, by the future Mrs. Coverdale, and persuaded to go

regularly to bed. And on Sundays, when you put on a blue coat with

brass buttons, you will think of nothing else to do but to go and

lounge over the stone walls and rail fences, and stare at the corn

growing. And you will look with a knowing eye at oxen, and will have a

tendency to clamber over into pigsties, and feel of the hogs, and give

a guess how much they will weigh after you shall have stuck and dressed

them. Already I have noticed you begin to speak through your nose, and

with a drawl. Pray, if you really did make any poetry to-day, let us

hear it in that kind of utterance!"

"Coverdale has given up making verses now," said Hollingsworth, who

never had the slightest appreciation of my poetry. "Just think of him

penning a sonnet with a fist like that! There is at least this good in

a life of toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out of a man,

and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to him. If a farmer can make

poetry at the plough-tail, it must be because his nature insists on it;

and if that be the case, let him make it, in Heaven's name!"

"And how is it with you?" asked Zenobia, in a different voice; for she

never laughed at Hollingsworth, as she often did at me. "You, I think,

cannot have ceased to live a life of thought and feeling."

"I have always been in earnest," answered Hollingsworth. "I have

hammered thought out of iron, after heating the iron in my heart! It

matters little what my outward toil may be. Were I a slave, at the

bottom of a mine, I should keep the same purpose, the same faith in its

ultimate accomplishment, that I do now. Miles Coverdale is not in

earnest, either as a poet or a laborer."

"You give me hard measure, Hollingsworth," said I, a little hurt. "I

have kept pace with you in the field; and my bones feel as if I had

been in earnest, whatever may be the case with my brain!"

"I cannot conceive," observed Zenobia with great emphasis,--and, no

doubt, she spoke fairly the feeling of the moment,--"I cannot conceive

of being so continually as Mr. Coverdale is within the sphere of a

strong and noble nature, without being strengthened and ennobled by its

influence!"

This amiable remark of the fair Zenobia confirmed me in what I had

already begun to suspect, that Hollingsworth, like many other

illustrious prophets, reformers, and philanthropists, was likely to

make at least two proselytes among the women to one among the men.

Zenobia and Priscilla! These, I believe (unless my unworthy self might

be reckoned for a third), were the only disciples of his mission; and I

spent a great deal of time, uselessly, in trying to conjecture what

Hollingsworth meant to do with them--and they with him!

IX.