Part 5
“In the afternoon Calvin Willard, Ashel Bellows, Wildes, and Lawyer Goodwin, with four or five other gentlemen, came in. Willard said, ‘How do you do, Palmer?’ I said, pretty tolerable well for me except I have got a bad cold. One of the men, which I took to be Esqre. Weed said to me: ‘Why don’t you go out? What do you stay here for? Why don’t you pay up the demand and go out?’ I said I have no way to pay it. Goodwin said: ‘A man from Fitchburg told me to-day that he has from ten to fifteen hundred dollars property.’ Willard said: ‘I always took him to be a man of property.’ One of the men said: ‘I think there ought to be some measures taken to secure the board if he stops here.’ I said: I board myself and have hard work to get it in here for the money. One said: ‘How much was your fine?’ I said, Ten dollars, I believe it was.”
* * * * *
Saturday, January 1, 1831.
“Since the first of December I haven’t bought me anything from Bellows, and they haven’t brought me anything but eight Bushels and one hod of coal, and they used two Bushels of that when they whitewashed the room, except what I took to make one fire. Thomas brought me my water. I was out of my room three and a half days to have it whitewashed, and I have now a half Bushel of coal which brings it to seven and a half Bushels I have burnt the past month while I was in the room.”
* * * * *
April 11, 1831.
“Food for the day:—
“Breakfast: 5 ounces of brown bread “Dinner: 5¼ ounces of brown bread 3½ ounces of beef meat 3½ ounces of potato 3¾ ounces of soup.”
“He far out-stayed his sentence because he had to pay for all his food, drink, and coal for heating, and he considered they cheated him, so he refused to go. The sheriff and jailers, tired of having him there, begged him to leave. Even his mother, Margaret Palmer, wrote to him ‘Not to be so set.’ But nothing could move him. He said they had put him in there, and they would have to take him out, as he would not walk out. They finally carried him out in his chair and placed it on the sidewalk.”
* * * * *
Shortly after leaving the jail at Worcester Palmer heard of the proposed Community of Fruitlands, and being much interested in all reforms, he offered to run the farm without pay and went there at the very start. He took some fine old furniture with him from No Town to help furnish the house, and whenever anything was needed in the way of farm implements, etc., he would drive over to No Town and bring it back with him. When the Community of Fruitlands failed, he bought the place and carried on a strange sort of Community of his own for upwards of twenty years. Emerson visited him afterwards, and a motley collection of reformers, wayfarers, and a host of tramps found a welcome by his fireside.
Any one driving by the old North Leominster graveyard will see a stone monument adorned with the head of a man with a flowing beard. On it is written:—
JOSEPH PALMER
died
October 30, 1875
Aged 84 years, 5 months
Underneath the carved head is written:—
Persecuted for
Wearing the Beard
V
SUMMER SUNSHINE
It was now July and all the days were full of healthful occupations—the weather was perfect. The philosophers had planted three mulberry trees next the front door, and they had set out apple trees and pear trees below the house on the slope of the hill. They put the mulberry trees so near the house that when they grew, the roots almost unsettled the foundations, and the fruit trees were planted in just the wrong place to permit of luxuriant growth; but they never knew it, and at the time they pictured to themselves the full-grown trees with branches overladen with the luscious ripening fruit. And now they all had gotten their linen suits designed by Mr. Lane:—loose trousers, tunic-ed 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.
Many visitors came and went. Parker Pillsbury often came, his mind full of the anti-slavery question. The Concord circle of friends looked in upon them off and on, and Channing spoke afterwards of conversations held in a small dining-room next to the front door, and, as Mr. Sanborn says in his account of it, “The library of rare books from London stood proudly on its hundred feet of new shelves in the small front entry of the old house, proclaiming the atmosphere of ‘Mind and Letters.’”
Emerson came and afterwards wrote in his “Journal” on July 8, 1843:—
“The sun and the evening sky do not look calmer than Alcott and his family at Fruitlands. They seemed to have arrived at the fact—to have got rid of the show, and so to be serene. Their manners and behavior in the house and the field were those of superior men—of men at rest. What had they to conceal? What had they to exhibit? And it seemed so high an attainment that I thought—as often before, so now more, because they had a fit home, or the picture was fitly framed—that these men ought to be maintained in their place by the country for its culture.
“Young men and young maidens, old men and women, should visit them and be inspired. I think there is as much merit in beautiful manners as in hard work. I will not prejudge them successful. They look well in July; we will see them in December. I know they are better for themselves than as partners. One can easily see that they have yet to settle several things. Their saying that things are clear, and they sane, does not make them so. If they will in very deed be lovers, and not selfish; if they will serve the town of Harvard, and make their neighbors feel them as benefactors wherever they touch them,—they are as safe as the sun.”
Mr. Sanborn, referring to the remark, “We will see them in December,” says: “This passage indicates that Emerson with his fatal gift of perception had long since seen the incongruity between Alcott and Lane. At this time all was still fair weather at the Fruitlands Eden, although the burden of too much labor, of which Lane had written to Thoreau in June, had been falling more and more heavily on Mrs. Alcott and her daughters, Anna, then twelve, and Louisa, not quite eleven. As they did so much of the domestic drudgery, Mrs. Alcott doubtless thought it no more than right that her English guests, both there and at Concord, during the seven months that Lane and his son were in their household, should pay their share of the family expenses.”
* * * * *
The house at times was very overcrowded and the children had their beds up in the garret. But Anna begged hard for a tiny room adjoining Mrs. Alcott’s, and great was the joy she took in it. Of course it all was very primitive. The men bathed in the brook in the early morning and the shower-baths that Anna speaks of in her diary were accomplished thus:—rough clothes-horses covered with sheets were put in a circle and the bathers stood hidden within, while Mr. Alcott, mounted on some wooden steps, poured water from a pitcher through a sieve on their head. (This was told the author by an old lady who when very young went to visit the children.)
Hired laborers and beasts of burden were against the principles of the Community, but in order to make headway against the advancing season they seemed to be a necessity. This concession, however, troubled the philosophers, and it was decided to carry out the original plan and rely wholly on the spade instead of the plough, even at a cost of valuable time. The results were rather disastrous: Charles Lane’s hands became sore and painful, and lame backs seriously interfered with progress. Sobered by this new experience, the philosophers met in conclave, and as a result Joseph Palmer, who always came to the rescue in trying situations, went to No Town and brought back his plough and yoke of oxen, as he called it—it really was an ox and a cow which he had trained to work together. Besides the outdoor work much writing was done indoors. Charles Lane and Bower wrote prolifically to different papers. The _Herald of Freedom_, the _Vermont Telegraph_ and the _New York Tribune_ of that summer are full of their writings.
* * * * *
Mr. Alcott’s Diary furnishes clear evidence of his purposes and hopes:—
“I would abstain from the fruits of oppression and blood, and am seeking means of entire independence. This, were I not holden by penury unjustly, would be possible. One miracle we have wrought nevertheless, and shall soon work all of them: Our wine is water, flesh, bread—drugs, fruits; and we defy meekly the satyrs all, and Æsculapians. The Soul’s banquet is an art divine.... This Beast named Man has yet most costly tastes, and must first be transformed into a very Man, regenerate in appetite and desire, before the earth shall be restored to fruitfulness, and redeemed from the curse of his cupidity. Then shall the toils of the farm become eloquent and invigorating leisures; Man shall grow his orchards and plant his gardens—an husbandman truly, sowing and reaping in hope, and a partaker in his hope. Labor will be attractive; life will not be worn in anxious and indurating toils; it will be a scene of mixed leisure, recreation, labor, culture. The soil, grateful then for man’s generous usage, debauched no more by foul ordures, nor worn by cupidities, shall recover its primeval virginity, bearing on its bosom the standing bounties which a sober and liberal Providence ministers to his heed—sweet and invigorating growths, for the health and comfort of the grower.”
* * * * *
Mr. Sanborn, commenting on this, remarks:—
“It was in the spirit of the passages just quoted from Alcott’s diary ... and not from the ordinary Fourieristic notions about attractions and destinies and coöperative housekeeping that Alcott undertook his experiment at ‘Fruitlands.’”
* * * * *
Alcott’s theory of human life was thus set down in his Diary:—
“I have been (as is ever the habit of my mind) striving to apprehend the real in the seeming, to strip ideas of their adventitious phrases, and behold them in their order and powers. I have sought to penetrate the showy terrestrial to find the heavenly things; I have tried to translate into ideas the language and images of spirit, and thus to read God in his works. The outward I have seen as the visible type of the inward. Ever doth this same nature double its divine form, and stand forth—now before the inner, now before the outer sense of man—at once substance and form, image and idea, so that God shall never slip wholly from consciousness of the Soul. Faith apprehends his agency, even in the meanest and most seemingly trivial act, whenever organ or matter undergo change of function or mode of form,—Spirit being all in all. Amidst all tumults and discomfitures, all errors and evils, Faith discerns the subtle bond that marries opposite natures, clinging to that which holds all in harmonious union. It unites opposites; it demolishes opposing forces. It melts all solid and obstinate matters. It makes fluid the material universe. It hopes even in despair, believes in the midst of doubts, apprehends stability and order even in confusion and anarchy, and, while all without is perturbed and wasting, it possesses itself in quietude and repose within. It abides in the unswerving, is mighty in the omnipotent, and enduring in the eternal. The soul quickened by its agency, though borne on the waves of the mutable and beset by the winds of error and the storms of evil, shall ride securely under this directing hand to the real and the true. In the midst of change, it shall remain unchanged. For to such a faith is the divine order of God made known. All visible things are but manifestations of this order. Nature, with all its change, is but the activity of this power. It flows around and obeys the invisible self-anchored spirit. Mutability to such a vision, is as the eddy that spirit maketh around its own self-circling agency, revealing alike in the smallest ripple and the mightiest surges the power that stirreth at the centre.”
VI
FATHER HECKER’S DESCRIPTION OF FRUITLANDS
[Isaac Thomas Hecker was born in New York in 1819. Two years after his experience at Brook Farm and Fruitlands he entered the Roman Catholic church, and in 1849 he was ordained a priest. Later he founded the Paulist Fathers. He died in 1888. The following extracts are taken from a contemporary record of his impressions while in the socialistic community.]
“Fruitlands,” so called because fruit was to be the principal staple of daily food, and to be cultivated on the farm, was a spot well chosen; it was retired, breathing quiet and tranquillity. No neighboring dwelling obstructed the view of Nature, and it lay some distance even from a bypath road, in a delightful solitude. The house, somewhat dilapidated, was on the slope of a slowly ascending hill; stretched before it was a small valley under cultivation, with fields of corn, potatoes, and meadow. In the distance loomed up on high “Cheshire’s haughty hill,” Monadnoc. Such was the spot chosen by men inspired to live a holier life, to bring Eden once more upon earth. These men were impressed with the religiousness of their enterprise. When the first load of hay was driven into the barn and the first fork was about to be plunged into it, one of the family took off his hat and said, “I take off my hat, not that I reverence the barn more than other places, but because this is the first fruit of our labor.” Then a few moments were given to silence, that holy thought might be awakened.
* * * * *
July 7, 1843. Brook Farm.
I go to Mr. Alcott’s next Tuesday, if nothing happens. I have had three pairs of coarse pants and a coat made for me. It is my intention to commence work as soon as I get there. I will gradually simplify my dress without making any sudden difference, although it would be easier to make a radical and thorough change at once than piece by piece. But this will be a lesson in patient perseverance to me. All our difficulties should be looked at in such a light as to improve and elevate our minds.
I can hardly prevent myself from saying how much I shall miss the company of those I love and associate with here. But I must go. I am called with a stronger voice. This is a different trial from any I have ever had. I have never had that of leaving kindred, but now I have that of leaving those whom I love from affinity. If I wished to live a life the most gratifying to me, and in agreeable company, I certainly would remain here. Here are refining amusements, cultivated persons—and one whom I have not spoken of, one who is too much to me to speak of, one who would leave all for me. Alas! him I must leave to go.
* * * * *
“[In this final sentence, as it now stands in the diary and as we have transcribed it, occurs one of those efforts of which we have spoken to obliterate the traces of this early attachment. ‘Him’ was originally written ‘her,’ but the _r_ has been lengthened to an _m_, and the _e_ dotted, both with care which overshot their mark, by an almost imperceptible hair’s breadth. If the nature of this attachment were not so evident from other sources, we should have left such passages unquoted; fearing lest they might be misunderstood. As it is, the light they cast seems to us to throw up into fuller proportions the kind and extent of the renunciations to which Isaac Hecker was called before he had arrived at any clear view of the end to which they tended.]”[9]
Footnote 9:
Walter Elliott’s _Life of Father Hecker_.
* * * * *
Fruitlands, July 12.
Last evening I arrived here. After tea I went out in the fields and raked hay for an hour in company with the persons here. We returned and had a conversation on clothing. Some very fine things were said by Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane. In most of their thoughts I coincide; they are the same which of late have much occupied my mind. Alcott said that “to Emerson the world was a lecture room, to Brownson a rostrum.”
This morning after breakfast a conversation was held on Friendship and its laws and conditions. Mr. Alcott places Innocence first; Larned, Thoughtfulness; I, Seriousness; Lane, Fidelity.
* * * * *
July 13.
This morning after breakfast there was held a conversation on the Highest Aim. Mr. Alcott said it was Integrity; I, Harmonic being; Lane, Progressive being; Larned, Annihilation of self; Bower, Repulsion of the evil in us. Then there was a confession of the obstacles which prevent us from attaining the highest aim. Mine was the doubt whether the light is light; not want of will to follow, or light to see.
* * * * *
July 17.
I cannot understand what it is that leads me, or what I am after. Being is incomprehensible. What shall I be led to? Is there a being whom I may marry and who would be the means of opening my eyes? Sometimes I think so, but it appears impossible. Why should others tell me that it is so, and will be so, in an unconscious way, as Larned did on Sunday last, and as others have done before him? Will I be led home? It strikes me these people here, Alcott and Lane, will be a great deal to me. I do not know but they may be what I am looking for, or the answer to that in me which is asking.
Can I say it? I believe it should be said. Here I cannot end. They are too near me; they do not awaken in me that sense of their high superiority which would keep me here to be bettered, to be elevated. They have much, very much. I desire Mr. Alcott’s strength of self-denial, and the unselfishness of Mr. Lane in money matters. In both these they are far my superior. I would be meek, humble, and sit at their feet that I might be as they are. They do not understand me, but if I am what my consciousness, my heart, lead me to feel,—if I am not deceived,—why, then I can wait. Yes, patiently wait. Is not this the first time since I have been here that I have recovered myself? Do I not feel that I have something to receive here, to add to, to increase my highest life, which I have never felt anywhere else?
Is this sufficient to keep me here? If I can prophesy, I must say no. I feel that it will not fill my capacity. Oh God! strengthen my resolution. Let me not waver, and continue my life. But I am sinful. Oh forgive my sins! what shall I do, O Lord! that they may be blotted out? Lord could I only blot them out from my memory, nothing would be too great or too much.
* * * * *
July 18.
I have thought of my family this afternoon, and the happiness and love with which I might return to them. To leave them, to give up the idea of living with them again.—Can I entertain that idea? Still, I cannot conceive how I can engage in business, share the practices, and indulge myself with the food and garmenture of our home and city. To return home, were it possible for me, would most probably not only stop my progress, but put me back. It is useless for me to speculate upon my future. Put dependence on the spirit which leads me, be faithful to it, work and leave results to God. If the question should be asked me, whether I would give up my kindred and business and follow out this spirit life, or return and enjoy them both, I could not hesitate a moment, for they would not compare—there would be no room for choice. What I do I must do, for it is not I that do it; it is the spirit. What that spirit may be is a question I cannot answer. What it leads me to do will be the only evidence of its character. I feel as impersonal as a stranger to it. I ask who are you? Where are you going to take me? Why me? Why not some one else? Alas! I cry, who am I and what does this mean? And I am lost in wonder.
* * * * *
Saturday, July 21.
Yesterday, after supper, a conversation took place between Mr. Alcott, Mr. Lane, and myself; the subject was my position with regard to my family, my duty, and my position here. Mr. Alcott asked for my first impressions as regards the hinderances that I have noted since coming here. I told him candidly they were:
First, his want of frankness; 2d, his disposition to separateness rather than win co-operation with the aims in his own mind; 3d, his family who prevent his immediate plans of reformation; 4th, the fact that his place has very little fruit on it, when it was and is their desire that fruit should be the principal part of their diet; 5th, my fear that they have too decided tendency toward literature and writing for the prosperity and success of their enterprise.
* * * * *
[From this on, the diary is full of questionings and unrest. Should he return to his family and live as an ordinary man, or should he listen to the urge of the spirit within and seek further for the light? These and other questions pursued him night and day. Finally he came to a conclusion.]
* * * * *
July 23.
I will go home, be true to the spirit with the help of God, and wait for further light and strength.... I feel that I cannot live at this place as I would. This is not the place for my soul.... My life is not theirs. They have been the means of giving me much light on myself, but I feel I would live and progress more in a different atmosphere.
* * * * *
[It is interesting to note that after his return home he continued the diet which was used at Fruitlands. The account of his life states: “One of the first noteworthy things revealed by the diary, which from this time on was kept with less regularity than before,—is that Isaac not only maintained his abstemious habits after his return, but increased their vigor.”]
* * * * *
August 30.
If the past nine months or more are any evidence, I find that I can live on very simple diet—grains, fruit, and nuts. I have just commenced to eat the latter; I drink pure water. So far I have had wheat ground and made into unleavened bread, but as soon as we get in a new lot, I shall try it in the grain.
* * * * *
Hecker had evidently at this time a practical conviction of the truth of a principle which, in after years, he repeated in the form of a maxim of the Transcendentalists: “A gross feeder will never be a central thinker.” It is a truth of the spiritual no less than of the intellectual order. A little later we come upon the following profession of a vegetarian faith:—
“Reasons for not eating animal food.
“It does not feed the spirit.
“It stimulates the propensities.
“It is taking animal life when the other kingdoms offer sufficient and better increment. Slaughter strengthens the lower instincts. It is the chief cause of the slavery of the kitchen.
“It generates in the body the diseases animals are subject to, and encourages in man their bestiality.
“Its odor is offensive and its appearance unæsthetic.”
* * * * *
Mr. Alcott’s death in 1888 was the occasion of reminiscences from Father Hecker, from which a few extracts are taken:—
“When did I first know him? Hard to remember. He was the head of Fruitlands, as Ripley was of Brook Farm. They were entirely different men. Diogenes and his tub would have been Alcott’s ideal if he had carried it out. Ripley’s ideal would have been Epictetus. Ripley would have taken with him the good things of this life. Alcott would have rejected them all.”
“How did he receive you at Fruitlands?”