The Blithedale Romance
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Blithedale Romance
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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 soleleather, 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 pocketcomb 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. HOLLINGSWORTH, ZENOBIA, PRISCILLA
It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation to devote
ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If
the person under examination be one's self, the result is pretty certain
to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second
glance. Or if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope,
we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his
peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of course patch him
very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened
by the aspect of a monster, which, after all,--though we can point to
every feature of his deformity in the real personage,--may be said to
have been created mainly by ourselves.
Thus, as my conscience has often whispered me, I did Hollingsworth a
great wrong by prying into his character; and am perhaps doing him as
great a one, at this moment, by putting faith in the discoveries which I
seemed to make. But I could not help it. Had I loved him less, I might
have used him better. He and Zenobia and Priscilla--both for their own
sakes and as connected with him--were separated from the rest of the
Community, to my imagination, and stood forth as the indices of a problem
which it was my business to solve. Other associates had a portion of my
time; other matters amused me; passing occurrences carried me along with
them, while they lasted. But here was the vortex of my meditations,
around which they revolved, and whitherward they too continually tended.
In the midst of cheerful society, I had often a feeling of loneliness.
For it was impossible not to be sensible that, while these three
characters figured so largely on my private theatre, I--though probably
reckoned as a friend by all--was at best but a secondary or tertiary
personage with either of them.
I loved Hollingsworth, as has already been enough expressed. But it
impressed me, more and more, that there was a stern and dreadful
peculiarity in this man, such as could not prove otherwise than
pernicious to the happiness of those who should be drawn into too
intimate a connection with him. He was not altogether human. There was
something else in Hollingsworth besides flesh and blood, and sympathies
and affections and celestial spirit.
This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an
overruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor
even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all
that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save
that one principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is not
cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart, no
sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he
make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you,
and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you
take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third,
and every other step of their terribly strait path. They have an idol to
which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to
offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to
suspect--so cunning has the Devil been with them--that this false deity,
in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see
only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself,
projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the
original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the
slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process
by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.
Of course I am perfectly aware that the above statement is exaggerated,
in the attempt to make it adequate. Professed philanthropists have gone
far; but no originally good man, I presume, ever went quite so far as
this. Let the reader abate whatever he deems fit. The paragraph may
remain, however, both for its truth and its exaggeration, as strongly
expressive of the tendencies which were really operative in Hollingsworth,
and as exemplifying the kind of error into which my mode of observation
was calculated to lead me. The issue was, that in solitude I often
shuddered at my friend. In my recollection of his dark and impressive
countenance, the features grew more sternly prominent than the reality,
duskier in their depth and shadow, and more lurid in their light; the
frown, that had merely flitted across his brow, seemed to have contorted
it with an adamantine wrinkle. On meeting him again, I was often filled
with remorse, when his deep eyes beamed kindly upon me, as with the glow
of a household fire that was burning in a cave. "He is a man after all,"
thought I; "his Maker's own truest image, a philanthropic man!---not that
steel engine of the Devil's contrivance, a philanthropist!" But in my
wood-walks, and in my silent chamber, the dark face frowned at me again.
When a young girl comes within the sphere of such a man, she is as
perilously situated as the maiden whom, in the old classical myths, the
people used to expose to a dragon. If I had any duty whatever, in
reference to Hollingsworth, it was to endeavor to save Priscilla from
that kind of personal worship which her sex is generally prone to lavish
upon saints and heroes. It often requires but one smile out of the
hero's eyes into the girl's or woman's heart, to transform this devotion,
from a sentiment of the highest approval and confidence, into passionate
love. Now, Hollingsworth smiled much upon Priscilla,--more than upon any
other person. If she thought him beautiful, it was no wonder. I often
thought him so, with the expression of tender human care and gentlest
sympathy which she alone seemed to have power to call out upon his
features. Zenobia, I suspect, would have given her eyes, bright as they
were, for such a look; it was the least that our poor Priscilla could do,
to give her heart for a great many of them. There was the more danger of
this, inasmuch as the footing on which we all associated at Blithedale
was widely different from that of conventional society. While inclining
us to the soft affections of the golden age, it seemed to authorize any
individual, of either sex, to fall in love with any other, regardless of
what would elsewhere be judged suitable and prudent. Accordingly the
tender passion was very rife among us, in various degrees of mildness or
virulence, but mostly passing away with the state of things that had
given it origin. This was all well enough; but, for a girl like
Priscilla and a woman like Zenobia to jostle one another in their love of
a man like Hollingsworth, was likely to be no child's play.
Had I been as cold-hearted as I sometimes thought myself, nothing would
have interested me more than to witness the play of passions that must
thus have been evolved. But, in honest truth, I would really have gone
far to save Priscilla, at least, from the catastrophe in which such a
drama would be apt to terminate.
Priscilla had now grown to be a very pretty girl, and still kept budding
and blossoming, and daily putting on some new charm, which you no sooner
became sensible of than you thought it worth all that she had previously.
possessed. So unformed, vague, and without substance, as she had come to
us, it seemed as if we could see Nature shaping out a woman before our
very eyes, and yet had only a more reverential sense of the mystery of a
woman's soul and frame. Yesterday, her cheek was pale, to-day, it had a
bloom. Priscilla's smile, like a baby's first one, was a wondrous
novelty. Her imperfections and shortcomings affected me with a kind of
playful pathos, which was as absolutely bewitching a sensation as ever I
experienced. After she had been a month or two at Blithedale, her animal
spirits waxed high, and kept her pretty constantly in a state of bubble
and ferment, impelling her to far more bodily activity than she had yet
strength to endure. She was very fond of playing with the other girls
out of doors. There is hardly another sight in the world so pretty as
that of a company of young girls, almost women grown, at play, and so
giving themselves up to their airy impulse that their tiptoes barely
touch the ground.
Girls are incomparably wilder and more effervescent than boys, more
untamable and regardless of rule and limit, with an ever-shifting variety,
breaking continually into new modes of fun, yet with a harmonious
propriety through all. Their steps, their voices, appear free as the
wind, but keep consonance with a strain of music inaudible to us. Young
men and boys, on the other hand, play, according to recognized law, old,
traditionary games, permitting no caprioles of fancy, but with scope
enough for the outbreak of savage instincts. For, young or old, in play
or in earnest, man is prone to be a brute.
Especially is it delightful to see a vigorous young girl run a race, with
her head thrown back, her limbs moving more friskily than they need, and
an air between that of a bird and a young colt. But Priscilla's peculiar
charm, in a foot-race, was the weakness and irregularity with which she
ran. Growing up without exercise, except to her poor little fingers, she
had never yet acquired the perfect use of her legs. Setting buoyantly
forth, therefore, as if no rival less swift than Atalanta could compete
with her, she ran falteringly, and often tumbled on the grass. Such an
incident--though it seems too slight to think of--was a thing to laugh at,
but which brought the water into one's eyes, and lingered in the memory
after far greater joys and sorrows were wept out of it, as antiquated
trash. Priscilla's life, as I beheld it, was full of trifles that
affected me in just this way.
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