The Blithedale Romance
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Blithedale Romance
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Her nerves being none of the strongest, Priscilla hardly recovered her
equanimity during the rest of the evening. This, to be sure, was a great
pity; but, nevertheless, we thought it a very bright idea of Zenobia's to
bring her legend to so effective a conclusion.
XIV. ELIOT'S PULPIT
Our Sundays at Blithedale were not ordinarily kept with such rigid
observance as might have befitted the descendants of the Pilgrims, whose
high enterprise, as we sometimes flattered ourselves, we had taken up,
and were carrying it onward and aloft, to a point which they never
dreamed of attaining.
On that hallowed day, it is true, we rested from our labors. Our oxen,
relieved from their week-day yoke, roamed at large through the pasture;
each yoke-fellow, however, keeping close beside his mate, and continuing
to acknowledge, from the force of habit and sluggish sympathy, the union
which the taskmaster had imposed for his own hard ends. As for us human
yoke-fellows, chosen companions of toil, whose hoes had clinked together
throughout the week, we wandered off, in various directions, to enjoy our
interval of repose. Some, I believe, went devoutly to the village church.
Others, it may be, ascended a city or a country pulpit, wearing the
clerical robe with so much dignity that you would scarcely have suspected
the yeoman's frock to have been flung off only since milking-time.
Others took long rambles among the rustic lanes and by-paths, pausing to
look at black old farmhouses, with their sloping roofs; and at the modern
cottage, so like a plaything that it seemed as if real joy or sorrow
could have no scope within; and at the more pretending villa, with its
range of wooden columns supporting the needless insolence of a great
portico. Some betook themselves into the wide, dusky barn, and lay there
for hours together on the odorous hay; while the sunstreaks and the
shadows strove together,--these to make the barn solemn, those to make it
cheerful,--and both were conquerors; and the swallows twittered a cheery
anthem, flashing into sight, or vanishing as they darted to and fro among
the golden rules of sunshine. And others went a little way into the
woods, and threw themselves on mother earth, pillowing their heads on a
heap of moss, the green decay of an old log; and, dropping asleep, the
bumblebees and mosquitoes sung and buzzed about their ears, causing the
slumberers to twitch and start, without awaking.
With Hollingsworth, Zenobia, Priscilla, and myself, it grew to be a
custom to spend the Sabbath afternoon at a certain rock. It was known to
us under the name of Eliot's pulpit, from a tradition that the venerable
Apostle Eliot had preached there, two centuries gone by, to an Indian
auditory. The old pine forest, through which the Apostle's voice was
wont to sound, had fallen an immemorial time ago. But the soil, being of
the rudest and most broken surface, had apparently never been brought
under tillage; other growths, maple and beech and birch, had succeeded to
the primeval trees; so that it was still as wild a tract of woodland as
the great-great-great-greatgrandson of one of Eliot's Indians (had any
such posterity been in existence) could have desired for the site and
shelter of his wigwam. These after-growths, indeed, lose the stately
solemnity of the original forest. If left in due neglect, however, they
run into an entanglement of softer wildness, among the rustling leaves of
which the sun can scatter cheerfulness as it never could among the
dark-browed pines.
The rock itself rose some twenty or thirty feet, a shattered granite
bowlder, or heap of bowlders, with an irregular outline and many fissures,
out of which sprang shrubs, bushes, and even trees; as if the scanty
soil within those crevices were sweeter to their roots than any other
earth. At the base of the pulpit, the broken bowlders inclined towards
each other, so as to form a shallow cave, within which our little party
had sometimes found protection from a summer shower. On the threshold,
or just across it, grew a tuft of pale columbines, in their season, and
violets, sad and shadowy recluses, such as Priscilla was when we first
knew her; children of the sun, who had never seen their father, but dwelt
among damp mosses, though not akin to them. At the summit, the rock was
overshadowed by the canopy of a birch-tree, which served as a
sounding-board for the pulpit. Beneath this shade (with my eyes of sense
half shut and those of the imagination widely opened) I used to see the
holy Apostle of the Indians, with the sunlight flickering down upon him
through the leaves, and glorifying his figure as with the
half-perceptible glow of a transfiguration.
I the more minutely describe the rock, and this little Sabbath solitude,
because Hollingsworth, at our solicitation, often ascended Eliot's pulpit,
and not exactly preached, but talked to us, his few disciples, in a
strain that rose and fell as naturally as the wind's breath among the
leaves of the birch-tree. No other speech of man has ever moved me like
some of those discourses. It seemed most pitiful--a positive calamity to
the world--that a treasury of golden thoughts should thus be scattered,
by the liberal handful, down among us three, when a thousand hearers
might have been the richer for them; and Hollingsworth the richer,
likewise, by the sympathy of multitudes. After speaking much or little,
as might happen, he would descend from his gray pulpit, and generally
fling himself at full length on the ground, face downward. Meanwhile, we
talked around him on such topics as were suggested by the discourse.
Since her interview with Westervelt, Zenobia's continual inequalities of
temper had been rather difficult for her friends to bear. On the first
Sunday after that incident, when Hollingsworth had clambered down from
Eliot's pulpit, she declaimed with great earnestness and passion, nothing
short of anger, on the injustice which the world did to women, and
equally to itself, by not allowing them, in freedom and honor, and with
the fullest welcome, their natural utterance in public.
"It shall not always be so!" cried she. "If I live another year, I will
lift up my own voice in behalf of woman's wider liberty!"
She perhaps saw me smile.
"What matter of ridicule do you find in this, Miles Coverdale?"
exclaimed Zenobia, with a flash of anger in her eyes. "That smile,
permit me to say, makes me suspicious of a low tone of feeling and
shallow thought. It is my belief--yes, and my prophecy, should I die
before it happens--that, when my sex shall achieve its rights, there will
be ten eloquent women where there is now one eloquent man. Thus far, no
woman in the world has ever once spoken out her whole heart and her whole
mind. The mistrust and disapproval of the vast bulk of society throttles
us, as with two gigantic hands at our throats! We mumble a few weak
words, and leave a thousand better ones unsaid. You let us write a little,
it is true, on a limited range of subjects. But the pen is not for
woman. Her power is too natural and immediate. It is with the living
voice alone that she can compel the world to recognize the light of her
intellect and the depth of her heart!"
Now,--though I could not well say so to Zenobia,--I had not smiled from
any unworthy estimate of woman, or in denial of the claims which she is
beginning to put forth. What amused and puzzled me was the fact, that
women, however intellectually superior, so seldom disquiet themselves
about the rights or wrongs of their sex, unless their own individual
affections chance to lie in idleness, or to be ill at ease. They are not
natural reformers, but become such by the pressure of exceptional
misfortune. I could measure Zenobia's inward trouble by the animosity
with which she now took up the general quarrel of woman against man.
"I will give you leave, Zenobia," replied I, "to fling your utmost scorn
upon me, if you ever hear me utter a sentiment unfavorable to the widest
liberty which woman has yet dreamed of. I would give her all she asks,
and add a great deal more, which she will not be the party to demand, but
which men, if they were generous and wise, would grant of their own free
motion. For instance, I should love dearly--for the next thousand years,
at least--to have all government devolve into the hands of women. I hate
to be ruled by my own sex; it excites my jealousy, and wounds my pride.
It is the iron sway of bodily force which abases us, in our compelled
submission. But how sweet the free, generous courtesy with which I would
kneel before a woman-ruler!"
"Yes, if she were young and beautiful," said Zenobia, laughing. "But how
if she were sixty, and a fright?"
"Ah! it is you that rate womanhood low," said I. "But let me go on. I
have never found it possible to suffer a bearded priest so near my heart
and conscience as to do me any spiritual good. I blush at the very
thought! Oh, in the better order of things, Heaven grant that the
ministry of souls may be left in charge of women! The gates of the
Blessed City will be thronged with the multitude that enter in, when that
day comes! The task belongs to woman. God meant it for her. He has
endowed her with the religious sentiment in its utmost depth and purity,
refined from that gross, intellectual alloy with which every masculine
theologist--save only One, who merely veiled himself in mortal and
masculine shape, but was, in truth, divine--has been prone to mingle it.
I have always envied the Catholics their faith in that sweet, sacred
Virgin Mother, who stands between them and the Deity, intercepting
somewhat of his awful splendor, but permitting his love to stream upon
the worshipper more intelligibly to human comprehension through the
medium of a woman's tenderness. Have I not said enough, Zenobia?"
"I cannot think that this is true," observed Priscilla, who had been
gazing at me with great, disapproving eyes. "And I am sure I do not wish
it to be true!"
"Poor child!" exclaimed Zenobia, rather contemptuously. "She is the
type of womanhood, such as man has spent centuries in making it. He is
never content unless he can degrade himself by stooping towards what he
loves. In denying us our rights, he betrays even more blindness to his
own interests than profligate disregard of ours!"
"Is this true?" asked Priscilla with simplicity, turning to
Hollingsworth. "Is it all true, that Mr. Coverdale and Zenobia have been
saying?"
"No, Priscilla!" answered Hollingsworth with his customary bluntness.
"They have neither of them spoken one true word yet."
"Do you despise woman?" said Zenobia.
"Ah, Hollingsworth, that would be most ungrateful!"
"Despise her? No!" cried Hollingsworth, lifting his great shaggy head
and shaking it at us, while his eyes glowed almost fiercely. "She is the
most admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and character. Her
place is at man's side. Her office, that of the sympathizer; the
unreserved, unquestioning believer; the recognition, withheld in every
other manner, but given, in pity, through woman's heart, lest man should
utterly lose faith in himself; the echo of God's own voice, pronouncing,
'It is well done!' All the separate action of woman is, and ever has been,
and always shall be, false, foolish, vain, destructive of her own best
and holiest qualities, void of every good effect, and productive of
intolerable mischiefs! Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a
monster--and, thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary
monster--without man as her acknowledged principal! As true as I had
once a mother whom I loved, were there any possible prospect of woman's
taking the social stand which some of them,--poor, miserable, abortive
creatures, who only dream of such things because they have missed woman's
peculiar happiness, or because nature made them really neither man nor
woman!--if there were a chance of their attaining the end which these
petticoated monstrosities have in view, I would call upon my own sex to
use its physical force, that unmistakable evidence of sovereignty, to
scourge them back within their proper bounds! But it will not be needful.
The heart of time womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never
seeks to stray beyond it!"
Never was mortal blessed--if blessing it were--with a glance of such
entire acquiescence and unquestioning faith, happy in its completeness,
as our little Priscilla unconsciously bestowed on Hollingsworth. She
seemed to take the sentiment from his lips into her heart, and brood over
it in perfect content. The very woman whom he pictured--the gentle
parasite, the soft reflection of a more powerful existence--sat there at
his feet.
I looked at Zenobia, however, fully expecting her to resent--as I felt,
by the indignant ebullition of my own blood, that she ought this
outrageous affirmation of what struck me as the intensity of masculine
egotism. It centred everything in itself, and deprived woman of her very
soul, her inexpressible and unfathomable all, to make it a mere incident
in the great sum of man. Hollingsworth had boldly uttered what he, and
millions of despots like him, really felt. Without intending it, he had
disclosed the wellspring of all these troubled waters. Now, if ever, it
surely behooved Zenobia to be the champion of her sex.
But, to my surprise, and indignation too, she only looked humbled. Some
tears sparkled in her eyes, but they were wholly of grief, not anger.
"Well, be it so," was all she said. "I, at least, have deep cause to
think you right. Let man be but manly and godlike, and woman is only too
ready to become to him what you say!"
I smiled--somewhat bitterly, it is true--in contemplation of my own
ill-luck. How little did these two women care for me, who had freely
conceded all their claims, and a great deal more, out of the fulness of
my heart; while Hollingsworth, by some necromancy of his horrible
injustice, seemed to have brought them both to his feet!
"Women almost invariably behave thus," thought I. "What does the fact
mean? Is it their nature? Or is it, at last, the result of ages of
compelled degradation? And, in either case, will it be possible ever to
redeem them?"
An intuition now appeared to possess all the party, that, for this time,
at least, there was no more to be said. With one accord, we arose from
the ground, and made our way through the tangled undergrowth towards one
of those pleasant wood-paths that wound among the overarching trees.
Some of the branches hung so low as partly to conceal the figures that
went before from those who followed. Priscilla had leaped up more
lightly than the rest of us, and ran along in advance, with as much airy
activity of spirit as was typified in the motion of a bird, which chanced
to be flitting from tree to tree, in the same direction as herself.
Never did she seem so happy as that afternoon. She skipt, and could not
help it, from very playfulness of heart.
Zenobia and Hollingsworth went next, in close contiguity, but not with
arm in arm. Now, just when they had passed the impending bough of a
birch-tree, I plainly saw Zenobia take the hand of Hollingsworth in both
her own, press it to her bosom, and let it fall again!
The gesture was sudden, and full of passion; the impulse had evidently
taken her by surprise; it expressed all! Had Zenobia knelt before him,
or flung herself upon his breast, and gasped out," I love you,
Hollingsworth!" I could not have been more certain of what it meant.
They then walked onward, as before. But, methought, as the declining sun
threw Zenobia's magnified shadow along the path, I beheld it tremulous;
and the delicate stem of the flower which she wore in her hair was
likewise responsive to her agitation.
Priscilla--through the medium of her eyes, at least could not possibly
have been aware of the gesture above described. Yet, at that instant, I
saw her droop. The buoyancy, which just before had been so bird-like,
was utterly departed; the life seemed to pass out of her, and even the
substance of her figure to grow thin and gray. I almost imagined her a
shadow, tiding gradually into the dimness of the wood. Her pace became so
slow that Hollingsworth and Zenobia passed by, and I, without hastening
my footsteps, overtook her.
"Come, Priscilla," said I, looking her intently in the face, which was
very pale and sorrowful, "we must make haste after our friends. Do you
feel suddenly ill? A moment ago, you flitted along so lightly that I was
comparing you to a bird. Now, on the contrary, it is as if you had a
heavy heart, and a very little strength to bear it with. Pray take my
arm!"
"No," said Priscilla, "I do not think it would help me. It is my heart,
as you say, that makes me heavy; and I know not why. Just now, I felt
very happy."
No doubt it was a kind of sacrilege in me to attempt to come within her
maidenly mystery; but, as she appeared to be tossed aside by her other
friends, or carelessly let fall, like a flower which they had done with,
I could not resist the impulse to take just one peep beneath her folded
petals.
"Zenobia and yourself are dear friends of late," I remarked. "At first,
--that first evening when you came to us,--she did not receive you quite
so warmly as might have been wished."
"I remember it," said Priscilla. "No wonder she hesitated to love me,
who was then a stranger to her, and a girl of no grace or beauty,--she
being herself so beautiful!"
"But she loves you now, of course?" suggested I. "And at this very
instant you feel her to be your dearest friend?"
"Why do you ask me that question?" exclaimed Priscilla, as if frightened
at the scrutiny into her feelings which I compelled her to make. "It
somehow puts strange thoughts into my mind. But I do love Zenobia dearly!
If she only loves me half as well, I shall be happy!"
"How is it possible to doubt that, Priscilla?" I rejoined. "But observe
how pleasantly and happily Zenobia and Hollingsworth are walking together.
I call it a delightful spectacle. It truly rejoices me that
Hollingsworth has found so fit and affectionate a friend! So many people
in the world mistrust him,--so many disbelieve and ridicule, while hardly
any do him justice, or acknowledge him for the wonderful man he is,--that
it is really a blessed thing for him to have won the sympathy of such a
woman as Zenobia. Any man might be proud of that. Any man, even if he be
as great as Hollingsworth, might love so magnificent a woman. How very
beautiful Zenobia is! And Hollingsworth knows it, too."
There may have been some petty malice in what I said. Generosity is a
very fine thing, at a proper time and within due limits. But it is an
insufferable bore to see one man engrossing every thought of all the
women, and leaving his friend to shiver in outer seclusion, without even
the alternative of solacing himself with what the more fortunate
individual has rejected. Yes, it was out of a foolish bitterness of
heart that I had spoken.
"Go on before," said Priscilla abruptly, and with true feminine
imperiousness, which heretofore I had never seen her exercise. "It
pleases me best to loiter along by myself. I do not walk so fast as you.
"
With her hand she made a little gesture of dismissal. It provoked me;
yet, on the whole, was the most bewitching thing that Priscilla had ever
done. I obeyed her, and strolled moodily homeward, wondering--as I had
wondered a thousand times already--how Hollingsworth meant to dispose of
these two hearts, which (plainly to my perception, and, as I could not
but now suppose, to his) he had engrossed into his own huge egotism.
There was likewise another subject hardly less fruitful of speculation.
In what attitude did Zenobia present herself to Hollingsworth? Was it in
that of a free woman, with no mortgage on her affections nor claimant to
her hand, but fully at liberty to surrender both, in exchange for the
heart and hand which she apparently expected to receive? But was it a
vision that I had witnessed in the wood? Was Westervelt a goblin? Were
those words of passion and agony, which Zenobia had uttered in my hearing,
a mere stage declamation? Were they formed of a material lighter than
common air? Or, supposing them to bear sterling weight, was it a perilous
and dreadful wrong which she was meditating towards herself and
Hollingsworth?
Arriving nearly at the farmhouse, I looked back over the long slope of
pasture land, and beheld them standing together, in the light of sunset,
just on the spot where, according to the gossip of the Community, they
meant to build their cottage. Priscilla, alone and forgotten, was
lingering in the shadow of the wood.
XV. A CRISIS
Thus the summer was passing away,--a summer of toil, of interest, of
something that was not pleasure, but which went deep into my heart, and
there became a rich experience. I found myself looking forward to years,
if not to a lifetime, to be spent on the same system. The Community were
now beginning to form their permanent plans. One of our purposes was to
erect a Phalanstery (as I think we called it, after Fourier; but the
phraseology of those days is not very fresh in my remembrance), where the
great and general family should have its abidingplace. Individual
members, too, who made it a point of religion to preserve the sanctity of
an exclusive home, were selecting sites for their cottages, by the
woodside, or on the breezy swells, or in the sheltered nook of some
little valley, according as their taste might lean towards snugness or
the picturesque. Altogether, by projecting our minds outward, we had
imparted a show of novelty to existence, and contemplated it as hopefully
as if the soil beneath our feet had not been fathom-deep with the dust of
deluded generations, on every one of which, as on ourselves, the world
had imposed itself as a hitherto unwedded bride.
Hollingsworth and myself had often discussed these prospects. It was
easy to perceive, however, that he spoke with little or no fervor, but
either as questioning the fulfilment of our anticipations, or, at any
rate, with a quiet consciousness that it was no personal concern of his.
Shortly after the scene at Eliot's pulpit, while he and I were repairing
an old stone fence, I amused myself with sallying forward into the future
time.
"When we come to be old men," I said, "they will call us uncles, or
fathers,--Father Hollingsworth and Uncle Coverdale,--and we will look
back cheerfully to these early days, and make a romantic story for the
young People (and if a little more romantic than truth may warrant, it
will be no harm) out of our severe trials and hardships. In a century or
two, we shall, every one of us, be mythical personages, or exceedingly
picturesque and poetical ones, at all events. They will have a great
public hall, in which your portrait, and mine, and twenty other faces
that are living now, shall be hung up; and as for me, I will be painted
in my shirtsleeves, and with the sleeves rolled up, to show my muscular
development. What stories will be rife among them about our mighty
strength!" continued I, lifting a big stone and putting it into its place,
"though our posterity will really be far stronger than ourselves, after
several generations of a simple, natural, and active life. What legends
of Zenobia's beauty, and Priscilla's slender and shadowy grace, and those
mysterious qualities which make her seem diaphanous with spiritual light!
In due course of ages, we must all figure heroically in an epic poem;
and we will ourselves--at least, I will--bend unseen over the future
poet, and lend him inspiration while he writes it."
"You seem," said Hollingsworth, "to be trying how much nonsense you can
pour out in a breath."
"I wish you would see fit to comprehend," retorted I, "that the
profoundest wisdom must be mingled with nine tenths of nonsense, else it
is not worth the breath that utters it. But I do long for the cottages
to be built, that the creeping plants may begin to run over them, and the
moss to gather on the walls, and the trees--which we will set out--to
cover them with a breadth of shadow. This spick-and-span novelty does
not quite suit my taste. It is time, too, for children to be born among
us. The first-born child is still to come. And I shall never feel as if
this were a real, practical, as well as poetical system of human life,
until somebody has sanctified it by death."
"A pretty occasion for martyrdom, truly!" said Hollingsworth.
"As good as any other," I replied. "I wonder, Hollingsworth, who, of all
these strong men, and fair women and maidens, is doomed the first to die.
Would it not be well, even before we have absolute need of it, to fix
upon a spot for a cemetery? Let us choose the rudest, roughest, most
uncultivable spot, for Death's garden ground; and Death shall teach us to
beautify it, grave by grave. By our sweet, calm way of dying, and the
airy elegance out of which we will shape our funeral rites, and the
cheerful allegories which we will model into tombstones, the final scene
shall lose its terrors; so that hereafter it may be happiness to live,
and bliss to die. None of us must die young. Yet, should Providence
ordain it so, the event shall not be sorrowful, but affect us with a
tender, delicious, only half-melancholy, and almost smiling pathos!"
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