University of Virginia Library

8. VIII.
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
snow-drifts 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, housatonias 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 noontime,
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 burthen
of its mortality in an earthly 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, O 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 be-ribboned 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
a-field! Coats with high collars and with no collars,
broad-skirted or swallow-tailed, and with the waist at

every point between the hip and armpit; pantaloons of
a dozen successive epochs, and greatly defaced at the
knees by the humiliations of the wearer before his ladylove;
— 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 a-field
when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from their conjugal
bond at night-fall. 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, to-day, 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 door-step, 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 pig-sties, 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!