VIII A MODERN ARCADIA

The Blithedale Romance

by Nathaniel Hawthorne

VIII A MODERN ARCADIA, THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE by Nathaniel Hawthorne

May-day--I forget whether by Zenobia s sole decree, or by the unanimous
vote of our community--had been declared a movable festival. It was
deferred until the sun should have had a reasonable time to clear away
the snowdrifts along the lee of the stone walls, and bring out a few of
the readiest wild flowers. On the forenoon of the substituted day, after
admitting some of the balmy air into my chamber, I decided that it was
nonsense and effeminacy to keep myself a prisoner any longer. So I
descended to the sitting-room, and finding nobody there, proceeded to the
barn, whence I had already heard Zenobia's voice, and along with it a
girlish laugh which was not so certainly recognizable. Arriving at the
spot, it a little surprised me to discover that these merry outbreaks
came from Priscilla.

The two had been a-maying together. They had found anemones in abundance,
houstonias by the handful, some columbines, a few longstalked 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, frostnipt girl, as heretofore described.
Nevertheless, among those fragrant blossoms, and conspicuously, too, had
been stuck a weed of evil odor and ugly aspect, which, as soon as I
detected it, destroyed the effect of all the rest. There was a gleam of
latent mischief--not to call it deviltry--in Zenobia's eye, which seemed
to indicate a slightly malicious purpose in the arrangement.

As for herself, she scorned the rural buds and leaflets, and wore nothing
but her invariable flower of the tropics.

"What do you think of Priscilla now, Mr. Coverdale?" asked she,
surveying her as a child does its doll. "Is not she worth a verse or
two?"

"There is only one thing amiss," answered I. Zenobia laughed, and flung
the malignant weed away.

"Yes; she deserves some verses now," said I, "and from a better poet than
myself. She is the very picture of the New England spring; subdued in
tint and rather cool, but with a capacity of sunshine, and bringing us a
few Alpine blossoms, as earnest of something richer, though hardly more
beautiful, hereafter. The best type of her is one of those anemones."

"What I find most singular in Priscilla, as her health improves,"
observed Zenobia, "is her wildness. Such a quiet little body as she
seemed, one would not have expected that. Why, as we strolled the woods
together, I could hardly keep her from scrambling up the trees, like a
squirrel. She has never before known what it is to live in the free air,
and so it intoxicates her as if she were sipping wine. And she thinks it
such a paradise here, and all of us, particularly Mr. Hollingsworth and
myself, such angels! It is quite ridiculous, and provokes one's malice
almost, to see a creature so happy, especially a feminine creature."

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

"You must correct that opinion, Mr. Coverdale," replied Zenobia
contemptuously, "or I shall think you lack the poetic insight. Did you
ever see a happy woman in your life? Of course, I do not mean a girl,
like Priscilla and a thousand others,--for they are all alike, while on
the sunny side of experience,--but a grown woman. How can she be happy,
after discovering that fate has assigned her but one single event, which
she must contrive to make the substance of her whole life? A man has his
choice of innumerable events."

"A woman, I suppose," answered I, "by constant repetition of her one
event, may compensate for the lack of variety." "Indeed!" said Zenobia.

While we were talking, Priscilla caught sight of Hollingsworth at a
distance, in a blue frock, and with a hoe over his shoulder, returning
from the field. She immediately set out to meet him, running and
skipping, with spirits as light as the breeze of the May morning, but
with limbs too little exercised to be quite responsive; she clapped her
hands, too, with great exuberance of gesture, as is the custom of young
girls when their electricity overcharges them. But, all at once, midway
to Hollingsworth, she paused, looked round about her, towards the river,
the road, the woods, and back towards us, appearing to listen, as if she
heard some one calling her name, and knew not precisely in what direction.

"Have you bewitched her?" I exclaimed.

"It is no sorcery of mine," said Zenobia; "but I have seen the girl do
that identical thing once or twice before. Can you imagine what is the
matter with her?"

"No; unless," said I, "she has the gift of hearing those 'airy tongues
that syllable men's names,' which Milton tells about."

From whatever cause, Priscilla's animation seemed entirely to have
deserted her. She seated herself on a rock, and remained there until
Hollingsworth came up; and when he took her hand and led her back to us,
she rather resembled my original image of the wan and spiritless
Priscilla than the flowery May-queen of a few moments ago. These sudden
transformations, only to be accounted for by an extreme nervous
susceptibility, always continued to characterize the girl, though with
diminished frequency as her health progressively grew more robust.

I was now on my legs again. My fit of illness had been an avenue between
two existences; the low-arched and darksome doorway, through which I
crept out of a life of old conventionalisms, on my hands and knees, as it
were, and gained admittance into the freer region that lay beyond. In
this respect, it was like death. And, as with death, too, it was good to
have gone through it. No otherwise could I have rid myself of a thousand
follies, fripperies, prejudices, habits, and other such worldly dust as
inevitably settles upon the crowd along the broad highway, giving them
all one sordid aspect before noon-time, however freshly they may have
begun their pilgrimage in the dewy morning. The very substance upon my
bones had not been fit to live with in any better, truer, or more
energetic mode than that to which I was accustomed. So it was taken off
me and flung aside, like any other worn-out or unseasonable garment; and,
after shivering a little while in my skeleton, I began to be clothed anew,
and much more satisfactorily than in my previous suit. In literal and
physical truth, I was quite another man. I had a lively sense of the
exultation with which the spirit will enter on the next stage of its
eternal progress after leaving the heavy burden of its mortality in an
early grave, with as little concern for what may become of it as now
affected me for the flesh which I had lost.

Emerging into the genial sunshine, I half fancied that the labors of the
brotherhood had already realized some of Fourier's predictions. Their
enlightened culture of the soil, and the virtues with which they
sanctified their life, had begun to produce an effect upon the material
world and its climate. In my new enthusiasm, man looked strong and
stately,--and woman, oh, how beautiful!--and the earth a green garden,
blossoming with many-colored delights. Thus Nature, whose laws I had
broken in various artificial ways, comported herself towards me as a
strict but loving mother, who uses the rod upon her little boy for his
naughtiness, and then gives him a smile, a kiss, and some pretty
playthings to console the urchin for her severity.

In the interval of my seclusion, there had been a number of recruits to
our little army of saints and martyrs. They were mostly individuals who
had gone through such an experience as to disgust them with ordinary
pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so deeply, as to
lose their faith in the better time to come. On comparing their minds
one with another they often discovered that this idea of a Community had
been growing up, in silent and unknown sympathy, for years. Thoughtful,
strongly lined faces were among them; sombre brows, but eyes that did not
require spectacles, unless prematurely dimmed by the student's lamplight,
and hair that seldom showed a thread of silver. Age, wedded to the past,
incrusted over with a stony layer of habits, and retaining nothing fluid
in its possibilities, would have been absurdly out of place in an
enterprise like this. Youth, too, in its early dawn, was hardly more
adapted to our purpose; for it would behold the morning radiance of its
own spirit beaming over the very same spots of withered grass and barren
sand whence most of us had seen it vanish. We had very young people with
us, it is true,--downy lads, rosy girls in their first teens, and
children of all heights above one's knee; but these had chiefly been sent
hither for education, which it was one of the objects and methods of our
institution to supply. Then we had boarders, from town and elsewhere,
who lived with us in a familiar way, sympathized more or less in our
theories, and sometimes shared in our labors.

On the whole, it was a society such as has seldom met together; nor,
perhaps, could it reasonably be expected to hold together long. Persons
of marked individuality--crooked sticks, as some of us might be
called--are not exactly the easiest to bind up into a fagot. But, so
long as our union should subsist, a man of intellect and feeling, with a
free nature in him, might have sought far and near without finding so
many points of attraction as would allure him hitherward. We were of all
creeds and opinions, and generally tolerant of all, on every imaginable
subject. Our bond, it seems to me, was not affirmative, but negative.
We had individually found one thing or another to quarrel with in our
past life, and were pretty well agreed as to the inexpediency of
lumbering along with the old system any further. As to what should be
substituted, there was much less unanimity. We did not greatly care--at
least, I never did--for the written constitution under which our
millennium had commenced. My hope was, that, between theory and practice,
a true and available mode of life might be struck out; and that, even
should we ultimately fail, the months or years spent in the trial would
not have been wasted, either as regarded passing enjoyment, or the
experience which makes men wise.

Arcadians though we were, our costume bore no resemblance to the
beribboned doublets, silk breeches and stockings, and slippers fastened
with artificial roses, that distinguish the pastoral people of poetry and
the stage. In outward show, I humbly conceive, we looked rather like a
gang of beggars, or banditti, than either a company of honest
laboring-men, or a conclave of philosophers. Whatever might be our
points of difference, we all of us seemed to have come to Blithedale with
the one thrifty and laudable idea of wearing out our old clothes. Such
garments as had an airing, whenever we strode afield! Coats with high
collars and with no collars, broad-skirted or swallow-tailed, and with
the waist at every point between the hip and arm-pit; pantaloons of a
dozen successive epochs, and greatly defaced at the knees by the
humiliations of the wearer before his lady-love,--in short, we were a
living epitome of defunct fashions, and the very raggedest presentment of
men who had seen better days. It was gentility in tatters. Often
retaining a scholarlike or clerical air, you might have taken us for the
denizens of Grub Street, intent on getting a comfortable livelihood by
agricultural labor; or Coleridge's projected Pantisocracy in full
experiment; or Candide and his motley associates at work in their cabbage
garden; or anything else that was miserably out at elbows, and most
clumsily patched in the rear. We might have been sworn comrades to
Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other points
of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have served admirably to
stick up for a scarecrow. And the worst of the matter was, that the
first energetic movement essential to one downright stroke of real labor
was sure to put a finish to these poor habiliments. So we gradually
flung them all aside, and took to honest homespun and linsey-woolsey, as
preferable, on the whole, to the plan recommended, I think, by Virgil,--
"Ara nudus; sere nudus,"--which as Silas Foster remarked, when I
translated the maxim, would be apt to astonish the women-folks.

After a reasonable training, the yeoman life throve well with us. Our
faces took the sunburn kindly; our chests gained in compass, and our
shoulders in breadth and squareness; our great brown fists looked as if
they had never been capable of kid gloves. The plough, the hoe, the
scythe, and the hay-fork grew familiar to our grasp. The oxen responded
to our voices. We could do almost as fair a day's work as Silas Foster
himself, sleep dreamlessly after it, and awake at daybreak with only a
little stiffness of the joints, which was usually quite gone by
breakfast-time.

To be sure, our next neighbors pretended to be incredulous as to our real
proficiency in the business which we had taken in hand. They told
slanderous fables about our inability to yoke our own oxen, or to drive
them afield when yoked, or to release the poor brutes from their conjugal
bond at nightfall. They had the face to say, too, that the cows laughed
at our awkwardness at milking-time, and invariably kicked over the pails;
partly in consequence of our putting the stool on the wrong side, and
partly because, taking offence at the whisking of their tails, we were in
the habit of holding these natural fly-flappers with one hand and milking
with the other. They further averred that we hoed up whole acres of
Indian corn and other crops, and drew the earth carefully about the weeds;
and that we raised five hundred tufts of burdock, mistaking them for
cabbages; and that by dint of unskilful planting few of our seeds ever
came up at all, or, if they did come up, it was stern-foremost; and that
we spent the better part of the month of June in reversing a field of
beans, which had thrust themselves out of the ground in this unseemly way.
They quoted it as nothing more than an ordinary occurrence for one or
other of us to crop off two or three fingers, of a morning, by our clumsy
use of the hay-cutter. Finally, and as an ultimate catastrophe, these
mendacious rogues circulated a report that we communitarians were
exterminated, to the last man, by severing ourselves asunder with the
sweep of our own scythes! and that the world had lost nothing by this
little accident.

But this was pure envy and malice on the part of the neighboring farmers.
The peril of our new way of life was not lest we should fail in becoming
practical agriculturists, but that we should probably cease to be
anything else. While our enterprise lay all in theory, we had pleased
ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor. It
was to be our form of prayer and ceremonial of worship. Each stroke of
the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom, heretofore hidden
from the sun. Pausing in the field, to let the wind exhale the moisture
from our foreheads, we were to look upward, and catch glimpses into the
far-off soul of truth. In this point of view, matters did not turn out
quite so well as we anticipated. It is very true that, sometimes, gazing
casually around me, out of the midst of my toil, I used to discern a
richer picturesqueness in the visible scene of earth and sky. There was,
at such moments, a novelty, an unwonted aspect, on the face of Nature, as
if she had been taken by surprise and seen at unawares, with no
opportunity to put off her real look, and assume the mask with which she
mysteriously hides herself from mortals. But this was all. The clods of
earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were
never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were
fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us
mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is
incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and
the scholar--the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not
the man of sturdiest sense and integrity--are two distinct individuals,
and can never be melted or welded into one substance.

Zenobia soon saw this truth, and gibed me about it, one evening, as
Hollingsworth and I lay on the grass, after a hard day's work.

"I am afraid you did not make a song today, while loading the hay-cart,"
said she, "as Burns did, when he was reaping barley."

"Burns never made a song in haying-time," I answered very positively.
"He was no poet while a farmer, and no farmer while a poet."

"And on the whole, which of the two characters do you like best?" asked
Zenobia. "For I have an idea that you cannot combine them any better than
Burns did. Ah, I see, in my mind's eye, what sort of an individual you
are to be, two or three years hence. Grim Silas Foster is your prototype,
with his palm of 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!