CHAPTER VI.
ENTERTAINMENTS
Our slide down the Knoll proved very popular, and, with occasional repairs, lasted all winter, making a welcome addition to our outdoor diversions during the season when these were necessarily limited. Living in the open was one of the salutary customs of the community, a custom faithfully followed even in comparatively bad weather. Rain or shine, snow or blow, save only in real storms, every one spent a good many of the twenty-four hours under the broad skies. There was always some work to be done, cutting wood, digging peat—the main reliance for fuel—mending stone walls, and attending to the tree-nurseries. Then for fun, there was coasting, skating, sleigh-riding and taking long tramps over the place or to some distant point of interest. Exposure to the elements seemed to harm no one, and coughs, influenzas and rheumatics were unknown.
Withal, however, indoor pleasures took the most prominent place, during the winter months. After the reorganization of the Association as a Phalanx, Mr. John Dwight was the Chief of the Festal Series, and as he was, first of all, a musician, it followed that music formed the principal feature of our entertainments. Vocal and instrumental music was thoroughly taught in the school, and, as nearly all the members of the community were music lovers, and many were singers and players, the place was melodious from morning until night. There was always some new song or perhaps some very old one to be tried, some local composition to be heard, or some preparation for future musical events to enlist attention. Selections from the operas then known and now forgotten, were given in the dining room; parts, with all the characters and choruses, from “Zampa,” “Norma” and the “Caliph of Bagdad” recur to my mind. Two public concerts were given to pay for a new piano, and as the proceeds did not quite fill the bill, we all gave up butter, selling the entire product of the dairy for three months to make up the deficit. That was just like Brook Farm. The most ambitious performance in my time was the rendition of the Oratorio of Saint Paul, which was given twice by request, but this was in the summer when we had ample room and verge enough in the pine-grove amphitheater.
We had another theater, a very little one, please, where light plays, tableaux, readings and recitations and similar entertainments were offered by the Dramatic Group during the winter. One member of this group, Mr. John Glover Drew, was ambitious, and urged the presentation of something more serious and edifying than merely amusing trifles, and, accordingly, an excursion was made into the realm of the melodrama. Glover, as he was called, was intensely Byronic, after the fashion of the times, and he prepared a succession of thrilling scenes from Byron’s sensational poem, “The Corsair,” for presentation by his fellow players. This melodramatic production was staged with all the pasteboard pomp and secondhand circumstance the little workshop theater could afford and was given with all the fire the high-toned author could impart to his company. The result was disastrous.
Glover was a very genial, jolly young man, a fellow of infinite jest, and always full of fun, but his play was distinctly dismal. The spirit of Brook Farm being as distinctly joyous, the melancholy drama went against the grain, and the performance fell dolefully flat. It was the one failure among the many successful entertainments offered by the Festal series, and the members of the cast including the author, were greatly depressed when the curtain went down with the auditorium already nearly empty. Glover undoubtedly had his bad quarter-of-an-hour that night, but the next morning he regained his usual equipoise, and cast off his chagrin with a characteristic gibe, at his own expense. A sympathetic friend ventured to ask if the fiasco was caused, perhaps, by too much blood and thunder in the piece.
“Not blood and thunder, but thud and blunder,” was Glover’s quick come-back.
We had two or three other plays in the shop, that season, in one of which my father took a small part. This was “The Rent Day,” by Douglas Jerrold, I think. The play opens with a tableau reproducing Wilkies’ picture of “The Rent Day,” and the most important thing my father had to do was to sit at the head of the table in the character of Master Crumbs, the steward. Peter Baldwin, who succeeded Mr. Hecker as baker-general—being therefore given the title of General—usually did the first old man business, but as he was suddenly called to Boston, my father, who happened to be visiting us at the moment, was asked to fill the role of Master Crumbs, which he consented to do, on short notice. There never was such a thing as a theater in the Old Colonie and I can imagine the disturbed feelings of the good Dutch burghers could they have known that their respected fellow citizen, Charles Sears, Esq., of the pier, was actually appearing on the stage as a play actor.
One play was given by the boys and girls, or rather by two boys and one girl, Dolly Hosmer, Craze Barlow and myself. We did Box and Cox, a short farce, produced to piece out a vaudeville program.
The first hour of our winter evenings at the Hive was, by common consent, assigned to the younger generation, and story-telling was regularly made its most attractive feature. Mr. Dana was one of our best story tellers, and his narrations were instructive as well as interesting. In an extended series he gave us accounts, partly imaginary, of the beginnings of things, of the discovery and the first use of iron, the evolutions of the boat, of primitive pottery, of glass, etc.
I was never in Mr. Dana’s classes, Greek and German being beyond my reach, but I saw something of him in the tree-nursery and the orchard where I worked under him, he being Chief of the Orchard Group. I cannot do better in trying to give an idea of him at Brook Farm than to quote from Mr. John Thomas Codman’s Memoirs, as follows: