“I would abstain from the fruits of oppression and blood, and am seeking means of entire independence. This, were I not holden by penury unjustly, would be possible. One miracle we have wrought nevertheless, and shall soon work all of them: Our wine is water, flesh, bread—drugs, fruits; and we defy meekly the satyrs all, and Æsculapians. The Soul’s banquet is an art divine.... This Beast named Man has yet most costly tastes, and must first be transformed into a very Man, regenerate in appetite and desire, before the earth shall be restored to fruitfulness, and redeemed from the curse of his cupidity. Then shall the toils of the farm become eloquent and invigorating leisures; Man shall grow his orchards and plant his gardens—an husbandman truly, sowing and reaping in hope, and a partaker in his hope. Labor will be attractive; life will not be worn in anxious and indurating toils; it will be a scene of mixed leisure, recreation, labor, culture. The soil, grateful then for man’s generous usage, debauched no more by foul ordures, nor worn by cupidities, shall recover its primeval virginity, bearing on its bosom the standing bounties which a sober and liberal Providence ministers to his heed—sweet and invigorating growths, for the health and comfort of the grower.”
Mr. Sanborn, commenting on this, remarks:—
“It was in the spirit of the passages just quoted from Alcott’s diary ... and not from the ordinary Fourieristic notions about attractions and destinies and coöperative housekeeping that Alcott undertook his experiment at ‘Fruitlands.’”
Alcott’s theory of human life was thus set down in his Diary:—
“I have been (as is ever the habit of my mind) striving to apprehend the real in the seeming, to strip ideas of their adventitious phrases, and behold them in their order and powers. I have sought to penetrate the showy terrestrial to find the heavenly things; I have tried to translate into ideas the language and images of spirit, and thus to read God in his works. The outward I have seen as the visible type of the inward. Ever doth this same nature double its divine form, and stand forth—now before the inner, now before the outer sense of man—at once substance and form, image and idea, so that God shall never slip wholly from consciousness of the Soul. Faith apprehends his agency, even in the meanest and most seemingly trivial act, whenever organ or matter undergo change of function or mode of form,—Spirit being all in all. Amidst all tumults and discomfitures, all errors and evils, Faith discerns the subtle bond that marries opposite natures, clinging to that which holds all in harmonious union. It unites opposites; it demolishes opposing forces. It melts all solid and obstinate matters. It makes fluid the material universe. It hopes even in despair, believes in the midst of doubts, apprehends stability and order even in confusion and anarchy, and, while all without is perturbed and wasting, it possesses itself in quietude and repose within. It abides in the unswerving, is mighty in the omnipotent, and enduring in the eternal. The soul quickened by its agency, though borne on the waves of the mutable and beset by the winds of error and the storms of evil, shall ride securely under this directing hand to the real and the true. In the midst of change, it shall remain unchanged. For to such a faith is the divine order of God made known. All visible things are but manifestations of this order. Nature, with all its change, is but the activity of this power. It flows around and obeys the invisible self-anchored spirit. Mutability to such a vision, is as the eddy that spirit maketh around its own self-circling agency, revealing alike in the smallest ripple and the mightiest surges the power that stirreth at the centre.”
VI
FATHER HECKER’S DESCRIPTION OF FRUITLANDS
[Isaac Thomas Hecker was born in New York in 1819. Two years after his experience at Brook Farm and Fruitlands he entered the Roman Catholic church, and in 1849 he was ordained a priest. Later he founded the Paulist Fathers. He died in 1888. The following extracts are taken from a contemporary record of his impressions while in the socialistic community.]
“Fruitlands,” so called because fruit was to be the principal staple of daily food, and to be cultivated on the farm, was a spot well chosen; it was retired, breathing quiet and tranquillity. No neighboring dwelling obstructed the view of Nature, and it lay some distance even from a bypath road, in a delightful solitude. The house, somewhat dilapidated, was on the slope of a slowly ascending hill; stretched before it was a small valley under cultivation, with fields of corn, potatoes, and meadow. In the distance loomed up on high “Cheshire’s haughty hill,” Monadnoc. Such was the spot chosen by men inspired to live a holier life, to bring Eden once more upon earth. These men were impressed with the religiousness of their enterprise. When the first load of hay was driven into the barn and the first fork was about to be plunged into it, one of the family took off his hat and said, “I take off my hat, not that I reverence the barn more than other places, but because this is the first fruit of our labor.” Then a few moments were given to silence, that holy thought might be awakened.