As any one knows who has any experience in farming, the true farmer spirit shows itself in the man who accepts the disappointment of a meagre crop in spite of his dreams of a plentiful harvest, and working diligently, gets what he can from it.

The crops at Fruitlands underwent many vicissitudes. No sooner did a crop show some sort of promise than they turned it back into the earth again, in order to enrich the soil, they said. This method did not tend to fill the winter storehouse with the needed vegetables, and a faint suggestion of disillusionment began to creep into the perfect harmony of the consociate family as autumn approached. Early in September Mr. Alcott and Charles Lane went on a trip in search of recruits. They went to Providence and had an evening’s conversation with Mrs. Newcomb and some of her friends, during which Mr. Alcott said that, as competition had made facilities so great, they might take that opportunity to go on to New York. Charles Lane then spoke up and said there was no other objection than lack of means, whereupon the company contributed the necessary amount. In writing to Oldham about it, Charles Lane passes comment on what he saw: “We went to the Graham House to breakfast where we found some people half if not quite alive” and again: “The number of living persons in the 300,000 inhabitants of New York is very small.” During this visit they went to see Mrs. L. M. Child, who gave the following account of it:

“A day or two after [Theodore] Parker left, Alcott and Lane called to see me. I asked, ‘What brings you to New York?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Mr. Alcott; ‘it seems a miracle that we are here.’ Mr. Child and John Hopper went to hear a discussion between them and W. H. Channing. I asked Mr. Child what they talked about. ‘Lane divided man into three states,—the disconscious, the conscious, and the unconscious. The disconscious is the state of the pig; the conscious is the baptism by water; and the unconscious is the baptism by fire.’ I laughed, and said, ‘Well, how did the whole discussion affect your mind?’ ‘Why, after I heard them talk a few minutes, I ‘ll be cursed if I knew whether I had any mind at all.’ J. H. stayed rather longer, though he left in the midst. He said they talked about mind and body. ‘What did they say?’ ‘Why, Channing seemed to think there was some connection between mind and body; but those Boston folks, so far as I could understand ‘em, seemed to think the body was all sham!’”

There is a story that on their return from New York they went by steamer to New Haven. All the money that had been contributed by Mrs. Newcomb and her friends had gone, but that did not trouble the philosophers. They boarded the boat quite serenely and when it started sat on deck enjoying the breeze. The ticket-man came to each passenger for his ticket, and when he came to Mr. Alcott and Mr. Lane, sitting there in their linen suits, he asked them for theirs. Quite undisturbed Mr. Alcott replied that they had no money or scrip, but they would quite willingly pay their way by addressing the passengers and crew with a little conversation in the saloon. It is said that in reply the language of the ticket-man was not as civil as it should have been.

It was all very pleasant, this wandering off and showing their linen tunics to the world and holding conversations to enlighten people in regard to the future wonders of the New Eden, but the day they left Fruitlands Joseph Palmer was off attending to his cattle at No Town, and the crop of barley had been cut and was waiting to be harvested. Poor Mrs. Alcott looked at it with anxious eyes. The granary was almost empty and this barley meant food. She could forget herself, but she could not ignore the needs of her children. Christopher Greene and Larned and Bower were also away. The barley lay there with no one to bring it in to a safe shelter. The next day she looked at it again with a sinking heart. As the afternoon waned, black clouds covered the sky and flashes of lightning rent seams through them with terrifying rapidity. Then Mrs. Alcott made a quick decision. Gathering all the baskets she could find, she carried them to the barley-field with the help of the children, and in hot haste they gathered the barley into the baskets and dragged them to the granary, and then ran back as fast as they could for more. Thus they worked with all their strength, and when the storm broke, they had saved enough to last them for at least a few weeks.

So if Mrs. Alcott lacked, as Lane said, spiritual insight, she fortunately for them had practical foresight, from which they all reaped a benefit.

The following letter to Mr. Oldham is suggestive of the trend of affairs in the community:—

On our arrival at home we learnt that in our absence several friends and strangers had called, amongst them S. Bower, Parker Pillsbury, and an acquaintance, Mr. Hamond of New Ipswich in New Hampshire State. Thinking the latter worth seeing we went to visit him, a distance of about twenty-five miles. He is married to an exoteric wife of some good household qualities; he has built with his own hands a smart cottage, being an expert workman, and has moreover a respectable talent for portrait painting which he estimates humbly without a consciousness of humility. Next to Edward Palmer, he is a person who, I should think, would make one with us. He introduced us at two houses to four females who vitally considered constitute with himself the whole of the town. Our visit there will do some good, for though they have read my letters printed last winter in the newspapers, yet the presence of a living person is much more real a thing. I saw their good intentions were greatly encouraged. I could not dissuade the oldest from promising never to taste flesh again, which I was rather inclined to on account of her years....

On Saturday last Anna Alcott most magnanimously walked her little legs fourteen miles in about five hours down to old Concord, where our friends appear to have been pretty somnolent since our departure. On Tuesday we returned on foot, and accomplished somewhat towards the liberation of the animals by a heroine of thirteen. Mr. Emerson is, I think, quite stationary: he is off the Railroad of Progress, and merely an elegant, kindly observer of all who pass onwards, and notes down their aspect while they remain in sight; of course, when they arrive at a new station they are gone from and for him. I see Mr. John Sterling dedicates his new tragedy of “Strafford” to him: no very alarming honor! I suppose that Thomas Carlyle, with all his famous talking, does not yet actually lead the people out of their troubles. These worthy and enlightened scribblers will do little to save the nation. Some there are I hope of more real solid metal....

Samuel Bower has not yet had your note, as I am not sure where he is. He could not, it seems, long endure Joseph Palmer’s offer of land, etc., it was so solitary. He called here when we were on our long journey on his way to Lowell, the Manchester of New England. If his aims are high and his head clear, or his hands effective, he will not be able to wander far from us; but a wanderer it is certain he must be allowed to be. Abraham [Abram Everett] comes and goes with some regard to the law within him; he is now busy with our latter hay, the maize, buckwheat, etc.

What is to be our destiny I can in no wise guess. Mr. Alcott makes such high requirements of all persons that few are likely to stay, even of his own family, unless he can become more tolerant of defect. He is an artist in human character requiring every painter to be a Michael Angelo. He also does not wish to keep a hospital, nor even a school, but to be surrounded by Masters—Masters of Art, of the one grand Art of human life. I suppose such a standard would soon empty your Concordium as well as every other house, which I suppose you call by insinuation “Discordiums,” or, more elegantly, “Discordia.” I propose to pass at least another winter in New England to know more averagingly what they are, as the last was particularly severe. I have gone about on these several journeys in the simple tunic and linen garments and mean to keep them on as long as I can. We have had a fine summer of three months, and a fine autumn seems on hand. Sharp frost this morning, yet we took our bath as usual out-of-doors in the gray of the morn at one-half past five. Health, the grand external condition, still attends me, every stranger rating me ten or twelve years younger than I am; so that if such are the effects of climate I may indeed be happy, for my youthfulness is not all appearance—I feel as buoyant and as boyish as I look, which I find a capital endorsement to my assertions about diet, etc. It staggers the sceptical and sets their selfish thoughts to work....

Hoping that all minds are thus laboring, let us, my dear friend, act as if all good progress depended upon us and unfailingly present a clean breast to Eternal Love, shedding forth our full measure in the clearest Light; in which I am

Abraham just notifies me there is work in the field, so I must go.

Joseph Palmer had offered his old house at No Town to Samuel Bower as a refuge in which to test his theory of the benefits to be derived from accustoming the body to live without the enervating burden of clothing. Bower’s experiences in this line at Fruitlands had not been satisfactory or convincing, as it was only at night that he could make the experiment, and then they insisted on his donning a white garment for his peregrinations in the open. Even this caused agitation in the neighborhood, and tales of a white ghost wandering over the hillside caused much alarm, and several times a posse went out from the village to look into the matter. At No Town he could be in solitude. While there he wrote a number of articles for the Liberator, in one of which he predicted the full regeneration of man, “if we can rid the kitchen of its horrors and keep our tables free from the mangled corse.”

In another letter Lane writes to Oldham:—

... At present I am situated thus. All the persons who have joined us during the summer have from some cause or other quitted, they say in consequence of Mr. Alcott’s despotic manner, which he interprets as their not being equal to the Spirit’s demands. Joseph Palmer, who has done, and is doing our farmwork for love, still remains in the same relation as he ever did.

Palmer says that having once declared this land free we should never go back, at least until the work has been fairly tested. Under all this it should be stated that Mrs. Alcott has no spontaneous inclination towards a larger family than her own natural one, of spiritual ties she knows nothing, though to keep all together she does and would go through a good deal of exterior and interior toil. I hoped I had done with pecuniary affairs, but it seems I am not to be let off. The crops, I believe, will not discharge all the obligations they were expected to liquidate, and against going further into debt I am most determinately settled.... You will perceive that I have, like yourself, a small peck of troubles; not quite heavy enough to drive me to a juncture with our friends, the Shakers, but sufficiently so to put the thought into one’s head, as you perceive. In the midst of all these events and of William’s illness, who is in bed eight or ten days with a sort of bilious fever, I am not without the consolatory hope that some measure of Spirit utilitary is bound up with our obscure doings.

At a late visit on foot to Roxbury, I found the numbers at Brook Farm considerably diminished. I don’t know what they will say to my letter if they see it in The New Age, but never mind.

From now on clashing of wills disturbed the serenity of Fruitlands. Charles Lane, despondent over the course of events and the sense of failure, and seeing further financial complications in store for him, began seriously to consider the plan of life adopted by the Shakers whose well-filled corn-bins and full-rigged haylofts bespoke a system which provided plenty for man and beast, and gave time for alternate work and meditation. He began to talk of this to Mr. Alcott and urged him toward a more monastic life, and then suggested that they should join them. That he had great influence with Mr. Alcott is evident, and Mrs. Alcott, who fully realized this, grew restless and then alarmed.

In writing to Oldham, Lane kept dwelling upon Mrs. Alcott. Once he wrote: “Mrs. Alcott has passed from the ladylike to the industrious order, but she has much inward experience to realize. Her pride is not yet eradicated and her peculiar maternal love blinds her to all else—whom does it not so blind for a season?”^[11]

And he ascribes the failure of other persons to join the experiment largely to Mrs. Alcott, “who vows that her own family are all that she lives for.” No such narrow purpose, Lane adds, has inspired him; and he blames Mr. Alcott for listening too much to his family affections, and regarding too much what that guardian angel of middle-class England, Mrs. Grundy, will say.

In speaking of Mr. Alcott, he complains that “constancy to his wife and inconstancy to the Spirit have blurred over his life forever.”

Poor Mrs. Alcott, poor “Marmee,” as her daughters called her!—in her loyalty she had almost worked her fingers to the bone with no thanks for it. Her days had passed without any help to lighten the manual labor. At first they said that not a lamp could lighten Fruitlands because the oil contained animal fat, and only bayberry candles could be used, and only a few of them. But Mrs. Alcott then rebelled. How could she sew and mend the clothes with such poor light? There seemed some sense in this, so one small lamp was brought to Fruitlands just for her. The philosophers tried sitting in the dark, but one by one would try to find some pretext to join her at the sewing-table, and Mrs. Alcott’s lamp burned bright and steady, an emblem of her own true and faithful heart.

Ellery Channing said: “Mrs. Alcott was one of the most refined persons of my acquaintance. She told me years afterwards that in 1843–44 she feared for her husband’s sanity; he did such strange things without seeming to know how odd they were; wearing only linen clothes and canvas shoes, and eating only vegetables.”

November 26, 1843, Lane wrote to Oldham from Fruitlands:—

“What with agitations of mind and ills of body, I have passed a less happy time than usual. William was ill a whole month with a low fever so that he could not even sit up in bed for one minute. I had to nurse him while plagued with hands so chapped and sore that I was little more capable than the patient. Then came Mr. [Samuel J.] May’s announcement that he should not pay the note to which he had put his hand; so that money affairs and individual property come back again upon me for a season. Thereupon ensued endless discussions, doubts, and anticipations concerning our destiny. These still hang over us. But in the midst of them Mrs. Alcott gives notice that she concedes to the wishes of her friends and shall withdraw to a house which they will provide for herself and her four children. As she will take all the furniture with her, this proceeding necessarily leaves me alone and naked in a new world. Of course Mr. A. and I could not remain together without her. To be ‘that devil come from Old England to separate husband and wife,’ I will not be, though it might gratify New England to be able to say it. So that you will perceive a separation is possible. Indeed, I believe that under the circumstances it is now inevitable.”

Mr. Sanborn says in his “Memoirs of Bronson Alcott”:—

“Those who read Louisa’s ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ will see by her names ‘Timon Lion’ for Lane, and ‘Abel Lamb’ for Alcott, that she looked on her father as rather the victim of Lane in the ‘Fruitlands’ failure. Without conceding this, the impartial observer will say that Lane had the stronger will, and the far more prosaic nature; that he decided most of the questions for his associates in both countries, and that he was rather a hard person to get on with. Neither his first wife, nor Wright, nor Mrs. Alcott, nor Alcott himself, nor the Harvard Shakers, nor finally Oldham, could quite suit him. He over-persuaded Alcott, who was a good farmer and mechanic, to adopt impossible modes of working the ‘Fruitlands’ farm, and much of their whimsies in dress and food seem to have come from Lane and his English friends. Mrs. Alcott, when reËstablished in a home of her own at Concord, early in 1845, offered Lane a home there, and he tried it for a time in the next summer, but still complained, as he had at ‘Fruitlands,’ that she wished to keep her family small, and made it uncomfortable for guests. Knowing Mrs. Alcott’s character well, in the last twenty years of her life, I cannot believe that this was ever true of her. She was hospitality itself, whether poor or rich; and it must have been Lane’s own individualism that made him dissatisfied.

“The rigors of a New England winter promoted the dissolution of the ‘Fruitlands’ Community, but did not alone break it up. A lack of organizing power to control the steady current of selfishness, as well as the unselfish vagaries of his followers, was the real cause. Nothing in fact could be more miserable than the failure of this hopeful experiment.”

Mr. Alcott had written in his diary of Emerson:—“It is much to have the vision of the seeing eye. Did most men possess this, the useful hand would be empowered with new dexterity also. Emerson sees me, knows me, and more than all others helps me,—not by noisy praise, not by low appeals to interest and passion, but by turning the eye of others to my stand in reason and the nature of things. Only men of like vision can apprehend and counsel each other. A man whose purpose and act demand but a day or an hour for their completion can do little by way of advising him whose purposes require years for their fulfilment. Only Emerson, of this age, knows me, of all that I have found. Well, every one does not find one man, one very man through and through. Many are they who live and die alone, known only to their survivors of an after-century.”

How he recalled that now! He was tossed in mind and troubled beyond measure. All his beautiful dreams were melting away one by one. Everything seemed to be falling from his grasp. Most of the crops had failed;—the enthusiastic lovers of “The Newness” had proved themselves false and had slipped away as the cold weather approached. All his wonderful plans had come to naught. He had promised to the world the vision of a new Eden: he had believed it could exist: he had worked for it with his whole soul: he had nothing to show for it but failure. Would his friend Emerson stay by him in his anguish? He believed he would, and yet how meet his friend? How face the world?

The cold penetrated the old house. William Lane lay ill in his room and his father watched over him. All were heavy-hearted. It was as late as January that Charles Lane and his son moved to the Shakers. After that Mr. Alcott retired to his room, as he thought, to face the end. Mr. Sanborn tells us: “The final expulsion from this Paradise nearly cost Mr. Alcott his life. He retired to his chamber, refused food, and was on the point of dying from grief and abstinence, when his wife prevailed on him to continue longer in this ungrateful world.”

This prayer was written in his diary after leaving Fruitlands: “Light, O source of light! give Thou unto thy servant, sitting in the perplexities of this surrounding darkness. Hold Thou him steady to Thee, to truth, and to himself; and in Thine own due time give him clearly to the work for which Thou art thus slowly preparing him, proving his faith meanwhile in Thyself and in his kind.”

“Shall I say with Pestalozzi that I was not made by this world, nor for it,—wherefore am I placed in it if I was found unfit? And the world that found him thus asked not whether it was his fault or that of another; but it bruised him with an iron hammer, as the bricklayer breaks an old brick to fill up a crevice.”

“That is failure when a man’s idea ruins him, when he is dwarfed and killed by it; but when he is ever growing by it, ever true to it, and does not lose it by any partial or immediate failures,—that is success, whatever it seems to the world.”

In speaking of the Fruitlands experiment Mr. Sanborn says:—

“It brought its own compensations, and left the whole Alcott family richer and not poorer for this romantic experience with its sad termination. It prepared Alcott to face more patiently the storms of later life, and to train his daughter, who was his best single gift to the world, better for her conspicuous service. And ‘Fruitlands’ will be remembered, perhaps longer than most of the adventures that awaited this romantic household in its voyage of life....

“There was some foundation for Alcott’s despair at ‘Fruitlands,’ and with the ill success that followed him after the flourishing Temple School in Boston. Emerson, the gentlest and least exacting of men, looking at his friend’s situation a few years after the ‘Fruitlands’ experiment, wrote in his private journal—

“‘The plight of Mr. Alcott! The most refined and the most advanced soul we have had in New England; who makes all other souls appear slow and cheap and mechanical; a man of such courtesy and greatness that in conversation all others, even the intellectual, seem sharp, and fighting for victory and angry,—while he has the unalterable sweetness of a muse! Yet because he cannot earn money by his talk or his pen, or by school-keeping, or bookkeeping, or editing, or any kind of meanness,—nay, for this very cause that he is ahead of his contemporaries, is higher than they, and keeps himself out of the shop condescensions and arts which they stoop to,—or, unhappily, need not stoop to, but find themselves, as it were, born to; therefore it is the unanimous opinion of New England judges that this man must die! We do not adjudge him to hemlock or garroting,—we are much too hypocritical and cowardly for that. But we not less surely doom him by refusing to protest against this doom, or combine to save him, and to set him in employments fit for him and salutary for the State.’”

The poem written by Mr. Alcott, with the title “The Return,” may fittingly close this chapter:—