Eden's Outcasts (17 page)

Charles Lane, whom Louisa remembered as the “Dictator” of Fruitlands.

(Courtesy of the Fruitlands Museum)

Charles Lane, on the other hand, settled comfortably with the Alcotts—comfortably, at least, for himself. Whatever physical energies he derived from the divine emanations of Concord, he appeared intent on conserving them. When Lane wrote to Alcott's brother Junius, describing his life at Hosmer Cottage, the latter could not have failed to notice the rather unequal division of labor that Lane described. While Lane gave the children lessons in French, geography, and other subjects, he evidently took no part in the manual labor of the household. Whereas he observed that “Mr. A. saws and chops, provides water,…prepares all the food, in which he tries new materials and mixtures, of a simple character,” Lane himself passed his mornings in his room, enjoying “much God-like quiet.”
⁸⁰
He heartily approved of the simple breakfasts at the cottage, which consisted of bread, apples, and potatoes and were served, not on plates, but only with napkins. The only spice in evidence at these meals came from “conversation of a useful and interior kind.”
⁸¹

Initially, at least, Lane cut an interesting figure among the liberal New Englanders to whom Bronson introduced him. When not busily turning out articles for reform journals, he appeared alongside Bronson at intellectual gatherings and symposia. Evidently, they made an attractively balanced team; Bronson's mild tone and airy idealism were brilliantly complimented by the sharper accents of the Englishman, who spoke with a hard intellectual clarity. Emerson thought that the two could not open their mouths without proclaiming a new solar system.

The two also achieved a public relations coup when it was discovered that Alcott had refused to pay his annual dollar-and-a-half poll tax. On a winter's day, the town constable came to the door of Hosmer Cottage and presented Alcott with an arrest warrant. Alcott meekly consented to be removed to the jailhouse, and when informed that the jailer was not on the premises, quietly waited for two hours while the constable went to look for him. As Alcott stood by, warming to the idea of his small civic martyrdom, a local attorney, Samuel Hoar, heard that his fellow Concordian was in danger of being incarcerated. Much to Alcott's disappointment, Squire Hoar paid the tax for him, and Alcott was told to go home. Nevertheless, Charles Lane seized on the incident to write an impassioned article for the
Liberator
on the subject of personal freedom, arguing that the payment of taxes should be voluntary and presenting Alcott as a brave resister of state slavery.

Yet Lane also had a talent for ruffling feathers. He strode through life with a firm conviction that he was morally superior to everyone he met, and he felt no great shyness about asserting this opinion. Ignoring Carlyle's caveat, Emerson had offered both Wright and Lane a room in his house when they first arrived in Concord. After briefly accepting this hospitality, Lane declared that Emerson lived all too comfortably and that his host's table was “
too good
for my simplicity.”
⁸²
Emerson could detect no trace of warmth in the Englishman, of whom he commented, “His nature and influence do not invite mine, but always freeze me.”
⁸³
As to the heft of his visitor's philosophical opinions, Emerson soon agreed with Carlyle. In his journal, he wrote that Lane and Wright were “two cockerels.”
⁸⁴

Not only Emerson was put off by Lane's hauteur. During a philosophical discussion in which Emerson and Thoreau both took part, Lane surprised the company by accusing Thoreau, of all people, of ethical laxness and immoral self-indulgence. Lane averred that the love of nature that Thoreau championed was “the most subtle and dangerous of sins”—indeed, “a refined idolatry, much more to be dreaded than gross wickedness.” When Thoreau suggested that Lane had no faculty for appreciating nature and therefore did not know what he was talking about, Alcott sided with Lane. Both he and his English friend, Bronson explained, had gone so far beyond material objects and were so filled with spiritual love and perception that their love of nature was incomprehensible to less enlightened natures. Lidian Emerson, who recorded the scene, found it “ineffably comic,” although she noted that no one was laughing.
⁸⁵
Small wonder, then, that when Emerson and Thoreau were asked to join Lane and Alcott's utopian venture, each discovered that he had better things to do.

No one was laughing at Hosmer Cottage either. Abba found it hard to abide Lane's cold insistence on discipline in all things and his hostility to innocent fun; on Bronson's and Louisa's joint birthday, she complained to her journal that she was being “frowned down into stiff quiet and peaceless order.” To a woman accustomed to laughter and frolic, particularly one who had just finished enjoying five months of liberty, the change was especially irksome. By her own description, she was becoming morbidly sensitive to every detail of life, and she was starting to fear that her husband's experiment might “bereave [her] of [her] mind.”
⁸⁶
Seeing to the wants of Wright and Lane had also tired her out. The day before Christmas, in hopes that a short absence from home would help to put matters right, she left Concord to visit her Boston relatives. The fact that, of her four daughters, she took only Louisa with her, suggests that Louisa, too, was chafing under the influence of Charles Lane.

After her initial outburst of joyous enthusiasm when her father came home, Louisa seems to have returned to reality with a bump. After her carefree summer with her mother and sisters, the presence of two strange Englishmen under the family roof required a tremendous readjustment. Moreover, she could hardly have been pleased to find that the more dominant of the two men was utterly without humor and wholly intolerant of frolicsome natures like hers. High-spirited children tend to regard sudden impositions of authority as challenges, and they tend to fight back. A contest of wills thus began to unfold at Hosmer Cottage, one whose intensity can be inferred from the somewhat pleading letter that Bronson wrote Louisa on her birthday, the same day that Abba lamented the climate of “restriction and form” that now pervaded her home.

Since coming back to Concord, Bronson wrote, he had been continually near Louisa, whom he called his “honest little girl,” meeting her daily at the fireside and table, observing her in all her walks, studies, and amusements. Yet she had seemed to repel his attentions, valuing her distance more than his attempts to please and assist her. Bronson tried to explain his fatherly wishes: “I would have you feel my presence and be the happier, and better that I am here. I want, most of all things, to be a kindly influence on you, helping you to guide and govern your heart, keeping it in a state of sweet and loving peacefulness.” It baffled him, then, to discover that she was determined to resist him, that she would rather form her own spirit than accept the spiritual shape that he imagined for her. He was utterly sure that what he offered her was best. She seemed equally certain that she did not want it. Her stubbornness must have tried his patience, but it was with patient, persuasive tones that he pursued his argument: “Will you not let me do you all the good that I would? And do you not know that I can do you little or none, unless you are disposed to let me; unless you give me your affections, incline your ears, and earnestly desire to become daily better and wiser, more kind, gentle, loving, diligent, heedful, serene.” Then, as if knowing that his argument would fail, Bronson altered his tone. Without expressly accusing Louisa, he scribbled out a long litany of character flaws, including anger, impatience, evil appetites, greedy wants, ill-speaking, and rude behavior. These, he threatened, would drive the good spirit out of the poor, misguided soul, leaving it “to live in its own obstinate, perverse, proud discomfort; which is the very
Pain of Sin
, and is in the
Bible
called the worm that never dies.”
⁸⁷
In the space of a few lines, Bronson's gentle admonition had transformed into a Calvinist sermon in miniature.

One can only imagine how her father's letter made Louisa think or feel. Not surprisingly, though, it effected no miraculous transformation. She was not, of course, willingly any of the bad things that her father suggested. Rather, she was of an age when children, reminded of their faults, tend to cry, apologize, and vow to be better. But then they forget, and their parents wonder why. Bronson was an exceptional man. Louisa was to become an extraordinary woman. As a middle-aged father and a growing daughter, however, they shared most of their traits with the rest of the world—both earnestly willing the best, both wanting to communicate all that they had to tell each other, but each failing to receive the messages that the other was sending them. This is how fathers and daughters could be in the nineteenth century. The species has not changed.

Abba and Louisa came back to Concord after New Year's Day, ready for another try at domestic peace. Bronson, too, wanted nothing more than a serene and contented home. In his mind, his upcoming venture into communal living was largely motivated by his concern for his children and how best to teach them of celestial things in a fallen world. He had concluded his birthday letter to Louisa with the hope that the Alcotts would “become a family more closely united in loves that can never sunder us from each other.” Two months later, he addressed to all four of his daughters a rhapsodic letter in which he promised to show them “what is…more lovely and more to be desired than every thing on which the eye can rest,” the thing “for which the world and all its glories was [
sic
] made.” He was referring to a kind and loving family and a house “from which sounds of content, and voices of confiding love alone ascend.” Such a family was, he said, “the Jewel—the Pearl of priceless cost.” He told his daughters that he wanted to prepare for them an “imperishable mansion”—a home as heaven. His dream seemed so near his grasp that he signed his letter, “Your Ascended Father.”
⁸⁸
The community he was readying himself to found would be the ultimate test of his ability to ascend.

As spring came to Concord in 1843, Alcott and Lane began to feel more urgently the need to find the land where they could build their paradise. The earlier in the growing season they could begin their work, the better the colony's chances for success. Emerson had by this time emphatically declined to take part in the enterprise, and he had spent the winter trying to talk Bronson out of the idea.
⁸⁹
Two years earlier, Emerson had politely declined an invitation to join George Ripley's commune at Brook Farm. Now he made a similar refusal. He doubted that he would find improvement by retreating from the world of bustle and conflict; running away, he implied, was not instructive. Rather, he argued, “He will instruct & strengthen me, who…where he is…in the midst of poverty, toil, & traffic, extricates himself from the corruptions of the same.”
⁹⁰
The man who had once advised his readers “Build therefore your own world,” wanted them to build on the spot where they already found themselves.

Alcott, who had gotten used to having Emerson underwrite his projects, was no doubt surprised when Emerson withheld not only his participation but also his financial backing from the utopian plan. Certainly Emerson was too well mannered to tell Bronson to his face what he had written about him in his journal: “For a founder of a family or institution, I would as soon exert myself to collect money for a madman.”
⁹¹
The only money available for the venture was Lane's, and so he provided it: his life's savings of approximately $2,000, a portion of which went to free Alcott of his remaining debts in Concord, which amounted to $175. Lane also located a piece of land that might serve for the commune. Reluctant to settle on a place too close to Concord and, therefore, the interfering influence of Emerson, Lane declared his preference for a ninety-acre tract of fields, orchards, and woodlands near the hamlet of Harvard, Massachusetts, a town that shared only its name with the great university. Lane liked the remoteness of the spot. It was well to the west of Concord, and there was no road leading to the house. Lane and Alcott visited the property and inspected the weather-beaten farmhouse and barn, neither in the best condition but acceptable. “The capabilities are manifold,” Lane wrote, “but the actualities humble.”
⁹²
He bargained down the owner, Maverick Wyman, to an affordable price: $1,800 for the land and rentfree use of the house for the first year. Without much ceremony, the deed was signed, and the land's legal ownership passed from one Maverick to two others. Alcott and Lane, however, refused to call themselves the owners of the property; rather, they had liberated the acreage from the bonds of commerce. Nevertheless, Lane congratulated himself on the handsomeness of the deal. To his friend William Oldham, back in England, Lane boasted, “this, I think you will admit…will entitle transcendentalism to some respect for its practicality.”
⁹³
The farm was given a new name: Fruitlands.

Bronson knew that Fruitlands would be the Rubicon of his life. In his view, the inspiration for the colony had been an expression of divine guidance, a holy directive that he must fulfill or lose all in the attempt. More realistically, it was the ultimate gambit of a man whose other choices had evaporated. Incalculable stakes lay in the balance. If the utopian farm succeeded, it would prove that human beings could thrive by adopting kinder, simpler relations with one another. Its example might light the way to a better way of living, and it would prove at last that Bronson Alcott was neither a failure nor a fool. But if the experiment did fail, it would be a byword of folly, a failure not only for Alcott but for all who dreamed of higher things. At the end of the road to Harvard, either ruin or redemption waited.