Wentworth Higginson, who, as a boy, was often in and out of the place,
visiting his aunt, Mrs. Channing, who lived here with her son, William
Henry Channing, the well-known anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a
youth, used to listen with keenest pleasure, to the singing of his
cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song she chose was, "The
Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut up in a
chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to the
Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that
there was a bride shut up in the walls of this house--and there may be
to-day, for all I know."
For fifty years after June, 1835, the house was in the possession of
Judge P. P. Fay's family. The surroundings were still country-like.
Cambridge Common was as yet only a treeless pasture, and the house had
not been materially changed from its original shape and plan. Judge Fay
was a jolly gentleman of the old school. A judge of probate for a dozen
years, an overseer of Harvard College, and a pillar of Christ Church, he
was withal fond of a well-turned story and a lover of good hunting, as
well as much given to hospitality. Miss Maria Denny Fay, whose memory is
now perpetuated in a Radcliffe scholarship, was the sixth of Judge
Fay's seven children, and the one who finally became both mistress and
owner of the estate. A girl of fourteen when her father bought the
house, she was at the time receiving her young-lady education at the
Convent of St. Ursula, where, in the vine-covered, red-brick convent on
the summit of Charlestown, she learned, under the guidance of the nuns,
to sing, play the piano, the harp, and the guitar, to speak French, and
read Spanish and Italian. But her life on Mt. Benedict was suddenly
terminated when the convent was burned. So she entered earlier than
would otherwise have been the case upon the varied interests of her new
and beautiful home. Here, in the course of a few years, we find her
presiding, a gracious and lovely maiden, of whom the venerable Colonel
Higginson has said: "I have never, in looking back, felt more grateful
to any one than to this charming girl of twenty, who consented to be a
neighbour to me, an awkward boy of seventeen, to attract me in a manner
from myself and make me available to other people."
Very happy times were those which the young Wentworth Higginson, then a
college boy, living with his mother at Vaughan House, was privileged to
share with Maria Fay and her friends. Who of us does not envy him the
memory of that Christmas party in 1841, when there were gathered in Fay
House, among others, Maria White, Lowell's beautiful fiancée; Levi
Thaxter, afterward the husband of Celia Thaxter; Leverett Saltonstall,
Mary Story and William Story, the sculptors? And how pleasant it must
have been to join in the famous charades of that circle of talented
young people, to partake of refreshments in the quaint dining-room, and
dance a Virginia reel and galop in the beautiful oval parlour which
then, as to-day, expressed ideally the acme of charming hospitality!
What tales this same parlour might relate! How enchantingly it might
tell, if it could speak, of the graceful Maria White, who, seated in the
deep window, must have made an exquisite picture in her white gown, with
her beautiful face shining in the moonlight while she repeated, in her
soft voice, one of her own ballads, written for the "Brothers and
Sisters," as this group of young people was called.
[Illustration: OVAL PARLOUR, FAY HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.]
Of a more distinctly academic cast were some of the companies later
assembled in this same room--Judge Story, Doctor Beck, President Felton,
Professors Pierce, Lane, Child, and Lowell, with maybe Longfellow,
listening to one of his own songs, or that strange figure, Professor
Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, oddly ill at ease in his suit of
dingy black. In his younger days he had been both pirate and priest, and
he retained, as professor, some of his early habits--seldom being seated
while he talked, and leaning against the door, shaking and fumbling his
college keys as the monks shake their rosaries. Mr. Arthur Gilman has
related in a charming article on Fay House, written for the _Harvard
Graduates Magazine_ (from which, as from Miss Norris's sketch of the old
place, printed in a recent number of the _Radcliffe Magazine_, many of
the incidents here given are drawn), that Professor Sophocles was
allowed by Miss Fay to keep some hens on the estate, pets which he had
an odd habit of naming after his friends. When, therefore, some
accomplishment striking and praiseworthy in a hen was related in company
as peculiar to one or another of them, the professor innocently calling
his animals by the name he had borrowed, the effect was apt to be
startling.
During the latter part of Miss Fay's long tenancy of this house, she had
with her her elder sister, the handsome Mrs. Greenough, a woman who had
been so famous a beauty in her youth that, on the occasion of her
wedding, Harvard students thronged the aisles and climbed the pews of
old Christ Church to see her. The wedding receptions of Mrs. Greenough's
daughter and granddaughter were held, too, in Fay House. This latter
girl was the fascinating and talented Lily Greenough, who was later a
favourite at the court of Napoleon and Eugénie, and who, after the death
of her first husband, Mr. Charles Moulton, was married in this house to
Monsieur De Hegermann Lindencrone, at that time Danish Minister to the
United States, and now minister at Paris. Her daughter, Suzanne Moulton,
who has left her name scratched with a diamond on one of the Fay House
windows, is now the Countess Suzanne Raben-Levetzan of Nystel, Denmark.
In connection with the Fays' life in this house occurred one thing which
will particularly send the building down into posterity, and will link
for all time Radcliffe and Harvard traditions. For it was in the upper
corner room, nearest the Washington Elm, that Doctor Samuel Gilman,
Judge Fay's brother-in-law, wrote "Fair Harvard," while a guest in this
hospitable home, during the second centennial celebration of the college
on the Charles. Radcliffe girls often seem a bit triumphant as they
point out to visitors this room and its facsimile copy of the famous
song. Yet they have plenty of pleasant things of their own to remember.
Just one of these, taken at random from among the present writer's own
memories of pretty happenings at Fay House, will serve: During Duse's
last tour in this country, the famous actress came out one afternoon, as
many a famous personage does, to drink a cup of tea with Mrs. Agassiz in
the stately old parlour, where Mrs. Whitman's famous portrait of the
president of Radcliffe College vies in attractiveness with the living
reality graciously presiding over the Wednesday afternoon teacups. As it
happened, there was a scant attendance at the tea on this day of Duse's
visit. She had not been expected, and so it fell out that some two or
three girls who could speak French or Italian were privileged to do the
honours of the occasion to the great actress whom they had long
worshipped from afar. Duse was in one of her most charming moods, and
she listened with the greatest attention to her young hostesses'
laboured explanations concerning the college and its ancient home.
The best of it all, from the enthusiastic girl-students' point of view,
was, however, in the dark-eyed Italienne's mode of saying farewell. As
she entered her carriage--to which she had been escorted by this little
group--she took from her belt a beautiful bouquet of roses, camellias,
and violets. And as the smart coachman flicked the impatient horses with
his whip, Duse threw the girls the precious flowers. Those who caught a
camellia felt, of course, especially delighted, for it was as the Dame
aux Camellias that Duse had been winning for weeks the plaudits of
admiring Boston. My own share of the largesse consisted of a few fresh,
sweet violets, which I still have tucked away somewhere, together with
one of the great actress's photographs that bears the date of the
pleasant afternoon hour passed with her in the parlour where the
"Brothers and Sisters" met.
THE BROOK FARMERS
One of the weddings noted in our Fay House chapter was that of Sophia
Dana to George Ripley, an event which was celebrated August 22, 1827, in
the stately parlour of the Cambridge mansion, the ceremony being
performed by the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The time between the
date of their marriage and the year 1840, when Mr. and Mrs. Ripley
"discovered" the milk-farm in West Roxbury, which was afterward to be
developed through their efforts into the most remarkable socialistic
experiment America has ever known, represented for the young people
joined together in what is now the home of Radcliffe College some dozen
years of quiet parsonage life in Boston.
The later years of George Ripley's life held for him a series of
disappointments before which his courage and ideals never failed. When
the young student left the Harvard Divinity School, he was appointed
minister over a Unitarian parish which was gathered for him at the
corner of Pearl and Purchase Streets, Boston. Here his ministrations
went faithfully on, but inasmuch as his parishioners failed to take any
deep interest in the social questions which seemed to him of most vital
concern, he sent them, in the October of 1840, a letter of resignation,
which they duly accepted, thus leaving Ripley free to enter upon the
experiment so dear to him.
The Ripleys, as has been said, had already discovered Brook Farm, a
pleasant place, varied in contour, with pine woods close at hand, the
Charles River within easy distance, and plenty of land--whether of a
sort to produce paying crops or not they were later to learn. That
winter Ripley wrote to Emerson: "We propose to take a small tract of
land, which, under skilful husbandry, uniting the garden and the farm,
will be adequate to the subsistence of the families; and to connect with
this a school or college in which the most complete instruction shall be
given, from the first rudiments to the highest culture." Ripley himself
assumed the responsibility for the management and success of the
undertaking, and about the middle of April, 1841, he took possession
with his wife and sister and some fifteen others, including Hawthorne,
of the farmhouse, which, with a large barn, was already on the estate.
The first six months were spent in "getting started," especially in the
matter of the school, of which Mrs. Ripley was largely in charge, and it
was not until early fall--September 29--that the Brook Farm Institute of
Agriculture and Education was organised as a kind of joint stock
company, not incorporated.
A seeker after country quiet and beauty might easily be as much
attracted to-day by the undulating acres of Brook Farm as were those who
sought it sixty years ago as a refuge from social discouragement. The
brook still babbles cheerily as it threads its way through the meadows,
and there are still pleasant pastures and shady groves on the large
estate. The only one of the community buildings which is still standing,
however, is that now known as the Martin Luther Orphan Home. This
house was built at the very start of the community life by Mrs. A. G.
Alford, one of the members of the colony.
[Illustration: BROOK FARM, WEST ROXBURY, MASS.]
The building was in the form of a Maltese cross with four gables, the
central space being taken by the staircase. It contained only about half
a dozen rooms, and probably could not have accommodated more than that
number of residents. It is said to have been the prettiest and best
furnished house on the place, but an examination of its simple
construction will confirm the memory of one of its occupants, who
remarked that contact with nature was here always admirably close and
unaffected. From the rough dwelling, which resembled an inexpensive
beach cottage, to out-doors was hardly a transition, it is chronicled,
and at all seasons the external and internal temperatures closely
corresponded. Until lately the cottage wore its original dark-brown
colour; and it is still the best visible remnant of the early days, and
gives a pleasant impression of what the daily life of the association
must have been.
Gay and happy indeed were the dwellers in this community during the
early stages of its development. Ripley's theory of the wholesomeness of
combined manual and intellectual work ruled everywhere. He himself
donned the farmer's blouse, the wide straw hat, and the high boots in
which he has been pictured at Brook Farm; and whether he cleaned
stables, milked cows, carried vegetables to market, or taught philosophy
and discussed religion, he was unfailingly cheerful and inspiring.
Mrs. Ripley was in complete accord with her husband on all vital
questions, and as the chief of the Wash-Room Group worked blithely eight
or ten hours a day. Whether this devotion to her husband's ideals grew
out of her love for him, or whether she was really persuaded of the
truth of his theory, does not appear. In later life it is interesting to
learn that she sought in the Church of Rome the comfort which Ripley's
transcendentalism was not able to afford her. When she died in 1859 she
had held the faith of Rome for nearly a dozen years, and, curiously
enough, was buried as a Catholic from that very building in which her
husband had preached as a Unitarian early in their married life, the
church having in the interim been purchased by the Catholics. With just
one glimpse of the later Ripley himself, we must leave this interesting
couple. In 1866, when, armed with a letter of introduction from Emerson,
the original Brook Farmer sought Carlyle (who had once described him as
"a Socinian minister who had left his pulpit to reform the world by
cultivating onions"), and Carlyle greeted him with a long and violent
tirade against our government, Ripley sat quietly through it all, but
when the sage of Chelsea paused for breath, calmly rose and left the
house, saying no word of remonstrance.
It is, of course, however, in Hawthorne and his descriptions in the
"Blithedale Romance" of the life at Brook Farm that the principal
interest of most readers centres. This work has come to be regarded as
the epic of the community, and it is now generally conceded that
Hawthorne was in this novel far more of a realist than was at first
admitted. He did not avoid the impulse to tell the happenings of life at
the farm pretty nearly as he found them, and substantial as the
characters may or may not be, the daily life and doings, the scenery,
the surroundings, and even trivial details are presented with a
well-nigh faultless accuracy.
The characters, as I have said, are not easily traceable, but even in
this respect Hawthorne was something of a photographer. Zenobia seems a
blend of Margaret Fuller and of Mrs. Barlow, who as Miss Penniman was
once a famous Brookline beauty of lively and attractive disposition. In
the strongest and most repellant character of the novel, Hollingsworth,
Hawthorne seems to have incorporated something of the fierce earnestness
of Brownson and the pathetic zeal of Ripley. And those who best know
Brook Farm are able to find in the book reflections of other well-known
members of the community. For the actual life of the place, however,
readers cannot do better than peruse Lindsay Swift's recent delightful
work, "Brook Farm, Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors."
There was, we learn here, a charming happy-go-luckiness about the whole
life. Partly from necessity, partly from choice, the young people used
to sit on the stairs and on the floor during the evening entertainments.
Dishes were washed and wiped to the tune of "Oh, Canaan, Bright Canaan,"
or some other song of the time. When about their work the women wore
short skirts with knickerbockers; the water-cure and the starving-cure
both received due attention at the hands of some of the members of the
household; at table the customary formula was, "Is the butter within the
sphere of your influence?" And very often the day's work ended in a
dance, a walk to Eliot's Pulpit, or a moonlight hour on the Charles!
During the earlier years the men, who were in excess of the young women
in point of numbers, helped very largely in the household labours.
George William Curtis occasionally trimmed lamps, Charles Dana, who
afterward founded the _New York Sun_, organised a band of griddle-cake
servitors composed of "four of the most elegant youths of the
Community!" One legend, which has the air of probability, records that a
student confessed his passion while helping his sweetheart at the sink.
Of love there was indeed not a little at Brook Farm. Cupid is said to
have made much havoc in the Community, and though very little mismating
is to be traced to the intimacy of the life there, fourteen marriages
have been attributed to friendships begun at Brook Farm, and there was
even one wedding there, that of John Orvis to John Dwight's sister,
Marianne. At this simple ceremony William Henry Channing was the
minister, and John Dwight made a speech of exactly five words.
Starting with about fifteen persons, the numbers at the farm increased
rapidly, though never above one hundred and twenty people were there at
a time. It is estimated, however, that about two hundred individuals
were connected with the Community from first to last. Of these all the
well-known ones are now dead, unless, indeed, one is to count among the
"Farmers" Mrs. Abby Morton Diaz, who as a very young girl was a teacher
in the infant department of the school.
Yet though the Farmers have almost all passed beyond, delicious
anecdotes about them are all the time coming to light. There is one
story of "Sam" Larned which is almost too good to be true. Larned, it is
said, steadily refused to drink milk on the ground that his relations
with the cow did not justify him in drawing on her reserves, and when it
was pointed out to him that he ought on the same principle to abandon
shoes, he is said to have made a serious attempt to discover some more
moral type of footwear.
And then there is another good story of an instance when Brook Farm
hospitality had fatal results. An Irish baronet, Sir John Caldwell,
fifth of that title, and treasurer-general at Canada, after supping with
the Community on its greatest delicacy, pork and beans, returned to the
now departed Tremont House in Boston, and died suddenly of apoplexy!
This baronet's son was wont later to refer to the early members of the
Community as "extinct volcanoes of transcendental nonsense and
humbuggery." But no witty sallies of this sort are able to lessen in
the popular mind the reverence with which this Brook Farm essay in
idealism must ever be held. For this Community, when all is said,
remains the most successful and the most interesting failure the world
has ever known.
MARGARET FULLER: MARCHESA D'OSSOLI
Any account of Brook Farm which should neglect to dwell upon the part
played in the community life by Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d'Ossoli,
would be almost like the play of "Hamlet" with the Prince of Denmark
left out. For although Margaret Fuller never lived at Brook Farm--was,
indeed, only an occasional visitor there--her influence pervaded the
place, and, as we feel from reading the "Blithedale Romance," she was
really, whether absent or present, the strongest personality connected
with the experiment.
Hawthorne's first bucolic experience was with the famous "transcendental
heifer" mistakenly said to have been the property of Margaret Fuller. As
a matter of fact, the beast had been named after Cambridge's most
intellectual woman, by Ripley, who had a whimsical fashion of thus
honouring his friends. According to Hawthorne, the name in this case was
not inapt, for the cow was so recalcitrant and anti-social that it was
finally sent to Coventry by the more docile kine, always to be counted
on for moderate conservatism.
This cow's would-be-tamer, not wishing to be unjust, refers to this
heifer as having "a very intelligent face" and "a reflective cast of
character." He certainly paid Margaret Fuller herself no such tribute,
but thus early in his Brook Farm experience let appear his thinly veiled
contempt for the high priestess of transcendentalism. Even earlier his
antagonism toward this eminent woman was strong, if it was not frank,
for he wrote: "I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday with
Miss Margaret Fuller, but Providence had given me some business to do
for which I was very thankful."
The unlovely side of Margaret Fuller must have made a very deep
impression upon Hawthorne. Gentle as the great romancer undoubtedly was
by birth and training, he has certainly been very harsh in writing, both
in his note-book and in his story of Brook Farm, of the woman we
recognise in Zenobia. One of the most interesting literary wars ever
carried on in this vicinity, indeed, was that which was waged here some
fifteen years ago concerning Julian Hawthorne's revelations of his
father's private opinion of the Marchesa d'Ossoli. The remarks in
question occurred in the great Hawthorne's "Roman Journal," and were
certainly sufficiently scathing to call for such warm defence as
Margaret's surviving friends hastened to offer. Hawthorne said among
other things:
"Margaret Fuller had a strong and coarse nature which she had done her
utmost to refine, with infinite pains; but, of course, it could be only
superficially changed.... Margaret has not left in the hearts and minds
of those who knew her any deep witness of her integrity and purity. She
was a great humbug--of course, with much talent and moral reality, or
else she could never have been so great a humbug.... Toward the last
there appears to have been a total collapse in poor Margaret, morally
and intellectually; and tragic as her catastrophe was, Providence was,
after all, kind in putting her and her clownish husband and their child
on board that fated ship.... On the whole, I do not know but I like her
the better, though, because she proved herself a very woman after all,
and fell as the meanest of her sisters might."
The latter sentences refer to Margaret's marriage to Ossoli, a man some
ten years the junior of his gifted wife, and by no means her
intellectual equal. That the marriage was a strange one even Margaret's
most ardent friends admit, but it was none the less exceedingly human
and very natural, as Hawthorne implies, for a woman of thirty-seven,
whose interests had long been of the strictly intellectual kind, to
yield herself at last to the impulses of an affectionate nature.
But we are getting very much ahead of our story, which should begin, of
course, far back in May, 1810, when there was born, at the corner of
Eaton and Cherry Streets, in Cambridgeport, a tiny daughter to Timothy
Fuller and his wife. The dwelling in which Margaret first saw the light
still stands, and is easily recognised by the three elms in front,
planted by the proud father to celebrate the advent of his first child.
The garden in which Margaret and her mother delighted has long since
vanished; but the house still retains a certain dignity, though now
divided into three separate tenements, numbered respectively 69, 72, and
75 Cherry Street, and occupied by a rather migratory class of tenants.
The pillared doorway and the carved wreaths above it still give an
old-fashioned grace to the somewhat dilapidated house.
[Illustration: FULLER HOUSE, CAMBRIDGEPORT, MASS.]
The class with which Margaret may be said to have danced through Harvard
College was that of 1829, which has been made by the wit and poetry
of Holmes the most eminent class that ever left Harvard. The memory of
one lady has preserved for us a picture of the girl Margaret as she
appeared at a ball when she was sixteen.