"he has been offered places." In fact, Hawthorne's friends in political
life had urged him to enter politics, and he had at one time been
tendered a post of some sort in the West Indies, but refused it because
he would not live in a slaveholding community. "I happen to know," said
the lady, "that he would be very glad of employment." The result was
that a commission for a small post in the Boston Custom House came, soon
after, to the young author. On going down from Salem to inquire further
about it, he received another and a better appointment as weigher and
gauger, with a salary, I think, of twelve hundred a year. Just before
entering the Collector's office, he noticed a man leaving it who wore a
very dejected air; and, connecting this with the change in his own
appointment, he imagined this person to be the just-ejected weigher.
Speaking of this afterward, he said: "I don't believe in rotation in
office. It is not good for the human being." But he took his place,
writing to Longfellow (January 12, 1839):
"I have no reason to doubt my capacity to fulfil the duties; for I don't
know what they are. They tell me that a considerable portion of my time
will be unoccupied, the which I mean to employ in sketches of my new
experience, under some such titles as follows: 'Scenes in Dock,'
'Voyages at Anchor,' 'Nibblings of a Wharf Rat,' 'Trials of a
Tide-Waiter,' 'Romance of the Revenue Service,' together with an ethical
work in two volumes, on the subject of Duties, the first volume to treat
of moral and religious duties, and the second of duties imposed by the
Revenue Laws, which I begin to consider the most important class."
Two years later, when Harrison and Tyler carried the election for the
Whigs, he suffered the fate of his predecessor. And here I may offer an
opinion as to Hawthorne's connection with the Democratic party. When
asked why he belonged to it, he answered that he lived in a democratic
country. "But we are all republicans alike," was the objection to his
defence. "Well," he said, "I don't understand history till it's a
hundred years old, and meantime it's safe to belong to the Democratic
party." Still, Hawthorne was, so far as it comported with his less
transient aims, a careful observer of public affairs; and mere badinage,
like that just quoted, must not be taken as really covering the ground
of his choice in politics. A man of such deep insight, accustomed to
bring it to bear upon everything impartially, was not to be influenced
by any blind and accidental preference in these questions; albeit his
actual performance of political duties was slight. I think he recognized
the human strength of the Democratic, as opposed to the theorizing and
intellectual force of the Republican party. It is a curious fact, that
with us the party of culture should be the radical party, upholding
ideas even at the expense of personal liberty; and the party of
ignorance that of order, the conservating force, careful of personal
liberty even to a fault! Hawthorne, feeling perhaps that ideas work too
rapidly here, ranged himself on the side that offered the greater
resistance to them.
This term of service in Boston was of course irksome to Hawthorne, and
entirely suspended literary endeavors for the time. Yet "my life only is
a burden," he writes, "in the same way that it is to every toilsome
man.... But from henceforth forever I shall be entitled to call the sons
of toil my brethren, and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing
that I likewise have risen at the dawn, and borne the fervor of the
midday sun, nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide." He
need not always have made the employment so severe, but the wages of the
wharf laborers depended on the number of hours they worked in a day, and
Hawthorne used to make it a point in all weathers, to get to the wharf
at the earliest possible hour, solely for their benefit. For the rest,
he felt a vast benefit from his new intercourse with men; there could
not have been a better maturing agency for him at this time; and the
interval served as an apt introduction to the Brook Farm episode.
That this least gregarious of men should have been drawn into a
socialistic community, seems at first inexplicable enough; but in
reality it was the most logical step he could have taken. He had
thoroughly tried seclusion, and had met and conquered by himself the
first realization of what the world actually is. Next, he entered into
the performance of definite duties and the receipt of gain, and watched
the operation of these two conditions on himself and those about him; an
experiment that taught him the evils of the system, and the necessity of
burying his better energies so long as he took part in affairs. This
raised doubts, of course, as to how he was to fit himself into the frame
of things; and while he mused upon some more generous arrangement of
society, and its conflicting interests, a scheme was started which
plainly proposed to settle the problem. Fourier had only just passed
away; the spread of his ideas was in its highest momentum. On the other
hand, the study of German philosophy, and the new dissent of Emerson,
had carried men's thoughts to the very central springs of intellectual
law, while in Boston the writing and preaching of Channing roused a
practical radicalism, and called for a better application of
Christianity to affairs. The era of the Transcendentalists had come. The
Chardon Street meetings--assemblages of ardent theorists and
"come-outers" of every type, who, while their sessions lasted, held
society in their hands and moulded it like clay--were a rude
manifestation of the same deep current. In the midst of these
influences, Mr. Ripley, an enthusiastic student of philosophy, received
an inspiration to establish a modified socialistic community on our own
soil. The Industrial Association which he proposed at West Roxbury was
wisely planned with direct reference to the emergencies of American
life; it had no affinity with the erratic views of Enfantin and the
Saint Simonists, nor did it in the least tend toward the mistakes of
Robert Owen regarding the relation of the sexes; though it agreed with
Fourier and Owen both, as I understand, in respect of labor. In a better
and freer sense than has usually been the case with such attempts, the
design sprang out of one man's mind and fell properly under his control.
His simple object was to distribute labor in such a way as to give all
men time for culture, and to free their minds from the debasing
influence of a merely selfish competition. It was a practical, orderly,
noble effort to apply Christianity directly to human customs and
institutions. "A few men and women of like views and feelings," one of
his sympathizers has said, "grouped themselves around him, not as their
master, but as their friend and brother, and the community at Brook Farm
was instituted." At various times Charles Dana, Pratt, the young
Brownson, Horace Sumner (a younger brother of Charles), George William
Curtis, and his brother Burrill Curtis were there. The place was a kind
of granary of true grit. People who found their own honesty too heavy a
burden to carry successfully through the rough jostlings of society,
flocked thither. "They were mostly individuals" says Hawthorne, "who had
gone through such an experience as to disgust them with ordinary
pursuits, but who were not yet so old, nor had suffered so deeply, as to
lose their faith in the better time to come."
To men like Hawthorne, however little they may noise the fact abroad,
the rotten but tenacious timbers of the social order shake beneath the
lightest tread. But he knew that the only wise method is to begin
repairing within the edifice, keeping the old associations, and losing
nothing of value while gaining everything new that is desirable. Because
Brook Farm seemed to adopt this principle, he went there. Some of the
meetings of the associators were held at Miss E. P. Peabody's, in
Boston, and the proceedings were related to him. Mr. Ripley did not at
first know who was the "distinguished literary gentleman" announced as
willing to join the company; and when told that it was Hawthorne, he
felt as if a miracle had befallen, or "as if," he tells me, "the heavens
would presently be filled with angels, and we should see Jacob's ladder
before us. But we never came any nearer to having _that_, than our
old ladder in the barn, from floor to hayloft." For his personal
benefit, Hawthorne had two ends in view, connected with Brook Farm: one,
to find a suitable and economical home after marriage; the other, to
secure a mode of life thoroughly balanced and healthy, which should
successfully distribute the sum of his life's labor between body and
brain. He hoped to secure leisure for writing by perhaps six hours of
daily service; but he found nearly sixteen needful. "He worked like a
dragon," says Mr. Ripley.
The productive industry of the association was agriculture; the leading
aim, teaching; and in some cases there were classes made up of men,
women, children, whom ignorance put on the same plane. Several buildings
accommodated the members: the largest, in which the public table was
spread and the cooking done, being called The Hive; another, The Pilgrim
House; a smaller one, The Nest; and still another was known as The
Cottage. In The Eyrie, Mr. and Mrs. Ripley lived, and here a great part
of the associators would gather in the evenings. Of a summer night, when
the moon was full, they lit no lamps, but sat grouped in the light and
shadow, while sundry of the younger men sang old ballads, or joined Tom
Moore's songs to operatic airs. On other nights, there would be an
original essay or poem read aloud, or else a play of Shakespere, with
the parts distributed to different members; and, these amusements
failing, some interesting discussion was likely to take their place.
Occasionally, in the dramatic season, large delegations from the farm
would drive into Boston in carriages and wagons to the opera or the
play. Sometimes, too, the young women sang as they washed the dishes, in
The Hive; and the youthful yeomen of the society came in and helped them
with their work. The men wore blouses of a checked or plaided stuff,
belted at the waist, with a broad collar folding down about the throat,
and rough straw hats; the women, usually, simple calico gowns, and
hats,--which were then an innovation in feminine attire. In the season
of wood-wanderings, they would trim their hats with wreaths of barberry
or hop-vine, ground-pine, or whatever offered,--a suggestion of the
future Priscilla of "Blithedale." Some families and students came to the
farm as boarders, paying for their provision in household or field
labor, or by teaching; a method which added nothing to the funds of the
establishment, and in this way rather embarrassed it. A great deal of
individual liberty was allowed. People could eat in private or public;
and it has been said by those who were there that the unconventional
life permitted absolute privacy at any time. Every one was quite
unfettered, too, in the sphere of religious worship. When a member
wished to be absent, another would generally contrive to take his work
for the interval; and a general good-will seems to have prevailed.
Still, I imagine there must have been a temporary and uncertain air
about the enterprise, much of the time; and the more intimate unions of
some among the members who were congenial, gave rise to intermittent
jealousies in those who found no special circle. "In this way it was
very much like any small town of the same number of inhabitants," says
one of my informants. Indeed, though every one who shared in the Brook
Farm attempt seems grateful for what it taught of the dignity and the
real fellowship of labor, I find a general belief in such persons that
it could not long have continued at its best. The system of compensating
all kinds of service, skilled or otherwise, according to the time used,
excited--as some have thought--much dissatisfaction even among the
generous and enlightened people who made up the society. "I thought I
could see some incipient difficulties working in the system," writes a
lady who was there in 1841. "Questions already arose as to how much
individual freedom could be allowed, if it conflicted with the best
interests of the whole. Those who came there were the results of another
system of things which still gave a salutary cheek to the more radical
tendencies; but the second generation there could hardly have shown
equal, certainly not the same, character." A confirmation of this augury
is the fact that the cast of the community became decidedly more
Fourieristic before it disbanded; and it is not impossible that another
generation might have decolorized and seriously deformed human existence
among them. Theories and opinions were very openly talked over, and
practical details as well; and though this must have had its charm, yet
it would also touch uncomfortably on a given temperament, or jar upon a
peculiar mood. In such enterprises there must always be a slight
inclination to establish a conformity to certain freedoms which really
become oppressions. Shyness was not held essential to a regenerated
state of things, and was perhaps too much disregarded; as also was
illness, an emergency not clearly provided for, which had to be met by
individual effort and self-sacrifice, after the selfish and
old-established fashion of the world. How this atmosphere affected
Hawthorne he has hinted in his romance founded on some aspects of
community life: "Though fond of society, I was so constituted as to need
these occasional retirements, even in a life like that of Blithedale,
which was itself characterized by a remoteness from the world. Unless
renewed by a yet further withdrawal towards the inner circle of
self-communion, I lost the better part of my individuality. My thoughts
became of little worth, and my sensibilities grew as arid as a tuft of
moss ... crumbling in the sunshine, after long expectance of a shower."
A fellow-toiler came upon him suddenly, one day, lying in a green hollow
some distance from the farm, with his hands under his head and his face
shaded by his hat. "How came you out here?" asked his friend. "Too much
of a party up there," was his answer, as he pointed toward the community
buildings. It has also been told that at leisure times he would sit
silently, hour after hour, in the broad old-fashioned hall of The Hive,
where he "could listen almost unseen to the chat and merriment of the
young people," himself almost always holding a book before him, but
seldom turning the leaves.
One sees in his letters of this time [Footnote: American Note-Books,
Vol. I.] how the life wore upon him; and his journal apparently ceased
during the whole bucolic experience. How joyously his mind begins to
disport itself again with fancies, the moment he leaves the association,
even temporarily! And in 1842, as soon as he is fairly quit of it, the
old darkling or waywardly gleaming stream of thought and imagination
flows freshly, untamably forward. Hawthorne remained with the Brook Farm
community nearly a twelvemonth, a small part of which time was spent in
Boston. Some of the letters which his sisters wrote him show a
delightful solicitude reigning at home, during the period of his
experiment.
"What is the use," says one, "of burning your brains out in the sun, if
you can do anything better with them?... I am bent upon coming to see
you, this summer. Do not you remember how we used to go a-fishing
together in Raymond? Your mention of wild flowers and pickerel has given
me a longing for the woods and waters again."
Then, in August,
"C---- A----," writes his sister Louisa, "told me the other day that he
heard you were to do the travelling in Europe for the community."
This design, if it existed, might well have found a place in the
Dialogues of the Unborn which Hawthorne once meant to write; for this
was his only summer at Brook Farm. "A summer of toil, of interest, of
something that was not pleasure, but which went deep into my heart, and
there became a rich experience," he writes, in "Blithedale." "I found
myself looking forward to years, if not to a lifetime, to be spent on
the same system." This was, in fact, his attitude; for, after passing
the winter at the farm as a boarder, and then absenting himself a little
while, he returned in the spring to look over the ground and perhaps
select a house-site, just before his marriage, but came to an adverse
decision. This no doubt accorded with perceptions which he was not
called upon to make public; but because he was a writer of fiction there
seems to have arisen a tacit agreement, in some quarters, to call him
insincere in his connection with this socialistic enterprise. He had not
much to gain by leaving the community; for he had put into its treasury
a thousand dollars, about the whole of his savings from the custom-house
stipend, and had next to nothing to establish a home with elsewhere,
while a niche in the temple of the reformers would have cost him nothing
but labor. The length of his stay was by no means uncommonly short, for
there was always a transient contingent at Brook Farm, many of whom
remained but a few weeks. A devoted but not a wealthy disciple, who had
given six thousand dollars for the building of the Pilgrim House, and
hoped to end his days within it, retired forever after a very short
sojourn, not dissuaded from the theory, but convinced that the practical
application was foredoomed to disaster. And, in truth, though a manful
effort was made, with good pecuniary success for a time, ten years
brought the final hour of failure to this millennial plan.
Very few people who were at Brook Farm seem to have known or even to
have seen Hawthorne there, though he was elected chairman of the Finance
Committee just before leaving, and I am told that his handsome presence,
his quiet sympathy, his literary reputation, and his hearty
participation in labor commanded a kind of reverence from some of the
members. Next to his friend George P. Bradford, one of the workers and
teachers in the community, his most frequent associates were a certain
Rev. Warren Burton, author of a curious little book called
"Scenery-Shower," designed to develop a proper taste for landscape; and
one Frank Farley, who had been a pioneer in the West, a man of singular
experiences and of an original turn, who was subject to mental
derangement at times. The latter visited him at the Old Manse,
afterward, when Hawthorne was alone there, and entered actively into his
makeshift housekeeping.
President Pierce, on one occasion, speaking to an acquaintance about
Hawthorne, said: "He is enthusiastic when he speaks of the aims and
self-sacrifice of some of the Brook Farm people; but when I questioned
him whether he would like to live and die in a community like that, he
confessed he was not suited to it, but said he had learned a great deal
from it. 'What, for instance?' 'Why, marketing, for one thing. I didn't
know anything about it practically, and I rode into Boston once or twice
with the men who took in things to sell, and saw how it was done.'" The
things of deepest moment which he learned were not to be stated fully in
conversation; but I suppose readers would draw the same inference from
this whimsical climax of Hawthorne's as that which has been found in
"The Blithedale Romance"; namely, that he looked on his socialistic life
as the merest jesting matter. Such, I think, is the general opinion; and
a socialistic writer, Mr. Noyes, of the Oneida Community, has
indignantly cried out against the book, as a "poetico-sneering romance."
This study of human character, which would keep its value in any state
of society that preserved its reflective faculty intact and sane, to be
belittled to the record of a brief experiment! Hawthorne indeed,
speaking in the prefatory third person of his own aim, says: "His whole
treatment of the affair is altogether incidental to the main purpose of
the romance; nor does he put forward the slightest pretensions to
illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in
respect to socialism." And though he has told the story
autobiographically, it is through a character whom we ought by no means
to identify with Hawthorne in his whole mood. I have taken the liberty
of applying to Hawthorne's own experience two passages from Coverdale's
account, because they picture something known to be the case; and a
careful sympathy will find no difficulty in distinguishing how much is
real and how much assumed. Coverdale, being merely the medium for
impressions of the other characters, is necessarily light and
diaphanous, and Hawthorne, finding it more convenient, and an advantage
to the lifelikeness of the story, does not attempt to hold him up in the
air all the time, but lets him down now and then, and assumes the part
himself. The allusions to the community scheme are few, and most of them
are in the deepest way sympathetic. Precisely because the hopes of the
socialists were so unduly high, he values them and still is glad of
them, though they have fallen to ruin. "In my own behalf, I rejoice that
I could once think better of the world than it deserved. It is a mistake
into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and
higher is the nature that can thus magnanimously persist in error."
Where is the sneer concealed in this serious and comprehensive
utterance? There is a class of two-pronged minds, which seize a pair of
facts eagerly, and let the truth drop out of sight between them. For
these it is enough that Hawthorne made some use of his Brook Farm
memories in a romance, and then wrote that romance in the first person,
with a few dashes of humor.
Another critic, acting on a conventional idea as to Hawthorne's "cold,
self-removed observation," quotes to his disadvantage this paragraph in
a letter from Brook Farm: "Nothing here is settled.... My mind will not
be abstracted. I must observe and think and feel, and content myself
with catching glimpses of things which may be wrought out hereafter.
Perhaps it will be quite as well that I find myself unable to set
seriously about literary occupation for the present." This is offered as
showing that Hawthorne went to the community--unconsciously, admits our
critic, but still in obedience to some curious, chilly "dictate of his
nature"--for the simple purpose of getting fresh impressions, to work up
into fiction. But no one joined the society expecting to give up his
entire individuality, and it was a special part of the design that each
should take such share of the labor as was for his own and the general
good, and follow his own tastes entirely as to ideal pursuits. A
singular prerogative this, which every one who writes about Hawthorne
lays claim to, that he may be construed as a man who, at bottom, had no
other motive in life than to make himself uneasy by withdrawing from
hearty communion with people, in order to pry upon them intellectually!
He speaks of "that quality of the intellect and the heart which impelled
me (often against my own will, and to the detriment of my own comfort)
to live in other lives, and to endeavor--_by generous sympathies, by
delicate intuitions_, by taking note of things too slight for record,
and by bringing my human spirit into manifold accordance with the
companions God had assigned me--to learn the secret which was hidden
even from themselves"; and this is cited as evidence of "his cold
inquisitiveness, his incredulity, his determination to worm out the
inmost secrets of all associated with him." Such distortion is amazing.
The few poets who search constantly for truth are certainly impelled to
get at the inmost of everything. But what, in Heaven's name, is the
motive? Does any one seriously suppose it to be for the amusement of
making stories out of it? The holding up to one's self the stern and
secret realities of life is no such pleasing pursuit. These men are
driven to it by the divine impulse which has made them seers and
recorders.