In his preface to the _Marble Faun_, as before in that to _The
Blithedale Romance_, Hawthorne complained that there was no romantic
element in American life; or, as he expressed it, "There is as yet no
such Faery-land so like the real world that, in a suitable remoteness,
one cannot tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange
enchantment, beheld through which the inhabitants have a propriety of
their own." This he says in _The Blithedale_ preface, and then adds
that, to obviate this difficulty and supply a proper scene for his
figures, "the author has ventured to make free with his old and
affectionately remembered home at Brook Farm as being certainly the most
romantic episode of his own life, essentially a day-dream, and yet a
fact, and thus offering an available foothold between fiction and
reality." Probably a genuine Brook-Farmer doubts whether Hawthorne
remembered the place and his life there very affectionately, in the
usual sense of that word, and although in sending the book to one of
them, at least, he said that it was not to be considered a picture of
actual life or character. "Do not read it as if it had anything to do
with Brook Farm [which essentially it has not], but merely for its own
story and characters," yet it is plain that it is a very faithful
picture of the kind of impression that the enterprise made upon him.
Strangely enough, Hawthorne is likely to be the chief future authority
upon "the romantic episode" of Brook Farm. Those who had it at heart
more than he whose faith and hope and energy were all devoted to its
development, and many of whom have every ability to make a permanent
record, have never done so, and it is already so much of a thing of the
past that it will probably never be done. But the memory of the place
and of the time has been recently pleasantly refreshed by the lecture of
Mr. Emerson and the _Note-Book_ of Hawthorne. Mr. Emerson, whose mind
and heart are ever hospitable, was one of the chief, indeed the
chiefest, figure in this country of the famous intellectual
"Renaissance" of twenty-five years ago, which, as is generally the case,
is historically known by its nickname of "Transcendentalism," a
spiritual fermentation from which some of the best modern influences of
this country have proceeded.
In his late lecture upon the general subject, Mr. Emerson says that the
mental excitement began to take practical form nearly thirty years ago,
when Dr. Channing counselled with George Ripley upon the practicability
of bringing thoughtful and cultivated people together and forming a
society that should be satisfactory. "That good attempt," says Emerson,
with a sly smile, "ended in an oyster supper with excellent wines." But
a little later it was revived under better auspices, and as Brook Farm
made a name which will not be forgotten. Mr. Emerson was never a
resident, but he was sometimes a visitor and guest, and the more ardent
minds of the romantic colony were always much under his influence. With
his sensitively humorous eye he seizes upon some of the ludicrous
aspects of the scene and reports them with arch gravity. "The ladies
again," he says, "took cold on washing-days, and it was ordained that
the gentlemen shepherds should hang out the clothes, which they
punctually did; but a great anachronism followed in the evening, for
when they began to dance the clothes-pins dropped plentifully from their
pockets." And again: "One hears the frequent statement of the country
members that one man was ploughing all day and another was looking out
of the window all day--perhaps drawing his picture, and they both
received the same wages."
In Hawthorne's just published _Note-Book_ he records a great deal of his
daily experience at Brook Farm. But he was never truly at home there.
Hawthorne lived in the very centre of the Transcendental revival, and he
was the friend of many of its leaders, but he was never touched by its
spirit. He seems to have been as little affected by the great
intellectual influences of his time as Charles Lamb in England. The
Custom-house had become intolerable to him. He was obliged to do
something. The enterprise at Brook Farm seemed to him to promise
Arcadia. But he forgot that the kingdom of heaven is within you, and
when he went to the tranquil banks of the Charles he found himself in a
barn-yard shovelling manure, and not at all in Arcadia. "Before
breakfast I went out to the barn and began to chop hay for the cattle,
and with such 'righteous vehemence,' as Mr. Ripley says, did I labor,
that in the space of ten minutes I broke the machine. Then I brought
wood and replenished the fires, and finally went down to breakfast and
ate up a huge mound of buckwheat cakes. After breakfast Mr. Ripley put a
four-pronged instrument into my hands, which he gave me to understand
was called a pitchfork, and he and Mr. Farley being armed with similar
weapons, we all three commenced a gallant attack upon a heap of manure."
Hawthorne was a sturdy and resolute man, and any heap of manure that he
attacked must yield; but he had not come to Arcadia to sweat and blister
his hands, and his blank and amused disappointment is evident. He had a
subtle and pervasive humor, but no spirits. He sees the pleasantness of
the place and the beauty of the crops, having knowledge of them and a
new interest in them; and he has a quiet conscience because he feels
that he is really doing some of the manual work of the world; but he is
always a spectator, a critic. He went to Brook Farm as he might have
gone to an anchorite's cell; but the fervor that warms and adorns the
cold bare rock he does not have, and the mere consciousness of
well-doing is a chilly abstraction. "I do not believe that I should be
patient here if I were not engaged in a righteous and heaven-blessed way
of life. I fear it is time for me, sod-compelling as I am, to take the
field again. Even my Custom-house experience was not such a thraldom and
weariness; my mind and heart were free. Oh, labor is the curse of the
world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionally
brutified!" Very soon, of course, the pilgrim to Arcadia escapes from
the manure-yard, and declares as he runs that it was not he, it was a
spectre of him, who milked and hoed and toiled in the sun. Hawthorne
remained at Brook Farm but a few months, and after he left he never
returned thither, even for a visit.
_The Blithedale Romance_ shows that he was not unmindful of its poetic
aspect; but his genius was stirring in him, and he felt that he could
not work hard with his hands and write also. So he went off, and never
came back; and although he may have remembered certain persons kindly,
his memory of the place and of his life there could not have been very
affectionate. Probably there were other diaries kept at Brook Farm;
certainly there were many and many letters written thence, in which
still lie, and will forever lie, buried the material for its history.
But it is likely to become a tradition only, and upon its finer side
more and more unreal, because of such sketches as those of Hawthorne.
The most comical part of the whole was its impression--that is, such
impression as it made, and without exaggerating its extent or importance
upon the steady old conservatism of Boston, which was of the most
inflexible and antediluvian type. The enterprise was the more appalling
because it seemed somehow to be a natural product of the spirit of
society there. The hen of the tri-mountain had herself hatched this
inexpressible duckling. Dr. Channing, indeed, was the honored
intellectual chief; the culture of Boston had owed much to the liberal
theology; old Dr. Beecher had battered that theology in vain; but the
liberality of Boston was like the British Whiggery of the last century:
it was more intelligent and more patrician than Toryism itself.
Mr. Emerson, as we said, was practically the head--or, at least, the
accepted representative--of the new movement. His discourses before the
Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard College, his address to the divinity
students, and his noble Dartmouth oration, followed by his lectures in
Boston and his _Nature_ had set the barn-yard--not offensively to retain
the metaphor of the hen--into the most resonant cackle, in the midst of
Theodore Parker's South Boston sermon, and there was universal thunder.
The pulpits which Dr. Beecher had assaulted, and which had watched him
serenely, when they heard Parker thought that the very foundations of
things were going. The most distinguished chanticleers went to Mr.
Emerson's lectures, and when asked if they understood him, shook their
stately combs and replied, with caustic superiority, "No; but our
daughters do." And when the experiment began at Brook Farm there was no
doubt in conservative circles that for their sins this offshoot of
Bedlam was permitted in the neighborhood. What it was, what it was meant
to be, was inexplicable. Are they fools, knaves, madmen, or mere
sentimentalists?... Is this Coleridge and Southey again with their
Pantisocracy and Susquehanna Paradise? Is it a vast nursery of
infidelity; and is it true that "the abbe or religieux" sacrifices white
oxen to Jupiter in the back parlor? What may not be true, since it is
within Theodore Parker's parish, and his house, crammed with books, and
modest under the pines, is only a mile away?
These extraordinary and vague and hostile impressions were not relieved
by the appearance of such votaries of the new shrine as appeared in the
staid streets and halls of the city. There is always a certain amount of
oddity latent in society, which rushes into such an enterprise as a
natural vent, and in youth itself there is a similar latent and
boundless protest against the friction and apparent unreason of the
existing order. At the time of the Brook Farm enterprise this was
everywhere observable. The freedom of the anti-slavery reform and its
discussions had developed the "come-outers," who bore testimony at all
times and places against Church and State. Mr. Emerson mentions an
apostle of the gospel of love and no money, who preached zealously, but
never gathered a large church of believers. Then there were the
protestants against the sin of flesh-eating, refining into curious
metaphysics upon milk, eggs, and oysters. To purloin milk from the udder
was to injure the maternal instincts of the cow; to eat eggs was Feejee
cannibalism, and the destruction of the tender germ of life; to swallow
an oyster was to mask murder. A still selecter circle denounced the
chains that shackled the tongue and the false delicacy that clothed the
body. Profanity, they said, is not the use of forcible and picturesque
words; it is the abuse of such to express base passions and emotions. So
indecency cannot be affirmed of the model of all grace, the human body.
The fig-leaf is the sign of the fall. Man returning to Paradise will
leave it behind. The priests of this faith, therefore, felt themselves
called upon to rebuke true profanity and indecency by sitting at their
front doors upon Sunday morning with no other clothes than that of the
fig-leaf period, tranquilly but loudly conversing in the most
stupendous oaths, by way of conversational chiaro-oscuro, while a
deluded world went shuddering to church.
These were the harmless freaks and individual fantasies. But the time
was like the time of witchcraft. The air magnified and multiplied every
appearance, and exceptions and idiosyncrasies and ludicrous follies were
regarded as the rule, and as the logical masquerade of this foul fiend
Transcendentalism, which was evidently unappeasable, and was about to
devour manner, morals, religion, and common-sense. If Father Lamson or
Abby Folsom were borne by main force from an antislavery meeting, and
the non-resistants pleaded that those protestants had as good a right to
speak as anybody, and that what was called their senseless babble was
probably inspired wisdom, if people were only heavenly-minded enough to
understand it, it was but another sign of the impending anarchy. And
what was to be said--for you could not call them old dotards--when the
younger protestants of the time came walking through the sober streets
of Boston and seated themselves in concert-halls and lecture-rooms with
hair parted in the middle and falling to their shoulders, and clad in
garments such as no human being ever wore before--garments which seemed
to be a compromise between the blouse of the Paris workman and the
_peignoir_ of a possible sister? For tailoring underwent the sage
revision to which the whole philosophy of life was subjected, and one
ardent youth, asserting that the human form itself suggested the proper
shape of its garments, caused trousers to be constructed that closely
fitted the leg, and bore his testimony to the truth in coarse crash
breeches.
These were the ludicrous aspects of the intellectual and moral
fermentation or agitation that was called Transcendentalism. And these
were foolishly accepted by many as its chief and only signs. It was
supposed that the folly was complete at Brook Farm, and it was
indescribably ludicrous to observe reverend doctors and other dons
coming out to gaze upon the extraordinary spectacle, and going as
dainty ladies hold their skirts and daintily step from stone to stone in
a muddy street, lest they be soiled. The dons seemed to doubt whether
the mere contact had not smirched them. But droll in itself, it was a
thousandfold droller when Theodore Parker came through the woods and
described it. With his head set low upon his gladiatorial shoulders, and
his nasal voice in subtle and exquisite mimicry reproducing what was
truly laughable, yet all with infinite _bonhommie_ and a genuine
superiority to small malice, he was as humorous as he was learned, and
as excellent a mimic as he was noble and fervent and humane a preacher.
On Sundays a party always went from Brook Farm to Mr. Parker's little
country church. He was there just exactly what he was afterwards, when
he preached to thousands of eager people at the Boston Music Hall--the
same plain, simple, rustic, racy man. His congregation were his personal
friends. They loved him and were proud of him; and his geniality and
tender sympathy, his ample knowledge of things as well as of books, his
jovial manliness and sturdy independence, drew to him all ages and sexes
and conditions.
The society at Brook Farm was composed of every kind of person. There
were the ripest scholars, men and women of the most aesthetic culture and
accomplishment, young farmers, seamstresses, mechanics, preachers, the
industrious, the lazy, the conceited, the sentimental. But they
associated in such a spirit and under such conditions that, with some
extravagance, the best of everybody appeared, and there was a kind of
high _esprit de corps_--at least in the earlier or golden age of the
colony. There was plenty of steady, essential, hard work, for the
founding of an earthly paradise upon a New England farm is no pastime.
But with the best intention, and much practical knowledge and industry
and devotion, there was in the nature of the case an inevitable lack of
method, and the economical failure was almost a foregone conclusion. But
there were never such witty potato patches and such sparkling cornfields
before or since. The weeds were scratched out of the ground to the
music of Tennyson or Browning, and the nooning was an hour as gay and
bright as any brilliant midnight at Ambrose's. But in the midst of it
all was one figure, the practical farmer, an honest neighbor who was not
drawn to the enterprise by any spiritual attraction, but was hired at
good wages to superintend the work, and who always seemed to be
regarding the whole affair with a most good-natured wonder as a
prodigious masquerade. Indeed, the description which Hawthorne gives of
him at a real masquerade of the farmers in the woods depicts his
attitude towards Brook Farm itself: "And apart, with a shrewd Yankee
observation of the scene, stands our friend Orange, a thick-set, sturdy
figure, enjoying the fun well enough, yet rather laughing with a
perception of its nonsensicalness than at all entering into the spirit
of the thing." That, indeed, was very much the attitude of Hawthorne
himself towards Brook Farm and many other aspects of human life.
But beneath all the glancing colors, the lights and shadows of its
surface, it was a simple, honest, practical effort for wiser forms of
life than those in which we find ourselves. The criticism of science,
the sneer of literature, the complaint of experience is that man is a
miserably half-developed being, the proof of which is the condition of
human society, in which the few enjoy and the many toil. But the
enjoyment cloys and disappoints, and the very want of labor poisons the
enjoyment. Man is made body and soul. The health of each requires
reasonable exercise. If every man did his share of the muscular work of
the world no other man would be overwhelmed with it. The man who does
not work imposes the necessity of harder toil upon him who does. Thereby
the first steals from the last the opportunity of mental culture, and at
last we reach a world of pariahs and patricians, with all the
inconceivable sorrow and suffering that surround us. Bound fast by the
brazen age, we can see that the way back to the age of gold lies through
justice, which will substitute co-operation for competition.
That some such generous and noble thought inspired this effort at
practical Christianity is most probable. The Brook-Farmers did not
interpret the words, "The poor ye have always with ye" to mean, "We must
keep always some of you poor." They found the practical Christian in him
who said to his neighbor, "Friend, come up higher." But apart from any
precise and defined intention, it was certainly a very alluring
prospect: that of life in a pleasant country, taking exercise in useful
toil, and surrounded with the most interesting and accomplished people.
Compared with other efforts upon which time and money and industry are
lavished, measured by Colorado and Nevada speculations, by California
gold-washing, by oil-boring, and by the Stock Exchange, Brook Farm was
certainly a very reasonable and practical enterprise, worthy of the hope
and aid of generous men and women. The friendships that were formed
there were enduring. The devotion to noble endeavor, the sympathy with
what is most useful to men, the kind patience and constant charity that
were fostered there, have been no more lost than grain dropped upon the
field. It is to the Transcendentalism that seemed to so many good souls
both wicked and absurd that some of the best influences of American life
to-day are due. The spirit that was concentrated at Brook Farm is
diffused but not lost. As an organized effort, after many downward
changes, it failed; but those who remember the Hive, the Eyrie, the
Cottage, when Margaret Fuller came and talked, radiant with bright
humor; when Emerson and Parker and Hedge joined the circle for a night
or day; when those who may not be named publicly brought beauty and wit
and social sympathy to the feast; when the practical possibilities of
life seemed fairer, and life and character were touched ineffaceably
with good influence, cherish a pleasant vision which no fate can harm,
and remember with ceaseless gratitude the blithe days at Brook Farm.