Puritans, bent on hanging the Quaker, burning the witch and banishing
the Romanist, these were gentle souls, with peaceful and even with
genial dispositions, casting sheep’s-eyes even on Fourier and his
houris. It was a time when the air was full of reform. Robert Owen of
Lanark came hither from England in 1845, and read lectures or held
conversations wherever he found listeners; the most amiable, sanguine
and candid of men. He had not the least doubt that he had hit on a
right and perfect socialism, or that all mankind would adopt it. He
was then seventy years old, and being asked, “Well, Mr. Owen, who is
your disciple? How many men are there possessed of your views who
will remain after you are gone, to put them in practice?” “Not one,”
was his reply. Robert Owen knew Fourier in his old age. He said that
Fourier learned of him all the truth he had; the rest of his system
was imagination, and the imagination of a banker. Owen made the best
impression by his rare benevolence. His love of men made us forget his
“Three Errors.” His charitable construction of men and their actions
was invariable. He was the better Christian in his controversy with
Christians, and he interpreted with great generosity the acts of the
“Holy Alliance,” and Prince Metternich, with whom the persevering
_doctrinaire_ had obtained interviews; “Ah,” he said, “you may
depend on it there are as tender hearts and as much good will to serve
men, in palaces, as in colleges.”
And truly I honor the generous ideas of the Socialists, the
magnificence of their theories, and the enthusiasm with which they
have been urged. They appeared the inspired men of their time. Mr.
Owen preached his doctrine of labor and reward, with the fidelity and
devotion of a saint, to the slow ears of his generation. Fourier,
almost as wonderful an example of the mathematical mind of France as La
Place or Napoleon, turned a truly vast arithmetic to the question of
social misery, and has put men under the obligation which a generous
mind always confers, of conceiving magnificent hopes and making great
demands as the right of man. He took his measure of that which all
should and might enjoy, from no soup-society or charity-concert, but
from the refinements of palaces, the wealth of universities, and the
triumphs of artists. He thought nobly. A man is entitled to pure air,
and to the air of good conversation in his bringing up, and not, as
we or so many of us, to the poor-smell and musty chambers, cats and
fools. Fourier carried a whole French Revolution in his head, and much
more. Here was arithmetic on a huge scale. His ciphering goes where
ciphering never went before, namely, into stars, atmospheres, and
animals, and men and women, and classes of every character. It was the
most entertaining of French romances, and could not but suggest vast
possibilities of reform to the coldest and least sanguine.
We had an opportunity of learning something of these Socialists and
their theory, from the indefatigable apostle of the sect in New York,
Albert Brisbane. Mr. Brisbane pushed his doctrine with all the force
of memory, talent, honest faith and importunacy. As we listened to his
exposition it appeared to us the sublime of mechanical philosophy; for
the system was the perfection of arrangement and contrivance. The force
of arrangement could no farther go. The merit of the plan was that it
was a system; that it had not the partiality and hint-and-fragment
character of most popular schemes, but was coherent and comprehensive
of facts to a wonderful degree. It was not daunted by distance, or
magnitude, or remoteness of any sort, but strode about nature with
a giant’s step, and skipped no fact, but wove its large Ptolemaic
web of cycle and epicycle, of phalanx and phalanstery, with laudable
assiduity. Mechanics were pushed so far as fairly to meet spiritualism.
One could not but be struck with strange coincidences betwixt Fourier
and Swedenborg. Genius hitherto has been shamefully misapplied, a
mere trifler. It must now set itself to raise the social condition
of man and to redress the disorders of the planet he inhabits. The
Desert of Sahara, the Campagna di Roma, the frozen Polar circles,
which by their pestilential or hot or cold airs poison the temperate
regions, accuse man. Society, concert, co-operation, is the secret of
the coming Paradise. By reason of the isolation of men at the present
day, all work is drudgery. By concert and the allowing each laborer to
choose his own work, it becomes pleasure. “Attractive Industry” would
speedily subdue, by adventurous scientific and persistent tillage, the
pestilential tracts; would equalize temperature, give health to the
globe and cause the earth to yield “healthy imponderable fluids” to the
solar system, as now it yields noxious fluids. The hyæna, the jackal,
the gnat, the bug, the flea, were all beneficent parts of the system;
the good Fourier knew what those creatures should have been, had not
the mould slipped, through the bad state of the atmosphere; caused
no doubt by the same vicious imponderable fluids. All these shall be
redressed by human culture, and the useful goat and dog and innocent
poetical moth, or the wood-tick to consume decomposing wood, shall take
their place. It takes sixteen hundred and eighty men to make one Man,
complete in all the faculties; that is, to be sure that you have got a
good joiner, a good cook, a barber, a poet, a judge, an umbrella-maker,
a mayor and alderman, and so on. Your community should consist of two
thousand persons, to prevent accidents of omission; and each community
should take up six thousand acres of land. Now fancy the earth planted
with fifties and hundreds of these phalanxes side by side,--what
tillage, what architecture, what refectories, what dormitories, what
reading-rooms, what concerts, what lectures, what gardens, what baths!
What is not in one will be in another, and many will be within easy
distance. Then know you one and all, that Constantinople is the natural
capital of the globe. There, in the Golden Horn, will the Arch-Phalanx
be established; there will the Omniarch reside. Aladdin and his
magician, or the beautiful Scheherezade can alone, in these prosaic
times before the sight, describe the material splendors collected
there. Poverty shall be abolished; deformity, stupidity and crime
shall be no more. Genius, grace, art, shall abound, and it is not to
be doubted but that in the reign of “Attractive Industry” all men will
speak in blank verse.
Certainly we listened with great pleasure to such gay and magnificent
pictures. The ability and earnestness of the advocate and his friends,
the comprehensiveness of their theory, its apparent directness of
proceeding to the end they would secure, the indignation they felt
and uttered in the presence of so much social misery, commanded our
attention and respect. It contained so much truth, and promised in the
attempts that shall be made to realize it so much valuable instruction,
that we are engaged to observe every step of its progress. Yet in
spite of the assurances of its friends that it was new and widely
discriminated from all other plans for the regeneration of society,
we could not exempt it from the criticism which we apply to so many
projects for reform with which the brain of the age teems. Our feeling
was that Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely Life. He treats
man as a plastic thing, something that may be put up or down, ripened
or retarded, moulded, polished, made into solid or fluid or gas, at
the will of the leader; or perhaps as a vegetable, from which, though
now a poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in
time produced,--but skips the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns
system and system-makers; which eludes all conditions; which makes or
supplants a thousand phalanxes and New Harmonies with each pulsation.
There is an order in which in a sound mind the faculties always appear,
and which, according to the strength of the individual, they seek to
realize in the surrounding world. The value of Fourier’s system is
that it is a statement of such an order externized, or carried outward
into its correspondence in facts. The mistake is that this particular
order and series is to be imposed, by force or preaching and votes, on
all men, and carried into rigid execution. But what is true and good
must not only be begun by life, but must be conducted to its issues by
life. Could not the conceiver of this design have also believed that a
similar model lay in every mind, and that the method of each associate
might be trusted, as well as that of his particular Committee and
General Office, No. 200 Broadway? Nay, that it would be better to say,
Let us be lovers and servants of that which is just, and straightway
every man becomes a centre of a holy and beneficent republic, which he
sees to include all men in its law, like that of Plato, and of Christ.
Before such a man the whole world becomes Fourierized or Christized or
humanized, and in obedience to his most private being he finds himself,
according to his presentiment, though against all sensuous probability,
acting in strict concert with all others who followed their private
light.
Yet, in a day of small, sour and fierce schemes, one is admonished
and cheered by a project of such friendly aims and of such bold and
generous proportion; there is an intellectual courage and strength in
it which is superior and commanding; it certifies the presence of so
much truth in the theory, and in so far is destined to be fact.
It argued singular courage, the adoption of Fourier’s system, to even a
limited extent, with his books lying before the world only defended by
the thin veil of the French language. The Stoic said, Forbear, Fourier
said, Indulge. Fourier was of the opinion of St. Evremond; abstinence
from pleasure appeared to him a great sin. Fourier was very French
indeed. He labored under a misapprehension of the nature of women. The
Fourier marriage was a calculation how to secure the greatest amount of
kissing that the infirmity of human constitution admitted. It was false
and prurient, full of absurd French superstitions about women; ignorant
how serious and how moral their nature always is; how chaste is their
organization; how lawful a class.
It is the worst of community that it must inevitably transform into
charlatans the leaders, by the endeavor continually to meet the
expectation and admiration of this eager crowd of men and women seeking
they know not what. Unless he have a Cossack roughness of clearing
himself of what belongs not, charlatan he must be.
It was easy to see what must be the fate of this fine system in any
serious and comprehensive attempt to set it on foot in this country. As
soon as our people got wind of the doctrine of Marriage held by this
master, it would fall at once into the hands of a lawless crew who
would flock in troops to so fair a game, and, like the dreams of poetic
people on the first outbreak of the old French Revolution, so theirs
would disappear in a slime of mire and blood.
There is of course to every theory a tendency to run to an extreme,
and to forget the limitations. In our free institutions, where every
man is at liberty to choose his home and his trade, and all possible
modes of working and gaining are open to him, fortunes are easily made
by thousands, as in no other country. Then property proves too much
for the man, and the men of science, art, intellect, are pretty sure
to degenerate into selfish housekeepers, dependent on wine, coffee,
furnace-heat, gas-light and fine furniture. Then instantly things
swing the other way, and we suddenly find that civilization crowed
too soon; that what we bragged as triumphs were treacheries: that we
have opened the wrong door and let the enemy into the castle; that
civilization was a mistake; that nothing is so vulgar as a great
warehouse of rooms full of furniture and trumpery; that, in the
circumstances, the best wisdom were an auction or a fire. Since the
foxes and the birds have the right of it, with a warm hole to keep
out the weather, and no more,--a pent-house to fend the sun and rain
is the house which lays no tax on the owner’s time and thoughts, and
which he can leave, when the sun is warm, and defy the robber. This
was Thoreau’s doctrine, who said that the Fourierists had a sense of
duty which led them to devote themselves to their second-best. And
Thoreau gave in flesh and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief the
purest ethics. He was more real and practically believing in them than
any of his company, and fortified you at all times with an affirmative
experience which refused to be set aside. Thoreau was in his own
person a practical answer, almost a refutation, to the theories of the
socialists. He required no Phalanx, no Government, no society, almost
no memory. He lived extempore from hour to hour, like the birds and
the angels; brought every day a new proposition, as revolutionary as
that of yesterday, but different: the only man of leisure in his town;
and his independence made all others look like slaves. He was a good
Abbot Sampson, and carried a counsel in his breast. “Again and again I
congratulate myself on my so-called poverty, I could not overstate this
advantage.” “What you call bareness and poverty, is to me simplicity.
God could not be unkind to me if he should try. I love best to have
each thing in its season only, and enjoy doing without it at all other
times. It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at
all. I have never got over my surprise that I should have been born
into the most estimable place in all the world, and in the very nick of
time too.” There’s an optimist for you.
I regard these philanthropists as themselves the effects of the age
in which we live, and, in common with so many other good facts,
the efflorescence of the period, and predicting a good fruit that
ripens. They were not the creators they believed themselves, but they
were unconscious prophets of a true state of society; one which the
tendencies of nature lead unto, one which always establishes itself
for the sane soul, though not in that manner in which they paint it;
but they were describers of that which is really being done. The large
cities are phalansteries; and the theorists drew all their argument
from facts already taking place in our experience. The cheap way is
to make every man do what he was born for. One merchant to whom I
described the Fourier project, thought it must not only succeed, but
that agricultural association must presently fix the price of bread,
and drive single farmers into association in self-defence, as the great
commercial and manufacturing companion had done. Society in England
and in America is trying the experiment again in small pieces, in
co-operative associations, in cheap eating-houses, as well as in the
economies of club-houses and in cheap reading-rooms.
It chanced that here in one family were two brothers, one a brilliant
and fertile inventor, and close by him his own brother, a man of
business, who knew how to direct his faculty and make it instantly and
permanently lucrative. Why could not the like partnership be formed
between the inventor and the man of executive talent everywhere? Each
man of thought is surrounded by wiser men than he, if they cannot
write as well. Cannot he and they combine? Talents supplement each
other. Beaumont and Fletcher and many French novelists have known how
to utilize such partnerships. Why not have a larger one, and with more
various members?
Housekeepers say, “There are a thousand things to everything,” and
if one must study all the strokes to be laid, all the faults to be
shunned in a building or work of art, of its keeping, its composition,
its site, its color, there would be no end. But the architect, acting
under a necessity to build the house for its purpose, finds himself
helped, he knows not how, into all these merits of detail, and
steering clear, though in the dark, of those dangers which might have
shipwrecked him.
BROOK FARM.
The West Roxbury association was formed in 1841, by a society of
members, men and women, who bought a farm in West Roxbury, of about two
hundred acres, and took possession of the place in April. Mr. George
Ripley was the President, and I think Mr. Charles Dana (afterwards
well known as one of the editors of the New York Tribune), was the
secretary. Many members took shares by paying money, others held
shares by their labor. An old house on the place was enlarged, and
three new houses built. William Allen was at first and for some time
the head farmer, and the work was distributed in orderly committees to
the men and women. There were many employments more or less lucrative
found for, or brought hither by these members,--shoemakers, joiners,
sempstresses. They had good scholars among them, and so received pupils
for their education. The parents of the children in some instances
wished to live there, and were received as boarders. Many persons
attracted by the beauty of the place and the culture and ambition of
the community, joined them as boarders, and lived there for years. I
think the numbers of this mixed community soon reached eighty or ninety
souls.
It was a noble and generous movement in the projectors, to try an
experiment of better living. They had the feeling that our ways of
living were too conventional and expensive, not allowing each to do
what he had a talent for, and not permitting men to combine cultivation
of mind and heart with a reasonable amount of daily labor. At the same
time, it was an attempt to lift others with themselves, and to share
the advantages they should attain, with others now deprived of them.
There was no doubt great variety of character and purpose in
the members of the community. It consisted in the main of young
people,--few of middle age, and none old. Those who inspired and
organized it were of course persons impatient of the routine,
the uniformity, perhaps they would say, the squalid contentment
of society around them; which was so timid and skeptical of any
progress. One would say then that impulse was the rule in the society,
without centripetal balance; perhaps it would not be severe to say,
intellectual sans-culottism, an impatience of the formal, routinary
character of our educational, religious, social and economical life in
Massachusetts. Yet there was immense hope in these young people. There
was nobleness; there were self-sacrificing victims who compensated for
the levity and rashness of their companions. The young people lived
a great deal in a short time, and came forth some of them perhaps
with shattered constitutions. And a few grave sanitary influences of
character were happily there, which, I was assured, were always felt.
George W. Curtis of New York, and his brother, of English Oxford,
were members of the family from the first. Theodore Parker, the near
neighbor of the farm and the most intimate friend of Mr. Ripley, was a
frequent visitor. Mr. Ichabod Morton of Plymouth, a plain man formerly
engaged through many years in the fisheries with success,--eccentric,
with a persevering interest in Education, and of a very democratic
religion, came and built a house on the farm, and he, or members of
his family, continued there to the end. Margaret Fuller, with her
joyful conversation and large sympathy, was often a guest, and always
in correspondence with her friends! Many ladies, whom to name were to
praise, gave character and varied attraction to the place.
In and around Brook Farm, whether as members, boarders, or
visitors, were many remarkable persons, for character, intellect, or
accomplishments. I recall one youth of the subtlest mind, I believe
I must say the subtlest observer and diviner of character I ever
met, living, reading, writing, talking there, perhaps as long as the
colony held together; his mind fed and overfed by whatever is exalted
in genius, whether in Poetry or Art, in Drama or Music, or in social
accomplishment and elegancy; a man of no employment or practical aims,
a student and philosopher, who found his daily enjoyment not with the
elders or his exact contemporaries so much as with the fine boys who
were skating and playing ball or bird-hunting; forming the closest
friendships with such, and finding his delight in the petulant heroisms
of boys; yet was he the chosen counsellor to whom the guardians would
repair on any hitch or difficulty that occurred, and draw from him a
wise counsel. A fine, subtle, inward genius, puny in body and habit as
a girl, yet with an _aplomb_ like a general, never disconcerted.
He lived and thought, in 1842, such worlds of life; all hinging on
the thought of Being or Reality as opposed to consciousness; hating
intellect with the ferocity of a Swedenborg. He was the Abbé or
spiritual father, from his religious bias. His reading lay in Æschylus,
Plato, Dante, Calderon, Shakspeare, and in modern novels and romances
of merit. There too was Hawthorne, with his cold yet gentle genius,
if he failed to do justice to this temporary home. There was the
accomplished Doctor of Music, who has presided over its literature ever
since in our metropolis. Rev. William Henry Channing, now of London,
was from the first a student of Socialism in France and England, and
in perfect sympathy with this experiment. An English baronet, Sir John
Caldwell, was a frequent visitor, and more or less directly interested
in the leaders and the success.
Hawthorne drew some sketches, not happily, as I think; I should rather
say, quite unworthy of his genius. No friend who knew Margaret Fuller
could recognize her rich and brilliant genius under the dismal mask
which the public fancied was meant for her in that disagreeable story.
The Founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made what
all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All comers, even
the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of residences. It is
certain that freedom from household routine, variety of character and
talent, variety of work, variety of means of thought and instruction,
art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade, did not permit sluggishness
or despondency; broke up routine. There is agreement in the testimony
that it was, to most of the associates, education; to many, the most
important period of their life, the birth of valued friendships, their
first acquaintance with the riches of conversation, their training
in behavior. The art of letter-writing, it is said, was immensely
cultivated. Letters were always flying not only from house to house,
but from room to room. It was a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution
in small, an Age of Reason in a patty-pan.
In the American social communities, the gossip found such vent and sway
as to become despotic. The institutions were whispering-galleries,
in which the adored Saxon privacy was lost. Married women I believe
uniformly decided against the community. It was to them like the brassy
and lacquered life in hotels. The common school was well enough, but to
the common nursery they had grave objections. Eggs might be hatched in
ovens, but the hen on her own account much preferred the old way. A hen
without her chickens was but half a hen.
It was a curious experience of the patrons and leaders of this
noted community, in which the agreement with many parties was that
they should give so many hours of instruction in mathematics, in
music, in moral and intellectual philosophy, and so forth,--that in
every instance the new comers showed themselves keenly alive to the
advantages of the society, and were sure to avail themselves of every
means of instruction; their knowledge was increased, their manners
refined,--but they became in that proportion averse to labor, and were
charged by the heads of the departments with a certain indolence and
selfishness.