F 1 ANTIC DAYS 1 OLD BOSTON && m IY CAROLINE' CRAWF< <**• «* V '.' Kf ■&K?w m ,;■. ■%■>. m 1 ; \ v?V fe^ ttfa&a &» F%& vm *Nfc / v ■'r- v * wN.f ROMANTIC DAYS IN OLD BOSTON " The great memories, noble deeds and sacred places of old Boston are the poetry of history and the keenest ripeners of character." — Wendell Phillips. 0?<1 " The history of Boston is written in the best things that have befallen this land." — Henry Ward Beecher. t>?< .'•-■C*. Kg -Z- .VS>. No < r-.' * ; .-'.I '•' C>> ! -- ."-J" ^ ~ T L'^-;-<" ■'.-'.-*- '_.-'% i <^ ; -o *-3Z-' 1 O ^vfl.; W&$it- <£>•<. K-0^ "- C:~ i ps* it* r.f " v-j O-- te :*I |p 5 ~ r -'j~ ;.o> fe r w -~^ T -'^ o--- gas -;££ o: fe ea " <>■-- ' : "M1# :t) r /.$:o- ti r' '** &■ '■•■: •"• I? l 1 « S.T.J 3 ? .•-.'- ^ IN OLD BOSTON 27 to take charge of even one soul." Certainly he shrank, almost with horror, from the as- sociative life implied in the Brook Farm proposi- tion, though, all the while, the idealist in him gave the movement secret encouragement and applause. Mr. Ripley had already in mind the spot upon which to try his experiment, for, in the summer of 1840, he and his wife had boarded at a pleasant milk-farm in West Roxbury through which a little brook ran cheerfully down to the Charles River near by, and in which he found many of the possibilities he sought. They had left the place full of eagerness to return and carry out what had become their dearest wish: a movement " to insure a more natural union* between intellectual and manual labor than exists; to combine the thinker and the worker as far as possible in the same individual; to guarantee the highest mental freedom by pro- viding all with labor adapted to their tastes and talents, and securing to them the fruits of their industry; to do away with the necessity of menial services by opening the benefits of education and the profits of labor to all; and thus to prepare a society of liberal, intelligent and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more wholesome and simple life than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions." , 28 ROMANTIC DAYS The means to this end were set forth as the cultivation of a garden, a farm, and the estab- lishment thereon of a school or college in which the most complete instruction should be given from the first rudiments to the highest culture. Thirty thousand dollars, it was decided, would supply land and buildings for ten families and allow a sufficient margin to cover the first year's expenses. This sum Ripley proposed to raise by forming a joint-stock company among those who were friendly to his enterprise, each subscriber to be guaranteed a fixed interest, and the subscriptions to be secured by the real estate. The first step towards the execution of the project was the purchase (in the winter of 1840-1) of Brook Farm by Ripley himself, he taking the responsibility of its management and success. Never did a man more conscientiously discharge an obligation! Every debt was paid off by him even when he himself was obliged to work at a wretched wage for the money with which to do this. The business arrangements of the enterprise, from its hopeful beginning to its saddened end, are carefully traced by Lindsay Swift in one chapter of his charming volume, Brook Farm, its Members, Scholars and Vis- itors. Suffice it here, therefore, merely to say that, in the spring of 1841, one third of the necessary amount was actually paid in, and the IN OLD BOSTON 29 nucleus of the community took possession of the farm-house which, with a large barn, was already on the estate. In Ripley's mind, and in the minds of the more thoughtful of those who began the ex- periment with him, the idea of Brook Farm was not at all, as has been generally supposed, to secure an idyllic retreat for a favored few, but to express belief in the brotherhood of man and to proclaim through community life faith in the possibility of realizing this belief. George P. Bradford, who was of the original family, has (in his chapter of the Memorial History of Boston) expressed the plan thus: "The move- ment was one form of the strong and rising feeling of humanity and of the brotherhood of man, then so widely pervading the community. With it, too, came the desire and hope for better conditions of life in which the less fortunate classes might come to share in the privileges, comforts, and various advantages belonging to civilized society. The feeling which at this time manifested itself in an excited form in the anti-slavery agitation may indirectly have had some effect in suggesting or stimulating this movement. Mr. Ripley and others with him, while sympathizing with the objects of the Abolitionists, thought that as the evils of which slavery is so signal and conspicuous a form lay deep in the present constitution and arrange- 30 ROMANTIC DAYS ment of society, so their remedy could only be found in a modification or radical change of ordinary life. " The feeling, then, which lay at the bottom of the Brook Farm enterprise, and from which it mainly sprang, was dissatisfaction with the existing conditions of society, — that under these some classes enjoy the advantages of high culture and the gratification of the intellect and taste, and if obliged to work in some way for subsistence they yet have leisure and oppor- tunity for refined recreation and for the enjoy- ment of comfortable or elegant modes of living, and are in some respects subject to more favor- able moral influences; while, under these also, other classes are doomed to wearisome or painful drudgery and incessant toil, without oppor- tunity for the enjoyment of intellect and taste, confined to dreary, squalid conditions of exist- ence, and more exposed to temptations at least to the more flagrant crimes. Then, again, there was the feeling that there is something wrong in the mode of industry as now constituted, namely, competitive industry; ... in which one man's gain is another man's loss, and the necessities of which make it the interest of each to get away from others and to appropriate to himself as large a share as possible of this world's goods, — a condition of things seemingly so contrary to the spirit of Christian brother- IN OLD BOSTON 31 hood. Consequently a mode of life was de- sired ... in which this evil condition of the relations of society might be corrected." It would seem from the above-quoted state- ment that the ideals which inspired the move- ment were nothing more or less than those embodied in what we are today calling " Christian Socialism," one of whose disciples has put the thing thus succinctly: " If manual labor is a blessing, not a curse, I want my part of it; if it is a curse, not a blessing, I ought to take my turn." * Of course, there were other and more superficial motives inciting to an interest in the enterprise and a desire to have a part in it. The prospect of a pleasant social life, with congenial society, somewhat free from distaste- ful conventions, moved some. Others were attracted by the idea of a life of mingled physical and intellectual labor as exhilarating and health- ful. And young women, especially, to whom in that day comparatively few interesting occupa- tions were open, hailed eagerly the opportunity thus afforded to earn a living amid congenial surroundings. Hawthorne was one of the first to embrace community life at Brook Farm, and in what has come to be known as the epic of the place, The Bliihedale Romance, he analyzes with characteristic acumen the psychology of his 1 Vida D. Scudder in A Listener In Babel. 32 ROMANTIC DAYS co-laborers for the common good, — " our little army of saints and martyrs," as he rather scathingly calls them. ' They were mostly individuals 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. On comparing their minds, one with another, they often discovered that this idea of a Community had been growing up, in silent and unknown sympathy, for years. Thoughtful, strongly lined faces were among them; sombre brows, but eyes that did not require spectacles, unless prematurely dimmed by the student's lamplight, and hair that seldom showed a thread of silver. Age, wedded to the past, incrusted over with a stony layer of habits and retaining nothing fluid in its possibilities, would have been absurdly out of place in an enterprise like this. Youth, too, in its early dawn, was hardly more adapted to our purpose; . . . We had very young people with us it is true, — downy lads, rosy girls in their first teens and children of all heights above one's knee, — but these had chiefly been sent thither for education, which it was one of the objects and methods of our institution to supply. Then we had boarders, from town and elsewhere, who lived with us in a familiar way, sympathized more or less in our theories IN OLD BOSTON 33 and sometimes shared in our labors. On the whole it was a society such as has seldom met together. ..." It was indeed. And nothing about it was more anomalous than the presence in it as a regular Community member of Nathaniel Haw- thorne, poet and romancer. His deciding motive in joining the enterprise does not appear; but it seems more than possible that he was himself among those in whom recent experience of the world had awakened " disgust," for he had just severed his relation with the Boston Custom House, and it was with the thousand dollars that he had saved from his government earnings that he purchased shares 18 and 19 of the Association stock. He arrived in the midst of one of those late spring snow- storms, " which, as Lindsay Swift says, *■ never fail to impress a New Englander with their unseasonableness, though they are as invariable as the solstices.' " To set out on such an untoward April day for an adventure in Arcady might well give any man pause. Hawthorne superbly voices the reflections such a situation would engender: " The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove oneself a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to 34 ROMANTIC DAYS be obeyed." There is a life philosophy for you, apropos of an April snowstorm! And the para- graph — in The Blithedale Romance — which immediately follows this one, and describes as only an artist in words could that long-ago snowstorm and the way in which its exhilara- tions and its buffets reacted upon the sensitized mind of our tyro in altruism, is a masterly piece of writing. Then comes this, — and it is the crux of the matter: " Whatever else I may repent of, however, let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies that I once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world's destiny, — yes ! — and to do what in me lay for their accomplishment." Hawthorne's immediate duty, at Brook Farm, was " to play chambermaid to a cow." At any rate that is the way he put the thing after he had tired of it. At first the scenery delighted him and he evinced considerable enthusiasm over his tasks. In a letter to his sister Louisa he wrote, " This is one of the most beautiful places I ever saw in my life, and as secluded as if it were a hundred miles from any city or village." Presently he writes, " I have milked a cow! " One of his first bucolic experiences was with the famous " transcendental heifer " which was named (very likely by Hawthorne) " Margaret Fuller " because the beast proved rather strong minded and had finally to be IN OLD BOSTON 35 sent to Coventry by the more docile kind, always to be counted on as more or less con- servative. Hawthorne later refers to this animal as having " a very intelligent face " and " a reflective cast of character." They all got a good deal of fun at Brook Farm, over the qualities imputed to their four-footed friends. Dr. Codman tells of a fine imported bull who, because he did not seem to be doing his share of work in their very industrious community, was harnessed up with a ring through his nose and made to draw a tip cart. His name was " Prince Albert." Then there was " Cyclops," too, a large raw-boned gray mare so christened because she had only one eye. Ripley loved working with the animals, but Hawthorne never did, and by the middle of the August which followed the April of his arrival we find him writing, "Ina little more than a fortnight I shall be free from my bondage — free to enjoy Nature — free to think and feel. . . . Oh, labor is the curse of the world and nobody can meddle with it without be- coming proportionably brutified ! " Yet he stuck it out for a whole year and referred always to his stay at Brook Farm as the romantic period of his life. When he came to write his epic of the place he closed the story with this beautiful passage: " Often in these years that are darkening around me, I remember our 36 ROMANTIC DAYS beautiful scheme of a noble and unselfish life, and how fair in that first summer appeared the prospect that it might endure for generations and be perfected, as the ages rolled by, into a system of a people and a world. Were my former associates now there — were there only three or four of those true-hearted men now laboring in the sun — I sometimes fancy that I would direct my world-weary footsteps thitherward, and entreat them to receive me for old friend- ship's sake." The reproach hurled today at nearly all socialistic enterprises — that they stand for " free love " — early came to be used as a boom- erang to throw at Brook Farm. Mrs. Butterfield tells me that her father and mother were looked upon as most rashly endangering the souls of their young children when they took them, the second year of the experiment, to " that regular free love institution." Now, of course, this charge was grossly untrue. But it soon began to militate very powerfully, none the less, against the success of the school which, at the start, was to have been a chief source of income. In the fall term of 1842 the school's teaching staff was composed of the following instructors: George Ripley, Intellectual and Natural Phi- losophy and Mathematics; George P. Bradford, Belles Lettres; John S. Dwight, Latin and Music; Charles A. Dana, Greek and German; IN OLD BOSTON 37 John S. Brown, Theoretical and Practical Agriculture; Sophia W. Ripley, History and Modern Languages; Marianne Ripley, Pri- mary School; Abigail Morton, Infant School; Georgiana Bruce, Infant School; Hannah B. Ripley, Drawing. The infant school was for children under six years of age; the primary school for children under ten; the preparatory school for pupils over ten years of age intending to pursue the higher branches of study in the institution. A young man could fit for college in six years at Brook Farm or he could take a three years' course in theoretical and practical agriculture. In any case he was expected to spend from one to two hours daily in manual labor. Now with such teachers, such a well- planned course and a healthy country back- ground upon which to live a free and happifying life, it would seem as if the school ought greatly to have succeeded. For a while, indeed, it did flourish like the proverbial green bay tree; Harvard College sent to its stimulating care young men who needed to study hard for a while in a community less exciting than Cam- bridge, — and their presence added not a little, as the presence of college boys always does, to the color and variety of the life. Charles A. Dana was one of the Harvard youths who found his way to the farm in the the middle of his college career, but he came as 38 ROMANTIC DAYS a " professor " and not as a pupil. Born at Hinsdale, New Hampshire, in 1819, he had passed his boyhood in Buffalo, and there fitted himself for Harvard College, which he entered in 1839. In the middle of his course his sight became seriously impaired from reading " Oliver Twist " by candle light. When at three in the morning he finished the badly printed volume he found that he could scarcely see.. Study, therefore, had to be abandoned for the time, and he was very glad to accept the invitation of the Harvard men already at Brook Farm to go there as instructor in Greek and German. He did his work as a teacher well, contributed articles to the Harbinger, — when that organ of the Brook Farmers came to be established, — and was throughout his five years of connection with the movement loyal and interested. Another famous editor who passed valuable for- mative years at Brook Farm was George William Curtis, who, with his brother Burrill, went out there as a boarder in 1842. Miss Amelia Russell, who has written charmingly of the home-life at Brook Farm, calls the Curtis brothers " Greek gods," — so handsome were they. Tra- dition recalls that they had an especial fondness for picnics and that he, whom we now associate chiefly with an Easy Chair, danced, at a certain Brook Farm junket, in a short green skirt modelled on that worn by Fanny Ellsler! IN OLD BOSTON 39 A seeker after country beauty might well choose Brook Farm today as an ideal place in which to take refuge from a jarring world. It still has a slender little brook gurgling through its undulating meadows and there is a happy air of peace resting upon its woods and hill-tops. The accompanying picture is a photograph of a painting done in 1845 by Josiah Wolcott, then a resident at the community. It belonged to Mrs. Butterfield and is interesting as an authen- tic contemporary reproduction of the actual " set " of this inspiriting drama of brotherhood. At the extreme right is shown the Hive, the farm house which stood not far from the road when the life of the little community began and which was immediately utilized. Here was the heart of the community: Mr. Ripley's library; the first day nursery ever known in America, — a room where mothers could leave their children in care of the Nursery Group while they did their daily work; " Attica," a large upper room where the unmarried men slept; and the low- studded dining-room with its old-fashioned fireplace of brick and its pine tables set off with white linen and white table-ware and having white painted benches on either side. At the highest point of land which the farm contained (and the second building from the right in the picture) was built, in 1842, the Eyrie, a square wooden structure of smooth 40 ROMANTIC DAYS matched boards painted, after the imitative fashion of the day, the color of gray sandstone. The house was reached by a long flight of steps from the farm road and the view from it was a delight. Into this house the Ripleys moved as soon as it was finished. The "Margaret Fuller Cottage," of the community buildings, remains today. It was the next house erected after the Eyrie. The remaining building, at the extreme left of the picture, was called Pilgrim House, and was built by Ichabod Morton for the use of his family. It is interesting to us as having been the editorial office of the Harbinger. And now let us see what manner of daily life was led in this community by those who had there withdrawn from the world to help in the world's reformation. Emerson always rather poked fun at Brook Farm, though he admitted that it was a pleasant place where lasting friendships were formed and the " art of letter writing was stimulated." He implies that there was a shirking of labor on the part of some, and perhaps that is true. Human nature is pretty apt to be human nature even at Brook Farm. " The country members," he says, " were naturally surprised to observe that one man ploughed all day and one looked out of the window all day — and perhaps drew his picture, and both received at night the same wages." IN OLD BOSTON 41 The work of the household as well as of the farm was organized by groups, and Mrs. Butter- field is as sure today as she was then that necessary labor can be greatly lightened as well as sweetened by working in this manner. " Let us suppose it is Tuesday," she says. " The rising horn sounded at five o'clock in summer. I often used to get up and go around from house to house with a peculiar whistle as a signal to some members of the singing group to sing under John S. D wight's windows from 6 to 7. We sang Mozart's and Haydn's masses, and it was glorious to hear that sacred music in the still, beautiful morning air. I never can forget it. I think it was one of the holiest and most inspiring things in my life. " Then came breakfast in the Hive and after breakfast our work. I greatly enjoyed ironing, and on Tuesday I would work all the morning with that group. Dinner was at twelve o'clock and in the afternoon there were German and French classes to which any one who wanted to study could go. The cobbler would stop in his mending of shoes to go to the Shakespeare class, making up time afterward. As a rule the women did the housework, and the men that connected with the farm, but the men helped in the housework too when that seemed advis- able. The baker was a man — Father Hecker, founder of the Paulist order, he came to be 42 ROMANTIC DAYS afterward, — another man was assistant in the laundry and one of the young fellows carried water for the dormitories. " I shall never forget the impression made upon my youthful mind, the day our family arrived at the farm, by seeing one of the culti- vated gentlemen from Concord hanging out the morning's washing. Yet that was not inap- propriate work in rough weather for a man. Our women seldom participated in outdoor work, though I remember that, on one or more occasions when help in that direction was im- peratively needed, half a dozen of our young women did very active work in the hay field. In several of the groups, notably the waiting groups, the young men and women were about equally divided. Charles A. Dana was at one time head waiter. After washing for three hours every Monday morning Mrs. Ripley would have her classes at the school in the afternoon. Ah! but she was a rare and lovely soul." Rare! indeed. Too much emphasis can scarcely be laid, in writing about Brook Farm, upon the exquisite quality of this woman who upheld the hands and sustained the courage of the founder of the enterprise. Granddaughter of Chief Justice Dana, our first minister to Russia, she had been a teacher, — when Ripley came to love her, — in a boarding and day CHARLES A. DANA. After a daguerreotype. Page 38. DR. ORESTES A. BROWNSON AS HE LOOKED WHEN AT BROOK FARM. Page 47. GEORGE RIPLEY, Page- 44. FATHER HECKER IN HIS PRIME. From a rare photograph in the pos- session of the Paulist Fathers, 'New York. Page 47. SOUTH SIDE OF TEMPLE PLACE ABOUT 1865. mksk BOSTON FROM THE STATE HOUSE, ABOUT 1858. IN OLD BOSTON 43 school for young ladies held in Fay House, Cambridge. In that house she was married to Ripley (August 22, 1827) by the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Their alliance was " founded not upon any romantic or sudden passion, but upon great respect for her intel- lectual power, moral worth, deep and true Christian piety and peculiar refinement and dignity of character," wrote the young husband to a friend. Ripley came of farmer stock — his boyhood home was in the beautiful Connecticut valley, — but he was a lover of books, a graduate of Harvard College, and he had chosen the ministry for his profession. It seemed indeed as if the life the pair would lead must be that of a quiet Boston parson and his wife, for he was soon called over the church at the corner of Pearl and Purchase Streets, and he stayed there preaching Unitarianism as he saw it for fourteen years. But, during those years there came to him a vision of that great truth which is now bursting afresh upon the minds of earnest-minded ministers, — that, under existing social conditions it is well-nigh impossible to harmonize Christian doctrine and Christian life. He tried to preach the social gospel, but his people were not responsive. Finally, therefore (in October, 1840), he wrote them from Northampton a manly letter in which he set forth with absolute open-minded- ./ 44 ROMANTIC DAYS ness the reasons for the faith which was in him, and his reluctant conviction that he and they could not longer work together. This letter was accepted as definitive by his congregation, and on March 28, 1841, they listened respect- fully but with resignation, to their minister's farewell sermon. The compact description of Ripley given by his biographer, Rev. O. B. Frothingham, warms one's heart to the man. " He was no unbeliever, no sceptic, no innovator in matters of opinion or observance, but a quiet student, a scholar, a man of books, a calm, bright-minded, whole- souled thinker, believing, hopeful, sunny, but absorbed in philosophical pursuits. Well does the writer of these lines recall the vision of a slender figure wearing in summer the flowing silk robe, in winter the dark blue cloak of the profession, walking with measured step from his residence in Rowe Street towards the meet- ing house in Purchase Street. The face was shaven clean, the brown hair curled in close crisp ringlets, the face was pale as if in thought; the gold-rimmed spectacles concealed black eyes; the head was alternately bent and raised. No one could have guessed that the man had in him the fund of humor in which his friends delighted, or the heroism in social reform which, a few years later, amazed the community." To Emerson Ripley wrote that his idea of IN OLD BOSTON 45 personal happiness would be to rent a place upon which he could live independently — " and one day drive his own cart to market and sell greens." As a matter of fact he possessed neither the taste nor the temperament of a magnetic leader of men. Mrs. Ripley was quite different. She sup- plied what he lacked in this way. She was ardent, impulsive, deeply sympathetic. Her power of enthusing those who came in contact with her was extraordinary and " impossible seemed a word unknown to her." She was a tall and graceful woman with fair coloring. When it is said of her that, by reason of being chief of the wash-room group, she made the laundry " a place of almost seductive cheerful- ness," one has perhaps given the strongest proof needed of her magnetism and buoyancy. With such people as Mr. and Mrs. Ripley at its head and such men as Dana and John S. Dwight acting as effective lieutenants, Brook Farm was sure to be a Mecca for visitors. The popularity of the place helped towards its undoing, indeed. Dr. Codman records that, in one year, more than four thousand people came out to the farm to stay for a longer or shorter period. At first these people were made welcome to meals without charge and members of the community were drafted to show them about. But when their number came to be 46 ROMANTIC DAYS " legion " it was found necessary to exact a fee for the food consumed, and they were left to wander as they would. " Yet every pleasant day from May to November," the historian of the place declares, " men, women and chil- dren were passing from Hive to Eyrie and over the farm back to the Hive, where they took private carriage or public coach for their de- parture. Among these people were some of the oddest of the odd; those who rode every con- ceivable hobby; some of all religions; bond and free, transcendental and occidental; anti-slavery and pro-slavery; come-outers, communists, fruitists and flutists; dreamers and schemers of all sorts." In a word cranks galore. Such was Bronson Alcott's friend Lane, who was opposed to eating anything that was killed or had died, so ate neither fish nor flesh; who was opposed to wearing wool because it was an animal product and implied robbing the sheep of its protection; who was opposed to wearing cotton and would use neither rice nor sugar because they were products of slave labor; for whom no way of getting to Brook Farm but on his legs seemed possible and no encompassing garment but a linen suit could be regarded as sufficiently moral. Alcott himself did not come often. He found Concord a more favorable spot in which to follow his peculiar genius. Moreover, he was fresh from the failure of IN OLD BOSTON 47 his own recent experiment in community life at Fruitlands, near Harvard, Massachu- setts. Orestes Augustus Brownson was one of the interesting characters who wandered back and forth between Brook Farm and the outer world. Brownson had experienced so many kinds of religion before he " walked backward into the Catholic Church " that it was once remarked of him, when a preacher invited to the communion table the members of all Christian churches, that Brownson was the only person in the congregation who could " fill the bill." Brownson it was who brought to the farm Isaac Hecker, — already referred to as the family baker, — who became the head of the Paulists and, in his day, the best interpreter of the Roman Catholic Church to the cool- headed practical American. His sojourn at Brook Farm may very well be credited in tracing out the influences which made him what he was. " To leave this pla,ce is to me a great sacrifice," he wrote as he was going away. " I have been much refined by being here." Hecker was a " partial " boarder when he first entered Brook Farm; he paid four dollars a week and gave his services as a baker in ex- change for instruction in German, philosophy, French and music. Later he became a " full " boarder, paying for the greater freedom five 48 ROMANTIC DAYS dollars and a half a week. Hecker was of the Grahamites, while at the Farm. In the dining- room there was always one table of vegetarians — those who used no flesh meats and generally no tea or coffee, who were, in fact, followers of the dietary principles of Dr. Sylvester Graham, whose name is still connected with bread made of unbolted flour because it was by him considered the very perfection of human food. When the plans for the Phalanstery — the large house which was destroyed by fire before it was completed — came to be made, it was decided that those at the Graham tables should be given board at a less price than the others, because their food was less expensive. The burning of the Phalanstery (March 3, 1846) marked an epoch at Brook Farm. For a long time accommodations had been insuffi- cient and high hopes were placed upon what might be accomplished when this large, roomy building should be available for lodging and assembly purposes. By those who wished to swing the Community into line with Fourier- ism the central house was deemed especially desirable, and when it seemed impossible to get together the seven thousand dollars which had been lost through the fire their enthusiasm dwindled gradually away. Writers on Brook Farm are agreed that the cause of the Com- munity's failure was its advocacy of this as- IN OLD BOSTON 49 sociationist doctrine as preached by Albert Brisbane, and that the occasion to which dampen- ing of enthusiasm may be traced is the burning of the Phalanstery, the outward and visible sign of Fourierism. When Charles Fourier, the son of a French linen draper, died in 1837, his theories were not well known in this country. But Albert Bris- bane got hold of them in England, converted Horace Greeley to them, and, through Greeley, who took a very deep and real interest in Brook Farm, foisted them upon the Brook Farm Community. The old slander that Brook Farm was a " regular free love institution " now began to be repeated in the religious press as well as from mouth to mouth. And unfor- tunately there was just one little remark which Fourier had once made which could be inter- preted as condoning irregularity in some cases. In his study of human nature he believed he had discovered inherently inconstant natures, ex- ceptional men and women who cannot be con- stant to one idea, one hope or one love; and believing this inconstancy to be a normal trait of character with some persons, who are exceptions to the general rule, he simply ac- knowledged the fact and speculated on the result and the position such persons would have in the future ideal society. " But," he said very unmistakably, " the man has no claim 50 ROMANTIC DAYS as discoverer or to the confidence of the world, who advocates such absurdities as community of property, absence of divine worship and rash abolition of marriage." This would have been circumstantial enough for any unprejudiced writer. But then, as now, newspapers battened on articles in defence of " sacred institutions " nobody has attacked, and the impression that Brook Farm encouraged a laxity of moral out- look was not allowed to die. Of course this reacted disastrously upon the school attendance, which was to have been a chief source of income. Moreover, the industries, which had latterly been introduced, did not flourish as it had been fondly hoped they might. The nine miles from Boston proved too far to cart window-frames and the like profitably to market. The organ of Fourierism in this country was the Harbinger, printed at Brook Farm from June, 1845, to June, 1847. Had the paper been used to tell the world the truth about Brook Farm instead of being devoted to the promulga- tion of doctrines already obnoxious to many, the day might have been saved in spite of the fire. As it was, the Harbinger was fatally associated with propaganda considered subversive of the social order. From a literary standpoint it was a great success, however; its poetry and musical criticism were excellent, and the first number contained an admirable translation of George IN OLD BOSTON 51 Sand's " Consuelo," contributed by Francis Gould Shaw, a neighbor and very kind friend of the Brook Farmers. Dr. Codman recalls that Mr. Shaw, on his horse, with his young son, a tiny little fellow, on a pony by his side, often galloped over to the Farm to call. The " little fellow" is now commemorated in Boston's beau- tiful Shaw Memorial, opposite the State House. Another West Roxbury neighbor whom those at the Farm were always glad to welcome was Theodore Parker. Parker was a warm friend of Ripley, and as he was then having troubles and religious perplexities of his own it is prob- able that he found it a great comfort to tramp two miles across the fields and talk things over with one who had been through the mill. On Sundays some members of the Community would usually turn out to hear Parker preach. Sunday was a delightful day at the Com- munity. Hawthorne has reproduced for us something of its flavor in his talk about Eliot's pulpit in The Blithedale Romance, and Dr. Codman has given us a charming snapshot description of a certain occasion when William Henry Channing held a religious service in the nearby beautiful pine woods and his hearers, like the Pilgrims and reformers of old, raised their voices in hymns of praise and listened to a sermon of hopefulness. That must have been a thrilling moment when Channing bade the 52 ROMANTIC DAYS assembled company, seated on the pine-needles at his feet, " to join hands and make a circle, the symbol of universal unity, and of the at-one-ment of all men and women." But life at Brook Farm was more than work and study and preaching. Of pure fun there was always a good deal. As Lindsay Swift has whimsically put it, " Enjoyment was almost from the first a serious pursuit of the Com- munity. It formed a part of the curriculum and was a daily habit of life." Dancing was much in vogue, and after the dishes had been done in the evening it was quite the custom to clear away the dining-room tables and have a joyous hour or two. Then the talk at meals was apt to be good. The immediate effect of a visit from Alcott was the direction to cut pie " from the centre to the periphery," and Mrs. Howe avers that the customary formula at table was, " Is the butter within the sphere of your influence? " The fact that, for a long time, there were more men than women in the Community made things very pleasant for the girls who had housework to do. George William Curtis occasionally trimmed lamps, Dana organized a band of griddle-cake servitors composed of four of the most elegant youths in the Com- munity, and there is a story that one young fellow confessed his passion while helping his IN OLD BOSTON 53 sweetheart at the sink. Of love-making there was quite a little. No less than fourteen happy marriages may be traced to acquaintance begun there. Dr. Codman thinks this was due, in part, to the fact that the girls in their neat costumes — very like that afterwards associated with Mrs. Bloomer — never looked anything but attractive. The men must have made a fine appearance, too, in their tunics of brown linen or Rob Roy flannel. Yet since the financial conditions for marriage were not inviting, only one union was consum- mated at the Farm. This was the wedding of Dwight's sister, Marianne, to John Orvis. Rev. W. H. Channing tied the knot, and the usually eloquent D wight made a speech of just five words, — "I like this making one." Perhaps he put his maturer thought about what he felt that night into his Harbinger poem, one verse of which runs: " Come, let us join hands. Let our two flames mingle In one more pure; Since there is truth in nothing that is single, Be love love's cure." Twenty-five years had been more or less vaguely set by the first Brook Farmers as the length of time which would be necessary to prove their experiment a real success. It had been going a fifth of that period with ever-in- 54 ROMANTIC DAYS creasing numbers and no decrease of enthusiasm when the Phalanstery burned. A year after that event Mr. Ripley was authorized by the creditors and stockholders to " let the farm." The intervening period covers the gradual dissolution of the Community. Quietly, al- most imperceptibly, the members withdrew into the big outside world. Dr. Codman says there was " no sadness of farewell." All had the feeling that they would some day be to- gether again in another Community whose finest building would not burn down just when things were at their best. The farm itself passed into various hands and suffered several vicissitudes of fortune. The Community buildings fell away one by one until today the single authentic survival of that happy time is the structure known as the Mar- garet Fuller Cottage, perhaps because it is the only house at which that famous lady never stopped while visiting Brook Farm. So ends the story of this romantic essay in socialism, this brave adventure in brotherhood which has well been called " the sweetest dream ever dreamed in America." Shall we not in leaving it repeat the benediction Haw- thorne pronounced upon it: "More and more I feel we at Brook Farm struck upon what ought to be a truth. Posterity may dig it up and profit by it." CHAPTER III THE REAL ZENOBIA THAT Hawthorne meant Margaret Fuller by Zenobia is quite as certain as that he meant Brook Farm by the Arcady he so wonderfully depicts in The Blithedale Romance. Of course this is not to say that he even attempted to describe Brook Farm or Margaret Fuller photographically in his story. He was first, last and always the great American romancer. Besides, Margaret was never a member of the community at West Roxbury. She was, indeed, only an occasional guest there. Yet, so persistent is belief in what the world wishes to believe and so muddled does literary history ere long become that a learned German work has actually been written under the title Margaret Fuller und Brook Farm. And Brook Farm pilgrims inquire to this day " for the pool in which Margaret Fuller was drowned! " Whether absent or present Margaret Fuller's influence pervaded the place however, — just / 56 ROMANTIC DAYS as her influence pervaded all the transcendental aspiration and all the literary activity of her time. 1 Necessarily, therefore, we must rehearse her story in a book covering the Boston of this period. The accident that she was born in Cambridge, did her largest literary work in New York and found the culmination of her life in Italy makes no real difference. For the best that Boston people were and felt and thought in the nineteenth century they owe — very largely — to Margaret Fuller. Yet Poe called Margaret " that detestable old maid," Carlyle was similarly scathing and uncomplimentary in his comment on her, and Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote down in his Roman Journal a sketch of her character, afterwards indiscreetly published by his son, which, if taken by itself, would brand as arrant idiots all those wise and cultivated folk who were proud to be known as Margaret's admiring friends. For, said Hawthorne, " Margaret Fuller had a strong and coarse nature which she had done her utmost to refine with infinite pains; but of course it could only be 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 1 " Her personality never ceased to hover about Concord, even after her death," wrote Rose Hawthorne Lathrop. " She is a part of its fascination." IN OLD BOSTON 57 was a great humbug — of course with much talent and moral reality, or else she could never have been so great a humbug. . . . Towards the last there appears to have been a total collapse in poor Margaret, morally and intellectually; and tragic as her catas- trophe was, Providence was after all kind in putting her and her clownish husband and her child on board that fated ship." Julian Hawthorne, certainly, was not kind in giving to the public (in 1884) this unflattering estimate of a woman, long dead. Happily, though, Margaret had still surviving several friends who were eager and able to set her right with the world. James Freeman Clarke, who had been one of her intimates, promptly published in the Independent an account of her relations with the Hawthornes which makes one feel very sure that the great romancer intended only for his private note-book this estimate of one to whom he had been a friend. 1 His gentle wife really loved Margaret and he gave the appearance of doing so. As witness this letter written by Miss Sophia Peabody just before her marriage to Hawthorne: 2 1 Dr. Clarke's article embodied, also, the suggestion of one of Hawthorne's intimates that the paragraph in the Roman Journal was really a sketch for a future imaginative character and not meant to be taken, as it too often has been, for Haw- thorne's secret feeling about Margaret Fuller and her claims. 2 Quoted by J. F. Clarke in the Independent. 58 ROMANTIC DAYS "Dear Most Noble Margaret: — I have now something to tell you which I know will give you great pleasure. The decision was not made till last evening; and I feel that you are entitled, through our love and profound regard for you, to be told directly. Mr. Hawthorne — in plain words the splendor of the world — and I are going to dwell in Concord at Dr. Ripley's old manse. . . . We shall be married in June, the month of roses and of perfect bloom. " Mr. Hawthorne, last evening, in the midst of his emotions, so deep and absorbing, after deciding, said that Margaret can now, when she visits Mr. Emerson, spend part of the time with us. . . . " Your very true and loving friend " Sophia." If Hawthorne had always disliked Margaret Fuller, as his son Julian contends, he would scarcely have paused, in the ecstasy of betrothal, to make plans that she should visit at his future home. Moreover, the following passage in his American Note-Booh 1 shows that their relations actually turned out to be those of capital friends: " After leaving Mr. Emerson's I returned through the woods, and entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining 1 American Note-Books, I, 221. IN OLD BOSTON 59 near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with some strange title which I did not understand and have forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret reclining on the ground and me standing by her side. He made some remark upon the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the crows whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the experiences of early childhood whose in- fluence remains upon the character after the recollection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains from a distance, and the view from their summits; and about other matter of high and low philosophy." One does not talk of these things a long summer afternoon through with a person whom one does not at least like. Yet Margaret Fuller had a side to her nature with which Hawthorne could only coolly sympa- 60 ROMANTIC DAYS thize at best. She was a superb lover! Of her culture much has been written. Of her ex- traordinary conversational gifts the descriptions have been so manifold and so awe-inspiring as quite sufficiently to have prejudiced against her the many who hate " haranguing women." But only in Higginson's biography of her is any emphasis laid upon her passionate love of humanity. And even there this phase is merely touched upon in passing because the task which had been set for the writer (in the American Men of Letters Series) was that of studying Margaret Fuller as a literary woman. Loving service was, however, far more the expression of her inmost personality than was writing or the pursuit of that culture with which she is chiefly associated by her contemporaries. Had this not been the case she would never have stood by the side of Mazzini, as she did in Italy's pitiful struggle for independence; nor would young patriots, dying in the hospital, have called for her that they might clasp her hands and cry " Viva l'ltalia " with their expiring breath. At the very moment indeed when Lowell was satirizing her in his Fable for Critics as one who "... will take an old notion and make it her own By saying it o'er in her Sibylline tone, Or persuade you 'tis something tremendously deep By repeating it so as to put you to sleep," IN OLD BOSTON 61 she was leading the life of heroic action for which she had long been yearning. Margaret Fuller was born, May 23, 1810, in a house on Cherry Street, Cambridgeport, which is still standing. She was drowned, with her husband and child, off the coast of Fire Island soon after she had passed her fortieth birth- day and when her real work in the world had only just begun. Yet the impress of her personality was such, and her book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century so remarkably pro- phetic, that hers may well be regarded as the most successful woman-life of her century, with the single exception of that which gave to the world the slave-freeing Uncle Tom's Cabin. As a child she was subjected by her father to a forcing-house system of education which, as she herself has said, " made her a youthful prodigy by day and, by night, a victim of spec- tral illusions, nightmare and somnambulism." As one reads her journal one's heart aches with pity for the little girl who, having recited Virgil to her father, late in the evening, dreamed, when she came to sleep, of horses trampling over her and of trees that dripped with blood. Yet Virgil, Horace and Ovid were early num- bered among her dear friends " and reading became a habit and a passion." Shakespeare, too, soon claimed her devotion, the first play 62 ROMANTIC DAYS she assimilated being that which tells the tragic tale of two young people in Verona. How largely the appeal which Romeo and Juliet made to this child was due to the impassioned love lines we are not told; but since Margaret Fuller was a very ardent creature and was soon to experience the first love of her young life, there is little question that this aspect of the drama must have moved. her pro- foundly. All her life long she loved many people with a deep absorbing devotion which, as she herself has said, " lavished away her strength." After a lapse of many years, she wrote of her first friend: " My thoughts were fixed on her with all the force of my nature. It was my first real interest in my kind and it engrossed me wholly. ..." She was twelve at the time. Two inexorable descriptions of the maiden Margaret have come down to us. One sets her before us as she appeared at the ball given by her father to President Adams : a young girl of sixteen " with a very plain face, half shut eyes and hair curled all over her head; she was laced so tightly, by reason of stoutness, that she had to hold her arms back as if they were pinioned; she was dressed in a badly cut, low necked pink silk, with white muslin over it; and she danced quadrilles very awkwardly, being withal so near-sighted that she could IN OLD BOSTON 63 hardly see her partner." Again, Oliver Wendell Holmes, with whose class she may be said to have " danced through college " — to quote Howells' phrase, — tells us graphically of her " long and flexile neck, arching and undulating in strange, sinuous movements, which one who loved her would compare to a swan, and one who loved her not to those of the ophidian who tempted our common mother." There were always many who loved Margaret Fuller and many who loved her not. No woman ever inspired such deep feelings both of attrac- tion and of dislike. James Freeman Clarke, writing of Margaret and her friendships, says that the persons she might most wish to know often retired from her and avoided her. But she was " sagacious of her quarry " and never suffered herself to be repelled by this. She saw when anyone belonged to her and never rested until she came into possession of her property. This is so reminiscent of certain passages in Emerson's essay on Friendship that it seems natural to remark, just at this point, that the Sage of Concord was one of Margaret's most true and devoted friends. " I became acquainted with her," he writes, " in 1835 . . . when she came to spend a fortnight with my wife. I still remember the first half hour of her conversation. She was then twenty-six years old. She had a face and 64 ROMANTIC DAYS frame that would indicate fulness and tenacity of life. She was rather under the middle height; her complexion was fair with strong fair hair. She was then, as always, carefully and becom- ingly dressed and of lady-like self-possession. For the rest, her appearance had nothing pre- possessing. Her extreme plainness — a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids, — the nasal tone of her voice, — all repelled; and I said to myself, we shall never get far." Yet they became dear and lifelong friends, writing to each other constantly and passing long afternoons in the close intimacy of kindred minds during her frequent and protracted visits to Concord. Emerson was seven years her senior and very grave. Yet to him, rather oddly, Margaret showed herself a wit; of all the people who have written of her he alone points out that she possessed a huge fund of anecdotes and drolleries and that what most call satire in her was really due only to a super- abundance of animal spirits. He was very proud to become her close friend, for he says, " she had drawn to her every superior young man or young woman she had met. . . . " When I first knew her," he continues, " she wore this circle of friends as a necklace of dia- monds about her neck. . . . The confidences given her were their best and she held them to them. She was an active inspiring companion IN OLD BOSTON 65 and correspondent, and all the art, the thought and the nobleness in New England seemed at that moment related to her and she to it. She was everywhere a welcome guest. The houses of her friends in town and country were open to her and every hospitable attention eagerly offered. Her arrival was a holiday. ... Of personal influence she had, I think, more than any other person I ever knew." Margaret Fuller honestly believed that not only between men and women can there be deep, passionate love. Witness the following passages from her journal and her letters: " At Mr. G's we looked over prints the whole evening. Nothing fixed my attention so much as a large engraving of Madame R^camier in her boudoir. I have often thought over the intimacy between her and Madame De Stael. It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman and a man with a man. I like to be sure of it, . . . for I loved for a time with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel. Her face was always gleaming before me. ... I do not love her now with passion, but I still feel towards her as I can to no other woman. I thought of all this as I looked at Madame Re'camier." While sustaining all this remarkable current of affection Margaret was earning her living in the only way then open to women — by school- 66 ROMANTIC DAYS teaching. Her father had died and there was a brood of young brothers to be educated. She was very glad, therefore, to avail herself of the chance which came to her, through Emerson, to teach (1836) in the school which Bronson Alcott had opened in Boston, in a part of the big stone building on that corner of Temple Place now for several years past given over to the R. H. Stearns Company for their headquarters. She was a welcome guest at the choicest parties of which Boston could boast, and we are indebted to her for this picture of the " society " of the day. " Last night I took my boldest peep into the ' Gigman ' world of Boston. I had not been to a large party before, and had only seen said world in half -boots. So I thought, as it was an occasion in which I felt real interest, to wit, a fete given by Mrs. Thorndike for my beautiful Susan, I would look at it for once in satin slippers. Dr. Channing meant to go but was too weary when the hour came. I spent the early part of the evening in reading bits of Dante with him and talking about the material sublime till half -past nine, when I went with Mrs. C. and graceful Mary. " It was very pretty to look at. So many fair maidens dressed as if they had stepped out of their grandmothers' picture frames, and youths with their long locks, suitable to repre- sent pages if not nobles. Signor Figaro was IN OLD BOSTON 67 there also. . . . And Daniel the Great (Web- ster), not however, when I saw him, engaged in an operation peculiarly favorable to his style of beauty, to wit, eating oysters. Theo- dore Parker was there, and introduced to me. I had some pleasant talk with him, but before I could get to Spinoza, somebody seized on me and carried me off to quite another S, — to supper. On the whole, it all pleased my eye; my fashionable fellow-creatures were very civil to me, and I went home glad to have looked at this slide in the magic lantern also." A form of dissipation much more in Mar- garet's line than fancy-dress balls were the meetings of the Transcendental Club and the famous " Conversations " which began (November 6, 1839) at the rooms on West Street where Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody main- tained at this time a circulating library and foreign bookshop. This place had become a kind of Transcendental Exchange where many who had no thought of purchasing books dropped in for the sheer delight that it was to " talk of many things" with the keen-witted little lady who was the proprietor of the shop. 1 No better setting could have been devised for the proposed classes, subscriptions to which were ob- tained through the circu T ation of a letter setting 1 The idea of the Church of the Disciples first occurred to Dr. Clarke in this room. 68 ROMANTIC DAYS forth " the advantages of a weekly meeting for conversation " in a class which should " supply a point of union to well-educated and thinking women, in a city, which, with great pretensions to mental refinement, boasts at present nothing of the kind." Twenty -five cultivated Boston women were present at the first meeting of Miss Fuller's class, which soon grew to be a famous Boston institution, meeting weekly for five winters to consider everything from vanity to soci- ology. The sessions opened at eleven in the morning, ten or a dozen, besides the leader, usually taking active part in the talk. The leader's own account of the first days, as sent to Emerson and by him quoted in the Mem- oirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, is as follows: " 25th November, 1839. — My class is pros- perous. I was so fortunate as to rouse at once the tone of simple earnestness, which can scarcely, when once awakened, cease to vibrate." No reports of the " Conversations " are extant, but this sprightly picture of the eighth meeting, as sent by one who was there to a friend in New Haven, is very pleasantly illumi- nating: " Christmas made a holiday for Miss Fuller's class, but it met on Saturday at noon. . . . Margaret, beautifully dressed (don't de- spise that, for it made a fine picture) , presided with more dignity and grace than I had thought *« J Jl » CO a O 5a « o 52 s '-» J J *» » fa s> fa e ■« Eh W e § 9 < Bh 3 « ^Ei f^M w £ o o Eh a ST' f * -S < Ch mil fc H H J W Ph £ P Eh d ■". O o < CO h3 h o fci. f > Eh m H K « Eh ' / < oq H & A Z '' « c *■ " '.-■ s a g wK-' ■ H H Eh K . . Eh O o O 02 tfr ' -V