The by the Dial. better. If any one word could certainly arouse their symadvocated pathetic enthusiasm, it was the word "reform." Two distinct reforms the Dial fervently advocated. The more specific, which reached its highest development later, was the abolition of slavery, a measure important enough in the intellectual history of New England to deserve separate discussion.* The more general, which developed, flourished, and failed decidedly before the antislavery movement became a political force, was that effort to reform the structure of society which found expression in the community of Brook Farm. Brook In 1841, a number of people,—all in sympathy with the Transcendentalists, and most of them writers for the Dial, -bought a farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, ten or twelve miles from Boston. Here they proposed to found a community, where everybody should work to support the establishment and where there should be plenty of leisure for scholarly and edifying pleasure. Incidentally there was to be a school, where children were to help in the work of the community. The experiment began. At least during its earlier years, Brook Farm attracted considerable notice, and the sympathetic attention of many people afterward more eminent than its actual members. Hawthorne came thither for a while, and his Blithedale Romance is an idealized picture of the establishment. Emerson, though never an actual member, was there off and on, always with shrewd, kindly interest. Thither, too, occasionally came Margaret Fuller, whom some have supposed to be the original of Hawthorne's Zenobia. Brook Farm, of course, was only a Yankee expression *See Chapter viii. of the world-old impulse to get rid of evil by establishing life on principles different from those of economic law. From earliest times, theoretical writers have proposed various forms of communistic existence as a solution of the problems presented by the sin and suffering of human beings in any dense population. The principles definitely adopted by the Brook Farm community in 1844 were those of Fourier, a French philosopher, who sketched out a rather elaborate ideal society. The basis of his system was that people should separate themselves into small phalanxes, each mutually helpful and self-supporting. This conception so commended itself to the Brook Farmers that, at an expense decidedly beyond their means, they actually built a phalanstery, or communal residence, as nearly as might be on the lines which Fourier suggested. tion. Brook Farm inevitably went to pieces. Its members were not skilled enough in agriculture to make farming pay; and, although after the Dial stopped they managed Disintegrato publish several numbers of a similar magazine called The Harbinger, they found manual labor too exhausting to permit much activity of mind. They also discerned with more and more certainty that when you get together even so small a company of human beings as are comprised in one of Fourier's phalanxes, you cannot avoid uncomfortable incompatibility of temper. In 1847 their new phalanstery, which had cost ten thousand dollars and had almost exhausted their funds, was burned down; it was not insured, and before long the whole community had to break up. The Dial had come to its end three years before. Transcendentalism proved unable long to express itself in any coherent form. Yet many of those who were connected with Brook Farm never relapsed into commonplace. GEORGE RIPLEY (1802-1880), the chief spirit of the community, became the literary critic of the New York Tribune, with which he retained his connection to the end of a long and honorable life. CHARLES ANDERSON DANA (1819-1897), also for a while connected with the Tribune, finally became editor of the New York Sun. GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (1824-1892), who became associated with the periodicals published by the Harpers, maintained more of the purely ideal quality of his early days. JOHN SULLIVAN DWIGHT (1813-1839) returned to Boston, where, as editor of the Journal of Music, he did rather more than any one else to make the city a And so in various ways Brook vital centre of musical art. Farm faded into the memory of an earnest, sincere, beautiful effort to make human life better by practising the principles of ideal truth. This New England Transcendentalism developed most vigorously in those years when the intellectual life of New York was embodied in the Knickerbocker school of writers. By contrasting those two neighboring phases of thought we can see how unalterably New England kept the trace of its Puritan origin, eagerly aspiring to knowledge of absolute truth. The literature of the Knicker bocker school was never more than a literature of pleasure. Summary. Even the lesser literature of Transcendentalism, not to speak of its permanent phases, constantly and earnestly aspired to be a literature of both knowledge and power, seeking in the eternities for new ranges of truth which should broaden, sweeten, strengthen, and purify mankind. In brief, the Transcendentalism of New England was not, like that of Germany, a system of pure philosophy. Nor was it, like that of England, primarily a phase of literature. New England Transcendentalism was above all a revolution in conduct, a crusade for the spontaneous expression in every possible form of that individual human nature which Calvinism had thought deserving of confinement and rebuke. Life. VI RALPH WALDO EMERSON REFERENCES WORKS: Works, Riverside Edition, 12 vols., Boston: Houghton, 18831893. A new ("Centenary") edition, with additional text and notes, is now being published (Boston: Houghton). BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: *J. E. Cabot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Memoir, 2 vols., Boston: Houghton, 1887; *O. W. Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Boston: Houghton, 1885 (AML); Richard Garnett, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, London: Scott, 1888 (Gw); Matthew Arnold, "Emerson, " in Discourses in America; J. R. Lowell, "Emerson the Lecturer," in Lowell's Works, Riverside Edition, I, 349 ff.; J. J. Chapman, "Emerson, Sixty Years After," Atlantic Monthly, January-February, 1897, reprinted in Emerson and Other Essays, New York: Scribner, 1898; *Stedman, Poets of America, Chapter v. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Garnett, Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, pp. i-xiv (at the end); Foley, 80-85. SELECTIONS: *Carpenter, 194-212; Duyckinck, II, 366–372; Griswold, Prose, 442-446; Griswold, Poetry, 299-304; Stedman, 90-101; *Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 128-166. As time passes, it grows more and more clear that by far the most eminent figure among the Transcendentalists, if not indeed in all the literary history of America, was Ralph WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882). People not yet past middle age still remember his figure, which so beautifully embodied the gracious dignity, the unpretentious scope, and the unassuming distinction of those who led the New England Renaissance. Born at Boston and descended from a long line of ministers, he was as truly a New England Brahmin as was Cotton Mather, a century and a half |
