Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
volcanic release from sterile conformity; and it summoned the awakening
soul to go forth and conquer the world for righteousness. Millennialism
is the prophetic hope of a primitive faith. To its disciples it is
certain of fulfillment because God’s promises are certain; but to
practical minds, unconvinced that Biblical phrases are authentic divine
contracts, any expectation of the speedy coming of the Kingdom of God
seems grotesque. The millennial enthusiast is a fair butt of ridicule,
and the perfectionists came in for a large share. It was Lowell who
leveled at the militant godliness of the new sects the wittiest attack.
Forgetting his English history he found himself puzzled, and being
puzzled he allowed himself to become ill-natured. His clever sentences
explode smartly about his subject, but there is no light in them.[453]
III
Upon another venture in Utopianism, and one far better known, the years
have laid a pleasant, idyllic haze, softening the prosaic outlines and
clothing them with romance. Brook Farm has been singularly fortunate
in the posthumous fame that has dealt with it so tenderly as to
transmute it into poetry. By virtue of the light reflected upon it by
the transcendental illumination and the literary skill it commanded,
the little communal settlement at West Roxbury has come to be regarded
as a homely Yankee pastoral, a sort of May Day adventure in brown
holland tunics, an inspiring quest of the ideal amongst furrows and
manures. It is a social poem fashioned out of Yankee homespun. No
hint of rude social leveling is associated with its aims; even its
communism suggests no stigma. Of the dozens of communistic experiments
which marked the first half of the nineteenth century in America,
few were native in origin or ventured upon in New England. They were
mostly undertaken by old-world groups, chiefly German, who sought cheap
land and a free environment for primitive religious experiments. But
Brook Farm was true Yankee, using the familiar dialect to clothe its
unfamiliar thoughts, and escaping the prejudice that confronts the
uncouth and alien; and in consequence the vagaries that all New England
once laughed at have become enshrined as a cherished New England
possession.
Perfectionism and Brook Farm embodied diverse phases of the
renaissance and made appeal to different temperaments. Fellow-ship
founded on common ownership and communal labor was an ideal that
left the religious mystic cold, whereas the anarchistic holiness of
perfectionism seemed to the Brook Farmers grotesque. Present economic
maladjustment appeared to the latter the fundamental problem of the
times. They were deeply concerned for the future that must emerge
from the chaotic individualism of the present. Unless society were
brought back to a wiser understanding of values, they foresaw only
chaos; and so in a small way they set about a great experiment.
Brook Farm grew out of the impact of the industrial revolution upon
the social conscience of New England. Industrialism and social
speculation were contemporary developments. The first cotton mill in
New England was established at Lawrence in 1822, and the following
year the Merrimac Mills were established in the newly founded city of
Lowell. By absorbing the vast Irish immigration the factory system
brought increasing wealth to Beacon Street homes, but it brought other
consequences in its train which Beacon Street carelessly overlooked.
How those consequences affected more sensitive and intelligent
minds--men like William Henry Channing, Theodore Parker and George
Ripley--is suggested by their eager talk of mutualism, association,
coöperation, as potential cures for the growing evils of competition,
discussions never before heard in New England. Describing the state
of mind of the Boston group of social thinkers, John Weiss offers the
following explanation:
A mutualism to secure culture and material welfare was consistently
desired by those who believed in a community of the sources of
moral and spiritual welfare. The social evils which result from
the struggles of competitive labour seemed to outweigh all its
benefits. Modern civilization was thought to be the culmination
of isolated selfishness, madly struggling from bread to luxury
and refined delights, which the strongest and least scrupulous
only could acquire. Prisons and punishments were the defences of
this artificial system, to repress instincts that were moral till
they become illegal. Hospitals and benevolent institutions were
also mere defences to absorb as much misery as possible ere it
became malicious, to get the social gangrene reduced to limits.
The providential impulses of the human being were forced to act in
subversive ways and directions, when they might all be harmonized
by their own inherent laws, and the blessing of mutualism succeed
to the bane of antagonism. Each man ought to be the guarantee
to all men against disorder; the carefully adjusted elements of
a selfishness which threatens continually to blow the social
fabric to atoms, would become not only innoxious but salutary in
its proper combination; and a new civilization might arise in
fair proportion from the serial development and movement of all
possible human tendencies. Then all men and women might labor and
be happy; all might earn with a minimum of toil a competence of
culture. Property would be the ally of the whole instead of the
oppressor of the many; and crime would disappear, because the
instincts would no longer have motives to be criminal. (_Life and
Correspondence of Theodore Parker_, Vol. I, pp. 106-107.)
The transcendental basis of such social speculation is evident enough.
The new social thought was transcendental thought. A common belief
in the excellence of human instincts drew these idealists together;
but when it came to the vexing problem of reconciling individualism
and mutualism, creating an economic fellowship out of electric
personalities, the more ardent transcendentalists took fright and
prudently kept without the gates of Brook Farm. Organization seemed
to them the fatal poison in the bottom of the cup. When a community
was planned in Massachusetts in 1841, by liberal Christians of the
Universalist sect, a writer in the _Dial_ subjected the proposal to
sharp criticism:
A true community can be founded on nothing short of faith in the
universal man, as he comes from the hands of the Creator, with
no law over his liberty but the eternal ideas that lie at the
foundation of his being.... The final cause of human society is the
unfolding of the individual man, into every form of perfection,
without let or hindrance, according to the inward nature of each.
(Quoted by Frothingham in _Transcendentalism, etc._, p. 157.)
Such a view is anarchistic rather than collectivistic, and as embodied
in Alcott’s Fruitlands, it may be regarded as the transcendental type
of Utopia. Towards all systems of socialism the transcendentalists
were instinctively hostile, as implying an industrial regimentation;
and in planning Brook Farm, Ripley rejected industrialism and reduced
regimentation to a minimum. With the agrarian background of Brook Farm
the transcendentalists were in hearty sympathy, quite oblivious of the
fact that agrarianism could offer no solution for industrialism; but
they balked at the principle of task allotment as a hindrance to the
unfolding of individual differences. Upon the later introduction of
the Fourier Phalanx their doubts grew into certainty, and they lost
their faith in the experiment. Of all the transcendentalists William
Henry Channing was clearly the most confirmed associationist, except
perhaps Ripley; to the end of his life he remained a socialist, active
in collectivistic movements and clinging fondly to his memory of Brook
Farm as a “great college of social students.” But few of his fellow
transcendentalists shared his faith.
This growing skepticism of organization is clearly shown in the
comments of Emerson’s _Journals_. In October, 1840, he set down his
first reaction to the plan as follows:
Yesterday George and Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller and Alcott
discussed here the Social Plans. I wish to be convinced, to be
thawed, to be made nobly mad by the kindlings before my eye of
a new dawn of human piety. But this scheme was arithmetic and
comfort; this was a hint borrowed from the Tremont House and United
States Hotel; a rage in our poverty and politics to live rich and
gentlemanlike, an anchor to leeward against a change of weather; a
prudent forecast on the probable issue of the great questions of
Pauperism and Poverty. And not once could I be inflamed, but sat
aloof and thoughtless; my voice faltered and fell. It was not the
cave of persecution which is the palace of spiritual power, but
only a room in the Astor House hired for the Transcendentalists. I
do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little
larger. I wish to break all prisons. I have not yet conquered
my own house. It irks and repents me. Shall I raise the siege
of this hencoop, and march baffled away to a pretended siege of
Babylon? It seems to me that so to do were to dodge the problem I
am set to solve, and to hide my impotency in the thick of a crowd.
(_Journals_, Vol. V, pp. 473-474.)
In January, 1844, noting the spontaneity of life at Brook Farm, he drew
the conclusion “that in the arrangements at Brook Farm, as out of them,
it is the person, not the communist, that avails” (_ibid._, Vol. VI,
p. 492). With the introduction of Fourierist organization he became
sharply critical. Neither in Fourier nor in Owen did he see any hope.
Fourier learned from him [Owen] all the truth he had, and the rest
of his system was imagination, and the imagination of a banker. The
Owen and Fourier plans bring no _a priori_ convictions. They are
come at merely by counting and arithmetic. All the fine _aperçus_
are for individualism. The Spartan broth, the hermit’s cell,
the lonely farmer’s life are poetic; but the Phalanstery, the
“Self-supporting Village,” are culinary and mean. (_Ibid._, Vol.
VIII, pp. 134, 135.)
And a few days later he gave his final judgment, “Dear heart, take
it sadly home to thee, that there will and can be no coöperation”--a
judgment that explains the clever phrase with which he demolished Brook
Farm, “It is the Age of Reason in a patty-pan.”
The transcendentalist with his Puritan conscience could understand and
sympathize with the perfectionist zeal for universal righteousness;
but collectivistic systems of economy seemed alien and a community of
goods uncongenial to his Yankee individualism. Albert Brisbane, the
American apostle of Fourierism, might bring George Ripley, the least
individualistic and most prosaic of the transcendental group, to his
views of organization; but he got on badly with the others who were
quite too fluid to take a mechanical set. In consequence it was not at
Brook Farm but at the North American Phalanx that the French system
found its fairest experiment and met with its solidest success.
IV
With the awakening interest in social problems the conscience of New
England could not longer remain indifferent to slavery. The incoming
of French humanitarianism, the spread of idealistic sociology under
the teachings of Unitarianism, above all the stimulus of English
Abolitionism that provided argument and example in the freeing of
slaves in the British West Indies, wore away the indifferentism
that had calloused the mind of New England; and with the decay of
her provincial particularism the conscience of New England slowly
roused itself. The arrogance of the slave party nowhere else stirred