Brook Farm

“ Compared with other efforts upon which time and money and industry are lavished, measured by Colorado and Nevada speculations, by California gold-washing, by oil-boring, and by the Stock Exchange, Brook Farm was certainly a very reasonable and practical enterprise, worthy of the hope and aid of generous men and women. The friendships that were formed there were enduring. The devotion to noble endeavor, the sympathy with what is most useful to men, the kind patience and constant charity that were fostered there, have been no more lost than grain dropped upon the field. ”

“ Our author is no farmer, except as every country gentleman is, yet the kindly slope from the rear of the house to a little brook, which, passing to the calm Concord beyond, washes the edge of his land, yields him at least occasional beans and pease—or some friend, agriculturally enthusiastic and an original Brook-Farmer, experiments with guano in the garden, and produces melons and other vines with a success that relieves Brook Farm from every slur of inadequate practical genius. ”

“ There, also, was the delegation from Brook Farm, in whose appearance it was plain to see that in Arcadia the hair was worn long, that the stiff collar and cravat were repudiated, and that woollen blouses were a mute protest against the body coats of a selfish and competitive civilization. Those young fellows walked in from Brook Farm and out again. They made nothing of ten miles or so each way under the winter stars. ”

“ The never failing succession of entertainments especially in summer were enjoyed to the full by the happy Farmers, but it was conversation, the mutual exchange of bright ideas that afforded their chiefest enjoyment. Not literature, not the drama, not the dance, but the fascination of human speech in its best employ attracted and held their enthralled attention. It is impossible to report in writing even the heads of this discourse, pervading as it did the atmosphere of Brook Farm as currents of electricity pervade the air in breaths. ”

“ The forest has melted away before the hand of steady industry, and we pass by cultivated fields on our way to the farm of Mr. Ainslie. The clearings have extended till very few trees obstruct our view as we gaze over the farms of the numerous settlers, which are now separated by fences instead of forest trees. But the loveliest spot of all is Hazel-Brook farm. The farm-house of Robert Ainslie, enlarged and remodelled according to his increased means, is painted a pure white, and very pleasant it looks to the eye, through the branches of the shade-trees which nearly surround it. ”

“ The swarm in the Hive had exemplified the poet’s idea of the tumultuous privacy of storm fairly well as to the tumult, but as to the privacy, that was what could be had in a house overcrowded with excited young folk. Frolic and fun were to the fore, and everybody bore the troubles of that tempestuous evening with high good humor; one weary, cross and fretful little chap being left out of the account. Left out he was, for sure. Always at Brook Farm, anyone not strictly in it, to use a phrase of later date, was absolutely out of it. ”

“ Brook Farm was a solidarity, a company united to put in practice certain principles and to accomplish certain results, and only those were wanted who could enter into the spirit of the movement and aid in carrying on the great work. Those who did not help, hindered, and to hinder the task of reforming society could not be permitted. As with the community, so also with the school. ”

“ The Brook Farm Association was at first organized as a joint stock company. The stated objects of this company were the conduct of a school, a farm, a printing and publishing business and other light industries. The unstated purpose was the carrying out of a social experiment; a practical attempt to form a community living what we would now call the Simple Life. ”

“ Brook Farm, however, was not the only Community which was founded by the disciples of the ‘Newness.’ There was one established in 1843 on a farm called Fruitlands, in the town of Harvard, about forty miles from Boston. This was of much more ultra and grotesque character 38than Brook Farm. Here were gathered the men and women who based their hopes of reforming the world and of making all things new on dress and on diet. They revived the Pythagorean, the Essenian, and the Monkish notions of Asceticism with some variations and improvements peculiarly American. ”

“ Brook Farm, being the most tangible and visible product of this whole New England movement, has come to stand in the public mind for a perfect incarnation of the transcendental spirit. This is an error. Brook Farm was characteristic of transcendentalism in its belief that the material factors of life should be subservient to the spiritual and ideal and in its conviction that right thinking would lead toward better social conditions—in the end, indeed, to a perfect society. ”

“ Brook Farm was a Community established in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1841. “The head of the Community was George Ripley, formerly a Unitarian clergyman in Boston, who had been in 1836 one of the Founders of the Transcendental Club with Emerson, Hedge, Alcott, and others. Associated with Ripley in the Brook Farm enterprise were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles A. Dana, John S. Dwight, and other well-known men. They bought a farm comprising some 200 acres. ”

“ The Ripleys, as has been said, had al [Pg 295] ready discovered Brook Farm, a pleasant place, varied in contour, with pine woods close at hand, the Charles River within easy distance, and plenty of land—whether of a sort to produce paying crops or not they were later to learn. That winter Ripley wrote to Emerson: "We propose to take a small tract of land, which, under skilful husbandry, uniting the garden and the farm, will be adequate to the subsistence of the families ”

“ At Brook Farm, however, there was small chance to indulge in regrets and the Christmas trouble had to give place to more immediate interests. The Farmers were, first of all, Transcendentalists which is to say they were philosophers and not given to repining. ”

“ That was a good ending of what had been a threatening phase of my first experience at Brook Farm.
CHAPTER VI.
ENTERTAINMENTS
Our slide down the Knoll proved very popular, and, with occasional repairs, lasted all winter, making a welcome addition to our outdoor diversions during the season when these were necessarily limited. Living in the open was one of the salutary customs of the community, a custom faithfully followed even in comparatively bad weather. Rain or shine, snow or blow, save only in real storms, every one spent a good many of the twenty-four hours under the broad skies. ”

“ His little world seems large to him and all his experiences great in their importance. A ten-acre meadow appears like a boundless prairie, and a half-mile wide piece of woods an unbounded forest.
On one side of the farm is a clear stream known as Ragged Brook, that, starting among the foothills of a low mountain range, laughs and chatters, leaps and tumbles, down the hills, through the gorges and over the ledges as if endowed with life. Since he is not blessed with brothers or sisters, this, together with the woods, the birds and squirrels, becomes his companion. ”

“ They loved him and admired him and were proud of him; and his geniality and tender sympathy, his ample knowledge of things as well as of books, drew to him all ages and sexes and conditions.
"The society at Brook Farm was composed of every kind of person. There were the ripest scholars, men and women of the most aesthetic culture and accomplishment, young farmers, seamstresses, mechanics, preachers—the industrious, the lazy, the conceited, the sentimental. ”

“ We could not part with either of the houses in which we have lived at Brook Farm, without a sadness like that which we should feel at the departure of a bosom friend. The destruction of our edifice makes no essential change in our pursuits. ”

“ In 1847 the experiment, having proved a failure financially, was given up.
“Life at Brook Farm, especially during the first years of enthusiasm, had idyllic and romantic aspects. In its palmiest state the Community, including school children and boarders, numbered about 150 souls. Kitchen and table were in common; very little help was hired, but philosophers, clergymen, and poets worked at the humblest tasks, milking cows, pitching manure, cleaning stables, etc., while cultivated women cooked, washed, ironed, and waited on table. ”

“ It was an excellent domain, with water power, splendid fruit-growing land, sufficiently near New York market for an undoubted sale of all its products. Greeley admired the talent and the social life at Brook Farm, but he thought that the leaders engaged at the North American Phalanx had a more practical turn, and their soil was wonderfully better fitted for farming, which always seems to be the hobby of reformers. ”

“ The hard and the disagreeable tasks now assigned to servants, would in the Phalanx be performed on a large scale by machinery.
There were no servants at Brook Farm. Every one served but no one was hired to serve. Household drudgery was reduced to the lowest practicable minimum. We did not live on the fat of the land, and that made a wonderful difference in the kitchen work,—that was at first. Later we had to employ farm-laborers and mechanics and as they needed meat for strong men, it became necessary for greasy Joan to keel the pot, and Joan was imported for that purpose. ”

“ Of these failures, the best known is Brook Farm, an intellectual community founded in 1841 by George Ripley at West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Six years later the project was abandoned and is now remembered as an example of the futility of trying to leaven a world of realism by means of an atom of transcendental idealism. In a sense, however, Brook Farm typifies this period of transition. It was a time of vagaries and longings. People seemed to be conscious of the fact that a new social solidarity was dawning. ”

“ Not being accustomed to Brook Farm’s quick changes, my little talk with Dr. Ripley made me a few minutes late at the Knoll, where I found two-score or so of children and half as many grown-ups engaged in a snowball scrimmage. Inquiring for Angus, I turned over the toboggan to him for the first ride. He asked if the slide was all right, if I had made the jump over the brook, and if Mr. Hosmer was badly hurt. As he was a little backward about coming forward, so to speak, I took the initiative, inviting any girl to join me who had courage enough to face the music. ”

“ We were idlers forever singing and fiddling and dancing when honest folk were at work. This criticism was in part true. We certainly did devote more time and more attention to recreation than was customary among working folk. The two half-holidays of the week were set apart for diversions. All care and toil came to a full stop, and everyone was free to do exactly as he or she pleased. Usually all hands pleased to be together, after the Brook Farm fashion, everyone joining in whatever scheme of amusement was on foot for the day. ”

“ It took but little to amuse, sometimes, for on one of the beautiful summer days at nooning time, a group of men were resting in the shade of the arbor that was on an island artificially made in the brook below the terraces in front of the Hive, breathing the pure, balmy air of outdoors instead of the indoor air of the workshop, reclining on the thick greensward, when some two or three essayed the not very difficult feat of jumping the merrily running brook, from embankment to embankment, and dared Tirrell, one of the number, to follow. ”

“ But the individuality of the old Brook Farm was gone. The association was not rescued even from financial troubles by the change. With increasing difficulty it kept on till the spring of 1846, when a fire which destroyed its nearly completed “phalanstery” brought losses which caused, or certainly gave the final ostensible reason for, its dissolution. The experiment was abandoned in the autumn of 1847. ”

“ He belonged to a well-to-do family in New York, engaged in the manufacture of flour specialties, but the restraints and the questionable practices of business were irksome to him, and he eagerly sought a home among the congenial spirits who were trying to live a higher life on their sterile little property in West Roxbury. Being one of the thoroughgoing kind, he had learned all the uses of flour from beginning to end, and this knowledge he gladly made available as baker-general for the Brook Farm community. ”

“ Three days and three nights the raiding powers of the arctics raged about us and blockaded all but the hardiest and strongest of us in the close quarters of the Hive. To venture out of the house was to risk life and limb. No one was allowed to run such risks alone, as, in case of a fall, the chances would be against getting up again without help, but parties of twos and threes of the young men went to the barns to look after the cattle or up to the Eyrie, the Cottage and Pilgrim Hall to see that all was right and to bring down a sled-load of bedding for the shut-ins. ”

“ Minot Pratt and one or two other skeptics left the Association, but the rest of the members unanimously voted to reorganize as a Fourierite Phalanx.
When this was accomplished Mr. Brisbane made Brook Farm a sort of headquarters for the Socialistic propaganda, and enlisted several of the members as lecturers and teachers of humanitarian science. The Harbinger was established as the Fourierite organ in this country. Dr. Ripley and Mr. Dana were the editors, and it was a Brook Farm publication. There was, however, very little of Brook Farm news in its columns, and no advertising. ”