The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees Part 11

The Ripleys, as has been said, had already 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; and to connect with this a school or college in which the most complete instruction shall be given, from the first rudiments to the highest culture." Ripley himself a.s.sumed the responsibility for the management and success of the undertaking, and about the middle of April, 1841, he took possession with his wife and sister and some fifteen others, including Hawthorne, of the farmhouse, which, with a large barn, was already on the estate.

The first six months were spent in "getting started," especially in the matter of the school, of which Mrs. Ripley was largely in charge, and it was not until early fall--September 29--that the Brook Farm Inst.i.tute of Agriculture and Education was organised as a kind of joint stock company, not incorporated.

A seeker after country quiet and beauty might easily be as much attracted to-day by the undulating acres of Brook Farm as were those who sought it sixty years ago as a refuge from social discouragement. The brook still babbles cheerily as it threads its way through the meadows, and there are still pleasant pastures and shady groves on the large estate. The only one of the community buildings which is still standing, however, is that now known as the Martin Luther Orphan Home. This house was built at the very start of the community life by Mrs. A. G.

Alford, one of the members of the colony.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BROOK FARM, WEST ROXBURY, Ma.s.s.]

The building was in the form of a Maltese cross with four gables, the central s.p.a.ce being taken by the staircase. It contained only about half a dozen rooms, and probably could not have accommodated more than that number of residents. It is said to have been the prettiest and best furnished house on the place, but an examination of its simple construction will confirm the memory of one of its occupants, who remarked that contact with nature was here always admirably close and unaffected. From the rough dwelling, which resembled an inexpensive beach cottage, to out-doors was hardly a transition, it is chronicled, and at all seasons the external and internal temperatures closely corresponded. Until lately the cottage wore its original dark-brown colour; and it is still the best visible remnant of the early days, and gives a pleasant impression of what the daily life of the a.s.sociation must have been.

Gay and happy indeed were the dwellers in this community during the early stages of its development. Ripley's theory of the wholesomeness of combined manual and intellectual work ruled everywhere. He himself donned the farmer's blouse, the wide straw hat, and the high boots in which he has been pictured at Brook Farm; and whether he cleaned stables, milked cows, carried vegetables to market, or taught philosophy and discussed religion, he was unfailingly cheerful and inspiring.

Mrs. Ripley was in complete accord with her husband on all vital questions, and as the chief of the Wash-Room Group worked blithely eight or ten hours a day. Whether this devotion to her husband's ideals grew out of her love for him, or whether she was really persuaded of the truth of his theory, does not appear. In later life it is interesting to learn that she sought in the Church of Rome the comfort which Ripley's transcendentalism was not able to afford her. When she died in 1859 she had held the faith of Rome for nearly a dozen years, and, curiously enough, was buried as a Catholic from that very building in which her husband had preached as a Unitarian early in their married life, the church having in the interim been purchased by the Catholics. With just one glimpse of the later Ripley himself, we must leave this interesting couple. In 1866, when, armed with a letter of introduction from Emerson, the original Brook Farmer sought Carlyle (who had once described him as "a Socinian minister who had left his pulpit to reform the world by cultivating onions"), and Carlyle greeted him with a long and violent tirade against our government, Ripley sat quietly through it all, but when the sage of Chelsea paused for breath, calmly rose and left the house, saying no word of remonstrance.

It is, of course, however, in Hawthorne and his descriptions in the "Blithedale Romance" of the life at Brook Farm that the princ.i.p.al interest of most readers centres. This work has come to be regarded as the epic of the community, and it is now generally conceded that Hawthorne was in this novel far more of a realist than was at first admitted. He did not avoid the impulse to tell the happenings of life at the farm pretty nearly as he found them, and substantial as the characters may or may not be, the daily life and doings, the scenery, the surroundings, and even trivial details are presented with a well-nigh faultless accuracy.

The characters, as I have said, are not easily traceable, but even in this respect Hawthorne was something of a photographer. Zen.o.bia seems a blend of Margaret Fuller and of Mrs. Barlow, who as Miss Penniman was once a famous Brookline beauty of lively and attractive disposition. In the strongest and most repellant character of the novel, Hollingsworth, Hawthorne seems to have incorporated something of the fierce earnestness of Brownson and the pathetic zeal of Ripley. And those who best know Brook Farm are able to find in the book reflections of other well-known members of the community. For the actual life of the place, however, readers cannot do better than peruse Lindsay Swift's recent delightful work, "Brook Farm, Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors."

There was, we learn here, a charming happy-go-luckiness about the whole life. Partly from necessity, partly from choice, the young people used to sit on the stairs and on the floor during the evening entertainments.

Dishes were washed and wiped to the tune of "Oh, Canaan, Bright Canaan,"

or some other song of the time. When about their work the women wore short skirts with knickerbockers; the water-cure and the starving-cure both received due attention at the hands of some of the members of the household; at table the customary formula was, "Is the b.u.t.ter within the sphere of your influence?" And very often the day's work ended in a dance, a walk to Eliot's Pulpit, or a moonlight hour on the Charles!

During the earlier years the men, who were in excess of the young women in point of numbers, helped very largely in the household labours.

George William Curtis occasionally trimmed lamps, Charles Dana, who afterward founded the _New York Sun_, organised a band of griddle-cake servitors composed of "four of the most elegant youths of the Community!" One legend, which has the air of probability, records that a student confessed his pa.s.sion while helping his sweetheart at the sink.

Of love there was indeed not a little at Brook Farm. Cupid is said to have made much havoc in the Community, and though very little mismating is to be traced to the intimacy of the life there, fourteen marriages have been attributed to friends.h.i.+ps begun at Brook Farm, and there was even one wedding there, that of John Orvis to John Dwight's sister, Marianne. At this simple ceremony William Henry Channing was the minister, and John Dwight made a speech of exactly five words.

Starting with about fifteen persons, the numbers at the farm increased rapidly, though never above one hundred and twenty people were there at a time. It is estimated, however, that about two hundred individuals were connected with the Community from first to last. Of these all the well-known ones are now dead, unless, indeed, one is to count among the "Farmers" Mrs. Abby Morton Diaz, who as a very young girl was a teacher in the infant department of the school.

Yet though the Farmers have almost all pa.s.sed beyond, delicious anecdotes about them are all the time coming to light. There is one story of "Sam" Larned which is almost too good to be true. Larned, it is said, steadily refused to drink milk on the ground that his relations with the cow did not justify him in drawing on her reserves, and when it was pointed out to him that he ought on the same principle to abandon shoes, he is said to have made a serious attempt to discover some more moral type of footwear.

And then there is another good story of an instance when Brook Farm hospitality had fatal results. An Irish baronet, Sir John Caldwell, fifth of that t.i.tle, and treasurer-general at Canada, after supping with the Community on its greatest delicacy, pork and beans, returned to the now departed Tremont House in Boston, and died suddenly of apoplexy!

This baronet's son was wont later to refer to the early members of the Community as "extinct volcanoes of transcendental nonsense and humb.u.g.g.e.ry." But no witty sallies of this sort are able to lessen in the popular mind the reverence with which this Brook Farm essay in idealism must ever be held. For this Community, when all is said, remains the most successful and the most interesting failure the world has ever known.

MARGARET FULLER: MARCHESA D'OSSOLI

Any account of Brook Farm which should neglect to dwell upon the part played in the community life by Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d'Ossoli, would be almost like the play of "Hamlet" with the Prince of Denmark left out. For although Margaret Fuller never lived at Brook Farm--was, indeed, only an occasional visitor there--her influence pervaded the place, and, as we feel from reading the "Blithedale Romance," she was really, whether absent or present, the strongest personality connected with the experiment.

Hawthorne's first bucolic experience was with the famous "transcendental heifer" mistakenly said to have been the property of Margaret Fuller. As a matter of fact, the beast had been named after Cambridge's most intellectual woman, by Ripley, who had a whimsical fas.h.i.+on of thus honouring his friends. According to Hawthorne, the name in this case was not inapt, for the cow was so recalcitrant and anti-social that it was finally sent to Coventry by the more docile kine, always to be counted on for moderate conservatism.

This cow's would-be-tamer, not wis.h.i.+ng to be unjust, refers to this heifer as having "a very intelligent face" and "a reflective cast of character." He certainly paid Margaret Fuller herself no such tribute, but thus early in his Brook Farm experience let appear his thinly veiled contempt for the high priestess of transcendentalism. Even earlier his antagonism toward this eminent woman was strong, if it was not frank, for he wrote: "I was invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft's yesterday with Miss Margaret Fuller, but Providence had given me some business to do for which I was very thankful."

The unlovely side of Margaret Fuller must have made a very deep impression upon Hawthorne. Gentle as the great romancer undoubtedly was by birth and training, he has certainly been very harsh in writing, both in his note-book and in his story of Brook Farm, of the woman we recognise in Zen.o.bia. One of the most interesting literary wars ever carried on in this vicinity, indeed, was that which was waged here some fifteen years ago concerning Julian Hawthorne's revelations of his father's private opinion of the Marchesa d'Ossoli. The remarks in question occurred in the great Hawthorne's "Roman Journal," and were certainly sufficiently scathing to call for such warm defence as Margaret's surviving friends hastened to offer. Hawthorne said among other things:

"Margaret Fuller had a strong and coa.r.s.e nature which she had done her utmost to refine, with infinite pains; but, of course, it could be only 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 was a great humbug--of course, with much talent and moral reality, or else she could never have been so great a humbug.... Toward the last there appears to have been a total collapse in poor Margaret, morally and intellectually; and tragic as her catastrophe was, Providence was, after all, kind in putting her and her clownish husband and their child on board that fated s.h.i.+p.... On the whole, I do not know but I like her the better, though, because she proved herself a very woman after all, and fell as the meanest of her sisters might."

The latter sentences refer to Margaret's marriage to Ossoli, a man some ten years the junior of his gifted wife, and by no means her intellectual equal. That the marriage was a strange one even Margaret's most ardent friends admit, but it was none the less exceedingly human and very natural, as Hawthorne implies, for a woman of thirty-seven, whose interests had long been of the strictly intellectual kind, to yield herself at last to the impulses of an affectionate nature.

But we are getting very much ahead of our story, which should begin, of course, far back in May, 1810, when there was born, at the corner of Eaton and Cherry Streets, in Cambridgeport, a tiny daughter to Timothy Fuller and his wife. The dwelling in which Margaret first saw the light still stands, and is easily recognised by the three elms in front, planted by the proud father to celebrate the advent of his first child.

The garden in which Margaret and her mother delighted has long since vanished; but the house still retains a certain dignity, though now divided into three separate tenements, numbered respectively 69, 72, and 75 Cherry Street, and occupied by a rather migratory cla.s.s of tenants.

The pillared doorway and the carved wreaths above it still give an old-fas.h.i.+oned grace to the somewhat dilapidated house.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FULLER HOUSE, CAMBRIDGEPORT, Ma.s.s.]

The cla.s.s with which Margaret may be said to have danced through Harvard College was that of 1829, which has been made by the wit and poetry of Holmes the most eminent cla.s.s that ever left Harvard. The memory of one lady has preserved for us a picture of the girl Margaret as she appeared at a ball when she was sixteen.

"She had a very plain face, half-shut eyes, and hair curled all over her head; she was dressed in a badly-cut, low-neck pink silk, with white muslin over it; and she danced quadrilles very awkwardly, being withal so near-sighted that she could hardly see her partner."

With Holmes she was not especially intimate, we learn, though they had been schoolmates; but with two of the most conspicuous members of the cla.s.s--William Henry Channing and James Freeman Clarke--she formed a lifelong friends.h.i.+p, and these gentlemen became her biographers.

Yet, after all, the most important part of a woman's training is that which she obtains from her own s.e.x, and of this Margaret Fuller had quite her share. She was one of those maidens who form pa.s.sionate attachments to older women, and there were many Cambridge ladies of the college circle who in turn won her ardent loyalty.

"My elder sister," writes Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his biography of Margaret Fuller, "can well remember this studious, self-conscious, over-grown girl as sitting at my mother's feet, covering her hands with kisses, and treasuring her every word. It was the same at other times with other women, most of whom were too much absorbed in their own duties to give more than a pa.s.sing solicitude to this rather odd and sometimes inconvenient adorer."

The side of Margaret Fuller to which scant attention has been paid heretofore is this ardently affectionate side, and this it is which seems to account for what has always before appeared inexplicable--her romantic marriage to the young Marchese d'Ossoli. The intellect was in truth only a small part of Margaret, and if Hawthorne had improved, as he might have done, his opportunities to study the whole nature of the woman, he would not have written even for his private diary the harsh sentences already quoted. One has only to look at the heroic fas.h.i.+on in which, after the death of her father, Margaret took up the task of educating her brothers and sisters to feel that there was much besides selfishness in this woman's makeup. Nor can one believe that Emerson would ever have cared to have for the friend of a lifetime a woman who was a "humbug." Of Margaret's school-teaching, conversation cla.s.ses on West Street, Boston, and labours on the _Dial_, a transcendental paper in which Emerson was deeply interested, there is not s.p.a.ce to speak here. But one phase of her work which cannot be ignored is that performed on the _Tribune_, in the days of Horace Greeley.

Greeley brought Boston's high priestess to New York for the purpose of putting the literary criticism of the _Tribune_ on a higher plane than any American newspaper then occupied, as well as that she might discuss in a large and stimulating way all philanthropic questions. That she rose to the former opportunity her enemies would be the first to grant, but only those who, like Margaret herself, believe in the sisterhood of women could freely endorse her att.i.tude on philanthropic subjects.

Surely, though, it could not have been a hard woman of whom Horace Greeley wrote: "If she had been born to large fortune, a house of refuge for all female outcasts desiring to return to the ways of virtue would have been one of her most cherished and first realised conceptions. She once attended, with other n.o.ble women, a gathering of outcasts of their s.e.x, and, being asked how they appeared to her, replied, 'As women like myself, save that they are victims of wrong and misfortune.'"

While labouring for the _Tribune_, Margaret Fuller was all the time saving her money for the trip to Europe, which had her life long been her dream of felicity; and at last, on the first of August, 1846, she sailed for her Elysian Fields. There, in December, 1847, she was secretly married, and in September, 1848, her child was born. What these experiences must have meant to her we are able to guess from a glimpse into her private journal in which she had many years before recorded her profoundest feeling about marriage and motherhood.

"I have no home. No one loves me. But I love many a good deal, and see some way into their eventful beauty.... I am myself growing better, and shall by and by be a worthy object of love, one that will not anywhere disappoint or need forbearance.... I have no child, and the woman in me has so craved this experience that it has seemed the want of it must paralyse me...."

The circ.u.mstances under which Margaret Fuller and her husband first met are full of interest. Soon after Miss Fuller's arrival in Rome, early in 1847, she went one day to hear vespers at St. Peter's, and becoming separated from her friends after the service, she was noted as she examined the church by a young man of gentlemanly address, who, perceiving her discomfort and her lack of Italian, offered his services as a guide in her endeavour to find her companions.

Not seeing them anywhere, the young Marquis d'Ossoli, for it was he, accompanied Miss Fuller home, and they met once or twice again before she left Rome for the summer. The following season Miss Fuller had an apartment in Rome, and she often received among her guests this young patriot with whose labours in behalf of his native city she was thoroughly in sympathy.

When the young man after a few months declared his love, Margaret refused to marry him, insisting that he should choose a younger woman for his wife. "In this way it rested for some weeks," writes Mrs. Story, who knew them both, "during which we saw Ossoli pale, dejected, and unhappy. He was always with Margaret, but in a sort of hopeless, desperate manner, until at length he convinced her of his love, and she married him."

Then followed the wife's service in the hospitals while Ossoli was in the army outside the city. After the birth of their child, Angelo, the happy little family went to Florence.

The letters which pa.s.sed between the young n.o.bleman and the wife he adored are still extant, having been with the body of her beautiful baby the only things of Margaret Fuller's saved from the fatal wreck in which she and her two loved ones were lost. One of these letters will be enough to show the tenderness of the man:

"Rome, 21 October, 1848.

"MIA CARA:--I learn by yours of the 20th that you have received the ten scudi, and it makes me more tranquil. I feel also Mogliani's indolence in not coming to inoculate our child; but, my love, I pray you not to disturb yourself so much, and not to be sad, hoping that our dear love will be guarded by G.o.d, and will be free from all misfortunes. He will keep the child for us and give us the means to sustain him."

In answer to this letter, or one like it, we find the woman whom Hawthorne had deemed hard and cold writing:

"Sat.u.r.day Evening, 28 October, 1848.