"I fancied he was fled—
And after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness,
Like daily sunrise there."
He delivered a lecture one winter before the Concord lyceum on wild apple-trees. The subject made his audience laugh, but their laughter was of short duration. The man who had lived there so long unknown was at last revealed before them, It was the best lecture of the season, and at its close there was long continued applause.
HAWTHORNE.
The literary celebrities of Concord, with the exception of Thoreau, were not indigenous. Emerson may have gone there from an hereditary tendency, but more likely because his cousins the Ripleys dwelt there. Hawthorne came there by way of the Brook Farm experiment. How, with his reserved and solitary mode of life, he should have embarked in such a gregarious enterprise is not very clear; but the election of General Harrison had deprived him of a small government office—it seems as if Webster might have interfered in his behalf—his writings brought him very little, and perhaps he hardly knew what to do with himself.
All accounts agree that he joined the West Roxbury association of his own free-will, and without solicitation of any kind. He not only threw himself into this hazardous scheme with an energy that astounded his friends but he embarked in it all the money he had in the world, which was nearly a thousand dollars. He has left no explanation from which we might infer what his hopes or his motives were.
Since three wise men went to sea in a bowl, or the army of German children set out for the Holy Land in the twelfth century, there was never a more hare-brained or chimerical undertaking. I once knew of a boy who after much reading of Robinson Crusoe, started for the woods at five o'clock of a summer afternoon, with the full intention of spending the night there alone. He took with him a light fowling-piece, and some crackers in his jacket pocket. He gathered some berries and shot some small birds, and cooked them after the Indian fashion. When it grew dark, however, he became frightened and climbed into a tree; but he could not sleep there, and finally returned home about one o'clock in the morning to find his family in great agitation.
This was not very unlike the Brook Farm enterprise, which was inspired by the writings of Fourier, a seductive French socialist and one of the most unreasonable of men. He considered, like Diogenes, that since all men could not be rich and comfortable, it was better that they should all be needy and miserable. It was one of the sentimental out-growths of the French Revolution, for which Napoleonism is always the proper remedy. One of his peculiar notions was that every man should black his own boots.
George Ripley and his friends do not seem to have made any definite calculation of what might be the result of their experiment. They expected, by working six hours a day and limiting themselves to the simplest and most frugal living, to have six left for literary pursuits and the enjoyment of profound conversation. Any practical farmer would have told them that this could not be done and make both ends meet at the close of the year. Any political economist would have told them that a community which disregards the advantage of division of labor, could not compete with one which recognizes that advantage. The principles of Fourier, if generally adopted, would produce general starvation and soon reduce the population of Europe to one fourth of its present numbers. London, which depends for its size on its commercial and political importance, would become almost as desolate as ancient Thebes.
There was lately an essay published in one of our magazines entitled, "Why Socialism appeals to Artists," and the reason alleged was that artists, being more sensitive and delicately organized than most people, were less capable of enduring the hard struggle with the world which all are obliged to sustain who make their own way in it. This is no doubt the true explanation of the Brook Farm enterprise, and it carries with it its own contradiction. The more realistic sort of literature might survive in the communistic order, but sculpture and painting, which depend upon the undivided surplus of production which we call wealth, would inevitably perish. Even literature would disappear at length, then science, or at least all advancement of science, precedent in law would be disregarded, and the dark ages come again. The present organization of society is the accumulated wisdom of mankind for thousands of years. Like the language we speak, it was rather an intellectual growth than the invention of an individual or any number of individuals. Those who have done the most for it have added but little to the whole. It may be subverted by revolution for a time, but will always reassert itself again. It may be amended or modified by reason, but cannot be replaced, either by the ingenuity of one man or that of a whole generation.
The logic of custom is the most cogent of all reasoning, for it is inherited in our veins from our ancestors. The man who tries to escape from it is like a plant being pulled up by the roots. It is exactly this which writers like Fourier and Henry George leave out of their reckoning. They see that in individual cases custom is often blind, cruel, and oppressive, and being kind-hearted and sympathetic they hate it; but they might as well hate the earth itself because there are deserts and swamps and malarious places on its surface. It is, no doubt, the special business of man to remodel the earth as much as possible; to drain its swamps, and level its forests; but in spite of that its rivers and mountains will always remain the same, and separate ourselves from it we cannot.