ohn Sullivan Dwight was born in Boston, Massachusetts, May 13th, 1813. After graduation at Harvard in 1832, he studied at the Divinity School, and for two years was pastor of a Unitarian church in Northampton, Massachusetts. He then became interested in founding the famous Brook Farm community, which furnished Hawthorne with the background for 'The Blithedale Romance'; and he is mentioned in the preface to this book with Ripley, Dana, Channing, Parker, etc. This was a "community" scheme, undertaken by joint ownership in a farm in West Roxbury near Boston; associated with the names of Hawthorne, Emerson, George William Curtis, and C.A. Dana,—a scheme which Emerson called "a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an age of reason in a patty-pan." This community existed seven years, and to quote again from Emerson,—"In Brook Farm was this peculiarity, that there was no head. In every family is the father; in every factory a foreman; in a shop a master; in a boat the skipper; but in this Farm no authority; each was master or mistress of their actions; happy, hapless anarchists."
Here Mr. Dwight edited The Harbinger, a periodical published by that community; taught languages and music, besides doing his share of the manual labor. In 1848 he returned to Boston and engaged in literature and musical criticism; and in 1852 he established Dwight's Journal of Music, which he edited for thirty years. Many of his best essays appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and he contributed to various periodicals.
He was one of the pioneers of scholarly, intelligent, original, and literary musical criticism in America, and he possessed fine general attainments and a distinct style. It is because of his clear perception of the indispensableness of the arts—and especially of the art of music—to life, and because of his clear statement of their vital relationship, that his work belongs to literature.
MUSIC AS A MEANS OF CULTURE
From the Atlantic Monthly, 1870, by permission of Houghton, Mifflin and Company
We as a democratic people, a great mixed people of all races, overrunning a vast continent, need music even more than others. We need some ever-present, ever-welcome influence that shall insensibly tone down our self-asserting and aggressive manners, round off the sharp, offensive angularity of character, subdue and harmonize the free and ceaseless conflict of opinions, warm out the genial individual humanity of each and every unit of society, lest he become a mere member of a party, or a sharer of business or fashion. This rampant liberty will rush to its own ruin, unless there shall be found some gentler, harmonizing, humanizing culture, such as may pervade whole masses with a fine enthusiasm, a sweet sense of reverence for something far above us, beautiful and pure; awakening some ideality in every soul, and often lifting us out of the hard hopeless prose of daily life. We need this beautiful corrective of our crudities. Our radicalism will pull itself up by the roots, if it do not cultivate the instinct of reverence. The first impulse of freedom is centrifugal,—to fly off the handle,—unless it be restrained by a no less free impassioned love of order. We need to be so enamored of the divine idea of unity, that that alone—the enriching of that—shall be the real motive for assertion of our individuality. What shall so temper and tone down our "fierce democracy"? It must be something better, lovelier, more congenial to human nature than mere stern prohibition, cold Puritanic "Thou shalt not!" What can so quickly magnetize a people into this harmonic mood as music? Have we not seen it, felt it?
The hard-working, jaded millions need expansion, need the rejuvenating, the ennobling experience of joy. Their toil, their church, their creed perhaps, their party livery, and very vote, are narrowing; they need to taste, to breathe a larger, freer life. Has it not come to thousands, while they have listened to or joined their voices in some thrilling chorus that made the heavens seem to open and come down? The governments of the Old World do much to make the people cheerful and contented; here it is all laissez-faire, each for himself, in an ever keener strife of competition. We must look very much to music to do this good work for us; we are open to that appeal; we can forget ourselves in that; we blend in joyous fellowship when we can sing together; perhaps quite as much so when we can listen together to a noble orchestra of instruments interpreting the highest inspirations of a master. The higher and purer the character and kind of music, the more of real genius there is in it, the deeper will this influence be.