History of American Literature Part 17

"It flourished in pure willingness; Discovered strongest earnestness; Was fragrant for each lightest wind; Was of its own particular kind;-- Nor knew a tone of discord sharp; Breathed alway like a silver harp; And went to immortality."

While turning the pages of _The Dial_, we shall often meet with sentiments as full of meaning to us as to the people of that time. Among such we may instance:--

"Rest is not quitting The busy career; Rest is the fitting Of self to its sphere."

Occasionally we shall find an expression fit to become a fireside motto:--

"I slept, and dreamed that life was beauty; I woke, and found that life was duty."

The prose in _The Dial_ reflects the new spirit. In the first volume we may note such expressions of imaginative enthusiasm as:--

"The reason why Homer is to me like dewy morning is because I too lived while Troy was and sailed in the hollow ships of the Grecians.... And Shakespeare in _King John_ does but recall me to myself in the dress of another age, the sport of new accidents. I, who am Charles, was sometime Romeo. In _Hamlet_ I pondered and doubted. We forget that we have been drugged with the sleepy bowl of the Present."

In the same volume we find some of Alcott's famous _Orphic Sayings_, of which the following is a sample:--

"Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you. Your first duty is self-culture, self-exaltation: you may not violate this high trust.

Yourself is sacred, profane it not. Forge no chains wherewith to shackle your own members. Either subordinate your vocation to your life or quit it forever."

A writer on _Ideals of Every Day Life_ in _The Dial_ for January, 1841, suggested a thought that is finding an echo in the twentieth century:--

"No one has a right to live merely to get a living. And this is what is meant by drudgery."

Two lines in the last volume voice the new spirit of growth and action:--

"I am never at anchor, I never shall be; I am sailing the gla.s.s of infinity's sea."

_The Dial_ afforded an outlet for the enthusiasms, the aspirations, the ideals of life, during a critical period in New England's renaissance. No other periodical during an equal time has exerted more influence on the trend of American literature.

BROOK FARM.--In 1841 a number of people, headed by GEORGE RIPLEY (1802-1880), a Unitarian clergyman, purchased a tract of land of about two hundred acres at West Roxbury, nine miles from Boston. This was known as Brook Farm, and it became the home of a group who wished to exemplify in real life some of the principles that _The Dial_ and other agencies of reform were advocating.

[Ill.u.s.tration: POOL AT BROOK FARM]

In _The Dial_ for January, 1842, we may find a statement of the aims of the Brook Farm community. The members especially wanted "_leisure to live in all the faculties of the soul_" and they determined to combine manual and mental labor in such a way as to achieve this result. Probably the majority of Americans are in sympathy with such an aim. Many have striven to find sufficient release from their hard, unimproving routine work to enable them to escape its dwarfing effects and to live a fuller life on a higher plane.

The Brook Farm settlement included such people as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles A. Dana (1819-1897), afterward editor of the New York _Sun_, George Ripley, in later times distinguished as the literary critic of the New York _Tribune_, and GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (1824-1892), who became a well-known essayist, magazine editor, and civil service reformer. The original pioneers numbered about twenty; but the membership increased to nearly one hundred and fifty. Brook Farm had an influence, however, that could not be measured by the number of its inmates. In one year more than four thousand visitors came to see this new social settlement.

Hawthorne, the most famous literary member of the Brook Farm group, has recorded many of his experiences during his residence there in 1841:--

"April 13. I have not yet taken my first lesson in agriculture, except that I went to see our cows foddered, yesterday afternoon. We have eight of our own; and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer belonging to Miss Margaret Fuller. She is very fractious, I believe, and apt to kick over the milk pail.... April 16. I have milked a cow!!! ...

May 3. The whole fraternity eat together, and such a delectable way of life has never been seen on earth since the days of the early Christians.... May 4.... there is nothing so unseemly and disagreeable in this sort of toil as you could think. It defiles the hands, indeed, but not the soul."

Unfortunately, in order to earn a living, it was found necessary to work ten hours a day in the summer time, and this toil was so fatiguing that the mind could not work clearly at the end of the day. We find Hawthorne writing on June 1 of the same year:--

"It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish ... in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money."

On August 12, he asks:--

"Is it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? It is not so."

On October 9, he says:--

"Our household, being composed in great measure of children and young people, is generally a cheerful one enough, even in gloomy weather.... It would be difficult to conceive beforehand how much can be added to the enjoyment of a household by mere sunniness of temper and liveliness of disposition...."

Hawthorne remained at Brook Farm for only one of the six years of its existence. An important building, on which there was no insurance, burned in 1846, and the next year the a.s.sociation was forced for financial reasons to disband. This was probably the most ideal of a series of social settlements, every one of which failed. The problem of securing sufficient leisure to live in all the faculties of the soul has not yet been solved, but attempts toward a satisfactory solution have not yet been abandoned.

The influence of Brook Farm on our literature survives in Hawthorne's _Blithedale Romance_ (p. 219), in his _American Note Books_, in Emerson's miscellaneous writings, and in many books and hundreds of articles by less well-known people. Almost all of those who partic.i.p.ated in this social experiment spoke of it in after years with strong affection.

IDEALS OF THE NEW ENGLAND AUTHORS.--When we examine with closest scrutiny the lives of the chief New England authors, of Emerson and Th.o.r.eau, Longfellow and Whittier, Holmes and Lowell, we find that all were men of the highest ideals and character. Not one could be accused of double dealing and intentional misrepresentation, like Alexander Pope; not one was intemperate, like Robert Burns or Edgar Allan Poe; not one was dissolute, like Byron; not one uttered anything base, like many a modern novelist and dramatist.

The mission of all the great New England writers of this age was to make individuals freer, more cultivated, more self-reliant, more kindly, more spiritual. Puritan energy and spirituality spoke through them all. Nearly all could trace their descent from the early Puritans. It is not an infusion of new blood that has given America her greatest writers, but an infusion of new ideals. Some of these ideals were illusions, but a n.o.ble illusion has frequently led humanity upward. The transcendentalists could not fathom the unknowable, but their attempts in this direction enabled them to penetrate deeper into spiritual realities.

The New Englander demanded a cultivated intellect as the servant of the spirit. He still looked at the world from the moral point of view. For the most part he did not aim to produce a literature of pleasure, but of spiritual power, which he knew would incidentally bring pleasure of the highest type. Even Holmes, the genial humorist, wished to be known to posterity by his trumpet call to the soul to build itself more stately mansions.

THE INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY.--The question of human slavery profoundly modified the thought and literature of the nation. In these days we often make the mistake of thinking that all of the people of New England disapproved of slavery at the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. The truth is that many of the most influential people in that section agreed with the South on the question of slavery. Not a few of the most cultivated people at the North thought that an antislavery movement would lead to an attack on other forms of property and that anarchy would be the inevitable result.

Opposition to slavery developed naturally as a result of the new spirit in religion and human philosophy. This distinctly affirmed the right of the individual to develop free from any trammels. _The Dial_ and Brook Farm were both steps toward fuller individuality and more varied life and both were really protests against all kinds of slavery. This new feeling in the air speedily pa.s.sed beyond the color line, and extended to the animals.

One of the earliest to advocate the abolition of slavery was WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON (1805-1879), a printer at Newburyport, Ma.s.sachusetts. In 1831 he founded _The Liberator_, which became the official organ of the New England abolitionists. He influenced the Quaker poet Whittier to devote the best years of his life to furthering the cause of abolition. Emerson and Th.o.r.eau spoke forcibly against slavery. Lowell attacked it with his keenest poetic shafts.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-1896).--It was, however, left for the daughter of an orthodox Congregational clergyman of New England to surpa.s.s every other antislavery champion in fanning into a flame the sentiment against enslaving human beings. Harriet Beecher, the sister of Henry Ward Beecher, the greatest pulpit orator of anti-slavery days, was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. When she was twenty-one, she went with her father, Lyman Beecher, to Cincinnati. Her new home was on the borderland of slavery, and she often saw fugitive slaves and heard their stories at first hand. In 1833 she made a visit to a slave plantation in Kentucky and obtained additional material for her most noted work.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HARRIET BEECHER STOWE]

In 1836 she married Calvin E. Stowe, a colleague of her father in the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. During the next twelve years she had six children to rear.

In 1850 Professor Stowe and his family moved to Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine. This year saw the pa.s.sage of the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the citizens of free states to aid in catching and returning escaped slaves. This Act roused Mrs. Stowe, and she began _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, which was published in book form in 1852.

Perhaps no other American book of note has been written under so great a handicap. When Mrs. Stowe began this work, one of her large family of children was not a year old, and the others were a constant care.

Nevertheless, she persevered with her epoch-making story. One of her friends has given us a picture of the difficulties in her way, the baby on her knee, the new hired girl asking whether the pork should be put on top of the beans, and whether the gingerbread should stay longer in the oven.

In _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ Mrs. Stowe endeavored to translate into concrete form certain phases of the inst.i.tution of slavery, which had been merely an abstraction to the North. Of Senator John Bird, who believed in stringent laws for the apprehension of fugitive slaves, she wrote:--

"... his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word,--or, at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle, with 'Ran away from the subscriber' under it. The magic of the real presence of distress,--the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony,--these he had never tried. He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenceless child...."

In chapters of intense dramatic power, Mrs. Stowe shows a slave mother and her child escaping on the floating ice across the Ohio. They come for refuge to the home of Senator Bird.

"'Were you a slave?' said Mr. Bird.

"'Yes, sir; I belonged to a man in Kentucky.'

"'Was he unkind to you?'

"'No, sir; he was a good master.'

"'And was your mistress unkind to you?'

"'No, sir,--no! my mistress was always good to me.'"

Senator Bird learned that the master and mistress were in debt, and that a creditor had a claim which could be discharged only by the sale of the child. "Then it was," said the slave mother, "I took him and left my home and came away."