Books: Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis
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G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke >> Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis
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15 Produced by Eric Eldred, Beth Trapaga
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
EARLY LETTERS OF GEORGE WM. CURTIS
TO
JOHN S. DWIGHT:
Brook Farm and Concord
Edited by
George Willis Cooke
CONTENTS
EARLY LIFE AT BROOK FARM AND CONCORD
EARLY LETTERS TO JOHN S. DWIGHT
LETTERS OF LATER DATE
EARLY LIFE AT BROOK FARM AND CONCORD
George William Curtis was born in Providence, February 24, 1824. From the
age of six to eleven he was in the school of C.W. Greene at Jamaica
Plain, and then, until he was fifteen, attended school in Providence. His
brother Burrill, two years older, was his inseparable companion, and they
were strongly attached to each other. About 1835 Curtis came under the
influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was heard by him in Providence, and
who commanded his boyish admiration. Burrill Curtis has said of this
interest of himself and his brother that it proved to be the cardinal
event of their youth; and what this experience was he has described.
"I still recall," he says, "the impressions produced by Emerson's delivery
of his address on 'The Over-Soul' in Mr. Hartshorn's school-room in
Providence. He seemed to speak as an inhabitant of heaven, and with the
inspiration and authority of a prophet. Although a large part of the
matter of that discourse, when reduced to its lowest terms, does not
greatly differ from the commonplaces of piety and religion, yet its form
and its tone were so fresh and vivid that they made the matter also seem
to be uttered for the first time, and to be a direct outcome from the
inmost source of the highest truth. We heard Emerson lecture frequently,
and made his personal acquaintance. My enthusiastic admiration of him and
his writings soon mounted to a high and intense hero-worship, which, when
it subsided, seems to have left me ever since incapable of attaching
myself as a follower to any other man. How far George shared such
feelings, if at all, I cannot precisely say; but he so far shared my
enthusiastic admiration as to be led a willing captive to Emerson's
attractions, and to the incidental attractions of the movement of which he
was the head; and Emerson always continued to command from us both the
sincerest reverence and homage."
Burrill went so far as to discontinue the use of money and animal food;
both the brothers discarded the conventional costumes in matters of dress,
and their interest was enlisted in the reforms of the day. The family
removed to New York in 1839, George studied at home with tutors, and was
an attendant at the church of Dr. Orville Dewey.
I
The warm and active interest of the brothers in the Transcendental
movement, in all its phases, led them to propose to their father that
he permit them to attend the school connected with the Brook Farm
Association. Permission having been granted, they became boarders there
in the spring or summer of 1842. At no time were they members of the
association, and they paid for their board and tuition as they would
have done at any seminary or college.
At this time the Brook Farm Association had two sources of income--the
farm of about two hundred acres, and the school which was carried on in
connection therewith. In fact, the school was more largely profitable than
the farm, and was for a time well patronized by those who were in general
sympathy with the leaders of the association. George Ripley was the
teacher in philosophy and mathematics, George P. Bradford in literature,
John S. Dwight in Latin and music, Charles A. Dana in Greek and German,
and John S. Brown in theoretical and practical agriculture. A six years'
course was arranged in preparation for college, and three years were given
to acquiring a knowledge of farming. The pupils were required to work one
hour each day, the idea being that this was conducive to sound
intellectual training.
It would seem, however, that Curtis gave only a part of his time to
study, as is indicated in a letter written to his father in June, 1843,
and published in the admirable biography by Mr. Edward Gary. "My life
is summery enough here," he writes. "We breakfast at six, and from
seven to twelve I am at work. After dinner, these fair days permit no
homage but to their beauty, and I am fain to woo their smiles in the
shades and sunlights of the woods. A festal life for one before whom
the great stretches which must be sailed; yet this summer air teaches
sea life-navigation, and I listen to the flowing streams, and to the
cool rush of the winds among the trees, with an increase of that hope
which is the only pole-star of life."
At Brook Farm, Curtis studied Greek, German, music, and agriculture. The
teaching was of the best, as good as could have been had in any college
of the country at that time, and was thorough and efficient. Much more of
freedom was allowed the students than was usual elsewhere, both as to
conditions of study and recitation, and as to the relations of the pupils
to the instructors. The young people in the school were treated as
friends and companions by their teachers; but this familiarity did not
breed contempt for the instructors or indifference to the work of the
school. On the other hand, it secured an unusual degree of enthusiasm
both for the teachers and for the subjects pursued. The work of the
school went on with somewhat less of system than is thought desirable in
most places of instruction; but in this instance the results justified
the methods pursued. The teachers were such as could command success by
their personal qualities and by their enthusiastic devotion to their
work.
The two years spent at Brook Farm formed an important episode in the life
of George William Curtis. It is evident that he did not surrender himself
to the associationist idea, even when he was a boarder at Brook Farm and a
member of its school. He loved the men and women who were at the head of
the community; he found the life attractive and genial, the atmosphere was
conducive to his intellectual and spiritual development; but he did not
surrender himself to the idea that the world can be reformed in that
manner. In a degree he was a curious looker-on; and in a still larger way
he was a sympathetic, but not convinced, friend and well-wisher. If not a
member, he retained throughout life his interest in this experiment, and
remembered with delight the years he spent there. He more than once spoke
in enthusiastic terms of Brook Farm, and gave its theories and its
practice a sympathetic interpretation. In one of his "Easy Chair" essays
of 1869 he described the best side of its life:
"There is always a certain amount of oddity latent in society which rushes
to such an enterprise as a natural vent; and in youth itself there is a
similar latent and boundless protest against the friction and apparent
unreason of the existing order. At the time of the Brook Farm enterprise
this was everywhere observable. The freedom of the antislavery reform and
its discussions had developed the 'come-outers,' who bore testimony in all
times and places against church and state. Mr. Emerson mentions an apostle
of the gospel of love and no money who preached zealously but never
gathered a large church of believers. Then there were the protestants
against the sin of flesh-eating, refining into curious metaphysics upon
milk, eggs, and oysters. To purloin milk from the udder was to injure the
maternal affections of the cow; to eat eggs was Feejee cannibalism and the
destruction of the tender germ of life, to swallow an oyster was to mask
murder. A still selecter circle denounced the chains that shackled the
tongue and the false delicacy that clothed the body. Profanity, they said,
is not the use of forcible and picturesque words; it is the abuse of such
to express base passions and emotions. So indecency cannot be affirmed of
the model of all grace, the human body....
"These were harmless freaks and individual fantasies. But the time was
like the time of witchcraft. The air magnified and multiplied every
appearance, and exceptions and idiosyncrasies and ludicrous follies were
regarded as the rule, and as the logical masquerade of this foul fiend
Transcendentalism, which was evidently unappeasable, and was about to
devour manners, morals, religion, and common-sense. If Father Lamson or
Abby Folsom were borne by main force from an antislavery meeting, and the
non-resistants pleaded that these protestants had as good right to speak
as anybody, and that what was called their senseless babble was probably
inspired wisdom, if people were only heavenly minded enough to understand
it, it was but another sign of the impending anarchy. And what was to be
said--for you could not call them old dotards--when the younger
protestants of the time came walking through the sober streets of Boston
and seated themselves in concert-halls and lecture-rooms with hair parted
in the middle and falling upon their shoulders, and clad in garments such
as no known human being ever wore before--garments which seemed to be a
compromise between the blouse of the Paris workman and the peignoir of a
possible sister? For tailoring underwent the same revision to which the
whole philosophy of life was subjected, and one ardent youth, asserting
that the human form itself suggested the proper shape of its garments,
caused trowsers to be constructed that closely fitted the leg, and bore
his testimony to the truth in coarse crash breeches.
"These were the ludicrous aspects of the intellectual and moral
fermentation or agitation that was called Transcendentalism. And these
were foolishly accepted by many as its chief and only signs. It was
supposed that the folly was complete at Brook Farm, and it was
indescribably ludicrous to observe reverend Doctors and other Dons coming
out to gaze upon the extraordinary spectacle, and going about as dainty
ladies hold their skirts and daintily step from stone to stone in a muddy
street, lest they be soiled. The Dons seemed to doubt whether the mere
contact had not smirched them. But droll in itself, it was a thousandfold
droller when Theodore Parker came through the woods and described it.
With his head set low upon his gladiatorial shoulders, and his nasal
voice in subtle and exquisite mimicry reproducing what was truly
laughable, yet all with infinite _bonhomie_ and with a genuine
superiority to small malice, he was as humorous as he was learned, and as
excellent a mime as he was noble and fervent and humane a preacher. On
Sundays a party always went from the Farm to Mr. Parker's little country
church. He was there exactly what he was afterwards when he preached to
thousands of eager people in the Boston Musichall; the same plain,
simple, rustic, racy man. His congregation were his personal friends.
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. But they were
associated in such a spirit and under such conditions that, with some
extravagance, the best of everybody appeared, and there was a kind of high
_esprit de corps_--at least, in the earlier or golden age of the colony.
There was plenty of steady, essential, hard work, for the founding of an
earthly paradise upon a rough New England farm is no pastime. But with the
best intention, and much practical knowledge and industry and devotion,
there was in the nature of the case an inevitable lack of method, and the
economical failure was almost a foregone conclusion. But there was never
such witty potato-patches and such sparkling cornfields before or since.
The weeds were scratched out of the ground to the music of Tennyson or
Browning, and the nooning was an hour as gay and bright as any brilliant
midnight at Ambrose's. But in the midst of all was one figure, the
practical farmer, an honest neighbor who was not drawn to the enterprise
by any spiritual attraction, but was hired at good wages to superintend
the work, and who always seemed to be regarding the whole affair with the
most good-natured wonder as a prodigious masquerade....
"But beneath all the glancing colors, the lights and shadows of its
surface, it was a simple, honest, practical effort for wiser forms of life
than those in which we find ourselves. The criticism of science, the sneer
of literature, the complaint of experience is that man is a miserably
half-developed being, the proof of which is the condition of human society,
in which the few enjoy and the many toil. But the enjoyment cloys and
disappoints, and the very want of labor poisons the enjoyment. Man is made,
body and soul. The health of each requires reasonable exercise. If every
man did his share of the muscular work of the world, no other man would be
overwhelmed by it. The man who does not work imposes the necessity of
harder toil upon him who does. Thereby the first steals from the last the
opportunity of mental culture--and at last we reach a world of pariahs and
patricians, with all the inconceivable sorrow and suffering that surround
us. Bound fast by the brazen age, we can see that the way back to the age
of gold lies through justice, which will substitute co-operation for
competition.
"That some such generous and noble thought inspired this effort at
practical Christianity is most probable. The Brook Farmers did not
interpret the words,'the poor ye have always with ye,' to mean,'ye must
always keep some of you poor.' They found the practical Christian in him
who said to his neighbor, 'Friend, come up higher.' But, apart from any
precise and defined intention, it was certainly a very alluring
prospect--that of life in a pleasant country, taking exercise in useful
toil, and surrounded with the most interesting and accomplished people.
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 all that
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.
It is to the Transcendentalism that seemed to so many good souls both
wicked and absurd that some of the best influences of American life
to-day are due. The spirit that was concentrated at Brook Farm is
diffused, but it is not lost. As an organized effort, after many downward
changes, it failed; but those who remember the Hive, the Eyrie, the
Cottage; when Margaret Fuller came and talked, radiant with bright humor;
when Emerson and Parker and Hedge joined the circle for a night or a day;
when those who may not be publicly named brought beauty and wit and
social sympathy to the feast; when the practical possibilities of life
seemed fairer, and life and character were touched ineffaceably with good
influence, cherish a pleasant vision which no fate can harm, and remember
with ceaseless gratitude the blithe days of Brook Farm."
Curtis returned to the same subject in 1874, in discussing Frothingham's
biography of George Ripley. Some of the errors into which writers about
Brook Farm had fallen he undertook to correct, to point out the real
character of the association, and its effort at the improvement of
society.
"The Easy Chair describes Brook Farm as an Arcadia, for such in effect was
the intention, and such is the retrospect to those who recall the hope
from which it sprang.... The curious visitors who came to see poetry in
practice saw with dismay hard work on every side, plain houses and simple
fare, and a routine with little aesthetic aspect. Individual whims in
dress and conduct, however, were exceptional in the golden age or early
days at Brook Farm, and those are wholly in error who suppose it to have
been a grotesque colony of idealogues. It was originally a company of
highly educated and refined persons, who felt that the immense disparity
of condition and opportunity in the world was a practical injustice, full
of peril for society, and that the vital and fundamental principle of
Christianity was universally rejected by Christendom as impracticable.
Every person, they held, is entitled to mental and moral culture, but it
is impossible that he should enjoy his rights as long as all the hard
physical work of the world is done by a part only of its inhabitants. Were
that work limited to what is absolutely necessary, and shared by all, all
would find an equal opportunity for higher cultivation and development,
and the evil of an unnatural and cruelly artificial system of society
would disappear. It was a thought and a hope as old as humanity, and as
generous as old. No common mind would have cherished such a purpose, no
mean nature have attempted to make the dream real. The practical effort
failed in its immediate object, but, in the high purposes it confirmed and
strengthened, it had remote and happy effects which are much more than
personal.
"It is an error to suppose that many of the more famous
'Transcendentalists' were of the Brook Farm company. Mr. Emerson, for
instance, was never there except as a visitor. Margaret Fuller was often a
visitor, and passed many days together as a guest, but she was never,
except in sympathy, one of the Brook Farmers. Theodore Parker was a
neighbor, and had friendly relations with many of the fraternity, but he
seldom came to the farm. Meanwhile the enterprise was considered an
unspeakable folly, or worse, by the conservative circle of Boston. In
Boston, where a very large part of the 'leaders' of society in every way
were Unitarians, Unitarian conservatism was peremptory and austere. The
entire circle of which Mr. Ticknor was the centre or representative, the
world of Everett and Prescott and their friends, regarded Transcendentalism
and Brook Farm, its fruit, with good-humored wonder as with Prescott, or
with severe reprobation as with Mr. Ticknor. The general feeling in regard
to Mr. Emerson, who was accounted the head of the school, is well expressed
by John Quincy Adams in 1840. The old gentleman, whose glory is that he was
a moral and political gladiator and controversialist, deplores the doom of
the Christian Church to be always racked with differences and debates, and
after speaking of 'other wanderings of mind' that 'let the wolf into the
fold,' proceeds to say: 'A young man named Ralph Waldo Emerson, a son of my
once-loved friend William Emerson, and a classmate of my lamented son
George, after failing in the every-day avocations of a Unitarian preacher
and school-master, starts a new doctrine of Transcendentalism, declares all
the old revelations superannuated and worn out, and announces the approach
of new revelations.' Mr. Adams was just on the eve of his antislavery
career, but he continues: 'Garrison and the non-resistant Abolitionists,
Brownson and the Marat Democrats, phrenology and animal magnetism, all come
in, furnished each with some plausible rascality as an ingredient for the
bubbling caldron of religion and politics.' C.P. Cranch, the poet and
painter, was a relative of Mr. Adams, and then a clergyman; and the
astonished ex-President says: 'Pearse Cranch, _ex ephebis_, preached here
last week, and gave out quite a stream of Transcendentalism most
unexpectedly.'
"This was the general view of Transcendentalism and its teachers and
disciples held by the social, political, and religious establishment. The
separation and specialty of the 'movement' soon passed. The leaders and
followers were absorbed in the great world of America; but that world has
been deeply affected and moulded by this seemingly slight and transitory
impulse. How much of the wise and universal liberalizing of all views and
methods is due to it! How much of the moral training that revealed itself
in the war was part of its influence! The transcendental or spiritual
philosophy has been strenuously questioned and assailed. But the life and
character it fostered are its sufficient vindication."
The school at Brook Farm brought together there a large number of bright
young people, and they formed one of the chief characteristics of the
place. The result was that the life was one of much amusement and healthy
pleasure, as George P. Bradford has said:
"We were floated away by the tide of young life around us. There was
always a large number of young people in our company, as scholars,
boarders, etc., and this led to a considerable mingling of amusement in
our life; and, moreover, some of our company had a special taste and skill
in arranging and directing this element. So we had very varied amusements
suited to the different seasons--tableaux, charades, dancing, masquerades,
and rural fetes out-of-doors, and in winter, skating, coasting, etc."
In her "Years of Experience," Mrs. Georgiana Bruce Kirby, who was at Brook
Farm for very nearly the same period as Curtis, has not only given an
interesting account of the social life there, but she has especially
described the entertainments mentioned by Mr. Bradford. Two of these
occasions, when Curtis was a leading participant, she mentions with
something of detail.
"At long intervals in what most would call our drudgery," she says, "there
came a day devoted to amusement. Once we had a masquerade picnic in the
woods, where we were thrown into convulsions of laughter at the sight of
George W. Curtis dressed as Fanny Ellsler, in a low-necked, short-sleeved,
book-muslin dress and a tiny ruffled apron, making courtesies and
pirouetting down the path. It was much out of character that I, a St.
Francis squaw, in striped shirt, gold beads, and moccasins, should be
guilty of such wild hilarity. Ora's movements were free and graceful in
white Turkish trousers, a rich Oriental head-dress, and Charles Dana's
best tunic, which reached just below her knee. She was the observed of all
observers.
"In the midwinter we had a fancy-dress ball in the parlors of the Pilgrim
House, when the Shaws and Russells, generous friends of the association,
came attired as priests and dervishes. The beautiful Anna Shaw was superb
as a portly Turk in quilted robe, turban, mustache, and cimeter, and bore
herself with grave dignity.
"George W. Curtis, as Hamlet, led the quadrille with Carrie Shaw as a Greek
girl. His sad and solemn 'reverence' contrasted charmingly with her sunny
ease. He acted the Dane to the life, his bearing, the melancholy light in
his eyes, his black-plumed head-cover, and his rapier glittering under his
short black cloak, which fell apart in the dance, were all perfect. It was
a picture long to be remembered, and as long as I could watch these two I
had no desire to take part in the dance myself."
Another phase of Curtis's life at Brook Farm she also mentions, and it
gives a new insight into his character. The occasion described was a
social Sunday evening spent in the parlor of the Eyrie:
"At supper it was whispered that George W. Curtis would sing at the Eyrie,
upon which several young men volunteered to assist with the dishes. My
services were also cordially accepted.... And now we ascended the winding,
moonlit path to the Eyrie, where Curtis was already singing. We went up
the steps of the building cautiously, lest a note of the melody which
floated through the open French windows should be lost to us. Entering the
large parlor, we found not only the chairs and sofas occupied, but the
floor well covered with seated listeners.
"I did not at first recognize the operatic air, so admirably modified and
retarded it was, and its former rapid words replaced by a sad and touching
theme, which called for noble endurance in one borne down by suffering.
The accompaniment consisted of simple chords and arpeggios, a very plain
and sufficient background. Curtis, though not yet twenty--not nineteen, if
I remember rightly--had a grave and mature appearance. He was full of
poetic sensibility, and his pure, rich voice had that sympathetic quality
that penetrates to the heart.... Curtis was not ever guilty of singing a
comic song. It would indeed have been most inappropriate to our intensely
earnest mood. Often his brother would join him in a duet with his
agreeable tenor.
"Low praises and half-spoken thanks were murmured as the grave and gracious
young friend, at the expiration of an hour, swung round on the piano-stool
and attempted to make his exit."
In his "Cheerful Yesterdays," Colonel T.W. Higginson has described the
same life as an onlooker. Although not a member of the community at Brook
Farm, he was somewhat in sympathy with it--at least, with the people of
whom it was composed. At the time he was living in Brookline and teaching
the children of a cousin. "Into this summer life," he writes, "there
occasionally came delegations of youths from Brook Farm. Among these were
George and Burrill Curtis, and Larned, with Charles Dana--all presentable
and agreeable, but the first three peculiarly costumed. It was then very
common for young men in college and elsewhere to wear what were called
blouses--a kind of hunter's frock, made at first of brown holland, belted
at the waist, these being gradually developed into garments of gay-colored
chintz, sometimes, it was said, an economical transformation of their
sisters' skirts or petticoats. All the young men of this party but Dana
wore these gay garments, and bore on their heads little round and
visorless caps with tassels."
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