Ch. 4 - Brook Farm and Concord - Page 2

possibility of making such industrial, social, and
educational arrangements as would simplify economies, combine leisure
for study with healthful and honest toil, avert unjust collisions of
caste, equalise refinements, awaken generous affections, diffuse
courtesy, and sweeten and sanctify life as a whole." The reader will
perceive that this was a liberal scheme, and that if the experiment
failed, the greater was the pity. The writer goes on to say that a
gentleman, who afterwards distinguished himself in literature (he had
begun by being a clergyman), "convinced by his experience in a
faithful ministry that the need was urgent for a thorough application
of the professed principles of Fraternity to actual relations, was
about staking his all of fortune, reputation, and influence, in an
attempt to organize a joint-stock company at Brook Farm." As Margaret
Fuller passes for having suggested to Hawthorne the figure of Zenobia
in _The Blithedale Romance_, and as she is probably, with one
exception, the person connected with the affair who, after Hawthorne,
offered most of what is called a personality to the world, I may
venture to quote a few more passages from her Memoirs--a curious, in
some points of view almost a grotesque, and yet, on the whole, as I
have said, an extremely interesting book. It was a strange history and
a strange destiny, that of this brilliant, restless, and unhappy
woman--this ardent New Englander, this impassioned Yankee, who
occupied so large a place in the thoughts, the lives, the affections,
of an intelligent and appreciative society, and yet left behind her
nothing but the memory of a memory. Her function, her reputation, were
singular, and not altogether reassuring: she was a talker, she was
_the_ talker, she was the genius of talk. She had a magnificent,
though by no means an unmitigated, egotism; and in some of her
utterances it is difficult to say whether pride or humility
prevails--as for instance when she writes that she feels "that there
is plenty of room in the Universe for my faults, and as if I could not
spend time in thinking of them when so many things interest me more."
She has left the same sort of reputation as a great actress. Some of
her writing has extreme beauty, almost all of it has a real interest,
but her value, her activity, her sway (I am not sure that one can say
her charm), were personal and practical. She went to Europe, expanded
to new desires and interests, and, very poor herself, married an
impoverished Italian nobleman. Then, with her husband and child, she
embarked to return to her own country, and was lost at sea in a
terrible storm, within sight of its coasts. Her tragical death
combined with many of the elements of her life to convert