Early Letters of George William Curtis | Page 3

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