Part 18 (2/2)
The reader will decide, if I have portrayed truly the men and the principles actuating them, that whoever they thus acknowledged as worthy of that sublime place must have been endowed with intellectual, moral and spiritual capacities, and intuitions of the highest order.
Should it have been the fortune of any one to come across an occasional allusion to Fourier, it will be apt to be of such a forbidding nature that there will be no strong temptation to follow the subject further; and all through the literature of our country, in the writings of men whose reading, if not their knowledge, should have taught them better, will be found intimations that ”Fourierism” was a system of life based on a plane hardly worthy of being rated higher than mere sensualism.
Against this accusation I place the record of the man whom especially spiritual minded and liberally educated men like George Ripley, John S.
Dwight, William Henry Channing and many others delighted to know and to honor.
Charles Fourier was born at Bezancon, France, April 7, 1772. The son of a merchant, he had a collegiate education, and took prizes for French and Latin themes and verses. He was found of geography but more fond of cultivating flowers, and of music. At eighteen years he entered into commercial pursuits. By the siege of Lyons he lost the fortune his father left him, and was forced into the army, where he served two years. This portion of his life was involved in the romance of war and revolution, during which he was doomed to death, but made a fortunate escape from it.
He was always noted for the avidity with which he sought knowledge, and his honesty was outraged at an early age, being punished by his father for telling the truth of goods on sale, thereby losing a purchaser.
Again his soul revolted when at Ma.r.s.eilles in 1799, where he was employed, for he was selected to superintend a body of men who secretly cast an immense quant.i.ty of rice into the sea, which monopolists had allowed to spoil in a time of famine rather than to sell at a reasonable profit. This last action was to him a crime of so deep a nature that he entered with more enthusiasm on his studies for preventing the like.
In capacity of agent he travelled in France, Belgium, Germany, Holland and Switzerland. He had a prodigious memory, and in his journeys when a building struck his attention, he took the measurement of it with his walking stick, which was notched off in feet and inches; and, one of his biographers says:--
”He was profoundly acquainted with every branch of science, particularly the exact sciences. For forty years he labored with patience and perseverance at the Herculean task of discovering and developing the theory and practical details of the system which he has given to the world.”
Says a writer in the London _Phalanx_:--
”The princ.i.p.al features of Fourier's private character were morality and the love of truth. He had a character both grave and dignified, religious and poetic, friendly and polite, indulgent and sincere, which never allowed truth to be profaned by libertine frivolity, nor faith to be confounded with austere duplicity. He was a man of dignified simplicity, a child of Heaven, loving G.o.d with all his heart, all his soul, and all his mind, also loving as himself his neighbor--the whole human family.”
Fourier's own words translated read:--
”G.o.d sees in the human race only one family, all the members of which have a right to his favors. He designs that they shall all be happy together, or else no one people shall enjoy happiness. . . . The love of G.o.d will become in this new order the most ardent love among men.”
The closing words of an exhaustive review of Fourier's writings, by Mr.
John S. Dwight, in the _Harbinger_, are these:--”There is a t.i.tanic strength in all the workings of that wonderful intellect. He walks as one who knows his ground. His step is firm, his eye is clear and unflinching, and he is acknowledged where he pa.s.ses, for there is no littleness or weakness, no halting or duplicity, in his movement. He is in earnest; he has taken up his cross to fulfil a mighty mission. He doubts not, desponds not; he speaks always with certainty, and though he suffers from impatience of postponement, yet he ceases not to insist upon the truth. He expostulates, perhaps, with deceived and degraded humanity in too much bitterness of sarcasm; but how profound his reverence for Christ and for humanity, how pure his love for man, and how sublime his contemplation of the destiny of man in the scale of higher and higher beings up to G.o.d!”
Fourier pa.s.sed from earth in 1837. His body was buried at Pere la Chaise Cemetery, Paris, France.
The idea of living in combined families is no new thing. From the earliest times to the present, it has cropped out under various circ.u.mstances and with various changes. Ever with dawning of new light and the increase of universal education comes the desire--sometimes in great waves--for more united interests, and a truer, more Christian brotherhood; for closer unity in life and for the enlargement of home with all the joy, comfort and peace that word contains.
In this country various outgrowths from the social body have taken positions on this plane. The ma.s.ses of our people are not now in sympathy with them. They believe that these little social homes or ”communities” are dull and monotonous, and are bound so tightly by creeds as to be obnoxious to freedom of life and ideas. My belief is that the creeds adopted and thrown around them, though often adding to their financial protection, and possibly often being their only safeguards from fraud and knavery, have covered from the public the great dignity, worthiness and beauty of this mode of life; when, therefore, Mr. Ripley formed his society free from any pledges or creeds, it touched a deeper bottom in men's hearts than any like organization had ever sounded.
Whatever of failure there was in their actualization, Brook Farm ideas remain. They charm philosophers, poets and statesmen. They work quietly, leavening the social ma.s.s. One must be in sympathy with them to know how potent is their action and how with a touch of the old enthusiasm they will be found breaking out again in larger and larger circles of humanity, for in view of the progress of mechanism, science and art in the last fifty years, to form the phalanstery in its material shape would be an easy task.
Rev. William Henry Channing expressed himself in this wise to his mother, years after the breaking up of the a.s.sociation:--
”My dearest mother, I a.s.sure you that did I see my way clear to an honorable independence for my family, so as to be just, while kind to them, I should joyfully die in attesting my fixed faith in a.s.sociation, and I predict that when, years hence, we meet in the spiritual world, you will smilingly bless me and say, 'My son, your personal limitations excepted, you were right.' You will feel proud of my seeming earthly failures then; at least I humbly hope so. If this is all romance it is of that earnest, living strain which I trust ever more and more to be quickened by.”
At a final visit to Brook Farm he said: ”Most beautiful was that last day and all its memories; and never did I feel so calmly, humbly, devoutly thankful that it had been my privilege to fail in this grandest, sublimest, surest of all human movements. Were Thermopylae and Bunker Hill considered successes in their day and generation?”
Lying before me is a letter not intended for publication, showing how one member of the a.s.sociation affectionately regarded his old home. It is as follows:--
PROVIDENCE, R. I., 1871.
”My Dear Friend:--I herewith return the letters you so kindly sent me.
I have derived much pleasure in their perusal, and have looked on them with affectionate regard as a mode of greeting from old friends from whom I have been separated for more than a quarter of a century. I do not think any one who was at Brook Farm has that deep and sincere affection for it and its memory that I have. It was my mother by adoption, and what little I have of education, refinement, or culture and taste for matters above things material, I owe to her and the heroic and self-sacrificing men and women who composed its body, social and scholastic. I was but a cipher there, among them by accident, and I was much the gainer even if they were not the losers. What I saw there, and what I learned there, have been of great value to me, and if I have made any progress in material matters or have attained any social position, I am frank enough to confess that I owe it all to dear old Brook Farm. G.o.d bless its memory. What I have, and what I am, is the outgrowth of a two years' life at my first real home. . . .
”When I commenced this I intended to write but a half dozen lines, simply making my acknowledgment of your kindness, but my purpose soon changed, and I now find that I have not enough room on this sheet to say one t.i.the of what comes rus.h.i.+ng in my mind 'as a river' about Brook Farm, and I can now only say that I wish you to convey my kindest regards to all of our dear old acquaintances whenever you see them or write to them. All Brook Farmers are to me as brothers and sisters, and I so esteem them.
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