The First Four Notes: Beethoven's Fifth and the Human Imagination (19 page)

Dwight tolerated being a farmhand; he rather more enjoyed
his work in Brook Farm’s school, where he taught Latin and, naturally, music. The
curriculum, based around singing and discussion, was heavy on Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven,
and included field trips that took advantage of the burgeoning vogue for the latter.
Dwight would lead parties into Boston “to drink in the symphonies, and then walk back
the whole way, seven miles at night, and unconscious of fatigue, carrying home with
them a new good genius, beautiful and strong, to help them through the next day’s
labors,” according to George William Curtis, who became famous as a writer, public
speaker, and government reformer. Curtis was a teenager at Brook Farm, and formed
a lifelong friendship with Dwight. In later life Curtis recalled those walks, the
radicals descending into moral peril for spiritual sustenance like musical Dantes:

If Wagner’s brand of nationalist mysticism might be characterized as Hegelianism without
socialism, the American energies that produced Brook Farm were socialism without Hegelianism,
or at least without the Young Hegelians’ ambitious fabric-of-history scope.
The Dial
extolled Brook Farm’s back-to-the-land ethos (“The lowing of cattle is the natural
bass to the melody of human voices”) but reserved the benefits for a certain breed
of the intellectually aspirant: “Minds incapable of refinement will not be attracted
into this association. It is
an Ideal Community, and only to the ideally inclined will it be attractive.”
¹⁵

The commune would, indeed, evolve in response to idealized programs rather than practical
concerns. The first shift was toward Fourierism, named for Charles Fourier, a French
socialist who came up with a scheme for remaking society that was equal parts far-seeing
tolerance and numerological eccentricity. He proposed reorganizing human society into
communities called phalanxes, each with an ideal population of 1,620—a number Fourier
arrived at by categorizing twelve kinds of human passions, which could combine into
810 types of human character, which he then multiplied by two (male and female). Each
community would be centered around a phalanstery, a large multipurpose building for
which Fourier helpfully provided a detailed architectural layout.

At his most outlandish, Fourier displayed an imagination worthy of science fiction.
He assigned personalities to the heavenly bodies: the moon, for example, was a dead
mummy that would eventually give way to five living replacements. At its peak, society
would reach a stage of Harmony, at which time, Fourier infamously insisted, the oceans
would turn to lemonade. Friedrich Engels recommended Fourier, despite his ignorance
of Hegelian theory, as a tonic against the tendency of Hegelianism toward arrogant
solemnity. “If it has to be,” Engels wrote, “I shall prefer to believe with the cheerful
Fourier in all these stories rather than in the realm of the absolute spirit, where
there is no lemonade at all.”
¹⁶

Fourier’s ideas were brought to America by his student Alfred Brisbane, who soft-pedaled
Fourier’s more extravagant fancies; still, enough remained, especially the obsessive
streams of impossibly precise numbers, to make even Brisbane’s watered-down Fourierism
off-the-wall by modern mainstream standards. And yet some of the leading minds of
the day—such as New York writer, publisher, and activist Horace Greeley and, in turn,
Ripley,
Dwight, and others in the Transcendentalist circle—became, for a time, dedicated Fourierists.

Fourier himself had lived through the French Revolution; the meticulous detail of
his prospectus can be read as a reaction to that idealistic descent into chaos. In
America, though, his prescriptive zeal was something to empower individual freedom.
Personal liberty wasn’t dependent on status, luck, or power; all one had to do was
follow directions. “Life brings to each his task,” Emerson wrote, “and, whatever art
you select, algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics,—all are attainable,
even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same terms … begin at the beginning, proceed
in order, step by step.”
¹⁷
The appeal of Fourier in America wasn’t just his harmonious destination, but that
traditional New England holy grail: a turn-by-turn guide for getting there, a path
spelled out so that anyone could follow it.

Hand in hand with Fourier’s social theories came the religious speculations of Emmanuel
Swedenborg. In his fifties, while working on an anatomical study called
The Economy of the Animal Kingdom
(attempting to demonstrate that the soul resided in the blood, since it penetrated
the entire body), the well-connected eighteenth-century Swedish gentleman-scientist
began having vivid dreams, which soon manifested themselves as revelatory experiences.
The Lord himself appeared to him, Swedenborg claimed, anointing him His messenger,
letting him travel freely among heaven and hell, conversing with spirits along the
way.

The theology that resulted from Swedenborg’s fact-finding tours of the next world
offered a vision—equal parts Eastern religious traditions and proto-Hegelianism—of
mankind graduating from its current materialist existence to a higher, spiritual plane.
A connection to Fourier’s prospective Harmony was easily made by Transcendental enthusiasts.
(Emerson included Swedenborg in his 1850 book
Representative Men
, along with, among others, Shakespeare, Napoléon, and Goethe.) Swedenborg combined
the prospect of enlightenment with a prescription
of charitable work in a way that appealed to Brook Farmers Ripley and Dwight, both
of whom had abandoned the pulpit in search of more concrete action. “Faith without
charity is not faith,” Swedenborg insisted. “The separation of charity and faith coincides
also with the separation of flesh and blood; for the blood separated from the flesh
is gore and becomes corruption, and the flesh separated from the blood by degrees
grows putrid and produces worms.”
¹⁸

What’s more, both Fourier and Swedenborg preached tolerance. Fourier was, in essence,
an early feminist (one factor behind the proposed phalansteries was to free women
from the tyranny of the house), and also thought society should be considerate toward
alternative sexualities; Swedenborg believed that the New Jerusalem, the final epoch
of Christianity, would most likely take hold in Africa, since Africans were “more
interior”
¹⁹
and thus more receptive to enlightenment—a stance that, noble-savage overtones aside,
fit nicely with the Transcendentalists’ abolitionist bent.

Encouraged by Greeley and Brisbane, Brook Farm converted to Fourierism and Swedenborgianism,
rebranding themselves from an Association to a Phalanx, and taking over editing and
printing of the main Fourierist newspaper in America, now renamed
The Harbinger
. Not all the Brook Farmers went along with change, but Dwight certainly did. He became
The Harbinger
’s music critic, and promptly began pouring his Beethovenian wine into Fourierist
bottles, filing composers under Fourier’s various human passions: Handel represented
Universal Friendship; Haydn, Paternity; and Mozart, Love. Beethoven was Ambition:
“the aspiring Promethean spirit, struggling for release from monotony and falseness,
sick of the actual, subduing every sincere sadness by heroic triumphs in art, which
are like tears brightening into joys of most rapturous, inspired visions of a coming
Era, which shall consummate the Unity of all things.”
²⁰

Such prose indicates how radical-by-association, at the time,
Beethoven’s reputation could and possibly should be considered. To sum up: Dwight
was living on a commune, espousing a far-out political system, delving into a mystical
religion. He was, as much as one could be in nineteenth-century America, a hippie.
And Beethoven’s symphonies were his music of choice. Lest anyone mistake the connection,
Dwight spelled it out: “In religion we have Swedenborg; in social economy, Fourier;
in music, Beethoven.”
²¹

The new idols proved false. With a huge part of the farm’s income siphoned off to
fund the construction of a Fourierist phalanstery, commune-wide economizing took a
toll on morale; when the nearly finished phalanstery burned to the ground, in March
1846, Brook Farm was, essentially, financially ruined. “The idealists lingered last,
loath to leave a spot endeared by so many associations, hallowed by so many hopes,”
wrote one chronicler. “One of the last to go, one of the saddest of heart, one of
the most self-sacrificing through it all, was John S. Dwight. It may be truly said
that Brook Farm dies in music.”
²²

At least Brook Farm could measure its span in years; Bronson Alcott, the Orphic idealist,
saw his own commune, a ninety-acre tract in Harvard, Massachusetts, dubbed “Fruitlands”
(“We rise with early dawn, begin the day with cold bathing, succeeded by a music lesson,
and then a chaste repast”
²³
) fail after only seven months. His daughter Louisa, after writing her wildly successful
novel
Little Women
, revisited the Fruitlands fiasco in a thinly disguised 1873 satire called “Transcendental
Wild Oats.” Her humor was cutting, but her postmortem, from its Gilded Age vantage,
was sympathetic to the fragility of the radical Transcendentalists’ idealism in a
society increasingly governed by capitalist ambition:

Annie Russell Marble, the daughter of one of Emerson’s favorite ministers and herself
a literary critic, was sassier, calling the Transcendentalists “a race who dove into
the infinite, soared into the illimitable, and never paid cash.”
²⁵

Nathaniel Hawthorne also put a sardonic spin on his Brook Farm memories in his 1852
novel
The Blithedale Romance
. D. H. Lawrence summarized
The Blithedale Romance
in pithy style: “[T]he famous idealists and transcendentalists of America met to
till the soil and hew the timber in the sweat of their own brows, thinking high thoughts
the while, and breathing an atmosphere of communal love, and tingling in tune with
the Oversoul, like so many strings of a super-celestial harp.… Of course they fell
out like cats and dogs. Couldn’t stand one another. And all the music they made was
the music of their quarrelling.”
²⁶

In Hawthorne’s case, the rue is also at least a little self-directed. He had left
Brook Farm after only five months; even before his final departure, he wrote, “It
already looks like a dream behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community:
there has been a spectral appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and milking
the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the sun, and doing me the
honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not myself.”
²⁷
In the form of Miles Coverdale, the narrator of
The Blithedale Romance
, Hawthorne would be rebuked for that by the novel’s dark feminine presence, Zenobia
(modeled, many thought, on Margaret Fuller):

Arriving for the interview, Coverdale had “heard a rich, and, as it were, triumphant
burst of music from a piano, in which I felt Zenobia’s character, although heretofore
I had known nothing of her skill upon the instrument.”
²⁸
Beethoven’s Fifth, maybe? Hawthorne doesn’t say.

SEEMING CONTRADICTIONS
resulting from the off-the-shelf adoption of Romantic ideas by the Transcendentalists
and their progeny might have derailed thinkers less confident of the exceptional nature
of the American experience. Dwight’s writings on Beethoven manage to evoke both the
most progressive strains of Transcendentalism and the American habit of co-opting
transcendence in the service of more worldly pursuits. In 1851, Dwight produced a
survey of “The Sentiment of Various Musical Composers” for the Philadelphia-based
Sartain’s Magazine
(he liked it enough to recycle it for an early issue of
Dwight’s Journal of Music
a year later). Beethoven, the best, is saved for last—in terms that make him into
an honorary American: “With a many-sidedness like Shakespeare’s, there is still one
pervading sentiment in all the music of Beethoven. It has more of the prophetic character
than any other. The progressive spirit of this age, the expansive social instinct
of these new times, accepts it by a strange sympathy. Many a young music-loving American
jumps the previous steps of training, through the taste for Haydn, Mozart, Hummel,
&c., and with his whole soul loves at once Beethoven.”
²⁹