 | The Blithedale romance |  |
PREFACE.
In the “Blithedale” of this volume many readers
will, probably, suspect a faint and not very faithful
shadowing of Brook Farm, in Roxbury, which
(now a little more than ten years ago) was occupied
and cultivated by a company of socialists. The author
does not wish to deny that he had this community in
his mind, and that (having had the good fortune, for a
time, to be personally connected with it) he has occasionally
availed himself of his actual reminiscences, in
the hope of giving a more life-like tint to the fancy-sketch
in the following pages. He begs it to be
understood, however, that he has considered the institution
itself as not less fairly the subject of fictitious
handling than the imaginary personages whom he has
introduced there. His whole treatment of the affair
is altogether incidental to the main purpose of the
romance; nor does he put forward the slightest pretensions
to illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion,
favorable or otherwise, in respect to socialism.
In short, his present concern with the socialist
removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where
the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical
antics, without exposing them to too close a
comparison with the actual events of real lives. In the
old countries, with which fiction has long been conversant,
a certain conventional privilege seems to be
awarded to the romancer; his work is not put exactly
side by side with nature; and he is allowed a license
with regard to every-day probability, in view of the
improved effects which he is bound to produce thereby.
Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as yet no
such Faery Land, so like the real world, that, in a
suitable remoteness, one cannot well tell the difference,
but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld
through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their
own. This atmosphere is what the American romancer
needs. In its absence, the beings of imagination are
compelled to show themselves in the same category as
actually living mortals; a necessity that generally
renders the paint and pasteboard of their composition
but too painfully discernible. With the idea of partially
obviating this difficulty (the sense of which has
always pressed very heavily upon him), the author
has ventured to make free with his old and affectionately
remembered home at Brook Farm, as being
certainly the most romantic episode of his own life, —
offering an available foothold between fiction and reality.
Furthermore, the scene was in good keeping
with the personages whom he desired to introduce.
These characters, he feels it right to say, are entirely
fictitious. It would, indeed (considering how few
amiable qualities he distributes among his imaginary
progeny), be a most grievous wrong to his former
excellent associates, were the author to allow it to be
supposed that he has been sketching any of their likenesses.
Had he attempted it, they would at least
have recognized the touches of a friendly pencil. But
he has done nothing of the kind. The self-concentrated
Philanthropist; the high-spirited Woman, bruising
herself against the narrow limitations of her sex;
the weakly Maiden, whose tremulous nerves endow
her with sibylline attributes; the Minor Poet, beginning
life with strenuous aspirations, which die out
with his youthful fervor; — all these might have been
looked for at Brook Farm, but, by some accident,
never made their appearance there.
The author cannot close his reference to this subject,
without expressing a most earnest wish that
some one of the many cultivated and philosophic
minds, which took an interest in that enterprise,
might now give the world its history. Ripley, with
whom rests the honorable paternity of the institution,
— with others, whom he dares not name,
because they veil themselves from the public eye, —
among these is the ability to convey both the outward
narrative and the inner truth and spirit of the whole
affair, together with the lessons which those years of
thought and toil must have elaborated, for the behoof
of future experimentalists. Even the brilliant Howadji
might find as rich a theme in his youthful reminiscences
of Brook Farm, and a more novel one, —
close at hand as it lies, — than those which he has
since made so distant a pilgrimage to seek, in Syria,
and along the current of the Nile.
| The Blithedale romance | |