Part 11

Dr. Hedge was struck by two traits of Margaret's character, repeatedly mentioned by others, but to which it is worth while to have his testimony. The first was a passionate love for the beautiful: "I have never known one who seemed to derive such satisfaction from beautiful forms"; the second was "her intellectual sincerity. Her judgment took no bribes from her sex or her sphere, nor from custom, nor tradition, nor caprice."

Margaret was nineteen years old when Dr. James Freeman Clarke, then a young man in college, made her acquaintance. "We both lived in Cambridge," he says, "and from that time until she went to reside in Groton in 1833, I saw her or heard from her almost every day. There was a family connection between us, and we called each other cousins." Possessing in a greater degree than any person he ever knew, the power of magnetizing others, she had drawn about her a circle of girl friends whom she entertained and delighted by her exuberant talent. They came from Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, Brookline, and met now at one house and now at another of these pleasant towns. Dr. Hedge also knows of this charming circle, and says, "she loved to draw these fair girls to herself, and make them her guests, and was never so happy as when surrounded in company, by such a bevy."

With all her social activity, Margaret kept up her studies at a rate that would be the despair of a young man in college. "She already, when I first became acquainted with her," says Dr. Clarke, "had become familiar with the masterpieces of French, Italian, and Spanish literature," and was beginning German, and in about three months, she was reading with ease the masterpieces of German literature. Meanwhile, she was keeping up her Greek as a pastime, reading over and over the dialogues of Plato. Still there is time for Mr. Clarke to walk with her for hours beneath the lindens or in the garden, or, on a summer's day to ride with her on horseback from Cambridge to Newton,--a day he says, "all of a piece, in which my eloquent companion helped me to understand my past life and her own."

We cannot wonder that, at the age of twenty-three, Margaret reluctantly left Cambridge where there was so much that she loved, and went with her family to a farm in Groton where, with certain unpleasant school-girl memories, there was nothing that she loved at all. In 1833, at the age of sixty-five Mr. Fuller retired from his law practice and bought an estate in Groton, with the double purpose of farming his lands for income, and, in his leisure, writing a history of the United States, for which his public life had been a preparation, and towards which he had collected much material. Margaret's most exacting duties were the education of the younger children, which left her much time for her favorite studies. She had correspondents by the score; her friends visited her; Cambridge homes were open to her; and Mrs. Farrar took her on a delightful journey to Newport, Hudson River and Trenton Falls. Still we cannot add the two years in Groton to her happy period, because she allowed herself to be intensely miserable. Six years later, in a moment of penitence, she said of this period, "Had I been wise in such matters then as now, how easy and fair I might have made the whole."

She fought her homesickness by overwork, so that Emerson says, "her reading in Groton was at a rate like Gibbon's," and she paid the penalty of her excesses by a serious illness which threatened to be fatal, and from which perhaps she never fully recovered. It was some consolation that her father was melted to an unwonted exhibition of tenderness, and that he said to her in this mood, "My dear, I have been thinking of you in the night, and I cannot remember that you have any faults. You have defects, of course, as all mortals have, but I do not know that you have a single fault."

Events were soon to make this remark one of her dearest memories. In a short time, death separated the father and child, who had been so much to each other. In 1835, Mr. Fuller fell a victim to cholera, and died in three days. For a year or more, Margaret's heart had been set upon a visit to Europe for study; the trip had been promised by her father; it had been arranged that she should accompany her friends, the Farrars; but the death of Mr. Fuller dissolved this dream, and, in her journal, solemnly praying that "duty may now be the first object and self set aside," she dedicates her strength to her "mother, brothers, and sister." No one can read the "Memoirs" without feeling that she kept her vows.

The estate of Mr. Fuller finally yielded $2,000 to each of the seven children, much less, Margaret says, than was anticipated. With reason, she wrote, "Life, as I look forward, presents a scene of struggle and privation only." In the winter, at Mrs. Farrar's, Margaret met Mr. Emerson; the summer following she visited at his house in Concord. There she met Mr. Alcott and engaged to teach in his school in Boston.

Margaret Fuller's visit at Mr. Emerson's in 1836 had for her very important consequences. It was the first of many visits and was the beginning of an intimacy which takes its place among the most interesting literary friendships in the history of letters. To this friendship Col. Higginson devotes a separate chapter in his biography of Margaret, and in the "Memoirs," under the title of "Visits to Concord," Mr. Emerson gives a charming account of it in more than a hundred pages.

Mr. Emerson was by no means the stranger to Margaret that she was to him. She had sat under his preaching during his pastorate at the Second Church in Boston, and "several of his sermons," so she wrote to a friend, "stood apart in her memory like landmarks in her spiritual history." It appears that she had failed to come to close quarters with this timid apostle. A year after he left his pulpit, she wrote of him as the "only clergyman of all possible clergymen who eludes my acquaintance."

When, at length, she was invited to Concord, it was as Mrs. Emerson's guest, not as his: "she came to spend a fortnight with my wife." However, at last she was under his roof. "I still remember," he says, "the first half hour of her conversation.... Her extreme plainness,--a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids,--the nasal tone of her voice--all repelled; and I said to myself, we shall never get far.... I remember that she made me laugh more than I liked.... She had an incredible variety of anecdotes, and the readiest wit to give an absurd turn to whatever passed; and the eyes, which were so plain at first, soon swam with fun and drolleries, and the very tides of joy and superabundant life."

The practical outcome of the visit was an engagement to teach in Mr. Alcott's school. Under date of August 2, 1836, Mr. Alcott writes, "Emerson called this morning and took me to Concord to spend the day. At his house, I met Margaret Fuller ... and had some conversation with her about taking Miss Peabody's place in my school." That is to say, Mr. Emerson had in his house a brilliant young lady who, by stress of circumstances, wanted a situation; he had a friend in Boston in whose school there was a vacancy; Mr. Emerson, at some pains to himself, brought the parties together. Nor was this the last time that Mr. Emerson befriended Margaret.

It appears from Mr. Alcott's diary that Miss Fuller began her engagement with January, that she taught Latin and French at the school, and French, German, and Italian to private classes. For a class of beginners, she "thought it good success," she says, "when at the end of three months, they could read twenty pages of German at a lesson, and very well." An advanced class in German read Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea, Goetz von Berlichingen, Iphigenia, and the first part of Faust, "three weeks of thorough study," she calls it, "as valuable to me as to them."

The class in Italian went at an equal pace. At the same time she had three private pupils, to one of whom, every day for ten weeks, she taught Latin "orally,"--in other words, Latin conversation. In her leisure, she "translated, one evening every week, German authors into English for the gratification of Dr. Channing." It is to be hoped that she was paid for this service, because she found it far from interesting. "It is not very pleasant," she writes, "for Dr. Channing takes in subjects more deliberately than is conceivable to us feminine people."

In the spring of 1837, Margaret accepted an invitation to teach in a private academy in Providence, R. I.--four hours a day, at a salary of $1,000. We are not told how this invitation came to her, but it is not difficult to detect the hand of Mr. Emerson. The proprietor of the school was an admirer of Emerson, so much so that he brought Emerson from Concord in June following, to dedicate a new school building. His relation to both parties makes it probable that Margaret owed her second engagement, as she did her first, to the good offices of Mr. Emerson.

She taught in this school with success, two years, "worshipped by the girls," it is said, "but sometimes too sarcastic for the boys." The task of teaching, however, was irksome to her, her mind was in literature; she had from Mr. Ripley a definite proposition to write a "Life of Goethe," a task of which she had dreamed many years; and she resigned her position, and withdrew from the profession of school-teacher, at the end of 1838. Her life of Goethe was never written, but it was always dancing before her eyes and, more than once, determined her course.

In the following spring, Margaret took a pleasant house in Jamaica Plain, "then and perhaps now," Col. Higginson says, "the most rural and attractive suburb of Boston." Here she brought her mother and the younger children. Three years later, she removed with them to Cambridge, and for the next five years, she kept the family together, and made a home for them. In addition to the income of the estate, she expected to meet her expenses by giving lessons. Two pupils came with her from Providence, and other pupils came for recitations, by whom she was paid at the rate of two dollars an hour.

With these resources the life in Jamaica Plain began very quietly and pleasantly. To be quiet however was not natural to Margaret. Besides, she had fallen upon what, intellectually, were stirring times. It was at the high tide of the Transcendental movement. William Henry Channing who, like Margaret, was a part of it, says, "the summer of 1839 saw the full dawn of this strange enthusiasm." As he briefly defines it "Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the living God in the soul." Its disciples, says Mr. Channing, "were pleasantly nick-named the 'Like-minded,' on the ground that no two were of the same opinion." Of this company, he says, "Margaret was a member by the grace of nature.... Men, her superiors in years, in fame and social position, treated her more with the frankness due from equal to equal, than the half condescending deference with which scholars are wont to adapt themselves to women.... It was evident that they prized her verdict, respected her criticism, feared her rebuke, and looked to her as an umpire." In speaking, "her opening was deliberate, like the progress of a massive force gaining its momentum; but as she felt her way, and moving in a congenial element, the sweep of her speech became grand. The style of her eloquence was sententious, free from prettiness, direct, vigorous, charged with vitality."

It was a saying of hers that if she had been a man, she would have aspired to become an orator, and it seems probable she would not have aspired in vain. The natural sequel to the occasional discussions of the summer was the formation of a class of ladies for Conversation, with Margaret as the leader. This class contained twenty-five or thirty ladies, among whom were Mrs. George Bancroft, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, Mrs. Horace Mann, Mrs. Theodore Parker, Mrs. Waldo Emerson, Mrs. George Ripley, and Mrs. Josiah Quincy. The first series of thirteen meetings was immediately followed by a second series; they were resumed the next winter and were continued with unabated interest for five years.

The subjects considered in these celebrated Conversations ranged over a very wide field, from mythology and religion, poetry and art, to war, ethics, and sociology. If Margaret had not been brilliant in these assemblies, she would have fallen short of herself as she has been represented in the Cambridge drawing-rooms. As reported by one of the members of the class, "Margaret used to come to the conversations very well dressed and, altogether, looked sumptuously. She began them with an exordium in which she gave her leading views,"--a part which she is further said to have managed with great skill and charm, after which she invited others to join in the discussion. Mr. Emerson tells us that the apparent sumptuousness in her attire was imaginary, the "effect of a general impression made by her genius and mistakenly attributed to some external elegance; for," he says, "I have been told by her most intimate friend, who knew every particular of her conduct at the time, that there was nothing of especial expense or splendor in her toilette."

Mr. Emerson knew a lady "of eminent powers, previously by no means partial to Margaret," who said, on leaving one of these assemblies, "I never heard, read of, or imagined a conversation at all equal to this we have now heard." Many testimonies have been brought together, in the "Memoirs," of the enthusiasm and admiration created by Margaret in these Conversations. They were probably her most brilliant achievements, though, in the nature of the case, nothing survives of them but the echo in these recorded memories of participants.

Mr. Emerson says that "the fame of these conversations" led to a proposal that Margaret should undertake an evening class to which gentlemen should be admitted and that he himself had the pleasure of "assisting at one--the second--of these soirees." Margaret "spoke well--she could not otherwise,--but I remember that she seemed encumbered, or interrupted, by the headiness or incapacity of the men." A lady who attended the entire series, a "true hand," he says, reports that "all that depended on others entirely failed" and that "even in the point of erudition, which Margaret did not profess on the subject, she proved the best informed of the party." This testimony is worth something in answer to the charge that Margaret's scholarship was fictitious, that she had a smattering of many things, but knew nothing thoroughly. She seems to have compared well with others, some of whom were considered scholars. "Take her as a whole," said Mr. Emerson's informant, "she has the most to bestow on others by conversation of any person I have ever known."

For these services, Margaret seems to have received liberal compensation, though all was so cordial that she says she never had the feeling of being "a paid Corinne." For the conversations with ladies and gentlemen, according to Mrs. Dall who has published her notes of them, the tickets were $20 each, for the series of ten evenings.

It appears from his account that Mr. Emerson saw much of Margaret during these years and that she was frequently his guest. "The day," he says, "was never long enough to exhaust her opulent memory; and I, who knew her intimately for ten years,--from July, 1836, till August, 1846, when she sailed for Europe,--never saw her without a surprise at her new powers." She was as busy as he, and they seldom met in the forenoon, but "In the evening, she came to the library, and many and many a conversation was there held," he tells us, "whose details, if they could be preserved, would justify all encomiums. They interested me in every manner;--talent, memory, wit, stern introspection, poetic play, religion, the finest personal feeling, the aspects of the future, each followed each in full activity, and left me, I remember, enriched, and sometimes astonished by the gifts of my guest."

She was "rich in friends," and wore them "as a necklace of diamonds about her neck." "She was an active and inspiring companion and correspondent, and all the art, the thought and nobleness of New England seemed, at that moment, related to her and she to it. She was everywhere a welcome guest.... Her arrival was a holiday, and so was her abode ... all tasks that could be suspended were put aside to catch the favorable hour, in walking, riding, or boating to talk with this joyful guest, who brought wit, anecdotes, love-stories, tragedies, oracles with her, and, with her broad relations to so many fine friends, seemed like the queen of some parliament of love, who carried the key to all confidences, and to whom every question had been finally referred."

At a later day, when Margaret was in Italy, reports came back that she was making conquests, and having advantageous offers of marriage. Even Mr. Emerson expressed surprise at these social successes in a strange land, but a lady said to him, "There is nothing extraordinary in it. Had she been a man, any one of those fine girls of sixteen, who surrounded her here, would have married her: they were all in love with her."

"Of personal influence, speaking strictly,--an efflux, that is, purely of mind and character," Mr. Emerson thinks she had more than any other person he ever knew. Even a recluse like Hawthorne yielded to this influence. Hawthorne was married to Miss Sophia Peabody in 1842, and began housekeeping in the Old Manse in Concord. The day following their engagement Miss Peabody wrote Miss Fuller addressing her "Dear, most noble Margaret," and saying, "I feel that you are entitled, through our love and regard to be told directly.... Mr. Hawthorne, last evening, in the midst of his emotions, so deep and absorbing, after deciding, said that Margaret can now, when she visits Mr. Emerson spend part of the time with us." A month after the marriage, Hawthorne himself wrote to Margaret, "There is nobody to whom I would more willingly speak my mind, because I can be certain of being understood." Evidently he is not beginning an acquaintance; he already knows Margaret intimately and respects her thoroughly. There is no evidence, I believe, that during her life, he held any different opinion of her.

These facts have become of special interest because, in Italy, eight years after her death, he wrote in his Note-Book, that Margaret "had a strong and coarse nature" and that "she was a great humbug." The most reasonable explanation of this change of view is that Margaret was dead, poor woman, and could not speak for herself; that she had fought with all her might in an Italian Revolution that had failed; that having failed, she and her party were discredited; that her enemies survived, and Hawthorne listened to them. However his later opinions may be explained, the quality of her friends in America, among whom had been Hawthorne himself, is evidence that Margaret was not of a "coarse nature," and it is incredible that a "humbug" could have imposed herself for five years upon those ladies who attended her conversations, not to speak of James Freeman Clarke who was a fair scholar and Dr. Hedge who was a very rare scholar.

Margaret had her weaknesses, which her friends do not conceal. It was a weakness, not perhaps that she overestimated herself; that might be pardoned; but that she took no pains to conceal her high opinion of her abilities and worth. One likes to see an appearance of modesty, and that little deceit Margaret did not practice. On the contrary, Mr. Emerson says, "Margaret at first astonished and then repelled us by a complacency that seemed the most assured since the days of Scaligar.... In the coolest way, she said to her friends, 'I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.'... It is certain that Margaret occasionally let slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who knew her good sense." Col. Higginson quotes a saying about the Fullers, that "Their only peculiarity was that they said openly about themselves the good and bad things which we commonly suppress about ourselves and express only about other people." The common way is not more sincere, but it is pleasanter.