I said that Margaret had a broad good sense, which brought her near to
all people. I am to say that she had also a strong temperament, which
is that counter force which makes individuality, by driving all the
powers in the direction of the ruling thought or feeling, and, when it
is allowed full sway, isolating them. These two tendencies were always
invading each other, and now one and now the other carried the day.
This alternation perplexes the biographer, as it did the observer.
We contradict on the second page what we affirm on the first: and I
remember how often I was compelled to correct my impressions of her
character when living; for after I had settled it once for all that
she wanted this or that perception, at our next interview she would
say with emphasis the very word.
I think, in her case, there was something abnormal in those obscure
habits and necessities which we denote by the word Temperament. In the
first days of our acquaintance, I felt her to be a foreigner,--that,
with her, one would always be sensible of some barrier, as if in
making up a friendship with a cultivated Spaniard or Turk. She had a
strong constitution, and of course its reactions were strong; and
this is the reason why in all her life she has so much to say of her
_fate_. She was in jubilant spirits in the morning, and ended the day
with nervous headache, whose spasms, my wife told me, produced total
prostration. She had great energy of speech and action, and seemed
formed for high emergencies.
Her life concentrated itself on certain happy days, happy hours, happy
moments. The rest was a void. She had read that a man of letters must
lose many days, to work well in one. Much more must a Sappho or a
sibyl. The capacity of pleasure was balanced by the capacity of pain.
'If I had wist!--' she writes, 'I am a worse self-tormentor than
Rousseau, and all my riches are fuel to the fire. My beautiful lore,
like the tropic clime, hatches scorpions to sting me. There is a
verse, which Annie of Lochroyan sings about her ring, that torments my
memory, 'tis so true of myself.'
When I found she lived at a rate so much faster than mine, and which
was violent compared with mine, I foreboded rash and painful crises,
and had a feeling as if a voice cried, _Stand from under!_--as if, a
little further on, this destiny was threatened with jars and reverses,
which no friendship could avert or console. This feeling partly wore
off, on better acquaintance, but remained latent; and I had always
an impression that her energy was too much a force of blood, and
therefore never felt the security for her peace which belongs to more
purely intellectual natures. She seemed more vulnerable. For the
same reason, she remained inscrutable to me; her strength was not my
strength,--her powers were a surprise. She passed into new states of
great advance, but I understood these no better. It were long to tell
her peculiarities. Her childhood was full of presentiments. She was
then a somnambulist. She was subject to attacks of delirium, and,
later, perceived that she had spectral illusions. When she was twelve,
she had a determination of blood to the head. 'My parents,' she said,
'were much mortified to see the fineness of my complexion
destroyed. My own vanity was for a time severely wounded; but
I recovered, and made up my mind to be bright and ugly.'
She was all her lifetime the victim of disease and pain. She read and
wrote in bed, and believed that she could understand anything better
when she was ill. Pain acted like a girdle, to give tension to her
powers. A lady, who was with her one day during a terrible attack of
nervous headache, which made Margaret totally helpless, assured me
that Margaret was yet in the finest vein of humor, and kept those who
were assisting her in a strange, painful excitement, between
laughing and crying, by perpetual brilliant sallies. There were other
peculiarities of habit and power. When she turned her head on one
side, she alleged she had second sight, like St. Francis. These traits
or predispositions made her a willing listener to all the uncertain
science of mesmerism and its goblin brood, which have been rife in
recent years.
She had a feeling that she ought to have been a man, and said of
herself, 'A man's ambition with a woman's heart, is an evil lot.' In
some verses which she wrote 'To the Moon,' occur these lines:--
'But if I steadfast gaze upon thy face,
A human secret, like my own, I trace;
For, through the woman's smile looks the male eye.'
And she found something of true portraiture in a disagreeable novel of
Balzac's, "_Le Livre Mystique_," in which an equivocal figure exerts
alternately a masculine and a feminine influence on the characters of
the plot.
Of all this nocturnal element in her nature she was very conscious,
and was disposed, of course, to give it as fine names as it would
carry, and to draw advantage from it. 'Attica,' she said to a friend,
'is your province, Thessaly is mine: Attica produced the marble
wonders, of the great geniuses; but Thessaly is the land of magic.'
'I have a great share of Typhon to the Osiris, wild rush and
leap, blind force for the sake of force.'
* * * * *
'Dante, thou didst not describe, in all thy apartments of
Inferno, this tremendous repression of an existence half
unfolded; this swoon as the soul was ready to be born.'
* * * * *
'Every year I live, I dislike routine more and more, though I
see that society rests on that, and other falsehoods. The
more I screw myself down to hours, the more I become expert at
giving out thought and life in regulated rations,--the more I
weary of this world, and long to move upon the wing, without
props and sedan chairs.'