WINTER IN BOSTON.--A SEASON OF SEVERE LABOR.--CONNECTION WITH GREENE
STREET SCHOOL, PROVIDENCE, R. I.--EDITORSHIP OF THE "DIAL."--MARGARET'S
ESTIMATE OF ALLSTON'S PICTURES.
Margaret's removal was to Boston, where a twofold labor was before her.
She was engaged to teach Latin and French in Mr. Alcott's school, then
at the height of its prosperity, and intended also to form classes of
young ladies who should study with her French, German, and Italian.
Mr. Alcott's educational theories did not altogether commend themselves
to Margaret's judgment. They had in them, indeed, the germ of much that
is to-day recognized as true and important. But Margaret considered him
to be too much possessed with the idea of the unity of knowledge, too
little aware of the complexities of instruction.
He, on the other hand, describes her "as a person clearly given to the
boldest speculation, and of liberal and varied acquirements. Not wanting
in imaginative power, she has the rarest good sense and discretion. The
blending of sentiment and of wisdom in her is most remarkable, and her
taste is as fine as her prudence. I think her the most brilliant talker
of her day."
Margaret now passed through twenty-five weeks of incessant labor,
suffering the while from her head, which she calls "a bad head," but
which we should consider a most abused one. Her retrospect of this
period of toil is interesting, and with its severity she remembers also
its value to her. Meeting with many disappointments at the outset, and
feeling painfully the new circumstances which obliged her to make
merchandise of her gifts and acquirements, she yet says that she
rejoices over it all, "and would not have undertaken an iota less."
Besides fulfilling her intention of self-support, she feels that she has
gained in the power of attention, in self-command, and in the knowledge
of methods of instruction, without in the least losing sight of the aims
which had made hitherto the happiness and enthusiasm of her life.
Here is, in brief, the tale of her winter's work.
To one class she gave elementary instruction in German, and that so
efficiently that her pupils were able to read the language with ease at
the end of three months. With another class she read, in twenty-four
weeks, Schiller's "Don Carlos," "Artists," and "Song of the Bell;"
Goethe's "Herman und Dorothea," "Götz von Berlichingen," "Iphigenia,"
first part of "Faust," and "Clavigo;" Lessing's "Nathan der Weise,"
"Minna," and "Emilia Galotti;" parts of Tieck's "Phantasus," and nearly
all of the first volume of Richter's "Titan."
With the Italian class she read parts of Tasso, Petrarch, Ariosto,
Alfieri, and the whole hundred cantos of Dante's "Divina Commedia."
Besides these classes she had also three private pupils, one of them a
boy unable to use his eyes in study. She gave this child oral
instruction in Latin, and read to him the History of England and
Shakespeare's plays in connection. The lessons given by her in Mr.
Alcott's school were, she says, valuable to her, but also very
fatiguing.
Though already so much overtasked, Margaret found time and strength to
devote one evening every week to the _viva voce_ translation of German
authors for Dr. Channing's benefit, reading to him mostly from De Wette
and Herder. Much conversation accompanied these readings, and Margaret
confesses that she finds therein much food for thought, while the
Doctor's judgments appear to her deliberate, and his sympathies somewhat
slow. She speaks of him as entirely without any assumption of
superiority towards her, and as trusting "to the elevation of his
thoughts to keep him in his place." She also greatly enjoyed his
preaching, the force and earnestness of which seemed to her "to purge as
by fire."
If Margaret was able to review her winter's work with pleasure, we must
regard it with mingled wonder and dismay. The range and extent of her
labors were indeed admirable, combining such extremes as enabled her to
minister to the needs of the children in Mr. Alcott's school, and to
assist the studies of the most eminent divine of the day. If we look
only at her classes in literature, we shall find it wonderful that a
woman of twenty-six should have been able to give available instruction
in directions so many and various.
On the other hand, we must think that the immense extent of ground gone
over involved too rapid a study of the separate works comprised in it.
Here was given a synopsis of literary work which, properly performed,
would fill a lifetime. It was no doubt valuable to her pupils through
the vivifying influence of her enthusiastic imagination, which may have
enabled some of them, in after years, to fill out the sketch of culture
so boldly and broadly drawn before their eyes. Yet, considered as
instruction, it must, from its very extent, have been somewhat
superficial.
Our dismay would regard the remorseless degree in which Margaret, at
this time, must have encroached upon the reserves of her bodily
strength. Some physicists of to-day ascribe to women a peculiar power of
concentrating upon one short effort an amount of vital force which
should carry them through long years, and which, once expended, cannot
be restored. Margaret's case would certainly justify this view; for,
while a mind so vigorous necessarily presupposes a body of uncommon
vigor, she was after this time always a sufferer, and never enjoyed that
perfect equipoise of function and of power which we call health.
* * * * *
In the spring of the year 1837 Margaret was invited to fill an important
post in the Greene Street School, at Providence, R. I. It was proposed
that she should teach the elder girls four hours daily, arranging
studies and courses at her own discretion, and receiving a salary of one
thousand dollars per annum.
Margaret hesitated to accept this offer, feeling inclined rather to
renew her classes of the year just past, and having in mind also a life
of Goethe which she greatly desired to write, and for which she was
already collecting material. In the end, however, the prospect of
immediate independence carried the day, and she became the "Lady
Superior," as she styles it, of the Providence school. Here a nearer
view of the great need of her services stimulated her generous efforts,
and she was rewarded by the love and reverence of her pupils, and by the
knowledge that she did indeed bring them an awakening which led them
from inert ignorance to earnest endeavor.
Margaret's record of her stay in Providence is enlivened by portraits of
some of the men of mark who came within her ken. Among these was Tristam
Burgess, already old, whose baldness, she says, "increases the fine
effect of his appearance, for it seems as if the locks had retreated
that the contour of his strongly marked head might be revealed." The
eminent lawyer, Whipple, is not, she says, a man of the Webster class;
but is, in her eyes, first among men of the class immediately below, and
wears "a pervading air of ease and mastery which shows him fit to be a
leader of the flock." John Neal, of Portland, speaks to her girls on the
destiny and vocation of woman in America, and in private has a long talk
with her concerning woman, whigism, modern English poets, Shakespeare,
and particularly "Richard the Third," concerning which play the two
"actually had a fight." "Mr. Neal," she says, "does not argue quite
fairly, for he uses reason while it lasts, and then helps himself out
with wit, sentiment, and assertion." She hears a discourse and prayer
from Joseph John Gurney, of England, in whose matter and manner she
finds herself grievously disappointed: "Quakerism has at times looked
lovely to me, and I had expected at least a spiritual exposition of its
doctrines from the brother of Mrs. Fry. But his manner was as wooden as
his matter. His figures were paltry, his thoughts narrowed down, and his
very sincerity made corrupt by spiritual pride. The poet, Richard H.
Dana, in those days gave a course of readings from the English
dramatists, beginning with Shakespeare. Margaret writes:--
"The introductory was beautiful.... All this was arrayed in a garb of
most delicate grace; but a man of such genuine refinement undervalues
the cannon-blasts and rockets which are needed to rouse the attention of
the vulgar. His naïve gestures, the rapt expression of his face, his
introverted eye, and the almost childlike simplicity of his pathos carry
one back into a purer atmosphere, to live over again youth's fresh
emotions." Her _résumé_ of him ends with these words: "Mr. Dana has the
charms and the defects of one whose object in life has been to preserve
his individuality unprofaned."
Margaret's connection with the Greene Street School in Providence
lasted two years. Her success in this work was considered very great,
and her brief residence in Rhode Island was crowned with public esteem
and with many valued friendships.
Her parting from the pupils here was not without tears on both sides.
Although engaged to teach the elder girls, Margaret's care had extended
over the younger ones, and also over some of the boys. With all she
exchanged an affectionate farewell, in which words of advice were
mingled. To the class of girls which had been her especial charge she
made a farewell address whose impressive sentences must have been long
remembered. Here are some of them:--
"I reminded them of the ignorance in which some of them had been found,
and showed them how all my efforts had necessarily been directed to
stimulating their minds, leaving undone much which, under other
circumstances, would have been deemed indispensable. I thanked them for
the moral beauty of their conduct, bore witness that an appeal to
conscience had never failed, and told them of my happiness in having the
faith thus confirmed that young persons can be best guided by addressing
their highest nature. I assured them of my true friendship, proved by my
never having cajoled or caressed them into good. All my influence over
them was rooted in reality; I had never softened nor palliated their
faults. I had appealed, not to their weakness, but to their strength. I
had offered to them always the loftiest motives, and had made every
other end subservient to that of spiritual growth. With a heart-felt
blessing I dismissed them."
* * * * *
In those days appeared Miss Martineau's book on America, of which we may
say that its sharply critical tone stirred the national consciousness,
and brought freshly into consideration the question of negro slavery,
the discussion of which had been by common consent banished from "good"
society in the United States. Miss Martineau dared to reprobate this
institution in uncompromising language, and, while showing much
appreciation of the natural beauties of the country, was generally
thought to have done injustice to its moral and social characteristics.
While Margaret regarded with indignation the angry abuse with which her
friend's book was greeted on this side of the Atlantic, she felt obliged
to express to her the disappointment which she herself had felt on
reading it. She acknowledges that the work has been "garbled,
misrepresented, scandalously ill-treated." Yet she speaks of herself as
one of those who, seeing in the book "a degree of presumptuousness,
irreverence, inaccuracy, hasty generalization, and ultraism on many
points which they did not expect, lament the haste in which you have
written, and the injustice which you have consequently done to so
important a task, and to your own powers of being and doing."
Among other grievances, Margaret especially felt the manner in which
Miss Martineau had written about Mr. Alcott. This she could not pass
over without comment: "A true and noble man; a philanthropist, whom a
true and noble woman, also a philanthropist, should have delighted to
honor; a philosopher, worthy the palmy times of ancient Greece; a man
whom the worldlings of Boston hold in as much horror as the worldlings
of ancient Athens did Socrates. They smile to hear their verdict
confirmed from the other side of the Atlantic by their censor, Harriet
Martineau."
Margaret expresses in this letter the fear lest the frankness of her
strictures should deprive her of the regard of her friend, but says, "If
your heart turns from me, I shall still love you, still think you
noble."
* * * * *
In 1840 Margaret was solicited to become the editor of the "Dial," and
undertook, for two years, the management of the magazine, which was at
this time considered as the organ of the Transcendentalists. The "Dial"
was a quarterly publication, somewhat nebulous in its character, but
valuable as the expression of fresh thought, stimulating to culture of a
new order. Like the transcendental movement itself, it had in it the
germs of influences which in the course of the last forty years have
come to be widely felt and greatly prized. In the newness of its birth
and origin, it needed nursing fathers and nursing mothers, but was fed
mostly, so far as concerns the general public, with neglect and
ridicule.
Margaret, besides laboring with great diligence in her editorship,
contributed to its pages many papers on her favorite points of study,
such as Goethe, Beethoven, Romantic poetry, John Stirling, etc. Of the
"Dial," Mr. Emerson says: "Good or bad, it cost a good deal of precious
labor from those who served it, and from Margaret most of all." As there
were no funds behind the enterprise, contributors were not paid for
their work, and Margaret's modest salary of two hundred dollars per
annum was discontinued after the first year.
The magazine lived four years. In England and Scotland it achieved a
_succès d'estime_, and a republication of it in these days is about to
make tardy amends for the general indifference which allowed its career
to terminate so briefly.
Copies of the original work, now a literary curiosity, can here and
there be borrowed from individuals who have grown old in the service of
human progress. A look into the carefully preserved volumes shows us the
changes which time has wrought in the four decades of years which have
elapsed (quite or nearly) since the appearance of the last number.
A melancholy touches us as we glance hither and thither among its pages.
How bright are the morning hours marked on this Dial! How merged now in
the evening twilight and darkness! Here is Ralph Waldo Emerson, with
life's meridian still before him. Here are printed some of his earliest
lectures and some of the most admired of his poems. Here are the
graceful verses of Christopher P. Cranch, artist and poet. Here are the
Channing cousins, nephews of the great man by different brothers, one,
William Henry Channing, then, as always, fervid and unrelinquishing in
faith; the other, William Ellery, a questioner who, not finding himself
answered to his mind, has ceased to ask. Here is Theodore Parker, a
youthful critic of existing methods and traditions, already familiar
with the sacred writings of many religions. A. Bronson Alcott appears in
various forms, contributing "Days from a Diary," "Orphic Sayings," and
so on. Here are, from various authors, papers entitled: "Social
Tendencies," "The Interior or Hidden Life," "The Pharisees," "Prophecy,
Transcendentalism, and Progress," "Leaves from a Scholar's Journal,"
"Ethnic Scriptures," "The Preaching of Buddha," "Out-World and
In-World,"--headings which themselves afford an insight into the
direction of the speculative thought and fancy of the time. An article
on the Hollis Street Council presents to us the long-forgotten
controversy between Rev. John Pierpont and his congregation, to settle
which a conference of the Unitarian clergy was summoned. Another,
entitled "Chardon Street and Bible Conventions," records the coming
together of a company of "madmen, mad women, men with beards, Dunkers,
Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists,
Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers," to
discuss church discipline and the authenticity of the Bible. Among those
present were Dr. Channing, Father Taylor, Mr. Alcott, Mr. Garrison,
Jones Very, and Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman. The chronicler says that "the
assembly was characterized by the predominance of a certain plain,
sylvan strength and earnestness, while many of the most intellectual and
cultivated persons attended its councils. Mrs. Little and Mrs. Lucy
Sessions took a pleasing and memorable part in the debate, and _that
flea of Conventions_, Mrs. Abigail Folsom, was but too ready with her
interminable scroll." In the July number of the year 1842 many pages are
devoted to a rehearsal of "the entertainments of the past winter," which
treats of Fanny Elssler's dancing, Braham's singing, oratorios, symphony
concerts, and various lectures. Among these last, those of Mr. Lyell
(afterwards Sir Charles) are curtly dismissed as "a neat article," while
those of Henry Giles are recognized as showing popular talent.
Among Margaret's own contributions to the "Dial," the article on Goethe
and that entitled "The Great Lawsuit" are perhaps the most noteworthy.
We shall find the second of these expanded into the well-known "Woman in
the Nineteenth Century," of which mention will be made hereafter. The
one first named seems to demand some notice here, the fine
discrimination of its criticism showing how well qualified the writer
was to teach the women of her day the true appreciation of genius, and
to warn them from the idolatry which worships the faults as well as the
merits of great minds.
From a lover of Goethe, such sentences as the following were scarcely to
have been expected:--
"Pardon him, World, that he was too worldly. Do not wonder, Heart, that
he was so heartless. Believe, Soul, that one so true, as far as he
went, must yet be initiated into the deeper mysteries of soul.
"Naturally of a deep mind and shallow heart, he felt the sway of the
affections enough to appreciate their working in other men, but never
enough to receive their inmost regenerating influence."
Margaret finds a decline of sentiment and poetic power in Goethe, dating
from his relinquishment of Lili.
"After this period we find in him rather a wide and deep wisdom than the
inspirations of genius. His faith that all must issue well wants the
sweetness of piety; and the God he manifests to us is one of law or
necessity rather than of intelligent love.
"This mastery that Goethe prizes seems to consist rather in the skilful
use of means than in the clear manifestation of ends. Yet never let him
be confounded with those who sell all their birthright. He became blind
to the more generous virtues, the nobler impulses, but ever in
self-respect was busy to develop his nature. He was kind, industrious,
wise, gentlemanly, if not manly."
Margaret, with bold and steady hand, draws a parallel between Dante's
"Paradiso" and the second part of Goethe's "Faust." She prefers "the
grandly humble reliance of old Catholicism" to "the loop-hole redemption
of modern sagacity." Yet she thinks that Dante, perhaps, "had not so
hard a battle to wage as this other great poet." The fiercest passions
she finds less dangerous to the soul than the cold scepticism of the
understanding. She sums up grandly the spiritual ordeals of different
historical periods:--
"The Jewish demon assailed the man of Uz with physical ills, the Lucifer
of the Middle Ages tempted his passions; but the Mephistopheles of the
eighteenth century bade the finite strive to compass the infinite, and
the intellect attempt to solve all the problems of the soul."
* * * * *
Among Margaret's published papers on literature and art is one entitled
"A Record of Impressions produced by the Exhibition of Mr. Allston's
Pictures in the Summer of 1839." She was moved to write this, she says,
partly by the general silence of the press on a matter of so much import
in the history of American art, and partly by the desire to analyze her
own views, and to ascertain, if possible, the reason why, at the close
of the exhibition, she found herself less a gainer by it than she had
expected. As Margaret gave much time and thought to art matters, and as
the Allston exhibition was really an event of historic interest, some
consideration of this paper will not be inappropriate in this place.
Washington Allston was at that time, had long been, and long continued
to be, the artist saint of Boston. A great personal prestige added its
power to that of his unquestioned genius.
Beautiful in appearance, as much a poet as a painter, he really seemed
to belong to an order of beings who might be called
"Too bright and good
For human nature's daily food."
He had flown into the heart of Europe when few American artists managed
to get so far. He had returned to live alone with his dreams, of which
one was the nightmare of a great painting which he never could finish,
and never did. He had kept the vulgar world at a distance from his life
and thought, intent on coining these into a succession of pictures which
claimed to have a mission to the age. The series of female heads which
are the most admirable of his works appeared to be the portraits of as
many ideal women who, with no existence elsewhere, had disclosed
themselves to him at his dreamy fireside or in his haunted studio. The
spirit of the age, in its highest extreme, was upon him, and the wave of
supervital aspiration swept him, as it did Channing and Emerson, beyond
the region of the visible and sensible. At that day, and for ten years
later, one might occasionally have seen in some street of Boston a
fragile figure, and upon it a head distinguished by snowy curls and
starry eyes. Here was the winter of age; here the perpetual summer of
the soul. The coat and hat did not matter; but they were of some quaint,
forgotten fashion, outlining the vision as belonging to the past. You
felt a modesty in looking at anything so unique and delicate. I remember
this vision as suddenly disclosed out of a bitter winter's day. And the
street was Chestnut Street, and the figure was Washington Allston going
to visit the poet Richard H. Dana. And not long afterwards the silvery
snows melted, and the soul which had made those eyes so luminous shot
back to its immortal sphere.
But, to leave the man and return to the artist. Mr. Allston's real merit
was too great to be seriously obscured by the over-sweep of imagination
to which he was subject. His best works still remain true classics of
the canvas; but the spirit which, through them, seemed to pass from his
mind into that of the public, has not to-day the recognition and
commanding interest which it then had.
Margaret had expected, as she says, to be greatly a gainer by her study
of this exhibition, and had been somewhat disappointed. Possibly her
expectations regarded a result too immediate and definite. Sights and
experiences that enrich the mind often do so insensibly. They pass out
of our consciousness; but in our later judgments we find our standard
changed, and refer back to them as the source of its enlargement.
Margaret was already familiar with several of the ideal heads of which
we have spoken, and which bore the names of Beatrice, Rosalie, the
Valentine, etc. Of these, as previously seen and studied, she says:--
"The calm and meditative cast of these pictures, the ideal beauty that
shone through rather than in them, and the harmony of coloring were as
unlike anything else I saw, as the 'Vicar of Wakefield' to Cooper's
novels. I seemed to recognize in painting that self-possessed elegance,
that transparent depth, which I most admire in literature."
With these old favorites she classes, as most beautiful among those now
shown, the Evening Hymn, the Italian Shepherd Boy, Edwin, Lorenzo and
Jessica.
"The excellence of these pictures is subjective, and even feminine. They
tell us the painter's ideal of character: a graceful repose, with a
fitness for moderate action; a capacity of emotion, with a habit of
reverie. Not one of these beings is in a state of _épanchement_. Not one
is, or perhaps could be, thrown off its equipoise. They are, even the
softest, characterized by entire though unconscious self-possession."
The head called Beatrice was sometimes spoken of in those days as
representing the Beatrice of Dante. Margaret finds in it nothing to
suggest the "Divina Commedia."
"How fair, indeed, and not unmeet for a poet's love. But what she is,
what she can be, it needs no Dante to discover. She is not a lustrous,
bewitching beauty, neither is she a high and poetic one. She is not a
concentrated perfume, nor a flower, nor a star. Yet somewhat has she of
every creature's best. She has the golden mean, without any touch of the
mediocre."
The landscapes in the exhibition gave her "unalloyed delight." She found
in them Mr. Allston's true mastery,--"a power of sympathy, which gives
each landscape a perfectly individual character.... The soul of the
painter," she says, "is in these landscapes, but not his character. Is
not that the highest art? Nature and the soul combined; the former freed
from crudities or blemishes, the latter from its merely human aspect."
Allston's Miriam suggests to Margaret a different treatment of the
subject:--
"This maiden had been nurtured in a fair and highly civilized country,
in the midst of wrong and scorn indeed, but beneath the shadow of
sublime institutions. Amid all the pains and penances of slavery, the
memory of Joseph, the presence of Moses, exalt her soul to the highest
pitch of national pride.
"Imagine the stately and solemn beauty with which such nurture and such
a position might invest the Jewish Miriam. Imagine her at the moment
when her lips were unsealed, and she was permitted to sing the song of
deliverance. Realize this situation, and oh, how far will this beautiful
picture fall short of your demands!"
To such a criticism Mr. Allston might have replied that a picture in
words is one thing, a picture in colors quite another; and that the
complex intellectual expression in which Margaret delighted is
appropriate to literary, but not to pictorial art.
Much in the same way does she reason concerning one of Allston's most
admired paintings, which represents Jeremiah in prison dictating to
Baruch:--
"The form of the prophet is brought out in such noble relief, is in such
fine contrast to the pale and feminine sweetness of the scribe at his
feet, that for a time you are satisfied. But by and by you begin to
doubt whether this picture is not rather imposing than majestic. The
dignity of the prophet's appearance seems to lie rather in the fine
lines of the form and drapery than in the expression of the face. It was
well observed by one who looked on him, that, if the eyes were cast
down, he would become an ordinary man. This is true, and the expression
of the bard must not depend on a look or gesture, but beam with mild
electricity from every feature. Allston's Jeremiah is not the mournfully
indignant bard, but the robust and stately Jew, angry that men will not
mark his word and go his way."
The test here imagined, that of concealing the eyes, would answer as
little in real as in pictured life. Although the method of these
criticisms is arbitrary, the conclusion to which they bring Margaret is
one in which many will agree with her:--
"The more I have looked at these pictures, the more I have been
satisfied that the grand historical style did not afford the scope most
proper to Mr. Allston's genius. The Prophets and Sibyls are for the
Michael Angelos. The Beautiful is Mr. Allston's dominion. Here he rules
as a genius, but in attempts such as I have been considering, can only
show his appreciation of the stern and sublime thoughts he wants force
to reproduce."
Margaret is glad to go back from these more labored and unequal
compositions to those lovely feminine creations which had made
themselves so beloved that they seemed to belong to the spiritual family
of Boston itself, and to "have floated across the painter's heaven on
the golden clouds of fantasy."
From this paper our thoughts naturally revert to what Mr. Emerson has
said of Margaret as an art critic:--
"Margaret's love of art, like that of most cultivated persons in this
country, was not at all technical, but truly a sympathy with the artist
in the protest which his work pronounced on the deformity of our daily
manners; her co-perception with him of the eloquence of form; her
aspiration with him to a fairer life. As soon as her conversation ran
into the mysteries of manipulation and artistic effect, it was less
trustworthy. I remember that in the first times when I chanced to see
pictures with her, I listened reverently to her opinions, and endeavored
to see what she saw. But on several occasions, finding myself unable to
reach it, I came to suspect my guide, and to believe at last that her
taste in works of art, though honest, was not on universal, but on
idiosyncratic grounds."