(MARCHIONESS OSSOLI)
(1810-1850)
[Illustration: MARGARET FULLER]
"Margaret was one of the few persons who looked upon life as an art,
and every person not merely as an artist, but as a work of art," wrote
Emerson. "She looked upon herself as a living statue, which should
always stand on a polished pedestal, with right accessories, and under
the most fitting lights. She would have been glad to have everybody so
live and act. She was annoyed when they did not, and when they did not
regard her from the point of view which alone did justice to her....
It is certain that her friends excused in her, because she had a right
to it, a tone which they would have reckoned intolerable in any
other." In the coolest way she said to her friends:--
"I take my natural position always: and the more I see, the
more I feel that it is regal. Without throne, sceptre, or
guards, still a queen....In near eight years' experience I
have learned as much as others would in eighty, from my great
talent at explanation.... But in truth I have not much to
say; for since I have had leisure to look at myself, I find
that so far from being an original genius, I have not yet
learned to think to any depth; and that the utmost I have
done in life has been to form my character to a certain
consistency, cultivate my tastes, and learn to tell the truth
with a little better grace than I did at first. When I look
at my papers I feel as if I had never had a thought that was
worthy the attention of any but myself; and 'tis only when on
talking with people I find I tell them what they did not
know, that my confidence at all returns.... A woman of tact
and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in
conversation with men. They are astonished at our instincts.
They do not see where we got our knowledge; and while they
tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel and fly, and dart
hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the weak
points, like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing
when we come to write, and without suggestion from another
mind, to declare the positive amount of thought that is in
us.... Then gentlemen are surprised that I write no better,
because I talk so well. I have served a long apprenticeship
to the one, none to the other. I shall write better, but
never, I think, so well as I talk; for then I feel
inspired.... For all the tides of life that flow within me, I
am dumb and ineffectual when it comes to casting my thought
into a form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it
seems to me the pleasure of creation would make it possible
for me to write. What shall I do, dear friend? I want force
to be either a genius or a character. One should be either
private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood
is at present too straitly bounded to give me scope. At
hours, I live truly as a woman; at others, I should stifle."
All these naive confessions were made, it must be remembered,
either in her journal, or in letters to her nearest friends, and without
fear of misinterpretation.
This complex, self-conscious, but able woman was born in Cambridgeport,
Massachusetts, in 1810, in the house of her father, Timothy
Fuller, a lawyer. Her mother, it is reported, was a mild, self-effacing
lover of flower-bulbs and gardens, of a character to supplement, and
never combat, a husband who exercised all the domestic dictation
which Puritan habits and the marital law encouraged.
"He thought to gain time by bringing forward the intellect as
early as possible," wrote Margaret in her autobiographical
sketch. "Thus I had tasks given me, as many and as various as
the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with
the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening
after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many
interruptions, I was often kept up till very late, and as he
was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his
ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till
the recitations were over. Thus, frequently, I was sent to
bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally
stimulated. The consequence was a premature development of
the brain that made me a 'youthful prodigy' by day, and by
night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and
somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious
development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while
later they induced continual headache, weakness, and nervous
affections of all kinds.... I was taught Latin and English
grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at six
years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily....
Of the Greek language I knew only enough to feel that the
sounds told the same story as the mythology; that the law of
life in that land was beauty, as in Rome it was stern
composure.... With these books I passed my days. The great
amount of study exacted of me soon ceased to be a burden, and
reading became a habit and a passion. The force of feeling
which under other circumstances might have ripened thought,
was turned to learn the thoughts of others."
By the time she entered mature womanhood, Margaret had made
herself acquainted with the masterpieces of German, French, and
Italian literatures. It was later that she became familiar with the
great literature of her own tongue. Her father died in 1835, and in
1836 she went to Boston to teach languages.
"I still," wrote Emerson (1851), "remember the first
half-hour of Margaret's conversation. She was then twenty-six
years old. She had a face and a frame that would indicate
fullness and tenacity of life. She was rather under the
middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong, fair
hair. She was then, as always, carefully and becomingly
dressed, and of ladylike self-possession. For the rest, her
appearance had nothing prepossessing. 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.' It is to be said
that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on most
persons, including those who became afterwards her best
friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in
the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her
manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power, and
slight esteem of others, and partly the prejudice of her
fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition
to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too
many guns, and the women did not like one who despised them."
In 1839 Margaret began her famous "Conversations" in Boston,
continuing these for five winters. "Their theory was not high-flown
but eminently sensible," writes Mr. Higginson, "being based expressly
on the ground stated in her circular; that the chief disadvantage of
women in regard to study was in not being called upon, like men, to
reproduce in some way what they had learned. As a substitute for
this she proposed to try the uses of conversation, to be conducted in
a somewhat systematic way under efficient leadership." In 1839 she
published her translation of Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,'
and in 1842 of the 'Correspondence of Fraeulein Guenerode and Bettine
von Arnim.' The year 1839 had seen the full growth of New
England transcendentalism, which was a reaction against Puritanism
and a declaration in vague phrases of God in man and of the indwelling
of the spirit in each soul,--an admixture of Platonism, Oriental
pantheism, and the latest German idealism, with a reminiscence of
the stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus. In 1840 The Dial was founded
to be the expression of these ideas, with Margaret as editor and
Emerson and George Ripley as aids. To this quarterly she gave
two years of hard work and self-sacrifice.
Another outcome of the transcendental movement, the community
of Brook Farm, was to her, says Mr. Higginson, "simply an experiment
which had enlisted some of her dearest friends; and later, she
found [there] a sort of cloister for occasional withdrawal from her
classes and her conversations. This was all: she was not a stockholder,
nor a member, nor an advocate of the enterprise; and even
'Miss Fuller's cow,' which Hawthorne tried so hard to milk, was a
being as wholly imaginary as [Hawthorne's] Zenobia."
Her 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' (1844)led Horace Greeley to
offer her a place in the literary department of the New York Tribune.
It is her praise that she was able to impart a purely literary
interest to a daily journal, and to make its critical judgment
authoritative. The best of her contributions to that journal were
published, with articles from the Dial and other periodicals, under
the title of 'Papers on Art and Literature' (1846).
In that year she paid the visit to Europe of which she had dreamed and
written; and her letters to her friends at home are now, perhaps, the
most readable of her remains. Taking up her residence in Italy in
1847, and sympathizing passionately with Mazzini and his republican
ideas, she met and married the Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli. Her
husband was seven years her junior, but his letters written while he
was serving as a soldier at Rome, and she was absent with their baby
in the country, reveal the ardor of his love for her. During the siege
of Rome by the French, Mazzini put in her charge the hospital of the
Trinity of the Pilgrims. "At the very moment when Lowell was
satirizing her in his 'Fables for Critics,'" says Mr. Higginson, "she
was leading such a life as no American woman had led in this century
before." Her Southern nature and her longing for action and love had
found expression. In May 1850 she sailed with her husband and son from
Leghorn for America. But the vessel was wrecked off Fire Island within
a day's sail of home and friends, and, save the body of her child and
a trunk of water-soaked papers, the sea swallowed up all remnants of
the happiness of her later life.
The position which Margaret Fuller held in the small world of letters
about her is not explained by her writings. She seems to have
possessed great personal magnetism. She was strong, she had
intellectual grasp and poise, possibly at times she had the tact she
so much admired, she had unusual knowledge, and above all a keen
self-consciousness. Her nature was too Southern in its passions, just
as it was too large in intellectual vigor, for the environment in
which she was born. She was in fact stifled until she escaped from her
egotism and self-consciousness, and from the pale New England life and
movement, to find a larger existence in her Italian lover and husband,
and their child. And then she died.
The affectionate admiration which she aroused in her friends has found
expression in three notable biographies: 'Memoirs of Margaret Fuller
Ossoli,' by her brother; 'Margaret Fuller Ossoli,' by Thomas Wentworth
Higginson ('American Men of Letters Series'); and 'Margaret Fuller
(Marchesa Ossoli)' by Julia Ward Howe ('Eminent Women Series').