that Margaret was crude and unformed socially, due perhaps to the
habit of considering her mother as a negligible quantity. Cambridge
ladies preserved an unpleasant portrait of the child as she appeared
at a grand reception given by Mr. Fuller to President Adams in 1826,
"one of the most elaborate affairs of the kind," says Col. Higginson,
"that had occurred in Cambridge since the ante-revolutionary days of
the Lechmeres and Vassals." Margaret ought to have been dressed by an
artist, but apparently, a girl of sixteen, she was left to her own
devices. She appeared, we are told, with a low-necked dress badly cut,
tightly laced, her arms held back as if pinioned, her hair curled all
over her head, and she danced quadrilles very badly. This escapade was
not allowed to repeat itself. Certain kind and motherly Cambridge
ladies took the neglected child in hand, tamed her rude strength, and
subdued her manners. Col. Higginson mentions half a dozen of these
excellent ladies, among them his mother, at whose feet "this studious,
self-conscious, overgrown girl" would sit, "covering her hands with
kisses and treasuring every word."
Chief among Margaret's motherly friends was Mrs. Eliza Farrar, wife of
a Harvard professor, an authoress of merit, "of uncommon character and
cultivation, who had lived much in Europe, and who, with no children
of her own," became a kind of foster-mother to Margaret. She had
Margaret "constantly at her own house, reformed her hairdresser,
instructed her dressmaker, and took her to make calls and on
journeys." Margaret was an apt pupil, and the good training of these
many Cambridge mothers was apparent when, ten years later, Mr. Emerson
made her acquaintance. "She was then, as always," he says, "carefully
and becomingly dressed, and of lady-like self-possession."
The seven years in Cambridge, from Margaret's fifteenth to her
twenty-third year, though uneventful, were, considering merely the
pleasure of existence, the most delightful of her life. She was a
school-girl as much or as little as she cared to be; her health, when
not overtaxed, was perfect; her family though not rich, were in easy
circumstances; her father was distinguished, having just retired from
Congress after eight years of creditable service; and, partly perhaps
from her father's distinction, she had access to the best social
circles of Cambridge. "In our evening reunions," says Dr. Hedge, "she
was always conspicuous by the brilliancy of her wit, which needed but
little provocation to break forth in exuberant sallies, that drew
around her a knot of listeners, and made her the central attraction of
the hour. Rarely did she enter a company in which she was not a
prominent object." Her conversational talent "continued to develop
itself in these years, and was certainly" he thinks, "her most decided
gift. One could form no adequate idea of her ability without hearing
her converse.... For some reason or other, she could never deliver
herself in print as she did with her lips." Emerson, in perfect
agreement with this estimate says, "Her pen was a non-conductor." The
reader will not think this true in her letters, where often the words
seem to palpitate. Doubtless the world had no business to see her love
letters, but one will find there a woman who, if she could speak as
she writes, must have poured herself out in tidal waves.
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.
In 1840, the second year of Margaret's Conversations, appeared the
first number of _The Dial_, a literary magazine of limited
circulation, but destined to a kind of post-mortem immortality. In
1841, the Community of Brook Farm was established. An interesting
account of both enterprises, and of Margaret's part in them, is given
by Mr. Emerson in a paper found in the tenth volume of his collected
Works. In the preliminary discussions leading to both enterprises,
Margaret participated. Like Mr. Emerson, she did not have unqualified
faith in the Brook Farm experiment and did not join the community,
though she had many friends in it, was a frequent visitor, and had the
honor to sit for the portrait of "Zenobia" in Mr. Hawthorne's
Blithedale Romance.