Sarah Margaret Fuller, by marriage Marchioness of Ossoli, was born
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about the year 1807. Her father, Mr.
Timothy Fuller, was a lawyer, and from 1817 to 1825 he represented
the Middlesex district in Congress. At the close of his last term as
a legislator he purchased a farm near Cambridge, and determined to
abandon his profession for the more congenial one of agriculture; but
he died soon after, leaving a widow and six children, of whom Margaret
was the eldest.
At a very early age she exhibited unusual abilities, and was
particularly distinguished for an extraordinary facility in acquiring
languages. Her father, proud of the displays of her intelligence,
prematurely stimulated it to a degree that was ultimately injurious to
her physical constitution. At eight years of age he was accustomed to
require of her the composition of a number of Latin verses every day,
while her studies in philosophy, history, general science and current
literature were pressed to the limit of her capacities. When he first
went to Washington he was accustomed to speak of her as one "better
skilled in Greek and Latin than half of the professors;" and alluding
in one of her essays, to her attachment to foreign literature, she
herself observes that in childhood she had well-nigh forgotten her
English while constantly reading in other tongues.
Soon after the death of her father, she applied herself to teaching
as a vocation, first in Boston, then in Providence, and afterward
in Boston again, while her "Conversations" were for several seasons
attended by classes of women, some of them married, and many of them
of the most eminent positions in society. These conversations are
described by Dr. Orestes A. Brownson, as "in the highest degree
brilliant, instructive, and inspiring," and our own recollections of
them confirm to us the justice of the applause with which they are
now referred to. She made her first appearance as an author, in a
translation of Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, published in
Boston in 1839. When Mr. Emerson, in the following year, established
_The Dial_, she became one of the principal contributors to that
remarkable periodical, in which she wrote many of the most striking
papers on literature, art, and society. In the summer of 1843 she made
a journey to the Sault St. Marie, and in the next spring published
in Boston reminiscences of her tour, under the title of Summer on the
Lakes. _The Dial_ having been discontinued, she came to reside in New
York, where she had charge of the literary department of the New York
_Tribune_, which acquired a great accession of reputation from her
critical essays. Here in 1845 she published Woman in the Nineteenth
Century; and in 1846, Papers on Literature and Art, in two volumes,
consisting of essays and reviews, reprinted, with one exception, from
periodicals.
In the summer of 1845, she accompanied the family of a friend to
Europe, visiting England, Scotland, and France, and passing through
Italy to Rome, where they spent the ensuing winter. The next spring
she proceeded with her friends to the north of Italy, and there
stopped, spending most of the summer at Florence, and returning at
the approach of winter to Rome, where she was soon after married to
Giovanni, Marquis d'Ossoli, who made her acquaintance during her first
winter in that city. They resided in the Roman States until the last
summer, after the surrender of Rome to the French army, when they
deemed it expedient to go to Florence, both having taken an active
part in the Republican movement. They left Florence in June, and
at Leghorn embarked in the ship Elizabeth for New York. The passage
commenced auspiciously, but at Gibraltar the master of the ship died
of smallpox, and they were detained at the quarantine there some time
in consequence of this misfortune, but finally set sail again on the
8th of June, and arrived on our coast during the terrible storm of
the 18th and 19th ult., when, in the midst of darkness, rain, and a
terrific gale, the ship was hurled on the breakers of Fire Island,
near Long Island, and in a few hours was broken in pieces. Margaret
Fuller d'Ossoli, the Marquis d'Ossoli, and their son, two years of
age, with an Italian girl, and Mr. Horace Sumner of Boston, besides
several of the crew, lost their lives. We reprint a sketch of the
works and genius of Margaret Fuller, written several years ago by the
late Edgar A. Poe.
* * * * *
"Miss Fuller was at one time editor, or one of the editors of the
'The Dial,' to which she contributed many of the most forcible and
certainly some of the most peculiar papers. She is known, too, by
'Summer on the Lakes,' a remarkable assemblage of sketches, issued
in 1844, by Little & Brown, of Boston. More lately she published
'Woman in the Nineteenth Century,' a work which has occasioned much
discussion, having had the good fortune to be warmly abused and
chivalrously defended. For '_The New York Tribune_,' she has furnished
a great variety of matter, chiefly notices of new books, etc., etc.,
her articles being designated by an asterisk. Two of the best of them
were a review of Professor Longfellow's late magnificent edition
of his own works, (with a portrait,) and an appeal to the public
in behalf of her friend Harro Harring. The review did her infinite
credit; it was frank, candid, independent--in even ludicrous contrast
to the usual mere glorifications of the day, giving honor _only_ where
honor was due, yet evincing the most thorough capacity to appreciate
and the most sincere intention to place in the fairest light the real
and idiosyncratic merits of the poet. In my opinion it is one of the
very few reviews of Longfellow's poems, ever published in America,
of which the critics have not had abundant reason to be ashamed. Mr.
Longfellow is entitled to a certain and very distinguished rank among
the poets of his country, but that country is disgraced by the evident
toadyism which would award to his social position and influence, to
his fine paper and large type, to his morocco binding and gilt edges,
to his flattering portrait of himself, and to the illustrations of his
poems by Huntingdon, that amount of indiscriminate approbation which
neither could nor would have been given to the poems themselves. The
defense of Harro Harring, or rather the philippic against those who
were doing him wrong, was one of the most eloquent and well-_put_
articles I have ever yet seen in a newspaper.
"'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' is a book which few women in the
country could have written, and no woman in the country would
have published, with the exception of Miss Fuller. In the way of
independence, of unmitigated radicalism, it is one of the 'Curiosities
of American Literature,' and Doctor Griswold should include it in
his book. I need scarcely say that the essay is nervous, forcible,
suggestive, brilliant, and to a certain extent scholar-like--for
all that Miss Fuller produces is entitled to these epithets--but I
must say that the conclusions reached are only in part my own. Not
that they are bold, by any means--too novel, too startling or too
dangerous in their consequences, but that in their attainment too many
premises have been distorted, and too many analogical inferences left
altogether out of sight. I mean to say that the intention of the Deity
as regards sexual differences--an intention which can be distinctly
comprehended only by throwing the exterior (more sensitive) portions
of the mental retina _casually_ over the wide field of universal
_analogy_--I mean to say that this _intention_ has not been
sufficiently considered. Miss Fuller has erred, too, through her own
excessive objectiveness. She judges _woman_ by the heart and intellect
of Miss Fuller, but there are not more than one or two dozen Miss
Fullers on the whole face of the earth. Holding these opinions in
regard to 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century,' I still feel myself
called upon to disavow the silly, condemnatory criticism of the
work which appeared in one of the earlier numbers of "_The Broadway
Journal_." That article was _not_ written by myself, and _was_ written
by my associate, Mr. Briggs.
"The most favorable estimate of Miss Fuller's genius (for high genius
she unquestionably possesses) is to be obtained, perhaps, from her
contributions to 'The Dial,' and from her 'Summer on the Lakes.' Many
of the _descriptions_ in this volume are unrivaled for _graphicality_,
(why is there not such a word?) for the force with which they convey
the true by the novel or unexpected, by the introduction of touches
which other artists would be sure to omit as irrelevant to the
subject. This faculty, too, springs from her subjectiveness, which
leads her to paint a scene less by its features than by its effects.
"Here, for example, is a portion of her account of Niagara:--
"'Daily these proportions widened and towered more and more
upon my sight, and I got at last a proper foreground for these
sublime distances. Before coming away, I think I really saw
the full wonder of the scene. After a while it _so drew me
into itself as to inspire an undefined dread, such as I never
knew before, such as may be felt when death is about to usher
us into a new existence_. The perpetual trampling of the
waters seized my senses. _I felt that no other sound, however
near, could be heard, and would start and look behind me for a
foe_. I realised the identity of that mood of nature in which
these waters were poured down with such absorbing force, with
that in which the Indian was shaped on the same soil. For
continually upon my mind came, unsought and unwelcome, _images
such as had never haunted it before, of naked savages stealing
behind me with uplifted tomahawks_. Again and again this
illusion recurred, and even _after I had thought it over, and
tried to shake it off, I could not help starting and looking
behind me_. What I liked best was to sit on Table Rock close
to the great fall; _there all power of observing details, all
separate consciousness was quite lost_.'
"The truthfulness of the passages italicized will be felt by all; the
feelings described are, perhaps, experienced by every (imaginative)
person who visits the fall; but most persons, through predominant
subjectiveness, would scarcely be conscious of the feelings, or, at
best, would never think of employing them in an attempt to convey to
others an impression of the scene. Hence so many desperate failures to
convey it on the part of ordinary tourists. Mr. William W. Lord, to be
sure, in his poem 'Niagara,' is sufficiently objective; he describes
not the fall, but very properly, the effect of the fall upon _him_.
He says that it made him think of his _own_ greatness, of his _own_
superiority, and so forth, and so forth; and it is only when we
come to think that the thought of Mr. Lord's greatness is quite
idiosyncratic confined exclusively to Mr. Lord, that we are in
condition to understand how, in spite of his objectiveness he has
failed to convey an idea of anything beyond one Mr. William W. Lord.
"From the essay entitled 'Philip Van Artevelde, I copy a paragraph
which will serve at once to exemplify Miss Fuller's more earnest
(declamatory) style, and to show the tenor of her prospective
speculations:--
"'At Chicago I read again 'Philip Van Artevelde,' and certain
passages in it will always be in my mind associated with the
deep sound of the lake, as heard in the night. I used to read
a short time at night, and then open the blind to look out.
The moon would be full upon the lake, and the calm breath,
pure light, and the deep voice, harmonized well with the
thought of the Flemish hero. When will this country have
such a man? It is what she needs--no thin Idealist, no coarse
Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens while his
feet step firmly on the ground, and his hands are strong and
dexterous in the use of human instruments. A man, religious,
virtuous, and--sagacious; a man of universal sympathies, but
self-possessed; a man who knows the region of emotion, though
he is not its slave; a man to whom this world is no mere
spectacle or fleeting shadow, but a great, solemn game, to be
played with good heed, for its stakes are of eternal value,
yet who, if his own play be true, heeds not what he loses by
the falsehood of others. A man who lives from the past, yet
knows that its honey can but moderately avail him; whose
comprehensive eye scans the present, neither infatuated by its
golden lures nor chilled by its many ventures; who possesses
prescience, as the wise man must, but not so far as to be
driven mad to-day by the gift which discerns to-morrow. When
there is such a man for America, the thought which urges her
on will be expressed."
"From what I have quoted, a _general_ conception of the prose style
of the authoress may be gathered. Her manner, however, is infinitely
varied. It is always forcible--but I am not sure that it is always
anything else, unless I say picturesque. It rather indicates than
evinces scholarship. Perhaps only the scholastic, or, more properly,
those accustomed to look narrowly at the structure of phrases, would
be willing to acquit her of ignorance of grammar--would be willing
to attribute her slovenliness to disregard of the shell in anxiety
for the kernel; or to waywardness, or to affectation, or to blind
reverence to Carlyle--would be able to detect, in her strange and
continual inaccuracies, a capacity for the accurate.
"'I cannot sympathize with such an apprehension; the spectacle
is _capable to_ swallow _up_ all such objects."
"It is fearful, too, to know, as you look, that whatever has
been swallowed by the cataract, is _like_ to rise suddenly to
light."
"I took our _mutual_ friends to see her."
"It was always obvious that they had nothing in common
_between them_."
"The Indian cannot be looked at truly _except_ by a poetic
eye."
"McKenny's Tour to the Lakes gives some facts not to be met
_with_ elsewhere."
"There is that mixture of culture and rudeness in the aspect
of things _as_ gives a feeling of freedom," etc., etc.
"These are merely a few, a very few instances, taken at random from
among a multitude of _willful_ murders committed by Miss Fuller on
the American of President Polk. She uses, too, the word 'ignore,' a
vulgarity adopted only of late days (and to no good purpose, since
there is no necessity for it) from the barbarisms of the law, and
makes no scruple of giving the Yankee interpretation to the verbs
'witness' and 'realize,' to say nothing of 'use,' as in the sentence,
'I used to read a short time at night.' It will not do to say in
defense of such words, that in such senses they may be found in
certain dictionaries--in that of Bolles', for instance;--_some_ kind
of 'authority' may be found for _any_ kind of vulgarity under the sun.
"In spite of these things, however and of her frequent unjustifiable
Carlyleisms, (such as that of writing sentences which are no
sentences, since, to be parsed, reference must be had to sentences
preceding,) the style of Miss Fuller is one of the very best with
which I am acquainted. In general effect, I know no style which
surpasses it. It is singularly piquant, vivid, terse, bold,
luminous--leaving details out of sight, it is everything that a style
need be.
"I believe that Miss Fuller has written much poetry, although she has
published little. That little is tainted with the affectation of the
_transcendentalists_, (I used this term, of course, in the sense which
the public of late days seem resolved to give it,) but is brimful of
the poetic _sentiment_. Here, for example, is something in Coleridge's
manner, of which the author of 'Genevieve' might have had no reason to
be ashamed:--
A maiden sat beneath a tree;
Tear-bedewed her pale cheeks be,
And she sighed heavily.
From forth the wood into the _light_
A hunter strides with carol _light_
And a glance so bold and bright.
He careless stopped and eyed the maid;
'Why weepest thou?' he gently said;
'I love thee well, be not afraid.'
He takes her hand and leads her on--
She should have waited there alone,
For he was not her chosen one.
He _leans_ her head upon his breast--
She knew 'twas not her home of rest,
But, ah! she had been sore distrest.
The sacred stars looked sadly down;
The parting moon appeared to frown,
To see thus dimmed the diamond crown.
Then from the thicket starts a deer--
The huntsman seizing _on_ his spear
Cries, 'Maiden, wait thou for me here.'
She sees him vanish into night--
She starts from sleep in deep affright,
For it was not her own true knight.
Though but in dream Gunhilda failed--
Though but a fancied ill assailed--
Though she but fancied fault bewailed--
Yet thought of day makes dream of night;
She is not worthy of the knight;
The inmost altar burns not bright.
If loneliness thou canst not bear--
Cannot the dragon's venom dare--
Of the pure meed thou shouldst despair.
Now sadder that lone maiden sighs;
Far bitterer tears profane her eyes;
Crushed in the dust her heart's flower lies.'
"To show the evident carelessness with which this poem was
constructed, I have italicized an identical rhyme (of about the same
force in versification as an identical proposition in logic) and two
grammatical improprieties. _To lean_ is a neuter verb, and 'seizing
_on_' is not properly to be called a pleonasm, merely because it
is--nothing at all. The concluding line is difficult of pronunciation
through excess of consonants. I should have preferred, indeed, the
ante-penultimate tristich as the _finale_ of the poem.
"The supposition that the book of an author is a thing apart from the
author's self, is, I think, ill-founded. The soul is a cipher, in the
sense of a cryptograph; and the shorter a cryptograph is, the more
difficulty there is in its comprehension--at a certain point of
brevity it would bid defiance to an army of Champollions. And thus
he who has written very little, may in that little either conceal his
spirit or convey quite an erroneous idea of it--of his acquirements,
talents, temper, manner, tenor and depth (or shallowness) of
thought--in a word of his character, of himself. But this is
impossible with him who has written much. Of such a person we get,
from his books, not merely a just, but the most just representation.
Bulwer, the individual, personal man, in a green velvet waistcoat and
amber gloves, is not by any means the veritable Sir Edward Lytton,
who is discoverable only in 'Ernest Maltravers,' where his soul is
deliberately and nakedly set forth. And who would ever know Dickens by
looking at him or talking with him, or doing anything with him except
reading his 'Curiosity Shop?' What poet, in especial, but must feel
at least the better portion of himself more fairly represented in even
his commonest sonnet, (earnestly written,) than in his most elaborate
or most intimate personalities?
"I put all this as a general proposition, to which Miss Fuller affords
a marked exception--to this extent, that her personal character and
her printed book are merely one and the same thing. We get access
to her soul _as_ directly from the one as from the other--no _more_
readily from this than from that--easily from either. Her acts are
bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts. Her literary and
her conversational manner are identical. Here is a passage from her
'Summer on the Lakes:'--
"'The rapids enchanted me far beyond what I expected; they
are so swift that they cease to _seem_ so--you can think
only of their _beauty_. The fountain beyond the Moss Islands
I discovered for myself, and thought it for some time an
_accidental_ beauty which it would not do to _leave_, lest
I might never see it again. After I found it _permanent_, I
returned many times to watch the play of its crest. In the
little waterfall, beyond, Nature seems, as she often does, to
have made a _study_ for some larger design. She delights in
this--a sketch within a sketch--a dream within _a dream_.
Wherever we see it, the lines of the great buttress in the
fragment of stone, the hues of the waterfall, copied in the
flowers that _star_ its bordering mosses, we are _delighted_;
for all the lineaments become _fluent_, and we mould the scene
in congenial thought with its _genius_.'
"Now all this is precisely as Miss Fuller would _speak_ it. She is
perpetually saying just such things in just such words. To get the
_conversational_ woman in the mind's eye, all that is needed is to
imagine her reciting the paragraph just quoted: but first let us have
the _personal_ woman. She is of the medium height; nothing remarkable
about the figure; a profusion of lustrous light hair; eyes a bluish
gray, full of fire; capacious forehead; the mouth when in repose
indicates profound sensibility, capacity for affection, for love--when
moved by a slight smile, it becomes even beautiful in the intensity
of this expression; but the upper lip, as if impelled by the action
of involuntary muscles, habitually uplifts itself, conveying the
impression of a sneer. Imagine, now, a person of this description
looking at you one moment earnestly in the face, at the next seeming
to look only within her own spirit or at the wall; moving nervously
every now and then in her chair; speaking in a high key, but
musically, deliberately, (not hurriedly or loudly,) with a delicious
distinctness of enunciation--speaking, I say, the paragraph in
question, and emphasizing the words which I have italicized, not by
impulsion of the breath, (as is usual) but by drawing them out as long
as possible, nearly closing her eyes, the while--imagine all this, and
we have both the woman and the authoress before us."
* * * * *
[FROM THE NEW YORK TRIBUNE.]