I 
 
MARGARET FULLER 
 
 From the Century Magazine, April, 1893 
 
MARGARET FULLER 
 
 A PSYCHOLOGICAL BIOGRAPHT 
 
 BY 
 
 KATHARINE ANTHONY 
 
 AUTHOR OF "MOTHERS WHO MUST EARN," "FEMINISM 
 IN GERMANY AND SCANDINAVIA" 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY 
 1921 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY 
 HARCOURT, BRACE AND HOWE, INC. 
 
a* 
 
 PREFACE | Cj O 
 
 THE life of Margaret Fuller has been the happy hunt- fM ft / 
 ing-ground of imaginative biographers. The Bac 
 chante, the Sybil, the Pythoness, these were the usual 
 clarifying terms in which she was explained to the 
 generations which succeeded her. After this Margaret 
 myth had been current for more than thirty years, Mr. 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson sought to inject some 
 realism into the picture. In his excellent biography, 
 he politely denounced the romantic legend and repre 
 sented Margaret as the woman of action which she 
 really was. But he was chiefly concerned with the 
 literary pioneer, and Margaret was, after all, more in 
 teresting as a personality than as a writer. About the 
 same time, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe composed another 
 life, emphasizing Margaret s pioneer work for the 
 emancipation of women and also eliminating the 
 " Pythian disguise," the " viraginian aspect," and all 
 the rest of the inflamed rhetoric which had contributed 
 so largely to Margaret s previous reputation. But 
 Mrs. Howe was so magnificently impersonal, that she 
 leaves us more in the dark than ever as to what manner 
 of woman this really was who was so startling and 
 upsetting to her own generation. Finally, Margaret s 
 Love Letters were published, scrupulously edited and 
 
 4i : 978 
 
iv Preface 
 
 pruned by one knows not how many censors. A 
 realistic interpretation of her life and character has not 
 only not been attempted but has rather been positively 
 avoided. A mood of evasion has marked almost all 
 that has been written about her. The following study 
 tries to arrive at the realities of Margaret s personality 
 and career, chiefly by means of modern psychological 
 analysis. 
 
 My purpose has been to apply a new method to old 
 matter. I have not tried to unearth fresh material 
 or discover unpublished evidence. The sources from 
 which the facts are drawn are well-known volumes 
 given in the bibliography at the end. But the follow 
 ing pages are less concerned with a chronology of 
 facts than with the phases of a complex personality 
 and a manifold life. It is an attempt to analyze the 
 emotional values of an individual existence, the motiva 
 tion of a career, the social transformation of a 
 woman s energies. 
 
 In order to give direct representation, Margaret s 
 writings are liberally quoted. Her books are now 
 forgotten and neglected, the only editions in existence 
 being so out of date that few libraries are old enough 
 to possess them. Yet she wrote much good criticism, 
 good feminism, and good psychology, which deserve 
 to be rescued from the dusty attic and classed with 
 some of our newest wisdom. 
 
Preface v 
 
 Many circumstances combine to lend a special in 
 terest to Margaret Fuller at this time. Seventy years 
 ago, she stood at the beginning of two great move 
 ments which have reached their culmination in our 
 day. She saw the inception of the woman movement 
 in America and the revolutionary movement in 
 Europe. Her life, with all its inward and outward 
 struggles, was peculiarly identified with both. Her 
 ideals have recently renewed their vitality for us. .For 
 instance, now that suffrage is out of the way, there 
 is a great need for the broader kind of feminism that 
 Margaret Fuller represented. And, similarly, her re 
 lation to the European crisis of 1848 gives her also 
 a relation to the second chapter of those revolutionary 
 processes through which we are living today. 
 
 In short, Margaret was a modern woman who died 
 in 1850. The legend she left cannot be truth. It 
 was created mainly by unemancipated men; Chivalry 
 and Puritanism combined to distort the picture. For 
 this reason, her life demands a vindication from certain 
 quarters which too long have failed her. Feminisme 
 oblige. Her story needed to be told by some one who 
 could sympathize with her struggles and affirm her 
 ideals. Therefore, while striving for realism and im 
 partiality, the following study does not pretend to 
 avoid the warmth of the advocate. 
 
 K. A. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTEB PAGE 
 
 I. FAMILY PATTERNS ...>.. I \ 
 
 II. A PRECOCIOUS CHILD . . . . > n 
 
 III. NARCISSA . . 27 
 
 IV. MIRANDA >. 40 
 
 V. A WOMAN S WOMAN 57 
 
 VI. THE TRANSCENDENTALIST . ... 84 V 
 
 VII. THE JOURNALIST 105 
 
 VIII. CONTACTS 125 
 
 IX. HER DEBT TO NATURE ..... 148 /X 
 
 X. THE REVOLUTIONIST ..... 175 
 
 XL 1850 .......... 193 
 
MARGARET FULLER 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 FAMILY PATTERNS 
 
 MARGARET FULLER S father was thirty-two when she 
 was born. A self-made man, he had been compelled 
 to postpone marriage and family life until a com 
 paratively advanced age. But it was written that in 
 the springtime of his thirty-first year, the Puritan 
 lawyer and politician should succumb to his first ro 
 mance. Less than a year later on May 23, 1810 
 he became the father of a daughter. 
 
 It was almost an incidental fact that the young 
 wife, who had married a man fully ten years older than 
 herself, became a mother at the same time, for she 
 proved to be the merest footnote of a mother. Her 
 influence appears to have been limited to the physical 
 acts of motherhood and to have terminated with her 
 daughter s very brief term of infancy. The house 
 in Cambridge and the second-story chamber in which 
 she was brought to bed of Margaret are still shown 
 to visitors; and one can almost imagine Timothy 
 Fuller in the pangs of a couvade in the adjoining 
 chamber. But if his jealousy of the maternal adven- 
 
-: /A. ^Margaret Fuller 
 
 ture did not carry him thus far, it stepped in at the 
 earliest possible moment that nature would permit. 
 He took the child s life in hand with a thoroughness 
 which amounted to a practical kidnaping from the 
 mother, and taught her to cleave only to him. To 
 celebrate his daughter s birth, he planted two elms in 
 front of his house, and as they flourished and grew 
 they typified the strong emotional bond which grew 
 up between father and daughter in spite of more than 
 thirty intervening years. 
 
 Margaret likened this relationship to that between 
 Prospero and Miranda. In her Woman in the Nine 
 teenth Century, she described it thus: " [Miranda s] 
 father was a man who cherished no sentimental 
 reverence for Woman, but a firm belief in the equality 
 of the sexes. She was his eldest child, and came to 
 him at an age when he needed a companion. From 
 the time she could speak and go alone, he addressed 
 her not as a plaything, but as a living mind. 
 Among the few verses he ever wrote was a copy 
 addressed to his child, when the first locks were cut 
 from her head. . . . He respected his child, how 
 ever, too much to be an indulgent parent. . . . 
 In so far as he possessed the keys to the wonders of 
 this universe, he allowed free use of them to her, and, 
 by the incentive of a high expectation, he forbade 
 . . . that she should let the privilege lie idle." 
 
Family Patterns 
 
 There is in Mount Auburn a solid, four-square 
 monument which sets forth the sum of Timothy 
 Fuller s political achievements. It states that he grad 
 uated at Harvard University in 1801; was a member 
 of the Massachusetts Senate from 1813 to 1816; a 
 representative in the United States Congress from 
 1817 to 1825; speaker of the Massachusetts House 
 of Representatives in 1825; and a member of the 
 Executive Council in 1828. He was, in fact, a man 
 of some distinction, and, in his little daughter s eyes, 
 every inch a Roman Senator. According to his tomb 
 stone, Mr. Fuller adjusted successfully to the society 
 into which he was born. He had a caustic tongue, 
 liked to stand with the opposition in politics, and, 
 notwithstanding his election successes, was not a 
 "good mixer." It was true, as Margaret said, that 
 he needed a companion. 
 
 Some years after her father s death, Margaret, after 
 spending an afternoon at Mount Auburn, went home 
 and wrote this note in her Journal : " Reasons why 
 there are no good monuments? I must write upon 
 this subject." To this she added another reflection, 
 " Persons die generally, not as a natural thing, but 
 from extraneous causes." But she was not thinking 
 of old age as the natural cause of death. "A death 
 from love would be perfectly natural," she concluded. 
 From girlhood Margaret betrayed a great deal of 
 
Margaret Fuller 
 
 this kind of insight which nowadays goes by the name 
 of Freudian psychology. 
 
 The Fullers sprang from the Puritan ghetto of 
 Salem. The first Fuller was a blacksmith who ex 
 perienced a passionate conversion under the preaching 
 of the " soul-ravishing Mr. Shepherd." This pious 
 ancestor was a contemporary of the Salem witches 
 and one of the founders of the church in which 
 witch " investigations " of those days were held. 
 Fortunately, none of the female Fullers of that gener 
 ation were witches. Margaret was the first of the 
 clan to achieve this melancholy distinction. 
 
 Another strongly marked figure in Margaret s gal 
 lery of ancestors was a certain Timothy Fuller of 
 Salem, called " Old Tim," who was the hero of a 
 peculiar legend. Working in the fields one day, he 
 grew thirsty and called at a house for a drink. The 
 woman, who was just putting her baby to sleep, replied, 
 " you rock the cradle while I draw the cider." On her 
 return, the stranger asked her jocularly for the child 
 in the cradle and the woman told him he must wait 
 eighteen years. To this stipulation the suitor agreed, 
 and, at the appointed time, returned and married the 
 eighteen-year-old girl. Whether the legend is true 
 or not, it suggests a parallel to what actually happened 
 to Margaret Fuller who began to be a companion to 
 her father while still an infant in the cradle. 
 
Family Patterns 
 
 Margaret s grandfather was a clergyman in Prince 
 ton, Massachusetts, when the Revolutionary War broke 
 out. Whether he was pro-British or pacifist does 
 not appear, but at any rate he preached a sermon on 
 the text : " Let not him that girdeth on the harness 
 boast himself as he that putteth it off," and was 
 promptly discharged by his congregation, which con 
 sisted largely of minute-men. He sued the town for 
 his salary, with the result that he was doubly dismissed 
 and had moreover to pay the costs of the legal proceed 
 ings. In the end, the unfrocked but still unbeaten 
 clergyman settled on a farm in the vicinity and got 
 himself elected to the constitutional convention. His 
 five sons, with one accord, forsook the ministry and 
 took to the law. 
 
 Timothy Fuller and his four brothers put themselves 
 through Harvard College in spite of narrow means 
 and harsh obstacles. They were the kind of young 
 men of whom it was proudly said by a descendant 
 that they " grudged the hours that nature demands for 
 sleep." True Puritans as they were, they regarded 
 nature generally with a most begrudging eye and 
 reveled in the dark worship of hardship for hardship s 
 sake. There was an Uncle Abraham who remained 
 a bachelor all his days and who presumed to teach 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson s mother how to darn 
 better than she had ever darned before. Higginson 
 
Margaret Fuller 
 
 says this shows how arrogant and self-assertive Uncle 
 Abraham was, this being a trait of the Fuller clan 
 which Margaret inherited. But it shows something 
 else, and that is that Uncle Abraham could darn. So 
 could Margaret s father, Congressman Timothy 
 Fuller; for he not only instructed his daughter in the 
 classics but he guided her training in the domestic 
 arts as well. Her dress, her correspondence, her 
 parties all this fell under the paternal supervision. 
 Again one has to comment that such efficiency in a 
 Congressman argues a feminine disposition rather than 
 the reverse. Margaret must have imbibed in early 
 childhood the idea that occupations were not divinely 
 ordained for each sex. If father and Uncle Abraham 
 could darn, why should she not go to sea? And so 
 it came about that Margaret, having been brought up 
 by hand by a father who had certain so-called feminine 
 traits, became a woman who had certain so-called 
 masculine traits. Such men and women confound 
 the categories and are usually unpopular. 
 
 Margaret s father, the eldest of the Fuller brothers, 
 was a non-conformist in religion and politics, being 
 a Unitarian and a Jeffersonian. In those days, this 
 was to be an unbeliever and a Jacobin. While still 
 in college, he began his career of non-conformity. 
 As a poor parson s son, obliged to work his way 
 through college, he took part in a students rebellion 
 
Family Patterns 
 
 organized against certain hated regulations. For this 
 indiscretion he lost his chance of being first-honor man 
 and graduated with second honors instead. It was 
 also while he was still in college that he became a 
 disciple of Jefferson, who as one critic said 
 " wrote such stuff about the will of the majorities as 
 a New Englander would lose his rank among men of 
 sense to avow." Nevertheless Timothy Fuller must 
 needs avow them in the face of the fact that all the 
 wealth and business of Boston were solidly on the 
 other side. As the father of a large family his course 
 was imprudent and led him at last almost into bank 
 ruptcy. 
 
 But Margaret had little appreciation of the com 
 plexities in her father s character, which were to so 
 great an extent repeated in her own. She thought 
 her father was a good business man. " He was a man 
 largely endowed with that sagacious energy, which 
 the state of New England society, for the last half 
 century, has been so well fitted to develop. ... As 
 5. boy, my father was taught to think only of preparing 
 himself for Harvard University, and when there of 
 preparing himself for the profession of the law. . . . 
 The result was a character, in its social aspect, of 
 quite the common sort. A good son and brother, a 
 kind neighbor, an active man of business ... he 
 was but one of a class, which surrounding conditions 
 
8 Margaret Fuller 
 
 have made the majority among us." But all this 
 was only one side of the eccentric man, who enjoyed 
 music with passionate delight, played the flute with 
 some skill, and fell in love at first sight with a hand 
 some girl who was worse than penniless, for she 
 was well-endowed with poor relations. This last was 
 not the act of a sagacious man of business. 
 
 " In the more delicate and individual relations," 
 wrote Margaret, " he never approached but two mor 
 tals, my mother and myself." A man of few 
 relationships, he naturally inclined towards intensity 
 in those which he did form. In politics his name 
 was frequently associated with that of John Quincy 
 Adams, towards whom Fuller displayed an unfaltering 
 and loyal friendship. He worked indefatigably in 
 Adams s campaign for the presidency and in the sum 
 mer of 1826 gave a great party for his chief at his 
 home in Cambridge. Such a party had not been given 
 in Cambridge for fifty years, and what a strain it 
 must have been on the frugal household of the Fullers ! 
 Of course it gave the family the proud status of having 
 entertained the President and helped to vindicate the 
 social position of the Timothy Fullers in the eyes of 
 the Federalist aristocracy of Boston. But it was 
 apparently a sentimental party, after all, an outburst 
 of affection on the part of the over-reserved Mr. 
 Fuller. At any rate, it netted him nothing in a business 
 
Family Patterns 
 
 way, for it was not so long after this that his law 
 practice entered its last fatal decline. 
 
 Having married so late, the poor man was caught 
 by middle age with a large family of young children. 
 When he was fifty the family baby was but two years 
 old. He kept up the struggle for five years longer, 
 and then decided to abandon Boston and retire with 
 his large family to a farm as his father had done 
 before him. Margaret, who was but twenty-three, 
 thought his retreat was ignoble. She " secretly won 
 dered how a mind which had, for thirty years, 
 been so widely engaged in the affairs of men, could 
 care so much for trees and crops." Nevertheless, she 
 went with the family to the farm and was more of a 
 companion to her father than ever. He varied 
 his occupation as a farmer with writing a history of 
 the United States, and Margaret shared in the reading 
 for this. But she hated the farm and there was now 
 something inimical in her " companionship." The 
 broken man lived but two years longer and then 
 succumbed to the Asiatic cholera. 
 
 Through all this, Mrs. Fuller seems to have been 
 the perfect example of the self-effacing mother. 
 She had nine children in sixteen years, and was 
 commemorated on her tombstone as " a true woman." 
 One of her sons said of her: "Duty was her daily 
 food. Self-sacrifice was as natural to her as self- 
 
IO Margaret Fuller 
 
 gratification is to others ". When the Fullers had 
 guests, Mr. Fuller and his daughter entertained 
 them, while Mrs. Fuller merely appeared as a shy 
 and awkward figure in the background. In brief, 
 Margaret had crowded her mother out of her right 
 ful position in the family with the most complete 
 success. It was no wonder that she grew up so bold, 
 and, as she herself said, " at nineteen the most in 
 tolerable girl that ever took a seat in a drawing-room." 
 If Mrs. Fuller had not been such a true and self- 
 sacrificing woman, her oldest daughter would have 
 had better manners. But she seems to have yielded 
 her place to her daughter without a protest, consoling 
 herself with reminiscences of her prowess as a school 
 mistress before her marriage. She brought up her 
 younger children on the story of how she had once 
 soundly feruled a big boy who had questioned her 
 authority. But there is no indication that she ever 
 displayed such energy and courage in her own home. 
 She was a weak submissive woman, like the mother 
 of Mary Wollstonecraft. Perhaps there was a com 
 mon reason why the daughters of both these mothers 
 have come down in history as aggressive women. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 A PRECOCIOUS CHILD 
 
 INTELLECTUALLY and emotionally, Margaret Fuller 
 was a precocious child. She had a hungry intellect 
 and hungry emotions. When, as a mature woman, 
 she visited Carlyle, his comment on her personality 
 was : " Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe 
 as her oyster or her egg, ... I have not before seen 
 in any human soul." Though Margaret was then 
 thirty-six, her soul was still uncouth with hunger, like 
 a voracious birdling in a nest, all wide-open beak and 
 nothing else. -She was lacking in the ingratiating 
 marks of all the partial satisfactions which should have 
 been her daily bread from childhood on. It was her 
 tragedy that things came to her either too soon or 
 too late: the essence of her fate was untimeliness. 
 
 Like her father and her grandfather, Margaret 
 Fuller was educated at home, her school life away 
 from home being practically negligible. She must have 
 had a little domestic Harvard of her own, for her 
 father had been a second-honor man and his father 
 before him had been a second-honor man, so that 
 Margaret s curriculum doubtless carried out the best 
 
 ii 
 
12 Margaret Fuller 
 
 Harvard tradition. " My father was a man of busi 
 ness," she said, " even in literature." 
 
 Probably because his own education had been re 
 tarded by lack of means, Timothy Fuller was resolved 
 to give his daughter an early start. At the age of 
 six, she was taught Latin and English grammar, and 
 read Latin daily from this time on. In translating, 
 she was required to proceed " without breaks or hesi 
 tation, for with these my father had absolutely no 
 patience." A year or two later, she read Horace and 
 Ovid, and before she reached her teens, she had 
 learned to read French. " The great amount of study 
 exacted of me soon ceased to be a burden, and reading 
 became a habit and passion." At the age of eight, 
 she read Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Moliere. When 
 she was twenty-five Emerson said of her that her 
 reading was at a rate like Gibbon s. 
 
 There was no library in the Cambridgeport house, 
 but her father had in his room a large closet filled with 
 books. Here Margaret found the best writers of the 
 eighteenth century, the English novelists and the 
 French political philosophers, in whose writings her 
 father, who was " more than half a Jacobin," was espe 
 cially well read. The priggish maiden read the French 
 Republicans, but she did not like " Smollett, Fielding, 
 and the like," because they dealt " too broadly with 
 the coarse actualities of life." 
 
A Precocious Child 13 
 
 Much has been made of Margaret s precocious 
 studies as the cause of her life-long ill health. Mar 
 garet herself believed that the forcing of her intellect 
 in tender years was the cause of her physical weakness 
 and suffering, and her biographers have accepted her 
 theory without criticism. Mrs. Howe thought that 
 Margaret had a real case against her father ; but, as a 
 mother herself, she is reminded that there are " dif 
 ficulties which parents encounter in the training of 
 their children, and especially in that of their eldest- 
 born," and she thought Margaret should not have 
 criticized her well-intentioned parent. But Mr. Hig- 
 ginson pointed out that there was nothing peculiar 
 about Margaret s education for that period, except that 
 it was given to a girl. She was overtasked by her 
 father merely because he trained her like a boy. If 
 she had been a boy, she would not have been over 
 tasked. " Cambridge boys, if the sons of college-bred 
 men, were brought up in much the same way," says 
 Higginson. Henry Hedge, who was Margaret s in 
 timate friend and fellow-student, was ready for college 
 at eleven, and had read as much Latin as she. Mar 
 garet must have been aware of young Hedge s attain 
 ments and she must have been aware, since they studied 
 so much together, that her powers were on a par with 
 his. Still, she had to find some theory for the miseries 
 of her youth, and so she attributed her sufferings to 
 
14 Margaret Fuller 
 
 over-study. But the truth was that, if Margaret had 
 not been endowed with superior intelligence, all her 
 father s efforts could not have stretched her mind to 
 the span of such performances as he required of her. 
 To this extent no violent hand was laid on her develop 
 ment. 
 
 But the by-products of Mr. Fuller s course were 
 unwholesome. Margaret had to recite her lessons in 
 the evening by candlelight, after her father s office 
 hours were over. Thus the excitable child went to 
 evening school and kept grown-up hours. If Mr. 
 Fuller was interrupted, her bed-time was postponed 
 to make up for it. And since he begrudged the hours 
 that nature requires for sleep, apparently he begrudged 
 them as well on Margaret s behalf. But it is doubtful 
 whether these things alone would have shattered her 
 health. Her vulnerable spot was her emotional pre 
 cocity. 
 
 All her affections were focused on her father. He 
 not only usurped the mother s place in addition to his 
 own, but added to this the influence of the school 
 master. In this triple character, he ruled his daugh 
 ter s life completely, and she worshiped a trinity of 
 authorities in him. Margaret s adult writings are full 
 of echoes of her hectic, unchildish preoccupation with 
 this attachment. "When I recollect how deep the 
 anguish, how deeper still the want, with which I 
 
A Precocious Child 
 
 walked alone in hours of childish passion and called 
 for a Father, after saying the word a hundred times, 
 till it was stifled by sobs, how great seems the duty 
 that name imposes." One would think that even a 
 literary biographer would realize the uncanny eroticism 
 of this reminiscence. 
 
 With characteristic candor, Margaret traces the 
 emotional history of her childhood in a fragment of 
 autobiography written at the age of thirty. It was 
 based on an earlier history written at sixteen which she 
 destroyed. Her record, brief as it is, contains almost 
 a clinical picture of the future hysteric. 
 
 For the first five years of her life, Margaret en 
 joyed the position of an only child. During this time 
 a baby sister made her appearance but she soon van 
 ished again. " My earliest recollection is of a death, * 
 Margaret writes; "the death of a sister, two years 
 younger than myself." She does not recall any feel 
 ings of tenderness towards this baby sister, but she 
 thinks that " probably there is a sense of childish en 
 dearments such as belong to this tie." But she re 
 members vividly the funeral, " the house all still and 
 dark, the people in their black clothes and dreary 
 faces, the scent of the newly-made coffin, my being 
 set up in a chair and detained by a gentle hand to hear 
 the clergyman, the carriages slowly going, the pro 
 cession slowly doling out their steps to the grave." 
 
1 6 Margaret Fuller 
 
 The reminiscence then proceeds rather more briskly: 
 " My father, all whose feelings were now concen 
 tered on me, instructed me himself." 
 
 When Margaret was five, a baby brother was born. 
 This was in the year 1815, and Mr. Fuller showed 
 where his political sympathies lay by naming his in 
 fant son " Eugene." He delivered a Fourth of July 
 oration at Watertown in his most caustic manner. 
 " The disinterested and magnanimous Allies, the 
 deliverers of the world , seem very affectionate to 
 the world they have delivered. Their labor of love 
 is only begun. One takes Poland under his gracious 
 protection; another is pleased to take Norway; a third, 
 Italy ; and modest England resigns to each his favorite 
 portion of prostrate Europe, and only claims, as a 
 small gratuity, the rest of the world! " In this strain, 
 the Honorable Timothy reviewed the events of 1815, 
 at home as well as abroad no doubt, and his five-year- 
 old daughter received a lasting imprint from the pa 
 ternal view of things. From this time forth, we may 
 always know where to find her. 
 
 In the picture of her childhood, Margaret pays great 
 attention to her dreams. As a woman of thirty, she 
 still recalls the child s dreams with great vividness. 
 They haunted her all her life long, and she believed 
 that, in some undefined way, they were the cause of 
 her unhappiness. She did not know, however, that 
 
A Precocious Child 17 
 
 they furnished the key to the passionate conflicts from 
 which she suffered. " These dreams/ she says, 
 writing of herself in the third person, " softened her 
 heart too much, and cast a deep shadow over her 
 young days; for then, and later, the life of dreams, 
 probably because there was in it less to distract the 
 mind from its own earnestness, has often seemed to 
 her more real, and been remembered with more inter 
 est, than that of waking hours." 
 
 There was one dream which came to her repeatedly. 
 " Often she dreamed of following to the grave the 
 body of her mother, as she had done that of her sister, 
 and wake to find the pillow drenched in tears." In 
 this good child s heart, as in all good children s hearts, 
 there were evil wishes which she had to keep secret 
 even from herself. She had a primeval and murderous 
 wish to attend the funeral of her beloved mother. But 
 that is only half the story. The tears which wet her 
 pillow were sincere, for the child also loved the gentle 
 mother who was all self-effacing kindness. It was in 
 the intensity of such early emotional conflicts that the 
 foundation was laid for Margaret s neurotic disposi 
 tion. The middle-aged Puritan father, who wished to 
 renew his youth by spiritual loot from the next genera 
 tion, was himself to blame for much of her suffering. 
 
 After her evening lessons, Margaret says that she 
 went to bed with "nerves unnaturally stimulated," 
 
1 8 Margaret Fuller 
 
 which led to her being a " victim of spectral illusions, 
 nightmare, and somnambulism " and later of " con 
 tinual headache, weakness, and nervous affections of 
 all kinds." She describes some of the dreams which 
 followed such evenings. 
 
 " As soon as the light was taken away," she says, 
 still using the third person, " she seemed to see colossal 
 faces advancing towards her, the eyes dilating, and 
 each feature swelling loathsomely as they came, till at 
 last, when they were about to close upon her, she 
 started up with a shriek which drove them away, but 
 only to return when she lay down again/ She de 
 scribes also a dream of horses: "When at last she 
 went to sleep, it was to dream of horses trampling over 
 her, and to awaken once more in fright." Yet another 
 dream was, " as she had just read in her Virgil, of 
 being among trees that dripped with blood, where she 
 walked and walked and could not get out, while the 
 blood became a pool and splashed over her feet, and 
 rose higher and higher, till soon she dreamed it would 
 reach her lips. No wonder the child arose and walked 
 in her sleep, moaning, all over the house, till once, when 
 they heard her, and came and waked her, and she told 
 them what she had dreamed, her father sharply bid her 
 leave off thinking of such nonsense, or she would be 
 crazy, never knowing that he was himself the cause 
 of all these horrors of the night." 
 
A Precocious Child 19 
 
 Margaret was altogether right in saying that her 
 father was to blame for these horrors, though it was 
 in a sense which she did not appreciate. It is only 
 surprising that she came as near the truth as she did. 
 Nowadays, the veriest tyro in psychoanalysis could 
 have told Mr. Fuller what it was that was making 
 such inroads on his daughter s nervous system. 
 
 These dreams show that the child went bowed and 
 aching under the terrible burden of her precocious 
 sexuality and painful repressions. The vision of the 
 trampling horses is an erotic phantasy common among 
 hysterical maidens. Similarly the dilating eyes are 
 well-known among the anxiety dreams of childhood 
 and usually have a sexual significance. To this dream 
 about eyes can probably be traced Margaret s eccentric 
 habit of opening and closing her eyelids alternately, 
 a trick described with gusto by all her biographers 
 and said to have been due to her near-sightedness. 
 Channing, who shared Margaret s belief in " magnet 
 ism," thought that her " highly-magnetized condition " 
 had something to do with it. But Emerson regarded 
 it as an affectation which he very much disliked. 
 According to him, it contributed to her "plainness/ 
 
 When Margaret was sixteen, the house was full 
 of "little Fullers," as she called them. Their fre 
 quent arrival upon the scene must have stimulated a 
 great deal the girl s natural curiosity concerning the 
 
2O Margaret Fuller 
 
 origin of life. " I remembered how, a little child," 
 she says, " I had stopped myself one day on the stairs, 
 and asked, how came I here ? How is it that I seem 
 to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? 
 What shall I do about it?" In this sort of childish 
 inquiry was laid the foundation of her passion for 
 knowledge; she had a consuming wish to know and 
 understand the world. Ignorance was to her, she said, 
 " a pain." 
 
 A child like Margaret Fuller, of course, has day 
 dreams as well as night dreams. Far back in the 
 " dewy dawn of memory," Margaret had thought of 
 herself as a " changeling " and pitied herself in her 
 " adopted home." Her real parents could not be this 
 commonplace New England couple whose thoughts 
 never strayed from the jobs of the day; she was a 
 European Princess confided to their care, and so forth. 
 
 She prayed earnestly for a sign, " that it would 
 lighten in some particular region of the heavens, or 
 that I might find a bunch of grapes in the path when 
 I went forth in the morning. But no sign was 
 given, and I was left a waif stranded upon the shores 
 of modern life! " Children with intense imaginations 
 commonly have these superstitious fancies about their 
 magnificent origin and their power over impossibilities 
 by wishing. In Margaret the delusional life was 
 over-developed, but there are none so normal that they 
 
A Precocious Child 21 
 
 can afford to smile at her childish absurdities from too 
 lofty a height. Yet Emerson, who wished to prove 
 that Margaret had a " mountainous me," seriously 
 produced the fantasies of omnipotence from her early 
 childhood as evidence. In order to show that " from 
 the beginning of her life she idealized herself as a 
 sovereign," he refers to a passage in her diary which 
 shows nothing of the kind, though it does show clearly 
 what an unhealthy emotional relationship existed be 
 tween the Puritan child and her father. " I remem 
 bered our walking in the garden avenue, between the 
 tall white lilies and Ellen s apple-tree; she was a 
 lovely child then, and happy, but my heart ached, and 
 I lived in just the way I do now. Father said, 
 seeing me at a distance, Incedo regina, etc. Poor 
 Juno! Father admired me, and, though he caused 
 me so much suffering, had a true sense at times of 
 what is tragic for me." The chief peculiarity of 
 Margaret Fuller is that she remembered her childish 
 day-dreams and set them down so accurately. Her 
 reminiscences are a distinct contribution to the psychol 
 ogy of normal childhood and it was only in the over- 
 accentuation of her emotions that they assumed a 
 neurotic coloring. 
 
 Margaret was clever enough to analyze the chief 
 injury of precocious learning in her own case. Out 
 of her own experience, she laid down a principle which 
 
22 Margaret Fuller 
 
 modern educators are coming more and more to recog 
 nize. Her conclusion was that children should not 
 learn to read too early, because "they should not 
 through books antedate their actual experiences, but 
 should take them gradually, as sympathy and interpre 
 tation are needed." As a result of her premature 
 studies, her world was a world of demi-gods and 
 Caesars and the denizens of Cambridgeport did not 
 shine by comparison. " How poor the scene around, 
 how tame one s own existence, how meager and faint 
 every power, with these beings in my mind! Often 
 I must cast them quite aside in order to grow in my 
 small way, and not sink into despair." Books should 
 be to children, she thought, the aftermath, and not 
 the vestibule, of experience. And they should be the 
 same thing to an adult. "A moment of action in 
 one s self," she said, " is worth an age of apprehension 
 through others ; not that our deeds are better, but that 
 they produce a renewal of our being." Here again 
 Margaret has laid down a principle of modern 
 psychology. There are few better statements of the 
 innate fertility of life and action as compared with 
 the sterile pleasures of the day-dreamer s lot. 
 
 Margaret s neurotic childhood has always been 
 a stumbling stone for her literary biographers. They 
 were fascinated by it indeed it seems for some of 
 them to have been her chief attraction but none of 
 
A Precocious Child 23 
 
 them has known what to make of it. Even Emerson, 
 who detested that aspect of her nature, could not pos 
 sibly pass it by. He shared the opinion of the Boston 
 conclave that her hysterical sufferings were in some 
 inexplicable way associated with her talents. Mrs. 
 Howe speaks of the child s hysteria as if it were some 
 thing afflicting but extraneous, like measles or scarlet 
 fever. Kind Mr. Higginson, very much alive to the 
 mischief which had been done to Margaret s reputa 
 tion by dwelling on all this " seeress " and " arcana " 
 business, strove to do justice to the commonplace and 
 practical side of Margaret s life and character which 
 has been so misrepresented. A gentleman of the old 
 school, he thought there was something not altogether 
 " nice " about hysteria, and so he left it out. McPhail, 
 who put her life into his Essays on Puritanism 
 where she most certainly belonged, had the good sense 
 to compassionate suffering when he saw it and not to 
 alternate between admiration and dislike. It was he 
 who said also with sensible finality, that the child s 
 character had puzzled and misled her biographers and 
 would certainly continue to do so " till the essential 
 nature of hysteria is disclosed." 
 
 So far as Margaret s case is concerned, Sigmund 
 Freud s theory of hysteria is a perfect fit. As one 
 of the Freudians has said, " It may be more comfort 
 able to believe that hysteria is due to a toxic process 
 
24 Margaret Fuller 
 
 than that it is due to psycho-sexual conflicts," but we 
 shall have to make ourselves uncomfortable for the 
 moment in the interests of the truth about Margaret 
 Fuller s childhood. But how can an innocent child 
 be the victim of a psycho-sexual conflict, some one 
 protests. " The passions are not un frequently felt in 
 their full shock, if not in their intensity, at eight or 
 nine years old." This is not a statement of those 
 profoundly irritating Freudians but of Margaret Fuller 
 herself, who wrote it in a book review in 1846. She 
 frequently wrote the most surprising statements about 
 the love-impulse which showed that she had more than 
 an inkling of the truth about its nature and its history. 
 Margaret s whole emotional life in childhood cen 
 tered around the father who likened her to Juno and 
 wrote verses to a lock of her hair. In spite of the 
 strictness of his Puritan regime, she knew herself to 
 be the center of his attentions and his hopes. Some 
 one suggested that Mr. Fuller educated his daughter 
 to satisfy a social ambition. But to teach a girl Latin 
 and send her into libraries in those days was the surest 
 way of all to wreck her social prospects and dedicate 
 her to spinsterhood. Mr. Fuller must have known 
 that himself. Margaret said that her father educated 
 her at home instead of sending her to school " merely 
 to please himself." JEvidently people thought that 
 Mr. Fuller s motive for taking so much pains with his 
 
A Precocious Child 25 
 
 daughter needed an explanation. " He took pride in 
 her precocious abilities, and enjoyed her companion 
 ship in his favorite studies," said Higginson; "that 
 tells the whole story." It does, almost, but not quite. 
 The tie between father and daughter is never without 
 some tinge of sex-attraction, and in the over-stressing 
 of that tie lies the possibility of much neurotic suffer 
 ing. In Margaret s case, without doubt, this early 
 and natural affection was forced by the circumstances 
 of her home-life into a premature strength and in 
 tensity. It became an amour which the sensitive con 
 sciousness was forced to drive down into the deepest 
 and most secret recesses of its abandoned memories. 
 Such impressions normally fade away with children 
 and leave only their traces upon after-life; but with 
 Margaret it was not so. Her childish love was the 
 mainspring of her whole career 
 
 It stamped her with an unforgettable longing. As 
 a woman of more than thirty, she walked along the 
 seashore one day and saw a fisherman playing with his 
 little girl. It struck her as a romantic idyll and she 
 described it in these terms. "As I approached, I be 
 held a young fisherman with his little girl. He had 
 nestled her into a hollow of the rock, and was standing 
 before her, with his arms around her, and looking up 
 in her face. Never was anything so pretty. I stood 
 and stared, country fashion ; and presently he scram- 
 
26 Margaret Fuller 
 
 bled up to the very top with her in his arms. She 
 screamed a little as they went, but when they were 
 fairly upon the crest of the rock, she chuckled and 
 stretched out her tiny hand over his neck, to go still 
 further. Yet, when she found he did not wish it, she 
 leaned against his shoulder, and he sat feeling himself 
 in the child like that exquisite madonna, and looking 
 out over the great sea." 
 
 All this was merely a tender reminiscence out of 
 Margaret s own childhood. Her rather bizarre pic 
 ture of the man feeling himself in the child like 
 a madonna was a fair portrait of the reserved, rather 
 feminine, and affectionate father who did so much 
 to make her what she was. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 NARCISSA 
 
 AT the age of thirteen, Margaret fell violently in love. 
 She fell in love " at first sight " (her life-long pattern 
 for this process) with a stranger, whom she saw at 
 church. The stranger was an English lady, who 
 played the harp and read Sir Walter Scott. It was 
 a sentimental and passing attachment, not a profound 
 and life-long influence like Mary Wollstonecraft s for 
 Fanny Blood. Margaret replaced the adored one 
 from time to time by other matrons equally adored, 
 but the original impression was never effaced. 
 
 All her pent-up feelings seized upon the strange lady 
 as a drowning man clutches at a straw. " It was my 
 first real interest in my kind, and it engrossed me 
 wholly. I had seen her, I should see her, and my 
 mind lay steeped in the visions that flowed from this 
 source. My task-work I went through with, as I have 
 done on similar occasions all my life, aided by pride 
 that could not bear to fail, or be questioned. Could 
 I cease from doing the work of the day, and hear 
 the reason sneeringly given, Her head is so com- 
 
 27 
 
28 Margaret Fuller 
 
 pletely taken up with that she can do nothing ? 
 
 Impossible ... I can tell little else of this time, 
 indeed, I remember little, except the state of feeling 
 in which I lived." 
 
 She was unable to cope with her excessive grief 
 when the stranger went away. " Those who are really 
 children could not know such love, or feel such sor 
 row," she comments. She fell into a complete hysteri 
 cal innervation, M knew not how to exert myself, 
 but lay bound hand and foot," and soon took refuge 
 in outright sickness. The robust and energetic girl 
 was genuinely ill. 
 
 For the first time, her father began to suspect that 
 there was something wrong. He suddenly discovered 
 that she needed to be with girls of her own age. But 
 already the Cambridge girls were hostile towards the 
 eccentric Margaret, and so she was sent away to board 
 ing school. The school selected was that of the Misses 
 Prescott, in Groton, Massachusetts. Here Margaret 
 spent her fourteenth and fifteenth years, and her ex 
 periences there are told in the story of a fictitious 
 " Marianna," who " irritated the girls, as all eccentric 
 ity does the world in general, more than vice or 
 malignity." Groton was, of course, no kinder than 
 Cambridge, the only difference being that the girl 
 was forced into a hand-to-hand struggle with public 
 opinion. She soon learned which was the stronger. 
 
Narcissa 29 
 
 Her father had delivered her up to a most unequal 
 combat. 
 
 The climax came as the result of a series of theatri 
 cals in which Margaret s abilities and talents naturally 
 brought her to the fore. The principal parts fell to 
 her as a matter of course and for a time she reigned 
 triumphant. But the plays came to an end and the 
 gray commonplace regime again prevailed. But Mar 
 garet, after the plays were over, kept on painting her 
 cheeks. The girls jeered at her, and Margaret de 
 fended herself at first, saying she thought it made her 
 look pretty. Then she became stubborn and silent 
 but kept up the habit. In her story, Margaret gives 
 no reason for Marianna s behavior, and probably 
 she knew none; but the famous peach-bloom on 
 her mother s cheeks, so celebrated in family annals, 
 was doubtless at the bottom of the girl s absurdity. 
 She could not stop for the simple reason that she did 
 not know why she did it. 
 
 Margaret s schoolmates did not understand her. 
 She infuriated them, as only the eccentric can infuriate 
 the blessed normal people. They decided to punish her 
 and enlisted the teachers in their conspiracy. One 
 day she came down to dinner to find all the girls deeply 
 rouged with round, glaring spots on their cheeks. As 
 her eyes traveled around the table, she saw that every 
 one had joined the trick against her. Even the teach- 
 
30 Margaret Fuller 
 
 ers smiled and the servants tittered. The world 
 despised her and triumphed in her disgrace ! She gave 
 no sign during the meal, but afterwards she went to 
 her room and fell upon the floor in convulsions. In 
 stantly, everybody was kind and attentive, and the 
 episode passed over. 
 
 Margaret left off painting her cheeks, but the mem 
 ory of how not one person had taken her part rankled 
 within her. Now that she was beaten and outwardly 
 subdued, her schoolmates became more friendly and 
 gave her their confidences. In a spirit of revenge 
 the girl saw her chance to create dissension among 
 them and used it. She began her deliberate mischief- 
 making with prudence but grew so bold with her suc 
 cess that she ran into a second fiasco. She was called 
 upon by the principal to answer charges to be preferred 
 against her. Marianna stood up and leaned against 
 the chimney-piece, while eight of the older girls came 
 forward and charged her with falsehood and calumny. 
 The outcome was more convulsions and another illness. 
 Her feeling of revenge had given place to a feeling 
 of remorse, and the poor distracted girl became more 
 hysterical than ever in the herd-atmosphere of the 
 Misses Prescott s school. 
 
 Margaret was fifteen when she returned from board 
 ing school and sixteen when her father gave the 
 famous party for John Quincy Adams. She wore a 
 
Narcissa 31 
 
 pink silk dress on that occasion and presented the 
 appearance of a buxom young woman of eighteen. 
 From this time forth, she was " out." She was a 
 marriageable young woman and she now went into 
 society. Higginson says she " danced through col 
 lege " with the class of 1829. But not all of them 
 would dance with her; they found her too dashing, 
 too aggressive, and too talkative. Aside from one 
 " disappointment," no love affairs developed. It 
 began to appear that she was destined for spinsterhood. 
 The natural conclusion in the observer s mind, and 
 doubtless in Margaret s own, was that the young men 
 of her own generation had passed her by. When 
 maids do not marry, of course, it is because they are 
 " plain." Margaret " made up her mind to be bright 
 and ugly." The theory of sex-attraction was very 
 simple in those days beauty in women and bravery in 
 men made it all so simple. 
 
 Margaret s passions found some outlet in that par 
 ticular form of self-love which is known as ambition. 
 She was madly ambitious. " I feel the power of in 
 dustry growing every day, and, besides the all-power 
 ful motive of ambition, and a new stimulus lately 
 given through a friend, I have learned to believe that 
 nothing, no! not perfection, is unattainable. I am 
 determined on distinction, which formerly I thought 
 to win at an easy rate; but now I see that long years 
 
32 Margaret Fuller 
 
 of labor must be given to secure even the succes de 
 societe which, however, shall never content me. I 
 see multitudes of examples of persons of genius, 
 utterly deficient in grace and the power of pleasurable 
 excitement. I wish to combine both. I know the 
 obstacles in my way. I am wanting in that intuitive 
 tact and polish, which nature has bestowed upon some, 
 but which I must acquire. And, on the other hand, 
 my powers of intellect, though sufficient, I suppose, 
 are not well disciplined. Yet all such hindrances may 
 be overcome by an ardent spirit. If I fail, my conso 
 lation shall be found in active employment." The 
 writer of these lines was just fifteen. It is already 
 easy to foresee that she would not deserve to be called 
 "a true woman " on her tombstone. 
 
 In order to produce that glorious Margaret of to- 
 . morrow to whom the Margaret of today was as the dull 
 caterpillar is to the gorgeous butterfly, the girl toiled 
 indefatigably. She wrote to her teacher : " I rise a 
 little before five, walk an hour, and then practice on 
 the piano, till seven, when we have breakfast. Next 
 I read French Sismondi s Literature of the South of 
 Europe, till eight, then two or three lectures in 
 Brown s Philosophy. About half -past nhie I go to 
 Mr. Perkin s school and study Greek till twelve, when, 
 the school being dismissed, I recite, go home, and prac 
 tice again till dinner, at two. Sometimes, if the con- 
 
Narcissa 33 
 
 versation is very agreeable, I lounge for half an hour 
 over the dessert, though rarely so lavish of time. 
 Then, when I can, I read two hours in Italian, but 
 I am often interrupted. At six, I walk, or take a drive. 
 Before going to bed, I play or sing for half an hour 
 or so, to make all sleepy, and, about eleven, retire to 
 write a little while in my journal, exercises on what 
 I have read, or a series of characteristics which I am 
 filling up according to advice. Thus, you see, I am 
 learning Greek, and making acquaintance with meta 
 physics, and French and Italian literature." 
 
 Margaret was going to be sixteen next week, and 
 she had a great decision to make. " Now tell me," she 
 wrote to her teacher, " had you rather be the brilliant 
 de Stael or the useful Edgeworth?" It was a mere 
 rhetorical question, for the brilliant de Stael was 
 an easy winner, the daughter of Necker who had 
 published at the age of fifteen a remarkable defense 
 of her father s political conduct and whose ruling pas 
 sion through life had been her filial devotion. De 
 Stael was plain; she was a brilliant conversationalist, 
 a distinguished author, and an able politician. Yes, 
 a de Stael would do as an incentive, but one must work 
 prodigiously. Margaret attacked her studies, as she 
 said, with a " gladiatorial disposition." 
 
 She liked a companion in her studies, but there were 
 few who could stand her pace. In Lydia Maria 
 
34 Margaret Fuller 
 
 Francis, a fellow-disciple of the brilliant de Stael, she 
 found a friend and the two seventeen-year-old girls 
 read together and conversed loftily on metaphysics and 
 politics. At nineteen, she attached to herself James 
 Freeman Clarke as a friend to whom she could speak 
 of her studies. They rode together on horseback from 
 Cambridge to Newton and discussed all day long so 
 cialism, friendship, and the power of circumstances. 
 When Carlyle made German literature the fashion, 
 they fell to and learned German together, and within 
 three months, according to the young man s account, 
 Margaret was reading with ease all the masterpieces 
 which Carlyle had reviewed and many others besides. 
 Probably Carlyle himself, in his remote Craigen- 
 puttock, had learned the language no faster than did 
 this new disciple in her narrow New England corner. 
 With Frederick Henry Hedge, another platonic friend, 
 she embarked upon ambitious schemes of translations 
 from the German, which led to some excellent literary 
 work from both. To William Henry Channing, Mar 
 garet confided " her secret hope of what Woman 
 might be and do, as an author, in our Republic." She 
 sketched a portrait which Channing recognized as her 
 own and, he adds, "we were strangers no more." 
 They were united in the free-masonry of the ambitious. 
 Though Margaret could read Latin and German and 
 compare ambitions with these young men, she could 
 
Narcissa 35 
 
 not make love to them. But it was a necessity of her 
 nature to make love to somebody. She solved the 
 dilemma in the usual way. "She was one of those 
 maidens/ says Higginson, " who form passionate 
 attachments to older women." He describes how she 
 paid court to his mother and other staid matrons of 
 Cambridge. One of her idols, a certain Mrs. Farrar, 
 who was the author of a Manual for Young Ladies, 
 took her in hand and polished up her manners, which, 
 according to Margaret s own account, were much in 
 need of an expert s touch. She wooed young women 
 also. There was the beautiful Anna Barker whom she 
 adored but who filled her with such despairing envy 
 that Margaret struggled with curl-papers night after 
 night when French and metaphysics had had their 
 due. What seemed so hard for Margaret seemed so 
 easy for Anna. The young men paid her court and 
 in the proper season, she married one of them. But 
 probably Anna had not been elected in her cradle to 
 be the companion of her father. 
 
 Margaret was accused of sentimentalism and ro 
 mantic exaggeration in her friendships. She belonged 
 to an age which reveled in Rousseau, Bettina Bren- 
 tano, and de Stael, and the grafting of foreign ro 
 manticism on the native Puritan stock sometimes pro 
 duced outlandish results. But for all that, Margaret 
 was a sincere student of the romantic impulse and 
 
36 Margaret Fuller 
 
 her observations were accurate so far as they went. 
 She was one of those who stood as sign-posts along 
 the road which was to lead in time to a scientific view 
 of the nature of love. " It is so true that a woman 
 may be in love with a woman, and a man with a 
 man. It is pleasant to be sure of it, because it is un 
 doubtedly the same love that we shall feel when we 
 are angels, when we ascend to the only fit place for 
 the Mignons, where sie f ragen nicht nach Mann und 
 Weib . It is regulated by the same law as that of 
 love between persons of different sexes, only it is 
 purely intellectual and spiritual, unprofaned by any 
 mixture of lower instincts, undisturbed by any need 
 of consulting temporal interests; its law is the desire 
 of the spirit to realize a whole, which makes it seek 
 in another being that which it finds not in itself. Thus 
 the beautiful seek the strong, the mute seek the elo 
 quent; the butterfly settles on the dark flower. Why 
 did Socrates love Alcibiades? Why did Kaiser so love 
 Schneider? How natural is the love of Wallenstein 
 for Max, that of Madame de Stael for de Recamier, 
 
 mine for ! I loved for a time with 
 
 as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel. 
 Her face was always gleaming before me; her voice 
 was echoing in my ear. All poetic thoughts clustered 
 round the dear image. . . . She loved me, for I well 
 remember her suffering when she first could feel my 
 
Narcissa 37 
 
 faults, and knew one part of the exquisite veil rent 
 away how she wished to stay apart and weep the 
 whole day." It is worth noticing that Margaret here 
 hit upon what is said by the modern Freudian to be 
 one of the chief ear-marks of this form of love, and 
 that is a greater mutual sensitiveness to faults than 
 exists in the more mature form of love between per 
 sons of opposite sexes. 
 
 Through these experiences of hers, Margaret was 
 led to make a translation of the Bettina-Gimderode 
 letters soon after their publication in Leipzig in 1840. 
 The Canoness Giinderode is perhaps less famous than 
 her masculine counterpart, the melancholy Werther, 
 but she suffered from the same kind of Weltschmerz 
 and threw herself into the river Rhine. The cor 
 respondence between her and Bettina Brentano is full 
 of ecstatic poetry of which Margaret was able, largely 
 through her sympathy, to make an excellent English 
 rendering. She met Gunderode at a turning-point in 
 her life and for a year or so followed her as a model. 
 She turned u her back upon the world and sought for 
 consolation in a life of mysticism. 
 
 Despite her strong instinct for action and her ex 
 traordinary energy, she seemed to languish at home 
 without an aim in life. The family fortunes were 
 declining and yet she made no effort to find an occu 
 pation for herself. In those years there were few 
 
38 Margaret Fuller 
 
 occupations open to women, and yet it seems as if 
 Margaret with her unusual energies might have found 
 something to do even then. She longed to travel, then 
 why not strike out for Virginia to be a governess 
 on a plantation? But she stuck at home like any 
 spiritless spinster of her time. She longed for love 
 and marriage, and yet she took no steps to satisfy her 
 longing. Of course she was a perfect lady, and a 
 perfect lady did not go husband-hunting. Yet she was 
 far from shrinking in her other relationships. When 
 she had marked a person for her friend, says Emerson, 
 the one so marked could not escape. " Persons were 
 her game, specially if marked by fortune, or character, 
 or success to such was she sent. . . . Indeed they 
 fell in her way, when the access might have seemed 
 difficult, by wonderful casualties." If she was such 
 a successful adventuress as all this, why did she not 
 acquire a husband by the same method? It was just 
 there, apparently, that her instinct for possession failed 
 her completely. 
 
 She sat in a prison of her own making. " All hopes 
 of traveling I have dismissed," she wrote in her 
 Journal. " All youthful hopes, of every kind, I have 
 pushed, from my thoughts. I will not, if I can help 
 it, lose an hour in castle-building and repining too 
 much of that already. I have now a pursuit of im 
 mediate importance: to the German language and lit- 
 
Narcissa 39 
 
 erature I will give my undivided attention. I have 
 made rapid progress for one quite unassisted. I have 
 always hitherto been too constantly distracted by 
 childish feelings to acquire anything properly, but have 
 snatched a little here and there to feed my restless 
 fancy therewith. Please God now to keep my mind 
 composed, that I may store it with all that may be 
 conducive to the best good of others. Oh, keep me 
 steady in an honorable ambition; favored by this calm,- 
 this obscurity of life, I might learn everything, did not 
 feeling lavish away my strength." 
 
 Soon after this, and quite suddenly, came her fa 
 ther s decision to retire upon a farm. Margaret was 
 appalled by the prospect, yet it never occurred to her 
 to find a way of remaining in Boston. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 MIRANDA 
 
 THE Fuller farm was only forty miles from Boston, 
 but there was no railway in those days and country 
 life represented a real exile to Margaret. Miranda 
 greeted her desert isle with a flood of bitter tears. 
 Nevertheless she unpacked her trunks, and settled in 
 for life: there was now no other prospect visible. 
 
 She was only doing what custom required of un 
 married daughters in those days. One by one the boys 
 would grow up and leave, but she would always stay 
 on in the Groton farmhouse. In Boston she had al 
 ready a "circle" and several Platonic friendships. 
 She had been reading German with Henry Hedge, but 
 now she read the letters of Thomas Jefferson with her 
 father. " I rejoice, if only because my father and I 
 can have so much in common on this topic," she wrote 
 to Hedge ; " all my other pursuits have led me away 
 from him; here he has much information and ripe 
 judgment." Together they delved into Latin again, 
 and Margaret wrote a long " defense of Brutus " 
 which was published in a Boston newspaper. It was 
 replied to by some learned " big-wig " of Salem, who 
 
 40 
 
Miranda 41; 
 
 would have been greatly humiliated no doubt could he 
 have known that his opponent in this duel of Latin 
 quotations was a young woman of twenty-four. Mar 
 garet s father was immensely proud of her. 
 
 He gave into her hands the education of the younger 
 children. There were younger brothers to be prepared 
 for college, and to this end Margaret kept school five 
 days in the week and her school day was from five 
 to eight hours long. Incidentally she renewed her 
 reading of Virgil and reflected a good deal on his 
 masculine women and his anti-religious ideas of heaven 
 and virtue. She watched her pupils as they tried to 
 reconcile Virgil with the Sunday morning sermon and 
 recalled her own struggles. " I really find it diffi 
 cult," she wrote to a friend, " to keep their morale 
 steady, and am inclined to think many of my skeptical 
 sufferings are traceable to this source." To another 
 friend she wrote, " I will tell you how I pass my time 
 without society or exercise. Even till two o clock, 
 sometimes later, I pour ideas into the heads of the 
 little Fullers ; much runs out, but the few drops which 
 remain mightily gladden the sight of my father." Her 
 labors were lightened also by the promise of a Eu 
 ropean tour. Her father had promised her this as a 
 reward for her school-keeping. 
 
 At the same time, Margaret was in no way exempt 
 from the household cares of the grown-up daughter. 
 
f 
 42 Margaret Fuller 
 
 She sewed and swept and nursed the sick. Her mother 
 fell ill; her invalid grandmother came to spend the 
 winter; one of the children had a serious accident and 
 a long convalescence; and the baby of the family fell 
 sick and died. Once when William Channing took 
 Margaret to task for her arrogance she replied, " Re 
 member that only through aspirations, which some 
 times make me what is called unreasonable, have I 
 been enabled to vanquish unpropitious circumstances 
 and save my soul alive." 
 
 The family atmosphere at Groton was darkened by 
 new currents of hostile feeling. Margaret s brothers 
 were nearing maturity and the old strife between 
 father and son broke out in the household. Margaret 
 says that " collisions with his elder sons, which would 
 not have ended there," embittered the last days of her 
 father. Having spoiled his daughter, he now fought 
 with his sons. Eugene, the eldest, went to Virginia 
 as a tutor on a plantation and ultimately made his way 
 to New Orleans and a journalist s career. The second 
 son followed, and only the little boys remained. The 
 patriarch was left practically alone with his women 
 folk. 
 
 But there was now a conflict between himself and 
 his daughter. She would not be reconciled to the 
 farm. She would not even look at it; rather would 
 she go without exercise than survey the crops and 
 
Miranda 43 
 
 fields and her father s improvements on the place. He 
 wished to build her a rustic seat, where she might go 
 and read alone, but she always put him off when it 
 came to selecting the spot. In this way, the petty but 
 poignant battle went on between them. 
 
 Margaret sustained the emotional conflict for two 
 years and then fell desperately ill. Her life was 
 despaired of by the family and she herself believed 
 that she was near death. Her poor mother tended her 
 for nine days and nights without intermission. At 
 last her father came into the sick-room and said, 
 " My dear, I have been thinking of you in the night, 
 and I cannot remember you have any faults. You 
 have defects, of course, as all mortals have, but I do 
 not know that you have a single fault." As her father 
 had always acted on the belief that praise was hurtful 
 to children, this declaration was a momentous event. 
 It shattered the habit of a lifetime, and Margaret 
 could feel that victory was hers. She began to recover. 
 
 Soon after this, her father fell ill and died very 
 suddenly of Asiatic cholera. His daughter, not his 
 wife, closed his eyes in death. 
 
 Margaret was filled with remorse. " My father s 
 image follows me constantly. Whenever I am in 
 my room, he seems to open the door, and to look 
 on me with a complacent smile." But she was now 
 the head of the family in earnest and prepared to 
 
44 Margaret Fuller 
 
 imitate the self-sacrificing parent whose mantle she 
 had inherited. " I have often had reason to regret 
 being of the softer sex," she said, " and never more 
 than now. If I were an oldest son, I could be 
 guardian to my brothers and sister, administer the 
 estate, and really become the head of the family." But 
 her father s business affairs had to be taken care of 
 by Uncle Abraham, and so the power was divided. 
 " Prospero gave Miranda a scepter, not his wand," was 
 the way Margaret described the situation. 
 
 The European trip was off. There was not enough 
 money, and Margaret s small portion would not be 
 available for some time to come. In the meantime, 
 Harriet Martineau was about to return to England 
 with Mrs. Farrar, the author of the Manual for 
 Young Ladies, and Margaret had been invited to 
 return with the party. But Uncle Abraham soon 
 showed her that this was impossible. Everybody was 
 sorry for poor Margaret. Harriet Martineau was 
 especially sorry, but Emerson rebuked her: "Does 
 Margaret Fuller, supposing her to be what you say, 
 believe her progress to be dependent on whether she 
 is here or there?" Margaret thought it did; never 
 theless she decided, after much agonizing, not to for 
 sake her family. Her self-sacrifice was greatly ad 
 mired by her friends and much celebrated by her 
 .biographers. But Margaret, who had a truthful 
 
Miranda 45 
 
 nature, wrote to her brother some years afterwards, 
 " Probably, if I had been aware at the time of what 
 I was doing, I might not have sacrificed myself so." 
 
 But she no longer contemplated a future on the 
 farm. One evening, while calling on some poor neigh 
 bors in Groton, she had a vision that stirred her to 
 action. " The moon tempted me out, and I set forth 
 for a house at no great distance ... I will try to 
 give you an impression of what you, I fancy, have 
 never come in contact with. The little room they 
 have but one contains a bed, a table, and some old 
 chairs. A single stick of wood burns in the fireplace. 
 It is not needed now, but those who sit near it have 
 long ceased to know what spring is. They are all 
 frost. Everything is old and faded, but at the same 
 time as clean and carefully mended as possible. For 
 all they know of pleasure is to get strength to sweep 
 those few boards, and mend those old spreads and 
 curtains. That sort of self-respect they have, and it 
 is all of pride their many years of poor-tithe has left 
 them. 
 
 "And there they sit, mother and daughter. In 
 the mother, ninety years have quenched every thought 
 and every feeling, except an imbecile interest about her 
 daughter, and the sort of self-respect I just spoke of. 
 Husband, sons, strength, health, house and lands, all 
 are gone. And yet those losses have not had power 
 
Margaret Fuller 
 
 to bow that palsied head to the grave. Morning by 
 morning, she rises without a hope, night by night 
 she lies down vacant or apathetic. . . . We look on 
 this dry leaf, and think how green it was, and how the 
 birds sung to it in its summer day. 
 
 " But can we think of spring, or summer, or any 
 thing joyous or really life-like, when we look at the 
 daughter? that bloodless effigy of humanity, whose 
 care is to eke out this miserable existence by means 
 of the occasional doles of those who know how faithful 
 and good a child she has been to that decrepit creature. 
 . . . The saddest part is, that she does not wish for 
 death. She clings to this sordid existence. Her soul 
 is now so habitually enwrapt in the meanest cares, 
 that if she were to be lifted two or three steps upward, 
 she would not know what to do with her life; how, 
 then, shall she soar to the celestial heights? Yet she 
 ought; for she has ever been good, and her crushing 
 duties have been performed with a self-sacrificing con 
 stancy, which I, for one, could never hope to equal. " 
 
 A short time after writing this sketch, Margaret was 
 looking for a job. She found one as a teacher of 
 languages in Mr. Alcott s school. She gave private 
 lessons as well and translated De Wette and Herder 
 evenings for Dr. Channing. Her cherished plan was 
 to write a life of Goethe; but the Alcott school soon 
 failed and Margaret left Boston to teach in Providence, 
 
Miranda 47 
 
 Rhode Island. The ambitious idea of writing a life 
 of Goethe was exchanged for the more modest task 
 of translating Eckermann s Conversations. Goethe at 
 that time enjoyed a very unsavory reputation in New 
 England. Longfellow expressed the general feeling 
 in a lecture at Harvard, " What I most object to in the 
 old gentleman is his sensuality." And even Emerson 
 could not forbear joining in the popular disgust. " The 
 Puritan in me accepts no apology for bad morals in 
 such as he," he said. Considering all this adverse 
 feeling, Margaret s solitary and unsupported enthusi 
 asm for the disreputable old gentleman must have 
 seemed at least unwomanly. She wrote a defense of 
 Goethe, which was published as an introduction to her 
 Eckermann s Conversations and which still ranks as 
 one of the best pieces of Goethe criticism extant. 
 
 In Providence, Margaret led an active life. She 
 called herself the " Lady Superior "of her school, still 
 evidently under the spell of the Canoness Giinderode, 
 but she did not fully espouse the part. She went to 
 political meetings and envied the political orators. A 
 French man-of-war, anchored in the bay, stirred her 
 imagination. " I thought I much should like to com 
 mand such a vessel, despite all the hardships and priva 
 tions of such a situation." She horrified the director 
 of her school by attending a Whig Caucus and wrote 
 to a friend, " It is rather the best thing I have done." 
 
48 Margaret Fuller 
 
 The school-mistress began to feel herself a citizen of 
 the world. 
 
 At last the farm was sold, and Margaret returned 
 home for a rest until the new tenants should take 
 possession in the spring. She returned in the midst 
 of the wintry snows and devoted her " rest " period 
 to almost constant invalidism. After her active life 
 in Providence, she became a sickly, aging spinster, 
 one of the tragic and benumbed sisterhood, of whom 
 Elizabeth Barrett wrote 
 
 " How dreary tis for women to sit still 
 On winter nights, by solitary fires, 
 And hear the nations praising them far off." 
 
 When she at last escaped from the clutches of the 
 farm and moved her family to Jamaica Plain, near 
 Boston, she wrote to Emerson triumphantly, "This 
 day I ii fTljjfififrTiiij jm ii hired house and am full 
 of the dignity of citizenship. Really, it is almost 
 happiness." 
 
 Presently Margaret woke up to discover that she 
 was thirty and life still unaccountably passed her by. 
 " Tonight I lay on the sofa," she wrote, " and saw how 
 the flame shot up from beneath, through the mass of 
 coal that had been piled above. It shot up in wild, 
 beautiful jets, and then unexpectedly sank again, and 
 all was black, unsightly, and forlorn. And thus, I 
 
Miranda 49 
 
 thought, is it with my life at present. Yet if the fire 
 beneath persists and conquers, that dead mass will 
 become all radiant, life-giving, fit for the altar on the 
 domestic hearth. Yes, and it shall be so." At times 
 she tried to persuade herself that she was willing to 
 postpone the whole thing until another incarnation. 
 " Please, good genius of my life, to make me very 
 patient, resolute, gentle, while no less ardent; and 
 after having tried me well, please present, at the end 
 of some thousand years or so, a sphere of congenial 
 and consecutive labors; of heart- felt, heart-filling 
 wishes carried out into life on the instant." But then 
 at other times she felt that any delay at all was danger 
 ous. " Once I was almost all intellect," she wrote, 
 " now I am almost all feeling. Nature vindicates her 
 rights, and I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon 
 crust. This cannot last long; I shall burn to ashes 
 if all this smolders here much longer. I must die 
 if I do not burst forth in genius or heroism." 
 
 In her desperation she confided her longing to the 
 dead Beethoven. Returning from the symphony, she 
 sat down at her desk and wrote : " My only friend ; 
 How shall I thank thee for one more breaking the 
 chains of my sorrowful slumber? My heart beats. I 
 live again, for I feel that I am worthy audience for 
 thee, and that my being would be reason enough for 
 thine. Master, my eyes are always clear. I see that 
 
50 Margaret Fuller 
 
 the universe is rich, if I am poor. I see the insignifi 
 cance of my sorrows. In my will, I am not a captive; 
 in my intellect, not a slave. Is it then my fault that the 
 palsy of my affections benumbs my whole life? 
 
 " I know that the curse is but for the time. I know 
 what the eternal justice promises. But on this one 
 sphere, it is sad. Thou didst say, thou hadst no friend 
 but thy art. But that one is enough. I have no art, 
 in which to vent the swell of a soul as deep as thine, 
 Beethoven, and of a kindred frame. Thou wilt not 
 think me presumptuous in this saying, as another 
 might. I have always known that thou wouldst wel 
 come and know me, as would no other who ever lived 
 upon this earth since its first creation. Thou wouldst 
 forgive me, master, that I have not been true to my 
 eventual destiny, and therefore have suffered on every 
 side the pangs of despised love. Thou didst the 
 same, but thou didst borrow from these errors the 
 inspiration of thy genius. Why is it not thus with me ? 
 Is it because, as a woman, I am bound by a physical 
 law, which prevents the soul from manifesting itself? 
 Sometimes the moon seems mockingly to say so to 
 say that I, too, shall not shine, unless I find a sun. 
 O, cold and barren moon, tell a different tale ! 
 
 " But thou, oh blessed master ! dost answer all my 
 questions, and make it my privilege to be. Like a 
 humble wife to the sage, or poet, it is my triumph 
 
Miranda 
 
 that I can understand and cherish thee : like a mistress, 
 I arm thee for the fight ; like a young daughter, I ten 
 derly bind thy wounds. Thou art to me beyond com 
 pare, for thou art all I want. No heavenly sweetness 
 of saint or martyr, no many leaved Raphael, no golden 
 Plato, is anything to me compared with thee. The 
 infinite Shakespeare, the stern Angelo, Dante bitter 
 sweet like thee are no longer seen in thy presence. 
 And besides these names, there are none that could 
 vibrate in thy crystal sphere. Thou hast all of them, 
 and that ample surge of life besides, that great winged 
 being which they only dreamed of. There is none 
 greater than Shakespeare; he, too, is a god; but his 
 creations are successive; thy fiat comprehends them 
 all. . . . 
 
 " Master, I have this summer envied the oriole 
 which had even a swinging nest in the high bough. I 
 have envied the least flower that came to seed, though 
 that seed were strown to the wind. But I envy none 
 when I am with thee.". . . 
 
 Steeped in the seductive mysticism of Novalis, 
 Margaret tried to find consolation for her surcharged 
 longings in a life of visions. But she was by no 
 means a success as a mystic, her tendency being, as she 
 put it, " rather to a great natural than a deep religious 
 life." Nevertheless, she was not to leave that ex 
 perience untried. In the summer of 1840 she isolated 
 
Margaret Fuller 
 
 herself completely, hoping to learn the lesson of renun 
 ciation through communion with ideal spirits and celes 
 tial loves. She declared that she achieved a state of 
 ecstasy and a haven of spiritual peace. But soon 
 after she was writing, " Renunciation appears to be 
 complete, and I am quite content; yet, probably, tis 
 no such thing, and that work is to be done over and 
 over again." In this surmise, she was altogether cor 
 rect. 
 
 At this time of her life, Margaret cultivated a de 
 mon. Goethe also had a demon and so did Soc 
 rates but Emerson did not. He was profoundly ir 
 ritated by demons, but Margaret insisted on telling 
 him the news of hers. "With me for weeks and 
 months the demon works his will," she declared. To 
 keep her demon company, she built up " a little my 
 thology of her own," in which anniversaries and sym 
 bols were seriously considered. She adopted the 
 carbuncle for her favorite stone and the sistrum for 
 her emblem. Her definition of the demoniacal was 
 taken from Goethe, but she explained it in her own 
 way thus : " In genius and in character, it works . . . 
 instinctively; it refuses to be analyzed by the under 
 standing, and is most of all inaccessible to the person 
 who possesses it. We can only say, I have it, he has 
 it. ... It has given rise to the fables of wizard, en 
 chantress, and the like; these beings are scarcely good, 
 
Miranda 53 
 
 yet not necessarily bad. Power tempts them." Thus 
 she tried to analyze the power of the unconscious, 
 that unknown and inexplicable force, repressed yet 
 irrepressible, forgotten but indestructible, by which 
 she felt herself enthralled but which was at the same 
 time the source of all her energy. Modern psychology 
 has fully justified her analysis of the source of her 
 creative energy and accounted for the resistance on 
 the part of Emerson, himself incapable of abandon, 
 to the recognition of a power which defied a rational 
 istic explanation. 
 
 Besides her demon, she cultivated a midnight per 
 sonality whom she called " Leila." To Leila she ad 
 dressed herself in a sketch which appeared in an early 
 issue of The Dial. " I did not love thee, Leila, but 
 the desire for love was soothed in thy presence." She 
 describes her dealings with the dream-world through 
 Leila. "At night I look into the lake for Leila. If 
 I gaze steadily and in the singleness of prayer, she 
 rises and walks on its depths. Then know I each night 
 a part of her life ; I know where she passes the mid 
 night hours. In the day she lives among men; she 
 observes their deeds, and gives them what they want of 
 her, justice or love. ... In the night she wanders 
 forth from her human investment, and travels amid 
 these tribes, freer movers in the game of spirit and 
 matter, to whom this man is a supplement. I know not 
 
54 Margaret Fuller 
 
 then whether she is what men call dreaming, but her 
 life is true, full, and more single than by day. . . . 
 
 " They say that such purity is the seal of death. 
 It is so; the condition of this ecstasy is, that it seems 
 to die every moment, and even Leila has not force to 
 die often; the electricity accumulates many days before 
 the wild one comes, which leads to these sylph nights 
 of tearful sweetness. After one of these, I find her 
 always to have retreated into the secret veins of earth. 
 Then glows through her whole being the fire that so 
 baffles men, as she walks on the surface of the earth; 
 the blood-red, heart s-blood-red of the universal heart, 
 with no care except to circulate as the vital fluid ; and it 
 would seem waste then for her to rise to the surface." 
 
 Frustrated in her affections, brooding over her 
 famine in the midst of plenty, Margaret found that 
 she could at least indulge herself in fantasies and 
 reveries. These treasured unrealities were the after 
 math of Irer father s death. The whole thing was a 
 process of self -cheating. She thought that she would 
 achieve happiness by a renunciation which was after 
 all no renunciation. It was, on the contrary, an in 
 dulgence in a visionary clinging to a companionship 
 which belonged to the past. " How often has the 
 spirit chosen the time, when no ray came from without, 
 to descend upon the orphan life," she wrote in her 
 Journal. " The great spirit wished to leave me no 
 
Miranda 55 
 
 refuge but itself." Her phenomenal energies were 
 running to waste in pathological quicksands, and she 
 tampered with her mental health as at other times she 
 had tampered with her physical health. She abandoned 
 herself to charms and spells, to symbolism and mysti 
 cism, employing such things as a means of reviving 
 within herself certain childish states of feeling, which 
 were all she knew of happiness. With a flash of in 
 sight, she one day declared in her Journal that " in feel 
 ing, she was still a child." 
 
 From this desert of the early thirties, Margaret was 
 in time to emerge pretty completely. But it was just 
 during this period of her life that her relations with 
 Emerson were intimate, and he always saw her in this 
 character. But whether she languished among her 
 visions or actually betook herself to a sick bed, she 
 displayed an amount of energy which astounded him. 
 " She had a rude strength, which, if it could have been 
 supported by an equal health, would have given her 
 the efficiency of the strongest man," he said. He 
 declared that he could not vie with her in the volume 
 of work that she turned out in spite of her frequent 
 disability. Yet neither he nor any of the others seemed 
 to waste much time over the anomalous combination 
 of frail health and inexhaustible energy. It did not 
 strike them as anything suspicious or inexplicable. 
 There were many such heroines of the sick bed in the 
 
56 Margaret Fuller 
 
 early Victorian and late Puritan era, so that Margaret s 
 case was not entirely unique. 
 
 Apparently she realized that it would cost her a long 
 and weary process to adapt herself to normal life. 
 Her muscular personality could not imitate the ethereal 
 Giinderode. Discordant action was always preferable 
 to her to stoical inaction. Therefore she compared 
 herself to a sistrum, a triangular musical instrument 
 which is induced to produce musical sounds by being 
 ceaselessly agitated, and she wrote these verses to 
 her emblem : 
 
 " Triune, shaping, restless power, 
 Life-flow from life s natal hour, 
 No music chords are in thy sound; 
 By some thou rt but a rattle found; 
 Yet, without thy ceaseless motion, 
 To ice would turn their dead devotion. 
 
 " Life-flow of my natal hour, 
 I will not weary of thy power, 
 Till in the changes of thy sound, 
 A chord s three parts distinct are found. 
 I will faithful move with thee, 
 God-ordered, self-fed energy, 
 Nature in eternity." 
 
CHAPTER V 
 A WOMAN S WOMAN 
 
 MARGARET emerged into public life as a woman s 
 woman. In her individual relationships, she ex 
 hibited, of course, the same characteristic. She in 
 spired other women with enthusiastic discipleship, 
 which was sometimes hard for men to understand, 
 especially if they happened to be the husbands of her 
 disciples. Horace Greeley spoke with great asperity 
 of the fascination which she seemed to exert over 
 eminent and cultivated women, who came to his out- 
 of-the-way dwelling to visit her, and who seemed 
 generally "to regard her with a strangely Oriental 
 adoration." In other words, Mr. Greeley could not 
 fathom the attraction she had for his wife. 
 
 Margaret Fuller s feminism represents the socializa 
 tion of a part of that " instinctive life ", which, con 
 trary to her Puritan upbringing, she had learned to 
 recognize and value. The feminism of women, like 
 the corresponding form of sex-solidarity among men, 
 is based on a social impulse which is in turn, rooted 
 in an erotic impulse towards others of one s own sex. 
 The destruction of this impulse is neither possible nor 
 
 57 
 
$8 Margaret Fuller 
 
 desirable. Women who are unfriendly and unsympa 
 thetic toward the mass problems of their own sex are 
 defective on this side of their emotional development. 
 Somewhere along the road of their evolving charac 
 ters, they have lost the capacity for a social emotion 
 of a very high value. 
 
 Margaret s life was a better argument for woman s 
 rights than anything she ever wrote. What she said 
 of Mary Wollstonecraft and George Sand applied 
 with equal truth to herself. " Mary Wollstonecraft, 
 like . . . George Sand in our day, was a woman 
 whose existence proved the need of some new inter 
 pretation of woman s rights more than anything she 
 wrote. Such beings as these, rich in genius, of most 
 tender sympathies, capable of high virtue and a, 
 chastened harmony, ought not to find themselves, by 
 birth, in a place so narrow, that in breaking bonds, they 
 become outlaws." 
 
 In this sense, Margaret too was an outlaw. She 
 was hedged about by a prejudice and misrepresenta 
 tion which almost assumed the character of a social 
 boycott. She shared the fate of every famous woman 
 from Sappho onward, who has set an example of 
 emancipation for their sex. People who did not know 
 Margaret in Boston, avoided an introduction, and, but 
 for her own athletic efforts to prevent it, she would 
 have been well isolated. 
 
A Woman s Woman 
 
 Among her own sex, Margaret never lacked for 
 champions. Though Mr. Greeley was mystified by 
 her influence over women, Mr. Higginson had a sim 
 ple explanation for it. " Margaret Fuller loved music, 
 painting, and women," said he, " and understood the 
 last." 
 
 She studied the conditions of women s lives and 
 recorded her observations with the accuracy and ob 
 jectivity which belongs to modern social research. 
 " The observations of women upon the position of 
 women are always more valuable than those of men/ 
 she said. Wherever she traveled, Margaret never 
 failed to remark the facts about the women their ap 
 pearance, their behavior, their social position. Now 
 it would be the Indian squaws whom she saw near 
 Chicago. " With the women I held much communi 
 cation by signs," she wrote. " They are almost in 
 variably coarse and ugly, with the exception of their 
 eyes, with a peculiarly awkward gait, and forms bent 
 by burdens. This gait, so different from the steady 
 and noble step of the men, marks the inferior position 
 they occupy." Compare this with her impression of 
 Italian women written seven years later. "The 
 women of Aries," she said, " answered to their repu 
 tation for beauty; tall, erect, and noble, with high and 
 dignified features, and a full earnest gaze of the eye. 
 ... . ;. Even the very old women still have a degree 
 
6o Margaret Fuller 
 
 of beauty because when the colors are all faded, and 
 the skin wrinkled, the face retains this dignity of out 
 line. The men do not share in these characteristics. 
 Some priestess, well-beloved of the powers of old re 
 ligion, must have called down a special blessing on her 
 sisters in this town." 
 
 Everywhere she commented on the character of 
 women s work. The life of the Illinois farmer s wife, 
 the washer-women of New York, the weavers of Lan 
 cashire and Lyons all women who earned their 
 bread were closely observed by her. During her stay 
 in New York she helped to organize the first protec 
 tive association for prostitutes and she carried on for 
 years a study of the social and economic causes of 
 prostitution. Writing from Paris, she said, " I have 
 collected many facts with regard to this suffering class 
 of women, both in England and in France. ... I 
 have seen the feelings of men with regard to their 
 condition and the general heartlessness in women of 
 more favored and protected lives, which I can only 
 ascribe to utter ignorance of the facts. If a proclama 
 tion of some of these can remove it, I hope to make 
 such a one in the hour of riper judgment, and after 
 a more extensive survey." And, still later, writing 
 about Italy, she said that the subjection of women 
 there had sharpened her perceptions to the ills of 
 women s condition and the remedies that must be ap- 
 
A Woman s Woman 61 
 
 plied, adding, " Had I but genius, had I but energy, 
 to tell what I know as it ought to be told." As Hig- 
 ginson said, she loved women and knew them, and 
 to the end of her life she served with earnestness 
 and sincerity the world-wide community of her 
 sex. 
 
 The famous " Conversations " which she held in 
 Boston from 1839 to 1844, were really an experiment 
 in feminism. Casting about for an occupation and a 
 career, the idea of a " paid Corinne " naturally pre 
 sented itself. She was one of the best impromptu 
 talkers of her time, and it was an era of great 
 talkers. Coleridge and Carlyle were Titans with the 
 tongue and, in America, Alcott, Channing, and 
 Emerson were the leaders of a talkers guild which 
 centered around Concord. It was just the time for 
 Margaret to try her luck as an improvisatrice, for her 
 demon had a brilliant turn for all this kind of thing. 
 As far back as her boarding-school days, when the 
 fifteen-year-old girl would spin like a Dervish and then 
 suddenly halt and improvise, her demon had been pre 
 paring her for this career. She said candidly about 
 herself: " Conversation is my natural element. I need 
 to be called out, and never think alone, without im 
 agining some companion. Whether this be nature or 
 the force of circumstances, I know not; it is my habit, 
 and bespeaks a second-rate mind." For all her ambi- 
 
62 Margaret Fuller 
 
 tion and her alleged self-esteem she was perfectly will 
 ing to face her own limitations. 
 
 Her scheme of Conversations addressed itself to 
 women and to women only. The purpose was, as her 
 prospectus said, " to supply a point of union to well- 
 educated and thinking women, in a city, which, with 
 great pretensions to mental refinement, boasts, at 
 present, nothing of the kind." Thus she set out to 
 imitate Aspasia, corrupting the women of Athens by 
 means of intellectual orgies. The prospectus continues 
 to outline Margaret s aim, which is to counteract the 
 bad education of her sex. Her ambition is " to sys 
 tematize thought and give a precision and clearness 
 in which our sex are so deficient, chiefly, I think, be 
 cause they have so few inducements to test and classify 
 what they receive. To ascertain what pursuits are best 
 suited to us, in our time and state of society, and how 
 we may make best use of our means for building up 
 the life of thought upon the life of action." In her 
 introductory meeting, she expanded her jtext more 
 fully. " Women are now taught, at school, all that 
 men are. . . . But with this difference; men are 
 called on, from a very early period to reproduce all 
 that they learn. Their college exercises, their political 
 duties, their professional studies, the first actions of 
 life in any direction, call on them to put to use what 
 they have learned. But women learn without any at- 
 
A Woman s Woman 63 
 
 tempt to reproduce. Their only reproduction is for 
 purposes of display." Yet Margaret s Conversa 
 tions are usually spoken of as a purely literary affair 
 instead of the feminist adventure which they really 
 were. 
 
 The original class of twenty-five "ladies" came 
 together in Elizabeth Peabody s rooms in West Street. 
 The first series of talks was on " Grecian Mythology; " 
 the second, on "The Fine Arts;" the third, on 
 " Woman." There was one isolated conversation 
 which dealt with " Persons who never awake to life 
 in this world." There must have been a number of 
 Boston ladies present who could have contributed 
 something on this theme. Margaret s talks were 
 mainly drawn from Goethe s philosophy of life, from 
 whom she had derived a heterodox attitude on the 
 subject of " moral evil " which was sometimes very 
 disturbing to the ladies of her class. But the talks 
 on "Woman: Her Position in the Family, in the 
 School, in the Church and in Society" embodied a 
 composite critique which must have been built up very 
 largely out of the thoughts and personal experiences 
 of those present. The outcome of the class was Mar 
 garet s book on Woman in the Nineteenth Century, 
 which in its turn prepared the way for the Seneca 
 Falls Convention of 1848 and the woman s rights con 
 ventions of the 5o s. 
 
64 Margaret Fuller 
 
 The new class, which included the feminine intel 
 ligentsia of Boston, became naturally the butt of wits 
 and the prey of scoffers. Their pretensions were de 
 rided and the leader was put down as a "pedant." 
 Margaret s crowning offense, in the eyes of the philis- 
 tines, was that she arrayed herself to look her best on 
 these occasions and her disciples naively imitated her 
 " dressiness/ Harriet Martineau, in a fit of pique 
 against her former friend, once described Margaret s 
 group as "gorgeous pedants." All this criticism 
 grew out of the fact that her young admirers came 
 away delighted with "her beautiful looks" and her 
 " sumptuous dress." Emerson tried to refute these 
 accusations, which he took very seriously, by protest 
 ing that he personally knew that Margaret did not 
 over-spend herself on dress and that she could not 
 possibly have looked beautiful. He admitted that the 
 " impression of her genius " might have " obscured 
 her homeliness of feature." But he did not admit 
 that the adoration of her young friends might have 
 imparted a glamour to its object such as affection is 
 accustomed to impart. The Puritan in him might 
 allow for the play of genius, but not for the play of 
 a perfectly natural feeling which made these women 
 like to dress to please each other. 
 
 A great impetus to the woman movement in this 
 country was given by the anti-slavery convention in 
 
A Woman s Woman 65 
 
 London. The exclusion of the women from the floor 
 stirred Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott 
 profoundly and gave the impulse to the protest which 
 was voiced by the Seneca Falls Convention eight 
 years later. In Mrs. Stanton s account of this his 
 toric event, she says of Lucretia Mott, " I shall never 
 forget the look of recognition she gave me when she 
 saw by my remarks that I fully comprehended the 
 problem of woman s rights and wrongs. How beau 
 tiful she looked to me that day! " This would seem 
 to indicate that the same kind of emotional sympathy 
 was at work in this contemporary group which char 
 acterized the atmosphere of the conversation class. 
 Of course this sentiment was frowned upon by people 
 who found it perfectly normal and moral, on the other 
 hand, that women should be antagonistic and com 
 petitive in their relations with other women. In the 
 same way they have stigmatized all affection among 
 men until a modern psychologist like Ferenczi declares 
 that, " to an astounding extent, present-day men have 
 lost the capacity for mutual affection and amiability." 
 This attitude assumes that ill-will among men and ill- 
 will among women are the only basis for good-will 
 between the sexes, whereas it should be evident that 
 social good-will cannot possibly obtain on a basis of 
 resistance and antagonism within a whole sex. But 
 when Margaret Fuller taught, in the words of 
 
66 Margaret Fuller 
 
 Antigone, that " the aim of women is not to hate but 
 to love each other," there were many who hastened 
 to construe this as " the aim of women is not to love 
 but to hate men." Nothing was more foreign to 
 Margaret s real feeling. She was, in fact, a very poor 
 hater of anybody; she had few personal quarrels and 
 few resentments. 
 
 After the Conversations had been going for a year 
 or so and had proved a great success, it was proposed 
 that gentlemen should be admitted. Margaret had the 
 very practical idea that the advantages of a Harvard 
 training would enable them to contribute an element 
 of strength to the discussions of Mythology which the 
 feeble learning of the ladies necessarily could not 
 supply. So an arrangement for evening classes was 
 made and the gentlemen were invited to participate. 
 But somehow the scheme did not prosper, and the 
 masculine contingent hastily retreated, though in per 
 fectly good order. Nobody could quite say just what 
 the trouble was. Emerson thought the men had been 
 too " heady " and had fancied that " they too must 
 assert and dogmatize/ But one of Margaret s pupils 
 declared that her erudition had quite outshone that of 
 the men and even Mr. Emerson " had only served to 
 display her powers." " His uncompromising ideal 
 ism, his absolute denial of the fact of human nature," 
 says this friend, " gave her opportunity and excite- 
 
A Woman s Woman 67 
 
 ment to unfold and illustrate her realism and accept 
 ance of conditions." But even this loyal pupil has 
 one troubled after-thought : " I have thought some 
 times that her acceptance of evil was too great." But 
 whether Margaret estranged the gentlemen by her 
 handling of evil or in some other way, they never came 
 again. 
 
 The oddest part of this affair was that Margaret 
 was all the while a prominent member of the Trans 
 cendental circle, where she was accepted on equal terms 
 by these same men. Among the Transcendentalists, 
 Margaret as she said " played the Mirabeau." 
 But here she was received as a woman who had " sur 
 passed her sex," and her extraordinary conversational 
 gifts were warmly applauded. Perhaps she referred 
 to the Transcendental fraternity when she wrote: 
 " Their encomiums, indeed, are always in some sense 
 mortifying; they show too much surprise. Can this 
 be you? he cries to the transfigured Cinderella; well, 
 I should never have thought it, but I am very glad. 
 . . . We will tell everyone that you have surpassed 
 your sex V Margaret Fuller was far from being one 
 of those superior women who relish the distinction 
 of being " the only woman who." 
 
 In 1844, she published her Woman in the Nine 
 teenth Century. It had previously appeared as an 
 essay in The Dial under the title of " The Great Law- 
 
68 Margaret Fuller 
 
 suit: Man versus Men; Woman versus Women." 
 But when the book was published, some of her friends 
 persuaded her to drop the cumbersome legalistic title 
 for the one she used. Margaret agreed reluctantly to 
 part with an unconscious but beloved souvenir of her 
 dead father s profession. 
 
 The only predecessor of Margaret s book was Mary 
 Wollstonecraft s Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 
 published fifty years before. The lives of these 
 two women had many circumstances in common. 
 Daughters of the middle class, poor-genteel, elder 
 sisters bearing the brunt of the burden of a large 
 family, spinsters of thirty-three the same picture 
 applies to both when they published their feminist 
 books. In Mary s time, the doctrine of the abstract 
 rights of man engrossed the Paine-Godwin circle to 
 which she belonged, and Mary deduced from this her 
 theory of woman s rights. In Margaret s time, 
 natural rights had given way to socialism; Rousseau, 
 to Fourier. Margaret s circle talked of "attractive 
 industry" and the "liberty of law," and Margaret 
 applied these ideas to the position of her sex. " I 
 solicit of women," she says, " that they will lay it to 
 heart to ascertain what is for them the liberty of law. 
 It is for this, and not for any, the largest, extension 
 of partial privileges that I seek. I ask them, if inter 
 ested in these suggestions, to search their own experi- 
 
A Woman s Woman 69 
 
 ences and intuitions for better, and fill up with fit ma 
 terials the trenches that hedge them in." First and 
 foremost she urged that women should be allowed to 
 follow their natural bent in the choice of an occupa 
 tion, and exclaimed enthusiastically, " Let them be 
 sea-captains, if they will." This was her application 
 of the principle of attractive industry to the woman s 
 world in which she lived. Between her Dante, who 
 compared Beatrice to an Admiral, and her Fourier, 
 she derived no small encouragement for such bold 
 images. 
 
 " I think women need," she wrote, " especially at 
 this juncture, a much greater range of occupation than 
 they have, to rouse their latent powers. ... In 
 families that I know, some little girls like to saw 
 wood, others to use carpenter s tools. Where these 
 tastes are indulged, cheerfulness and good humor are 
 promoted. . . . Fourier had observed these wants 
 of women, as no one can fail to do who watches the 
 desires of little girls, or knows the ennui that haunts 
 grown women, except where they make to themselves 
 a serene little world by art of some kind. He, there 
 fore, in proposing a great variety of employments, in 
 manufactures or the care of plants and animals, allows 
 for one-third of women as likely to have a taste for 
 masculine pursuits, one-third of men for feminine. 
 Who dares not observe the immediate glow and 
 
70 Margaret Fuller 
 
 serenity that is diffused over the life of women, before 
 restless or fretful, by engaging in gardening, building, 
 or the lowest department of art? Here is something 
 that is not routine, something that draws forth life 
 towards the infinite." 
 
 To reassure those who shudder at a world in which 
 all women would be converted into admirals, car 
 penters, and gardeners, Margaret goes on, " I have no 
 doubt, however, that a large proportion of women 
 would give themselves to the same employments as 
 now, because there are circumstances that must lead 
 them. Mothers will delight to make the nest soft and 
 warm. Nature will take care of that." In another 
 essay, she urged : " As you would not educate a soul 
 to be an aristocrat, so do not to be a woman. A gen 
 eral regard to her usual sphere is dictated in the 
 economy of nature. You need never enforce these 
 provisions rigorously. Achilles had long plied the 
 distaff as a princess; yet, at the first sight of a sword, 
 he seized it. So with Woman; one hour of love would 
 teach her more of her proper relations than all your 
 formulas and conventions." 
 
 Examining Margaret s book in the light of present- 
 day feminism, one cannot but be impressed by the com 
 prehensiveness and enduring character of her views. 
 " As the principle of liberty is better understood, and 
 more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made in 
 
A Woman s Woman 71 
 
 behalf of Woman. As men become aware that few 
 men have had a fair chance, they are inclined to say 
 that no women have had a fair chance." In practice, 
 she found, however, that this opinion was not general 
 enough to prevent feminism from being a dangerous 
 trade. " It demands some valor," she confessed, " to 
 lift one s head amidst the shower of public squibs, 
 private sneers, anger, scorn, derision, called out by 
 the demand that women should be put on a par with 
 their brethren, legally and politically; that they should 
 hold property not by permission but by right, and that 
 they should take an active part in all great move 
 ments." 
 
 She taught that women would have to win their 
 own liberties. " I believe that, at present, women are 
 the best helpers of one another. Let them think; let 
 them act; till they know what they need. ... I 
 have urged on woman independence of man; not that 
 I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one 
 another, but because in woman this fact has led to an 
 excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded 
 marriage, and prevented either sex from being what 
 it should be to itself or the other. . . . Man has 
 gone but a little way; now he is waiting to see whether 
 Woman can keep step with him; but instead of calling 
 out, like a good brother, You can do it, if you only 
 think so , or impersonally, anyone can do what he 
 
72 Margaret Fuller 
 
 tries to do , he often discourages, with schoolboy 
 brag, Girls can t do that; girls can t play ball. 
 But let anyone defy their taunts, break through 
 and be brave and secure, they rend the air with 
 shouts. . . . 
 
 " Women are taught to learn their rule from with 
 out, not to unfold it from within. . . . The diffi 
 culty is to get them to the point from which they shall 
 naturally develop self-respect and learn self-help. 
 Once I thought that men would help to forward this 
 state of things more than I do now. I saw so many 
 of them wretched in the connections they had formed 
 in weakness and vanity. They seemed so glad to 
 esteem women whenever they could. . . . But early 
 I perceived that men never, in any extreme of despair, 
 wished to be women. . . . An intimate friend of 
 the other sex said, in a fervent moment, that I de 
 served in some star to be a man/ He was much sur 
 prised when I disclosed my view of my position and 
 hopes, when I declared my faith that the feminine 
 side, the side of love, of beauty, of holiness, was now 
 to have its full chance, and that, if either were better, 
 it was better now to be a woman, for even the slightest 
 achievement of good was an especial work of our 
 time. He smiled incredulously. She makes the 
 best she can of it, thought he. Let Jews believe 
 the pride of Jewry, but I am of the better sort, and 
 
A Woman s Woman 73 
 
 know better/ . . . This by no means argues a will 
 ing want of generosity toward woman. Man is as 
 generous toward her as he knows how to be." 
 
 She indignantly protested against one argument 
 which has not disappeared even in our day. " Too 
 much is said of women being better educated, that they 
 may become better companions and mothers for men. 
 . . . The intellect, no more than the sense of hear 
 ing, is to be cultivated merely that Woman may be a 
 more valuable companion to Man, but because the 
 Power who gave a power, by its mere existence 
 signifies that it must be brought out toward per 
 fection." ..." Let it not be said, wherever there 
 is energy of creative genius, She has a masculine 
 mind V 
 
 Margaret thought that the increase in the number 
 of spinsters, though regrettable, might, after all, be 
 the harbinger of better days. " In this regard of 
 self-dependence, ... we must hail as a preliminary 
 the increase of the class contemptuously designated 
 as old maids . We cannot wonder at the aversion 
 with which old bachelors and old maids have been 
 regarded. . . . Those who have a more full ex 
 perience of the instincts have a distrust as to whether 
 the unmarried can be thoroughly human and humane. * 
 But, after all, this state of things she deemed to be the 
 lesser of the two evils. " We shall not decline celibacy 
 
74 Margaret Fuller 
 
 as the great fact of the time. It is one from which 
 no vow, no arrangement, can at present save a think 
 ing mind. For now the rowers are pausing on their 
 oars; they wait a change before they can pull to 
 gether. . . . Union is only possible to those who are 
 units/ 
 
 Without any help from modern psychology, Mar 
 garet was most intelligently aware of the criss-crossing 
 of the sexes by character-types which are common to 
 both. " There is no wholly masculine man," she 
 wrote, " no purely feminine woman. History jeers 
 at the attempts of physiologists to bind great original 
 laws by the forms which flow from them. They 
 make a rule; they say from observation what can 
 and cannot be. In vain! Nature provides excep 
 tions to every rule. She sends women to battle, and 
 sets Hercules spinning; she enables women to bear 
 immense burdens, cold, and frost; she enables man, 
 who feels maternal love, to nourish his infant like 
 a mother. . . . Presently she will make a female 
 Newton, and a male Siren. Man partakes of the 
 feminine in the Apollo, Woman of the masculine as 
 Minerva. . . . 
 
 " Let us be wise, and not impede the soul. Let 
 her work as she will. Let us have but one creative 
 energy, one incessant revelation. Let it take what 
 form it will, and let us not bind it by the past to man or 
 
A Woman s Woman 
 
 woman, black or white. Jove sprang from Rhea, 
 Pallas from Jove. So let it be." 
 
 Margaret reminds her readers that women have 
 never lacked for power, but it is the power that 
 " vanity would crave " rather than that which " wis 
 dom would accept." " It is not the transient breath 
 of poetic incense that women want. . . . It is not 
 life-long sway; it needs but to become a coquette, a 
 shrew, or a good cook, to be sure of that. It is not 
 money, nor notoriety, nor the badges of authority 
 which men have appropriated to themselves. If de 
 mands made in their behalf lay stress on any of these 
 particulars, those who make them have not searched 
 deeply into the needs. ... Ye cannot believe it, 
 men; but the only reason why women ever assume 
 what is more appropriate to you, is because you pre 
 vent them from finding out what is fit for themselves. 
 Were they free, were they wise, fully to develop the 
 strength and beauty of Woman, they would never 
 wish to be men, or manlike." 
 
 Margaret could not forbear a few sarcastic com 
 ments on the subject of chivalry to women. " Men 
 are very courteous to them. They praise them often ; 
 check them seldom. There is chivalry in the feeling 
 towards the ladies/ which gives them the best seats 
 in the stage-coach, frequent admission, not only to 
 lectures of all sorts, but to courts of justice, halls of 
 
76 Margaret Fuller 
 
 legislature, reform conventions. The newspaper ed 
 itors * would be better pleased that the Lady s Book 
 should be filled up exclusively by ladies. It would 
 then, indeed, be a true gem, worthy to be presented by 
 young men to the mistress of their affections/ Can 
 gallantry go further? " 
 
 Sometimes she feels that she must apologize for her 
 aggressiveness. " If it has been the tendency of these 
 remarks," she says, " to call Woman rather to the 
 Minerva side, ... let it be pardoned ! It is love that 
 has caused this, love for many incarcerated souls that 
 might be freed, could the idea of religious self-de 
 pendence be established in them, could the weakening 
 habit of dependence on others be broken up. ... I 
 would have Woman lay aside all thought, such as she 
 habitually cherishes, of being taught and led by men. 
 . . . Men do not look on both sides, and women 
 must leave off asking them and being influenced by 
 them, but retire within themselves, and explore the 
 groundwork of life till they find their peculiar 
 secret. . . . 
 
 "As to this living so entirely for men, I should 
 think when it was proposed to women they would 
 feel, at least, some spark of the old spirit of races 
 allied to our own. If he is to be my bridegroom 
 and lord/ cries Brunhilda, * he must first be able to 
 pass through fire and water/ ... If women are 
 
A Woman s Woman 77 
 
 to be bond-maids, let it be to men superior to women 
 in fortitude, in aspiration, in moral power, in refined 
 sense of beauty. You who give yourselves * to be 
 supported or because one must love something/ 
 are they who make the lot of the sex such that mothers 
 are sad when daughters are born." 
 
 Margaret did not hesitate to criticize the institution 
 of marriage and discuss the evils of prostitution. One 
 can imagine how the lavender window-panes of Boston 
 must have trembled with the shock and how all the 
 decent family people sitting tight behind the panes 
 must have felt about this incorrigible woman and 
 her unnecessary outspokenness. " Civilized Europe 
 is still in a transition state about marriage," she wrote, 
 "not only in practice, but in thought. It is idle to 
 speak of the nations where polygamy is an institution, 
 or seraglios a custom, while practices far more de 
 basing haunt, well-nigh fill, every city and every 
 town." She drew a comparison between the Christian 
 citizen and the Oriental polygamist to show the 
 superior morality of the latter. The Christian legis 
 lator, she says, declares that prostitution must be, it 
 is a necessary accompaniment of civilization ; " he 
 will and must buy the comforts and commercial ad 
 vantages of his London, Vienna, Paris, New York, by 
 conniving at the moral death, the damnation, so far 
 as the action of society can insure it, of thousands 
 
78 Margaret Fuller 
 
 of women for each splendid metropolis." But the 
 Oriental, who had several wives and many hand 
 maidens, she considered, " did not wrong according 
 to his light. What he did, he might publish it to God 
 and man; it was not a wicked secret that hid in vile 
 lurking-places and dens. . . . These women were 
 not lost, not polluted in their own eyes, nor those of 
 others." She denounced the marriage de convenance, 
 which prevailed in her day, as little better than the 
 Turkish slave-trade, though the Turkish slave, in that 
 her situation was not " in defiance of an acknowl 
 edged law of right," was at least to this extent less 
 degraded than the fashionable debutante. We find 
 her always dwelling on this essential conflict in the 
 Christian view of the erotic life. 
 
 But she was also practical. " Early marriages are 
 desirable," she said, " but ... the world is now so 
 out of joint that there are a hundred thousand chances 
 to one against it." How was the young man then 
 (not even Margaret was bold enough to worry about 
 young women) to lead "a virtuous and happy life? " 
 Nowadays when social hygiene lecturers stump the 
 country on this theme, and have withal a neat pre 
 scription for the difficult achievement, the subject has 
 little novelty for us. But in Margaret s day, people 
 did not talk about such things, and certainly no woman 
 except herself would have had the courage. " Cold 
 
A Woman s Woman 79 
 
 bathing and exercise will not suffice to keep a life 
 pure," she advised young men, " without an inward 
 baptism, and noble, exhilarating employment for the 
 thoughts and passions." But in one respect, Margaret 
 did not entirely fall into line with our most recent 
 social hygienists. "Women are accustomed to be 
 told by men that the reform is to come from them. 
 * You/ say the men, must frown upon vice; you must 
 decline the attentions of the corrupt/ . . . This 
 seems to us hard. Men have, indeed, been for more 
 than a hundred years rating women for countenancing 
 vice. But at the same time, they have carefully hid 
 from them its nature, so that the preference often 
 shown by women for bad men arises rather from a 
 confused idea that they are bold and adventurous, 
 acquainted with regions which women are forbidden 
 to explore. . . . As to marriage, it has been incul 
 cated in women for centuries, that men have not only 
 stronger passions than they, but of a sort that it 
 would be shameful for them to share or even under 
 stand." And yet, the indictment continues, " the 
 least appearance of coldness or withdrawal, from 
 whatever cause, in the wife is wicked, because liable 
 to turn her husband s thoughts to illicit indulgence; 
 for a man is so constituted that he must indulge his 
 passions or die ! " 
 
 Though Margaret s book did not dwell especially 
 
80 Margaret Fuller 
 
 on political rights, she emphatically included them. 
 " Woman should have not only equal power with 
 men," she wrote, " for of that omnipotent nature will 
 never suffer her to be defrauded, but a chartered 
 power, too fully recognized to be abused. ... Man 
 should prove his own freedom by making her free. 
 . . . Let him trust her entirely, and give her every 
 privilege already acquired for himself, elective fran 
 chise, tenure of property, liberty to speak in public 
 assemblies, and so forth." 
 
 v / Margaret s little volume was the first considered 
 statement of feminism in this country. It did not, 
 as she said, argue for this or that particular privilege, 
 but for an all-inclusive " woman s charter." Its fame 
 spread rapidly. Her brother Eugene found people 
 in New Orleans reading and discussing it and Jane 
 Carlyle read it in Chelsea. In many respects it 
 was more humane, less denunciatory, and less Puritan 
 in temper than the Declaration of Sentiments, adopted 
 a few years later. But Margaret s spirit and her 
 breadth of view were carried over by this insurgent 
 group which organized the woman s rights conven 
 tions of the early 50*5. Women told on the platform 
 of how they had read her book and, as they learned 
 for the first time that there were other women with 
 the same feelings as themselves, their " incarcerated 
 souls " had been liberated. We have the story of 
 
A Woman s Woman 81 
 
 how Susan B. Anthony went out to Mount Auburn 
 one Saturday morning in 1855 and wandered about 
 trying to find Margaret Fuller s monument but had to 
 come away without finding it, " which she re 
 gretted." Margaret was a vivid presence in these 
 early years of the woman movement. 
 
 But as time went on and " woman s rights " nar 
 rowed down to a strictly suffrage basis, her name was 
 more rarely heard. There were several reasons for this 
 neglect. Margaret s plea was for the broadest possible 
 development of women, for the realization of their 
 destiny as human beings. Her philosophical feminism 
 became indigestible for those engaged in the intense 
 and single-minded propaganda for the ballot. She 
 wanted elbow-room and scope, claiming her emo 
 tional rights with the same conviction as her economic 
 and political rights. In acting upon her beliefs, she 
 did not escape the fatal " breath of scandal " and the 
 consequent loss of a one hundred per cent respect 
 ability. This made her apologists uneasy and there 
 fore prone to forget her. But as long as the gen 
 eration of women who had known and loved her 
 survived, she did not lack for sympathetic advocates 
 with posterity. At last came a time, however, when the 
 published reminiscences of her Transcendental friends 
 formed the only portrait which remained. The per 
 sonality which emerged from their memoirs is the 
 
82 Margaret Fuller 
 
 contradictory and pretentious caricature which survives 
 under the name of Margaret Fuller. 
 
 The truth is that the men who made the book about 
 Margaret gave a better portrait of themselves in that 
 volume than they did of its subject. For instance, they 
 created a legend about her having a neck like a serpent, 
 which she " would wind about and make as serpentine 
 as possible." Several of them dwelt upon this serpen 
 tine association with great enthusiasm, and seemed 
 to think it quite an original inspiration. Woman 
 wisdom serpent: it is a combination to which the 
 long road of man s memory seems easily to lead. 
 Horace Walpole could find no more satisfactory in 
 sult for Mary Wollstonecraft than to call her " a 
 philosophizing serpent." The conscious memory of 
 the Puritan is short, but his unconscious memory 
 endureth forever. 
 
 Over against the voluminous reminiscences of the 
 two-volume Memoirs, composed by her masculine con 
 temporaries, so curiously lacking in any real feeling 
 for the dead comrade, one would like to set the few 
 friendly words of gentle Rebecca Spring, written half 
 a century after Margaret s death. " For years after 
 wards, if I went to the seashore, I would dream of 
 Margaret, always pleasantly. In my dream, she always 
 seemed happy ; it may be that the requiem of the winds 
 and waves was the best for her. She believed in the 
 
A Woman s Woman 83 
 
 higher education or women and in equal rights for 
 them as citizens. She would have rejoiced in the won 
 derful progress they have made in these things since 
 her time. Let our sex never forget Margaret Fuller." 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 THE TRANSCENDENTALIST 
 
 EARLY in Margaret s Boston career, George Sand 
 burst upon a startled world. Naturally Margaret 
 followed her life and works with breathless interest, 
 and envied the femme libre in her. And because she 
 envied, she sometimes told herself that she had some 
 thing which Sand had not, or that Sand had also 
 failed where she had failed. " George Sand smokes, 
 wears male attire, wishes to be addressed as mon 
 frere" she said; "perhaps, if she found those who 
 were as brothers indeed she would not care whether 
 she were brother or sister." Evidently Margaret was 
 rather complacent at that time over her position in 
 the Transcendental fellowship as compared with 
 George Sand s place in her socialist circle. In the same 
 provincial spirit, she wrote to Emerson that, so far 
 as the real enigmas of life were concerned, " Sand 
 and her friends seem to have solved [them] no better 
 than M. F. and her friends." She was proud of her 
 place among the Transcendental sts, where she wielded 
 a lorgnette very much as George Sand used her ciga 
 rette to vindicate the intellectual claims of her sex. 
 
 84 
 
The Transcendentalist 85 
 
 But time gradually weaned her away from the Trans 
 cendental view of life s enigmas towards a greater 
 sympathy with George Sand s; in later years she 
 learned there was a difference. 
 
 Margaret s connection with this eminent New Eng 
 land group is the part of her life to which we need 
 give least attention here. It is the part which is best 
 known and which has given her her textbook fame. 
 The " American Literature " class, conning the pages 
 under " Transcendentalism," always finds Margaret s 
 name written there with that of Emerson and all the 
 rest. High school classes nowadays may speak of these 
 people with a pious regard they are a sacred memory 
 like the Boston tea-party but they enjoyed no such 
 respect from their own contemporaries. The opinion 
 of John Quincy Adams was even tolerant by the 
 side of the opinion of most. Adams explained their 
 origin in this way: "A young man named Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson, after failing in the everyday occupa 
 tions of Unitarian preacher and schoolmaster, starts 
 a new doctrine of Transcendentalism, declares all the 
 old revelations superannuated and worn out, and an 
 nounces the approach of new revelations and prophe 
 cies." This was the voice of the elders, condemning 
 an upstart cult, and it was mild by comparison with 
 that of the plain business man of Boston. " You 
 know, we consider those men insane," one of them said 
 
86 Margaret Fuller 
 
 to Margaret. They circulated stories about Emerson 
 going to a dinner party in top-boots, stories about 
 Margaret as a precieuse and Alcott as a maniac. Mar 
 garet was fully identified with the group and whatever 
 ungraceful notoriety she had not earned through her 
 connection with the cause of woman s rights was now 
 hers through her connection with these Boston 
 " zanies," as one New Yorker politely called them. 
 The victims of the caricatures viewed their case with 
 commendable good humor. " We are all a lirtle wild 
 here," wrote Emerson to Carlyle, " with numberless 
 projects of social reform. Not a reading man but 
 has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat 
 pocket. I am gently mad myself, and am resolved 
 to live cleanly. George Ripley is talking up a colony 
 of agriculturists and scholars, with whom he threatens 
 to take the field and the book. One man renounces 
 the use of animal foods; and another of coin; and an 
 other of domestic hired service; and another of the 
 State ; and on the whole we have a commendable share 
 of reason and hope." But it was not the kind of 
 reason and hope that the " rooted capitalists " as 
 Emerson called them could share in as making for 
 a bigger and a better Boston. 
 
 The nickname of " Transcendentalist " stuck and 
 became ^historical. It was a vulgarization of the Kan 
 tian term, but as applied to this New England group 
 
The Transcendentalist 87 
 
 it meant practically nothing more than " Idealists ". 
 But by its awkward and esoteric form, it obscured a 
 great deal. It made the movement seem like a transient 
 and isolated phenomenon of New England life instead 
 of a part, as it was, of the spiritual revolution then 
 sweeping over Europe. The young man named Ralph 
 Waldo Emerson who announced the approach of new 
 revelations and prophecies did not have to wait long 
 until his announcements were thoroughly vindicated. 
 A further obscurity produced by the foreign poly 
 syllable was the simple fact that these people were 
 liberals and socialists as the terms were understood 
 and used in those days when there was scarcely 
 a distinction between them. But Margaret s friends 
 have not been commemorated under these political 
 and economic classifications. Indeed, the word 
 " liberal " has hardly existed in the American lan 
 guage since the death of Horace Greeley, with whom 
 not only the name but the fact passed out of existence. 
 
 Transcendentalism, in brief, was a reaction against 
 Puritan orthodoxy in every department of life, 
 politics, economics, religion, and education. Margaret 
 Fuller reacted more strongly in certain directions 
 than did her fellows; she revolted primarily against 
 the aesthetic starvation and the kind of devil-worship 
 which stamped the Puritan morality of her ancestors. 
 
 Her explanation of Transcendentalism was this: 
 
Margaret Fuller 
 
 " Since the Revolution, there has been little, in the 
 circumstances of this country, to call out the higher 
 sentiments. The effect of continued prosperity is 
 the same on nations as on individuals it leaves the 
 nobler faculties undeveloped. . . . New England is 
 now old enough, some there have leisure enough, to 
 look at all this, and the consequence is a violent re 
 action, in a small minority. . . . They see that po 
 litical freedom does not necessarily produce liberality 
 of mind, nor freedom in church institutions, vital re 
 ligion; and, seeing that these changes cannot be 
 wrought from without inwards, they are trying to 
 quicken the soul, that they may work from within out 
 wards. . . . Man is not made for society, but society 
 is made for man. No institution can be good which 
 does not tend to improve the individual. ... I agree 
 with those who think that no true philosophy will try 
 to ignore or annihilate the material part of man, but 
 will rather seek to put it in its place as servant and 
 minister to the soul." This was Margaret s version 
 of the Transcendentalist faith. 
 
 In 1840, Mr. George Ripley put his project of " field 
 and book " into execution, and with the assistance of 
 some friends established Brook Farm near Rox- 
 bury, Massachusetts. Margaret was urged to become 
 a member of the community, but she could not be 
 won for any project which involved living on a farm. 
 
The Transcendentalist 89 
 
 She went there often as a visitor but she would not be 
 a resident. Mrs. George Ripley, whose learning was 
 as prodigious as her own, could spend her days con 
 tentedly over the ironing-board in the Brook Farm 
 laundry. But Margaret could not be induced to join 
 them even by the offer of " brain-work," like teach 
 ing. The bitterness of the combat with her father 
 about the Groton farm, from which she had emerged 
 as a remorseful victor, was probably the main reason 
 why she would never on any terms reside at Brook 
 Farm. But among all her objections there was never 
 a hint that she had once tried farrn-life and did not 
 like it. Nothing so simple. On the contrary, she 
 argued over Fourier upon whose theories and schemes 
 the place was founded. She sympathized with the 
 heroism which prompted the experiment, but " in 
 judgment she considered it premature." She thought 
 association the great experiment of the age, but still 
 only an experiment; to which the others replied that 
 they had no confidence in it beyond this. " But they 
 seem to me to have," said Margaret stubbornly. She 
 did not " agree with the principle of paying for serv 
 ices by time," but there were Brook Farmers them 
 selves who sided with her on this point. Then she 
 thought up another objection : " It is a constellation, 
 not a phalanx, to which I would belong." Finally, she 
 could not subscribe to their system of ethics, for she 
 
90 Margaret Fuller 
 
 did not " believe in the hope of excluding evil, for that 
 was a growth of nature and one condition of the de 
 velopment of good." And here again she had only 
 to turn to Fourier himself to find abundant support, 
 for her theory of the instincts and passions was far 
 more in accordance with his own than were those of 
 the actual Brook Farmers. Higginson said of the 
 community, " There was a singular moral purity 
 about it which observers from the point of view of 
 Paris or even London have since found a little con 
 temptible." Fourier might have been somewhat 
 surprised himself at the compromise theory there 
 achieved between his ideas and the most rigorous Puri 
 tan standards. 
 
 The association of Margaret Fuller s name with 
 that of Brook Farm rests chiefly on Hawthorne s 
 Blithe dale Romance, in which he portrays the life 
 of the place and represents Margaret as its central 
 figure. Margaret s friends, who thought Zenobia 
 an unflattering portrait, based their defense on a 
 simple, literal alibi : as she had never lived at Brook 
 Farm, Zenobia could not have been meant for 
 her by the author, who really was a resident. But 
 this was merely an evasion of an uncomfortable fact. 
 One needs only to read Hawthorne s life and letters, 
 as published by his son, to realize that Zenobia was 
 certainly Hawthorne s version of Margaret Fuller and 
 
The Transcend entalist 911 
 
 that he had even less complimentary versions in his 
 private note-books and journals. Through their 
 publication, Hawthorne has come to be one of the 
 chief contributors to Margaret s fame. Apparently 
 their actual acquaintance was of the slightest; in fact 
 Hawthorne was a solitary man who held himself aloof 
 from the talkative Transcendentalists and especially 
 aloof from the female of the species. Margaret was 
 merely an idea to him, but withal a strangely engross 
 ing idea. His obsessive interest in her personality has 
 led to an artificial association of their names for which 
 Margaret certainly was not responsible. Her atten 
 tions were all frankly focused on Mr. Emerson. 
 
 We can only understand Hawthorne s excessive 
 antagonism by taking a look at his own mental pat 
 terns. Once when invited to dine at Mr. Bancroft s 
 with her, he wrote in his note-book, " Providence 
 had given me some other business to do for which 
 I was very thankful." According to his own remi 
 niscences, he had but recently escaped from the clutches 
 of a certain "nefarious female," very much like 
 Margaret, who, merely to gratify her own vanity, 
 had induced him to challenge a friend to a duel. Hap 
 pily, the duel was avoided by the discovery of the 
 lady s base character, whereupon says the biography 
 "Hawthorne went to Mary and crushed her." His 
 excessive self-righteousness and his abnormal fear of 
 
92 Margaret Fuller 
 
 women were symptoms of a mental distress which 
 bordered on the pathological. When he at last became 
 engaged in his late thirties, he postponed his marriage 
 for several years on the ground that the news would 
 kill his mother. " While I love you so dearly, ..." 
 he wrote to his fiancee, " still I have an awe of you 
 that I never felt for anybody else." A young man in 
 this state of mind naturally postpones his wedding 
 day. His biography is full of morbid symptoms of 
 a malady which grew upon him with advancing years 
 and weakened his mental powers long before his com 
 paratively early death. His violent repugnance to the 
 nude statues which he saw in Italy, his intemperate 
 tirade against a painted Venus, and his attack on 
 Margaret s character written in his note-books at this 
 time, all indicated a mental malaise which had grown 
 all but unbearable. Like many gentle, suffering souls 
 he was capable of the deepest malice; and his life-long 
 preoccupation with the concepts of sin and guilt, 
 the central theme of all his novels, made a healthy 
 outlook on the facts of life increasingly impossible. 
 His immoderate dislike of Margaret is only compre 
 hensible as a symptom of his hidden misery, a cover 
 for his fascinated interest in a Bacchante type. Yet 
 even an amiable critic like Henry James took Haw 
 thorne s antagonism seriously, and recorded it as a 
 bad mark against Margaret s personality. One of 
 
The Transcend entalist 93 
 
 the most recent biographers of Hawthorne justifies his 
 view of Margaret by declaring that " she was a revo 
 lutionary character, a sort of female Garibaldi, who 
 attacked old Puritan traditions with a two-edged 
 sword. She won victories for liberalism and social 
 ism, but she left confusion behind her." The portrait, 
 by no means an unjust one, explains, as the author 
 intends it to explain, why Hawthorne did not like 
 Margaret Fuller; but it does not explain why, for all 
 his distaste, he simply could not leave her alone. The 
 reason for that lay deep within himself. No doubt 
 he received the same sort of emotional satisfaction 
 from vilifying her that his near ancestor had received 
 from whipping a witch through the streets of Salem. 
 This complexity of feeling expressed itself more freely 
 and truly through his art, for the wicked Zenobia 
 was by no means lacking in attractiveness and 
 charm. 
 
 As already said, Margaret s actual encounters with 
 Hawthorne appear to have been few and trivial, and, 
 by her, entirely unnoted. But his references to them 
 magnify their importance. Once she wrote a note to 
 Hawthorne s wife, inquiring whether her newly mar 
 ried sister and brother-in-law might come to board 
 with the Hawthornes at Concord. Hawthorne in 
 sisted on answering the letter himself, though it had 
 been addressed to his wife, on the chivalrous pre- 
 
94 Margaret Fuller 
 
 text that he wished the entire odium of their refusal 
 to rest on his own shoulders. He then wrote her an 
 elaborate letter of many pages declining her simple and 
 direct proposal. One questions whether Margaret 
 ever realized what a tempest in a teapot she had 
 caused, a tempest whose reverberations, moreover, 
 could be marked a whole generation afterwards. 
 " Miss Fuller, if she felt any dissatisfaction," com 
 mented Mr. Hawthorne s son in his chronicle of the 
 incident, " not thinking it advisable to express any, 
 and the Channings resigning themselves to finding 
 quarters elsewhere. But Miss Fuller was at this time 
 in her apogee/* [we are not through with the con 
 sequences yet!] "and had to be doing something; 
 and, accordingly, during the ensuing year, she pro 
 duced a book in which the never-to-be-exhausted theme 
 of Woman s Rights was touched upon." 
 
 This extraordinary account of the origin of Mar 
 garet s book suggests a solemn thought : had her will 
 to power been satiated by persuading the Hawthornes 
 to take in boarders, her Woman in the Nineteenth 
 Century might never have been written! 
 
 On still another occasion, Hawthorne encountered 
 Margaret by chance in the Concord woods and sat 
 down on the grass to talk with her. " An old man 
 passed near us/ he wrote, " and smiled to see Mar 
 garet reclining on the ground, and me sitting by her 
 
The Transcend entallst 95 
 
 side." One gathers from his description of the episode 
 that he was not displeased himself with the situation. 
 They talked of a number of things that afternoon, 
 among other topics, about "the experiences of early 
 childhood, whose influence remains upon the character 
 after the recollection of them has passed away." What 
 these two had to say on this fruitful topic would be 
 very much worth knowing, but the conversation was 
 not set down by either of them. Later on Mr. Emer 
 son appeared and joined in their conversation. The 
 casual meeting stood out as an event in Hawthorne s 
 life, so much so that even his most recent biographer 
 makes him lie buried " on the same hillside where he 
 and Emerson and Margaret Fuller conversed together 
 on the summer afternoon twenty years before." Even 
 in death they were not divided. 
 
 Margaret s rejection of the Brook Farm scheme was 
 followed by her eager acceptance of the editorship of 
 The Dial. It was a joint editorship with Emerson, 
 who, like Margaret, had more enthusiasm for a mag 
 azine than for a farm. He was full of projects for the 
 exchange of liberal thought through informal and non* 
 institutional channels, and always he invited Margaret 
 to share in whatever plans he had afoot. He had not 
 found, for instance, that liberal thought was encour 
 aged by the universities, being himself persona non 
 grata at Harvard. "Alcott and I projected a whole 
 
96 Margaret Fuller 
 
 university out of our straws/ he wrote to Margaret, 
 and after outlining the courses, he invited her to join 
 the " puissant faculty " which would " front the world 
 without charter, diploma, corporation, or steward." 
 The university never came off, but The Dial did ; that 
 is to say, it came off after a fashion, though it threat 
 ened to fall through with every issue. Without Mar 
 garet s executive talents, it certainly would not have 
 lasted as long as it did. During the first two years 
 of the quarterly, she was editor-in-chief; and when 
 she resigned, Emerson assumed the editorship-in-chief 
 for another two years. Still Margaret continued as 
 associate editor and contributor, and The Dial did 
 not finally give up the ghost until she left Boston 
 for New York. It was succeeded, in effect, by The 
 Harbinger, published by the Brook Farm phalanx 
 with George Ripley as editor. The Harbinger, to 
 which Margaret was an occasional contributor, was 
 specifically devoted to socialistic propaganda, and 
 lasted, like The Dial, for a term of four years. Its 
 editor later succeeded to Margaret Fuller s place as 
 literary critic of the New York Tribune. 
 
 The Dial was, from its beginning, chiefly the ex 
 pression of the personalities of Margaret Fuller and 
 Emerson. The initial number of this journal of the 
 new spirit began with a leader by Emerson and an 
 Essay on Critics by Margaret. " No one can converse 
 
The Transcendentalist 97 
 
 much with different classes of society in New Eng 
 land," wrote Emerson, " without remarking the pro 
 gress of a revolution. Those who share in it have no 
 external organization, no badge, no creed, no name. 
 . . . It is in every form a protest against usage, and 
 a search for principles. In all its movements, it is 
 peaceable, and in the very lowest marked with a trium 
 phant success. ... It has the step of Fate, and goes 
 on existing like an oak or a river, because it must." 
 Margaret s essay which followed Emerson s contained 
 her view of a literary craft of which she was, and still 
 remains, one of the most distinguished representatives 
 in this country. " The critic is beneath the maker, 
 but is his needed friend," she wrote. " The critic is 
 not a base caviler, but the younger brother of genius. 
 Next to invention is the power of interpreting inven 
 tion; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty. 
 And of making others appreciate it; for the universe is 
 a scale of infinite gradation, and below the very high 
 est, every step is explanation down to the lowest. . . . 
 Nature is the literature and art of the divine mind; 
 human literature and art the criticism on that; and 
 they, too, find their criticism within their own sphere." 
 Real critics, she said, would not write as guide-books 
 or expurgatory indexes but as companions and 
 friends. " We would live with them, rather than be 
 taught by them how to live ; we would catch the conta- 
 
98 Margaret Fuller 
 
 tagion of their mental activity, rather than have them 
 direct us how to regulate our own." 
 
 Margaret was to have been paid two hundred dollars 
 a year for her work as editor. But The Dial never 
 prospered sufficiently to pay even this one small salary. 
 How Margaret must have labored with her unpaid 
 contributors is not hard to imagine. " My vivacious 
 friend," as Emerson called her, had to call up all her 
 reserves of vivacity to keep her columns filled. 
 " Henry, I adjure you in the name of all the Genii, 
 Muses, Pegasus, Apollo, Pollio, Apollyon," she wrote 
 to Henry Hedge in Bangor, "to send me something 
 good for this journal, before the first of May. All 
 mortals, my friend, are slack and bare ; they wait to see 
 whether Hotspur wins, before they levy aid for as good 
 a plan as ever was laid. I know you are plagued and 
 it is hard to write; just so it is with me, for I also am 
 a father." Oftener than she liked Margaret was 
 compelled to fill in with her own compositions, for 
 she was not over-proud of them. " In truth I have 
 not much to say," she declared, " 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." There is cer- 
 
The Transcend entalist 99 
 
 tainly very little of the " mountainous me " in this 
 sort of self-criticism, of which there are many in 
 stances in Margaret s diaries. 
 
 The common criticism was that The Dial was too 
 " feminine." Carlyle protested irritably that the 
 journal was " no stalwart Yankee man with color in 
 the cheeks of him, and a coat on his back." It was 
 true that the editor wore a shawl, and one suspects 
 that this fact had something to do with the impres 
 sion of femininity ascribed to the whole enterprise. 
 Theodore Parker, who was one of the chief con 
 tributors and quite stalwart and masculine, also 
 thought that what The Dial needed was a beard. He 
 accordingly established a quarterly of his own, after 
 the failure of The Dial, which undertook to give the 
 public its beard. But he prospered no better than his 
 predecessor, his journal turning out to quote Mr. 
 Higginson s little joke " to be the beard without The 
 Dial" 
 
 The story of The Dial s rise and fall is linked 
 with the story of Emerson s and Margaret s friend 
 ship. Emerson was a man of many friendships ; hav 
 ing severed relations with Church and State, he re 
 served his loyalties for individual affiliations. His 
 classic friendships were with Carlyle and Margaret 
 Fuller; Carlyle he had chosen, but Margaret had 
 chosen him. After her father s death, Margaret re- 
 
ioo Margaret Fuller 
 
 solved to have Emerson for her guide and mentor 
 and had set out to win him. " Margaret, who had 
 stuffed me out as a philosopher in her own fancy, * 
 reads Emerson s account, " was too intent on estab 
 lishing a good footing between us, to omit any art of 
 winning." But it was only after a long resistance and 
 then not very gracefully that he yielded. "Of course, 
 it was impossible long to hold out against such urgent 
 assault/ he remarks. In spite of this inauspicious 
 beginning, the friendship went better later on. 
 Emerson said that, during an intimacy which lasted 
 for ten years, he never saw her without surprise at 
 her new powers. He carefully preserved every letter 
 that she wrote him and included her in his various 
 schemes. But all the while he feared her tempera 
 ment, much as Goethe feared Beethoven s. " Such 
 people pull down the pillars of the temple," said 
 Goethe of Beethoven; " I . . . had a feeling as if a 
 voice cried, Stand from under" said Emerson of 
 Margaret. Emerson feared for his unshakable calm 
 in the presence of the ardor and abandon of his friend. 
 " It was a war of temperaments/ he said; bat added 
 that " the incongruity never interrupted for a moment 
 the intercourse, such as it was, that existed between 
 us." 
 
 But the ardent disciple in time became a critic, not 
 a critic of details but a questioner of the foundation- 
 
The Transcendentalist ibi 
 
 stone of Emerson s whole existence. She could not 
 give her sanction to his cloistered life in Concord; for 
 herself, she told him, she preferred " the animating 
 influences of Discord." And to a friend she wrote, 
 " What did you mean by saying that I had imbibed 
 much of his way of thought? I do indeed feel his 
 life stealing gradually into mine; and I sometimes 
 think that my work would have been more simple, 
 and my unfolding to a temporal activity more rapid 
 and easy, if we had never met." Again she wrote, 
 " Leave him in his cell affirming absolute truth ; pro 
 testing against humanity, if so he appears to do; the 
 calm observer of the courses of things." In Margaret 
 the force of Puritan tradition was fast wearing away; 
 she had hovered for long between Goethe and Emer 
 son and Goethe had in the end prevailed. 
 
 No doubt they rather liked their arguments, into 
 which they seemed to fall so naturally and so irre 
 concilably. To please Margaret s memories, Emer 
 son had to go on fighting the departed Timothy s bat 
 tles over and over again; and to please Emerson, 
 Margaret had to go on playing the part of his obstruc 
 tive Aunt Mary Moody Emerson. This Calvinistic 
 maiden aunt, who had taken the place of Emerson s 
 dead father, was a woman of unusual force of char 
 acter, enormous learning, and great outspokenness. It 
 is not to be wondered at if Emerson could not forbear 
 
102 Margaret Fuller 
 
 getting back at the tyrannical " auntism " of his 
 Transcendental colleague from time to time. Nor is 
 it surprising that he could maintain his attitude of 
 resistance within a friendship which he apparently had 
 no wish to break away from. He wrote a character 
 portrait of his aunt after her death which contained 
 some striking points of similarity with his memoir 
 of Margaret. Were the older and the younger women 
 really so much alike or did he unconsciously tend 
 to force them both into a single cherished mold? 
 Probably he liked his second maiden aunt and her 
 Platonic attentions better than he ever admitted to 
 himself. 
 
 Margaret abandoned her career of hermitism and 
 mysticism in 1843, and tried traveling instead. She 
 journeyed by way of the Great Lakes to Chicago, and 
 spent the summer in a survey of the Far West. She 
 traveled in an ox wagon over the grassy plains of 
 Illinois and penetrated into the territory of Wisconsin. 
 The Indians still dwelt in scattered encampments while 
 German and Swedish immigrants were daily disem 
 barking at the Chicago piers. She ate white-fish in 
 Chicago, weighed the Indians cause, and visited in 
 log-cabin homes along the Rock River. There is cer 
 tainly little suggestion of frailty and invalidism in the 
 following description of an over-night stop at Ross s 
 Grove: "We ladies were to sleep in the bar-room, 
 
The Transcend entalist 103 
 
 from which its drinking visitors could be ejected only 
 at a late hour. . . . We had also rather hard 
 couches (mine was the supper table) but we Yankees 
 born to rove, were altogether too much fatigued to 
 stand upon trifles, and slept as sweetly as we would 
 in the bigly bower of any baroness. But I think 
 England [referring to an English lady of the party] 
 sat up all night, wrapped in her blanket shawl, with 
 a neat lace cap upon her head, so that she would have 
 looked perfectly the lady, if anyone had come in. 
 . . . She watched, as her parent country watches 
 the seas, that nobody may do wrong in any case, and 
 deserved to have met some interruption, she was so 
 well prepared." 
 
 Margaret returned home and described her western 
 travels in a little volume entitled, Summer on the 
 Lakes. The book made but little impression but it 
 had at least one appreciative reader in Mr. Horace 
 Greeley. The West was his hobby, and here was a 
 woman who had caught the idea. " Wherever the hog 
 comes, the rattlesnake disappears/ wrote Margaret 
 with some of Mr. Greeley s own tang. Mrs. Greeley 
 was already an admirer of Margaret s, having attended 
 the Conversations during her visits in Boston. It 
 was she who set the plans on foot for having Mar 
 garet on the Tribune staff and at the same time a 
 resident in the Greeley home. 
 
IO4 Margaret Fuller 
 
 Margaret was delighted with the prospect of becom 
 ing a journalist in New York. But Mr. Emerson did 
 not approve of the step, and retained his disapproval 
 even though the venture obviously turned out so well. 
 He wrote to Carlyle two years later, " Margaret 
 Fuller s work as critic of all new books, critic of the 
 drama, of music, and good arts in New York, has been 
 honorable to her. Still this employment is not satis 
 factory to me." And though Margaret said the cir 
 culation of the Tribune was 50,000, Emerson men 
 tioned it in this letter to Carlyle as but 30,000. Some 
 natural resentment may have been felt over the loss 
 of a maiden aunt and right-hand man in one. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE JOURNALIST 
 
 THE New York Tribune was in the fourth year of its 
 existence when Margaret Fuller became a member of 
 the staff. In those days, Horace Greeley was the 
 Tribune and the Tribune was Horace Greeley; the 
 man and his journal were one. 
 
 In all his personal relations, the editor was amiable 
 and good-natured to a fault, but he was one of the 
 most passionate political campaigners and election 
 warriors that American history has produced. Once 
 a political antagonist in Washington who did not 
 know him personally, struck him with a horsewhip; 
 even rival editors were incensed by the assault and 
 one of them said that " the fellow who would strike 
 Horace Greeley would strike his mother." The 
 Tribune was like its editor, incessantly campaigning, 
 reforming, and crusading and yet exceedingly popular 
 and prosperous. Though Mr. Greeley came of 
 Puritan stock, he had the saving graces of his Irish 
 blood. 
 
 As Margaret was a woman s woman, Mr. Greeley 
 was a man s man. His real home was in his news- 
 
 105 
 
106 Margaret Fuller 
 
 paper office and his real life was lived there with his 
 host of friends. He was the center of a group of 
 persons engrossed with the labor problem and the 
 social reforms of the day. Important figures of this 
 circle were William H. Channing, the minister; 
 Marcus Spring, the merchant; Albert Brisbane, the 
 wealthy scholar; and the silent Mr. McElrath, who 
 was Mr. Greeley s business partner. They all co 
 operated in various ways with Mr. Greeley s schemes 
 for the emancipation of labor. William Channing 
 was a preacher and a kind of social reformer-at-large. 
 He and Margaret Fuller together made a survey of 
 New York s philanthropic institutions in order that 
 Margaret might write up her observations for the 
 Tribune. Marcus Spring, like Horace Greeley, was 
 an ardent supporter of the North American phalanx 
 at Red Bank, New Jersey. Albert Brisbane expounded 
 the ideas of Fourier, the prophet of the social revolu 
 tion, on the front page of the Tribune, and Margaret 
 fell heir to this space when he left for Europe in 
 1845. Most important of them all, perhaps, was the 
 faithful Mr. McElrath who kept the Tribune s house 
 in order and maintained a perfect organization in 
 spite of the picturesque and incorrigible disorder of 
 the chief. " As Damon and Pythias are the types of 
 perfect friendship," exclaims Greeley s biographer, 
 " so may Greeley and McElrath be of a perfect part- 
 
The Journalist 107 
 
 nership; and we may say, with a sigh at the many 
 discordant unions the world presents, oh! that every 
 Greeley could find his McElrath and blessed is the 
 McElrath that finds his Greeley!" Mr. Greeley s 
 coterie embraced all sorts and conditions of men, until 
 life in the editorial offices seemed to be one never- 
 ending stag-party. 
 
 Mrs. Greeley apparently felt the need of a friend 
 her husband had so many. She was often lonely and 
 dejected and there was a lack of " mental harmony ", 
 so Margaret said, in the domestic atmosphere. 
 Wives like Mrs. Greeley and Xantippe really have a 
 case, though their genial and convivial husbands 
 usually get all the sympathy. Mrs. Greeley was 
 probably trying to find her McElrath when she 
 invited Margaret Fuller to share her home. Mr. 
 Greeley said that he regarded Margaret as his wife s 
 friend rather than his own, and added ungraciously 
 that he could not understand the adoring women 
 friends who flocked out to his home to see her. 
 Perhaps it was but natural under the circumstances 
 that he should look on his wife s friend and her 
 numerous disciples with rather a critical and distrust 
 ful eye. It was too much like having the tables sud 
 denly turned on himself. Margaret s book on the 
 woman question had " made quite a breeze," as Mrs. 
 Peabody, who kept a bookstore in Boston, said in 
 
108 Margaret Fuller 
 
 describing its success. This fact must have greatly 
 increased the number of Margaret s visitors and 
 stirred up more interest in feminism within the 
 Greeley home than the editor himself could com 
 fortably subscribe to. 
 
 Still the business partnership between Margaret and 
 her chief was a most successful one. Mr. Greeley 
 had the profoundest respect for his literary critic 
 and considered her "the best instructed woman in 
 America; " while Margaret had the highest regard for 
 the editor s great abilities and his generous disposi 
 tion as an employer. Mr. Greeley knew more about 
 the labor problem than any American public man of 
 his day, and Margaret acquired a groundwork in 
 economics while she worked for the Tribune which 
 served her well in the European whirlpool of revolu 
 tion later. The editor was a hard beleaguered man, 
 especially in the years of Margaret s association with 
 his paper, and she was immovably on his side against 
 the ruling classes. But at home, she was on the side 
 of Mrs. Greeley. 
 
 Horace Greeley declared himself the friend of the 
 woman movement. And so he was, but with impor 
 tant reservations. The kind of woman movement 
 which he favored was purely for political and eco 
 nomic rights. It would never seek to reform the in 
 stitution of marriage in any way; it would abolish 
 
The Journalist 109 
 
 divorce entirely; and it would never push its claim 
 for suffrage at a time which the editor of the Tribune 
 did not think propitious. But this was not the kind 
 of woman movement which Margaret Fuller believed 
 in and wrote about and Susan B. Anthony fought for. 
 There were inevitable clashes of opinion between 
 these women and a man who believed in the Episcopal 
 marriage ceremony and the Roman Catholic attitude 
 towards divorce. Though his religious views were so 
 liberal that he belonged to a Universalist church, de 
 fended Tom Paine in his newspaper, and was de 
 nounced as an atheist by his enemies, he would be 
 married by the Episcopal ceremony and no other and 
 believed that the marriage tie should be absolutely 
 indissoluble. Mrs. Greeley had a tendency to agree 
 with Margaret Fuller, and later with Susan B. 
 Anthony, rather than with her husband, on questions 
 concerning women, which naturally did not increase 
 her husband s sympathy with these rival influences. 
 
 His own account of his behavior as a host shows 
 that Margaret must have been rather broad-minded to 
 keep their relations as friendly as they were. He lec 
 tured her on her tea-drinking habits, telling her that 
 this was the source of her ill-health and she should 
 give it up at once. Also at every opportunity he 
 pointed out her personal inconsistencies as a champion 
 of the emancipated woman. If she demanded, as she 
 
[IIO Margaret Fuller 
 
 did, free access to the professions, politics, and em 
 ployments of the rougher sex, he said, she should not 
 accept their protection as escorts. He also thought 
 that, as a strong-minded woman, she should not give 
 in so much to her headaches and " spinal affliction " 
 and boasted that he could write ten columns to her 
 one a day. In the old Dial days, Emerson had re 
 garded her as a marvel of speed. Lucky for Mr. 
 Emerson, he did not work for Mr. Greeley. And did 
 not Mr. Greeley himself have boils, was he not covered 
 with them like Job, and did he not do a day s work 
 every day regardless of his sufferings? Incidentally, 
 it does not appear that Margaret failed to live up to 
 her contract of three articles a week, but what was 
 this to the hero of ten thousand paragraphs? The 
 point was that she could not keep up with him, and 
 this was a point which Mr. Greeley never failed to 
 make. He cared for nothing in life so much as just 
 winning; when a little boy, he cried if he lost the 
 spelling-match and when he made the race for presi 
 dent, he could not survive the tragedy of his defeat. 
 All this was because Horace Greeley had to make up 
 for a father who had been a failure in life. The 
 paternal Greeley had been an unsuccessful farmer and 
 frontiersman, with a wife who could work as hard 
 and drink as hard as he could himself. The mother 
 of Horace Greeley, one learns from his biography, 
 
The Journalist in 
 
 " had the strength of a man without his coarseness," 
 and she could out-rake any man in the town and load 
 the hay-wagons as fast as her husband. The son of 
 this Amazon refused to pay tribute to Margaret s 
 prowess as an intellectual worker, however much 
 others might be impressed by it. 
 
 During her career as a journalist in New York, 
 her business life, as she called it, Margaret ac 
 complished two definite things. She established her 
 self as a leading American literary critic. The Cam 
 bridge History of American Literature describes her as 
 " one of the best-equipped, most sympathetic, and 
 genuinely philosophical critics produced in America 
 prior to 1850." The second achievement of her New 
 York career was a love affair. 
 
 This innocent and bourgeois romance was sedulously 
 concealed for a long time by means of outright lying 
 on the part of gallant Christian gentlemen. The 
 painful, the unmentionable fact was that Margaret s 
 hopes were disappointed ; she was jilted, in short. But 
 after fifty years or more the whole story came out 
 through the publication of the Love Letters of Mar 
 garet Fuller with a preface by the faithless lover him 
 self. The preface, dated 1873, shows that he prepared 
 the letters for publication thirty years before they 
 actually appeared; but for some reason, probably the 
 interposition of a hand much stronger than his own, 
 
112 Margaret Fuller 
 
 the letters remained unpublished until 1903. The poor 
 man never saw this handsome tribute to himself in 
 print. His reason for publishing Margaret s letters, 
 he said, was to show "that great and gifted as she 
 was as a writer, she was no less so in the soft and 
 tender emotions of a true woman s heart." 
 
 The Greeley homestead, on the bank of the East 
 River and at the foot of what is now Forty-ninth 
 Street, was a favorable background for a summer 
 romance. The place had been a summer residence, 
 but Mr. Greeley dubbed it " The Farm " as he always 
 insisted on viewing himself as a farmer. It was 
 charmingly sequestered ; a long lane connected it with 
 the hourly stage on Third Avenue, while the windows 
 overlooked, in the opposite direction, a scene of wide 
 waters and moving sails. While Mr. Greeley cherished 
 a day-dream of being a farmer, Margaret cherished 
 one of going to sea, and both of them were delighted 
 with the new home. The housekeeping went on " in 
 Castle Rackrent style," for, unfortunately, the orderly 
 sway of Mr. McElrath did not extend as far as The 
 Farm. Margaret soon found, she said, that " things 
 would not stay put" and gave up trying to better 
 them. But there were eight acres of wooded grounds, 
 a dell with falling water, paths that wound through 
 myrtle and white cherry, and waves murmuring in 
 the moonlight at the base of the rocks. It was an 
 
The Journalist 113 
 
 ideal place in which to fall in love in the spring 
 time. 
 
 Mr. James Nathan was a Jew from Hamburg, who 
 was engaged in the banking business in Wall Street. 
 When he was about forty-five, he changed his name 
 to Gotendorf, the name of a place in Holstein owned 
 by his father. He says that he did this by Horace 
 Greeley s advice, who also no doubt facilitated the act 
 of Congress by which the change of name was made 
 possible. Mr. Greeley would have taken any amount 
 of trouble on behalf of a man who strove, if only 
 symbolically, to regain the parental homestead. He 
 himself spent a lifetime regaining the lost paradise of 
 a Vermont farm which was wrested from his father 
 for debt when Horace was nine years old. " We de 
 vote most of the excess of energy of maturity work 
 ing out the wishes of childhood," says a modern 
 psychologist, so that perhaps Mr. Greeley s course 
 should not be looked upon as very exceptional, after 
 all. Certainly he spent a great deal of his mature 
 energies in the vicarious working out of those same 
 childish wishes. 
 
 When Mr. Gotendorf visited the Greeley Farm 
 he was still Mr. Nathan. About the same age as Mar 
 garet, he was a gentle, blue-eyed dreamer, who played 
 the guitar, wrote verses, and chafed at the uncon 
 genial life of a business man. " I have long had a 
 
114 Margaret Fuller 
 
 presentiment/ Margaret wrote to him, " that I should 
 meet nearly one of your race, who would show me 
 how the sun of today shines upon the ancient Temple 
 but I did not expect so gentle and civilized an ap 
 parition and with blue eyes!" Mr. James Nathan 
 was not by temperament a man of action and was dis 
 contented with the lot which a masculine nature is 
 supposed to crave ; while Margaret, being emphatically 
 a woman of action, had always struggled against the 
 pressure of social customs which refused her any out 
 let for her energies. "We parted in the lane and 
 went our opposite ways/ said one of Margaret s let 
 ters to her lover, " and I thought : my brother wishes 
 to make his existence more poetic, I need mine should 
 be more deeply real ; must we go opposite ways in the 
 same road? " More than once in her letters she refers 
 to the " feminine sweetness and sensibility " of her 
 lover s disposition. 
 
 Mr. Nathan suddenly departed from New York in 
 June, 1845. He left his dog and his guitar in Mar 
 garet s care, and set forth upon long journeys through 
 Europe and Palestine. His leaving has the air of a 
 rather ungallant flight. He continued to send back 
 travel articles to Margaret for publication in the 
 Tribune, but his personal letters to her dwindled 
 away. In the meantime Margaret s plans for a Eu 
 ropean trip had rapidly matured. She wrote to Mr. 
 
The Journalist 115 
 
 Nathan, who had now retired to Hamburg and the 
 protection of his mother, that she would be in London 
 on September the first and hoped to see him then. 
 Furthermore, her party would go from London to 
 Hamburg along the usual route. One can imagine the 
 sensations of the unhappy Mr. Nathan, who had be 
 come engaged to be married in the meantime but had 
 forgotten to mention it when he wrote to Margaret 
 and asked her to find a publisher for his book of travels. 
 But the moment for candor had come. He rose to 
 the heights of a man of action and dispatched a letter 
 to Margaret in England which had the desired effect. 
 It completely changed her itinerary. Mr. Nathan 
 describes the episode in his preface twenty years after, 
 " She, in London, found letters, and then went to 
 Rome and to Heaven, but the mutually much longed 
 for meeting is yet to be, somewhere, somehow ! " 
 
 The letters which Margaret found in London are 
 referred to in her Journal: "From ist June, 1845, to 
 ist Sept., 1846, a mighty change has taken place, I 
 ween. I understand more and more the character of 
 the tribes. I shall write a sketch of it and turn the 
 whole to account in a literary way, since the affections 
 and ideal hopes are so unproductive. I care not. I 
 am resolved to take such disappointments more lightly 
 than I have." 
 
 A few days later, she was lost on a lonely mountain- 
 
Ii6 Margaret Fuller 
 
 top in Scotland, where she spent a night of dangerous 
 exposure. She wrote a letter to the Tribune describ 
 ing her vigil, telling how she kept herself in motion 
 the whole night long, while death seemed to woo her 
 in visionary shapes. " Floating slowly and gracefully, 
 their white robes would unfurl from the great body 
 of mist in which they had been engaged, and come 
 upon me with a kiss pervasively cold as that of death. 
 What they might have told me, who knows, if I had 
 but resigned myself more passively to that cold, spirit- 
 like breathing! " The temptation to resign herself 
 though perhaps unconscious was evidently strong 
 upon her. But as it turned out, her uncomfortable 
 night had the happy effect of curing the worst pangs 
 of her disappointment, for she apparently forgot the 
 faithless Mr. Nathan very soon. It was a desperate 
 remedy like that of poor Mary Wollstonecraft whose 
 plunge into the cold waters of the Thames seemed to 
 do more than anything else to cure her of her hopeless 
 love for the elusive Gilbert Imlay. It was true of both 
 these ardent women that they were capable of consol 
 ing their orphaned affections by a rather sudden and 
 complete transference to another and a different object. 
 But in spite of Mr. Nathan s heart-breaking deser 
 tion, he and his dog and his guitar probably helped 
 to make Margaret into a better woman and a better 
 critic. When she was in Italy, she was said to be 
 
The Journalist 117 
 
 quite humanized; and no doubt the emotional, blue- 
 eyed foreigner was a happy antidote for the trans 
 cendental life just left behind in Boston. At any rate, 
 her critical work on the Tribune shows a mind much 
 more tempered to reality and purged of fantasy than 
 the extracts in the Memoirs would lead one to expect. 
 She was moving at last in a world of fact. 
 
 The Tribune was noted for the excellence and free 
 dom of its reviews. Margaret had the task of re 
 viewing the works of Carlyle, Browning, Elizabeth 
 Barrett, and Tennyson as they first came from the 
 press; while volumes by American contemporaries 
 like Longfellow, Poe, and Lowell fell into her hands 
 for judgment and appraisal. Her reviews were col 
 lected and published in a small volume entitled Papers 
 on Literature and Art, which was read with apprecia 
 tion in England and led to the offer of journalistic 
 opportunities in London. As her previous books had 
 promoted her transfer to New York, her critical 
 papers would have given her a foothold among London 
 journalists, had she been eager to gain one. Her 
 strange indifference to these English offers was a part 
 of her general lack of sympathy for England. She 
 turned her back on London where she might perhaps 
 have earned her bread with considerable distinction 
 and embraced a life of pauperism in her beloved 
 Italy. 
 
n8 Margaret Fuller 
 
 A glance through Margaret s critical papers shows 
 the strong, resonant fiber of her mind and an energy 
 of character which is usually called masculine. She 
 had little mercy for sentimentalisms of any kind. To 
 a lady who over-modestly apologized for publishing, 
 Margaret recommended that she " leave such affecta 
 tions to her aunts ; they were the fashion of their day." 
 " Literature has become not merely an archive for the 
 preservation of great thoughts, but a means of general 
 communication between all classes of minds, and all 
 grades of culture. There needs be no great fuss about 
 publishing or not publishing. Those who forbear may 
 rather be considered the vain ones, who wish to be 
 distinguished among the crowd." In a review of the 
 biography of Sir James Mackintosh, she analyzed him 
 as a day-dreamer. " A man who means to think and 
 write a great deal, must, after six and twenty, learn to 
 read with his fingers." And she concluded from the 
 character of this man that "man may escape from 
 every foe and every difficulty, except what are within 
 himself." Reviewing Emerson, she says, " Here is, 
 undoubtedly, the man of ideas ; but we want the ideal 
 man also want the heart and genius of human life to 
 interpret it. ... We doubt this friend raised him 
 self too early to the perpendicular, and did not lie 
 along the ground long enough to hear the whispers 
 of our parent life. We would wish he might be 
 
The Journalist 1119 
 
 thrown by conflicts on the lap of mother earth, to see 
 if he would not rise again with added powers." She 
 had a very practical view of the uses of biography. 
 " Both as physiological and psychical histories, they 
 are full of instruction. . . . Let the physician com 
 pare the furies of Alfieri with the silent rages of 
 Byron, and give the mother and pedagogue the light 
 in which they are now wholly wanting, showing how 
 to treat such noble plants in the early stages of 
 growth." 
 
 Reviewing American literature in those days, when 
 it was still so young and sensitive and a narrow 
 patriotism was ever on the defensive, was a dangerous 
 trade. Horace Greeley had found it so and Margaret 
 also won her scars as a critic. On the whole Mar 
 garet s punishment was more severe. When Greeley 
 was sued for libel by Fenimore Cooper and condemned 
 to pay the author damages, the irrepressible editor at 
 least enjoyed the comedy. " Fenimore shall have his 
 $200," he assured the public; " we are glad to do any 
 thing for one of the most creditable (of old) of our 
 authors." This famous suit had taken place but a 
 short while before Margaret joined the Tribune staff. 
 When Mr. Greeley gave into her hands the full critical 
 sway of the most influential newspaper in America, 
 he resigned a dangerous post which required courage 
 as well as judgment in the holder. But Margaret was 
 
I2O Margaret Fuller 
 
 as honest as Mr. Greeley himself and had no more 
 respect for the ruling classes; she was therefore as 
 much as he bound to commit Use majeste sooner or 
 later. One day Mr. Greeley brought home a new 
 volume by Longfellow for her to review. Margaret 
 tried to put it off on the editor, saying that her view 
 of poetry was so very different from that of Mr. 
 Longfellow, who had grown by this time to be the 
 most important American poet. Mr. Greeley at first 
 consented to write the review himself, but then he said 
 he had no time and Margaret had to write it after 
 all. It is an easy guess that if he had been an admirer 
 of Longfellow s he would have found time to write 
 the more favorable criticism. His opinion probably 
 differed but little from Margaret s, for Mr. Hig- 
 ginson tells us that Margaret s opinion of Longfellow 
 and of Lowell as well, was commonly held among the 
 Transcendentalists and was not merely a personal 
 prejudice of hers. 
 
 " When we see a person of moderate powers," she 
 wrote, " receive honors which should be reserved for 
 the highest, we feel somewhat like assailing him and 
 taking from him the crown which should be reserved 
 for grander brows. And yet this is, perhaps, ungen 
 erous. . . . He [Longfellow] has no style of his 
 own, growing out of his own experiences and observa 
 tions of nature. Nature with him, whether human 
 
The Journalist 121 
 
 or external, is always seen through the windows of 
 literature. . . . This want of the free breath of 
 nature, this perpetual borrowing of imagery, this ex 
 cessive, because superficial, culture which lie has de 
 rived from an acquaintance with the elegant literature 
 of many nations and men, out of proportion to the 
 experience of life within himself, prevent Mr. Long 
 fellow s verses from ever being a true refreshment to 
 ourselves." 
 
 But this was not the whole of her offending. She 
 thought Lowell s work of less worth than Long 
 fellow s. " We cannot say as much for Lowell, who, 
 we must declare it, though to the grief of some friends 
 and the disgust of more, is absolutely wanting in the 
 true spirit and tone of poesy. His interest in the 
 moral questions of the day has supplied the want of 
 vitality in himself; his great facility at versification 
 has enabled him to fill the ear with a copious stream 
 of pleasant sound. But his verse is stereotyped; his 
 thought sounds no depth, and posterity will not re 
 member him." 
 
 Longfellow, famous for his amiability, passed over 
 the episode in silence and vindicated his reputation 
 for a sweet temper. But Lowell pursued Margaret in 
 public and private with bitter reprisals. He lam 
 pooned her in his Fable for Critics as Miranda with 
 a ferocity which certainly should have relieved his 
 
122 Margaret Fuller 
 
 feelings and wiped out the score. But apparently his 
 resentment was still unappeased, and he continued to 
 pour it out in his private correspondence. Writing to 
 William Story in Rome, he devotes most of his letter 
 to Margaret. " I have it on good authority/ he 
 begins a long-drawn joke, " that the Austrian govern 
 ment has its eye on Miss F. It would be a pity to 
 have so much worth and genius shut up for life in 
 Spielberg. Her beauty might perhaps save her. Pio 
 Nono also regards her with a naturally jealous eye, 
 fearing that the college of cardinals may make her the 
 successor of Pope Joan." In this strain, the joke con 
 tinues and recurs throughout the letter until one quite 
 agrees with Henry James s comment, that Lowell s 
 absorption in his joke is rather " a significant mark 
 for Miss F." 
 
 When Margaret went to Europe, her connection 
 with the Tribune remained unbroken. Her letters 
 appeared on the front page of the newspaper, for she 
 wrote as a foreign correspondent. In the meantime, 
 soon after her departure, an important change had 
 taken place in the editorial policy. Mr. Greeley had 
 eliminated the theories of Fourier (at least under that 
 name) from the columns of his paper. It had hap 
 pened in this way. 
 
 Mr. Greeley had challenged Mr. H. J. Raymond of 
 the Courier and Enquirer to a debate on socialism and 
 
The Journalist 123 
 
 Fourierism, and Mr. Raymond had accepted. This 
 was one of the occasions when Mr. Greeley s passion 
 for debates and contests was his undoing. As long as 
 he could keep the argument on property and poverty, 
 capital and labor, Mr. Greeley was in his element, hit 
 ting hard and scoring vigorously. But Mr. Raymond, 
 who was astute and a good Presbyterian, kept shift 
 ing the theme to marriage and family life in spite of 
 his adversary s efforts to stick to capital and labor. 
 Mr. Raymond quoted shocking things from Fourier, 
 who had clearly never had the advantages of a New 
 England education and who held that the passions 
 are good in themselves, that evil flows only from 
 their repression or subversion. Poor Mr. Greeley 
 hastened to " deny with disgust and indignation that 
 there was in socialism, as American socialists under 
 stand and teach it, any provision or license for the 
 gratification of criminal passions or unlawful desires." 
 Mr. Raymond pursued his advantage and wrote 
 solemn warnings against a social scheme which was 
 in favor of " Bacchantes, Aspasias, and Bayarderes " 
 and declared that the Tribune, perhaps unknowingly, 
 was helping to introduce such horrors into our midst. 
 All of Mr. Greeley s protestations could not wipe out 
 the stain thus cast upon his economic prophet, whose 
 name was henceforth associated in the public mind 
 with sexual immorality. The Tribune no longer 
 
124 Margaret Fuller 
 
 dared to advocate even the economics of Fourier. Mr. 
 Raymond had destroyed the menace. He was victor 
 and on this rock he founded the New York Times. 
 Now there was no one who had less desire than Mr. 
 Greeley to stand up as the defender of " Bacchantes, 
 Aspasias, and Bayarderes," but fate and Mr. Ray 
 mond combined to force him into a position which his 
 very soul repudiated. After the debate was over, and 
 while Mr. Greeley was still trying to pretend to him 
 self that he had not lost it, there came a stagger 
 ing piece of news from Italy. It was reported that 
 the lady correspondent of the New York Tribune had 
 entered upon a sort of Fourieristic marriage in Rome. 
 The awful consequences of the socialism of the 
 Tribune stood revealed. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 CONTACTS 
 
 T friends with whom Margaret finally went to 
 Europe were Marcus and Rebecca Spring and their 
 little boy Edward. The Springs were apparently 
 fairy god-parents to many idealistic protegees. They 
 rescued Channing from an uncongenial life in the 
 West and provided a career for him in New York. 
 They took Fredrika Bremer to see New England ; and 
 when Fredrika froze in the icy bed-chamber of a 
 Puritan farmhouse, they made up a bed for her before 
 the parlor fire and occupied the frigid guest-chamber 
 themselves. They took Margaret Fuller to see 
 Europe; and when Margaret was lost on the moun 
 tain-top and the Scotch shepherds spent the night 
 looking for her, Mr. Spring gave them a splendid 
 party in return. Judged by their behavior toward 
 these friends, the Springs set little store by the virtues 
 of self-denial and took a naive pleasure in giving 
 people what they wanted. The stoical Emerson said, 
 " The mind is its own place," but the kind-hearted 
 Springs thought that, when Channing was discon 
 tented with Cincinnati and Margaret Fuller consumed 
 
 125 
 
iia6 Margaret Fuller 
 
 by a desire to go to Europe, something ought to be 
 done about it. The fact that the Springs were rich 
 enough to gratify their generous impulses was less 
 remarkable than the cheerful simplicity with which 
 they dispensed their treats. Of course Margaret 
 also had some treats for these excellent friends: 
 for instance, she could take the good Marcus to see 
 the great Carlyle, whose works the good man enthusi 
 astically admired. 
 
 On August I, 1846, the party sailed from Boston 
 on the Cambria. A voyage on the Cambria was in 
 itself an event in those days, and this particular pas 
 sage was memorable for being the shortest trip yet 
 made across the Atlantic. The time was ten days and 
 sixteen hours from Boston to Liverpool, announced 
 with much celebration and rejoicing by the newspapers. 
 
 Margaret and her traveling companions were keen 
 upon the track of reform. They rejoiced in the recent 
 triumph of the Corn Laws and the gathering signs of 
 . Chartism in England. Wordsworth was pictured in 
 Margaret s Tribune letter as a " reverend old man, 
 clothed in black, and walking with cautious step along 
 the level garden-path " who was not " prepared to say 
 in the matter of the Corn Laws whether existing 
 interests had been as carefully attended to as was 
 just." She went to hear James Martineau preach 
 and described him as one of those " who love the new 
 
Contacts 127 
 
 wine, but do not feel that they can afford to throw 
 away all their old bottles." At the Mechanics Insti 
 tute in Liverpool, she was enormously pleased to hear 
 The Dial quoted by the Director in speaking on the 
 subject of self-culture. She praised the work that the 
 Institute was doing for girls, but she added briefly, 
 " Woman nominally, not really, at the head." From 
 Liverpool also she wrote : " I saw there, too, the body 
 of an infant borne to the grave by women; for it is 
 a beautiful custom here that those who have fulfilled 
 all other tender offices to the little being should hold 
 to it the same relation to the very last." 
 
 The London Reform Club was a great adventure 
 to the whole party, especially the marvelous kitchen 
 arrangements, of which Margaret remarked that 
 " Fourier himself might have taken pleasure in them." 
 Mr. Spring was busy taking notes on the steam cook 
 ing and washing machinery, which he meant to install 
 in the Red Bank phalanstery on his return home, and 
 which he actually did with great success. Margaret, 
 always peering at symptoms of woman s status, re 
 marks of this wonder-kitchen that there she found 
 women only as the " servants of servants ; " but she did 
 not begrudge the chef and his male apprentices their 
 position of supremacy. " I was not sorry, however," 
 she wrote, " to see men predominant in the cooking de 
 partment, as I hope to see that and washing transferred 
 
1 28 Margaret Fuller 
 
 to their care in the progress of things, since they are 
 the stronger sex V With Mr. Spring she also 
 visited model laundries, and they busied themselves 
 .with plans for installing a similar institution in New 
 York. " One arrangement that they have here in 
 Paris will be a good one," wrote Margaret, " even 
 when we cease to have any very poor people, and, 
 please Heaven, also any very rich. These are the 
 Creches, houses where poor women leave their chil 
 dren to be nursed during the day while they are at 
 work." 
 
 a 
 
 Margaret and her friends, primed with all the ideas 
 of Fourier, visited the great industries of England and 
 France and saw for themselves the misery of the 
 working classes in that terrible year. At Newcastle 
 they descended into a coal mine and at Sheffield they 
 went on Saturday night to see the steel-workers paid 
 off. At Manchester, Margaret went out in the street 
 at night to talk with the girls from the mills, " who 
 were strolling bareheaded, with coarse, rude, and 
 reckless air," and saw " through the windows of the 
 gin-palaces the women seated drinking, too dull to 
 carouse." In Lyons, she went into some weavers 
 homes, consisting of a single room filled with looms 
 with the beds on shelves near the ceiling. Of these 
 women, she said, " There are but two ways open to 
 them, weaving and prostitution, to gain their bread." 
 
Contacts 129 
 
 From England, she wrote, " Can any man who has 
 seen these things dare blame the Associationists for 
 their attempt to find prevention against such misery 
 and wickedness in our land," and by the time she had 
 reached Paris, she was of the opinion that " erelong . 
 help must be sought by other means than words." J 
 
 Margaret s visit to Harriet Martineau was described 
 by the latter in one of the most lively passages of 
 her autobiography. She expressed her opinion of 
 Margaret s manners and criticized her behavior as a 
 guest at Ambleside with the warmest animosity. In 
 deed, her resentment was somewhat excusable owing 
 to Margaret s unpleasant candor with regard to her 
 book Society in America, published in 1836. The 
 book had exasperated not only Margaret but many 
 of the author s American friends; and Margaret with 
 her customary candor had written Miss Martineau a 
 frank letter. 
 
 " I got the book as soon as it came out," she wrote, 
 " long before I received the copy endeared by your 
 handwriting, and devoted myself to reading it. I gave 
 myself up to my natural impressions, without seeking 
 to ascertain those of others. . . . Certainly you 
 show no spirit of harshness towards this country in 
 general. . . . But many passages are reformed by 
 intemperance of epithet. . . . Would your heart, 
 could you but investigate the matter, approve such 
 
130 Margaret Fuller 
 
 overstatement, such a crude, intemperate tirade as you 
 have been guilty of about Mr. Alcott, a true and 
 noble man, a philanthropist, whom a true and 
 noble woman, also a philanthropist, should have de 
 lighted to honor; whose disinterested and resolute 
 efforts, for the redemption of poor humanity, all in 
 dependent and faithful minds should sustain, since the 
 broadcloth vulgar will be sure to assail them ; . . . 
 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. . . . 
 
 " I have thought it right to say all this to you, since 
 I felt it. I have shrunk from the effort, for I fear 
 that I must lose you. ... I know it must be so 
 trying to fail of sympathy, at such a time, where we 
 expect it. And, besides, I felt from the book that 
 the sympathy between us is less general than I had 
 supposed, it was so strong on several points. It is 
 strange enough for me to love you ever, and I could 
 no more have been happy in your friendship, if I had 
 not spoken out now." 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to say that the friendship 
 which survived this piece of correspondence was cool 
 and formal to a degree. Nevertheless, Miss Martineau 
 pretended to herself that she had forgotten all about 
 
Contacts 131 
 
 the painful episode when Margaret appeared at 
 Ambleside ten years later. " I am sure I met her with 
 every desire for friendly intercourse," Miss Martineau 
 protests. Yet Margaret, it appears, from her hostess s 
 lively reminiscences, behaved atrociously. She and 
 the Springs had lodgings in the village, but Miss 
 Martineau otherwise did the honors as hostess. Mar 
 garet s companions, we are told, evidently enjoyed 
 themselves (they had that faculty) but Margaret as 
 evidently did not. One day she would insist on 
 haranguing the whole party incessantly and on the 
 next she would not speak a word to anyone. As Miss 
 Martineau, aided by her convenient deafness, was her 
 self an incessant and uninterruptable talker, her com 
 ments on Margaret s loquaciousness have the familiar 
 flavor of the pot who called the kettle black. At the 
 same time, Margaret s manners, always too aggres 
 sive to be really ladylike, were doubtless not improved 
 by the emotional crisis in which she found herself at 
 this particular time, owing to the position of her 
 affairs with the errant Mr. Nathan. 
 
 The real business in hand between Margaret and 
 her Ambleside hostess was mesmerism. Miss Mar- 
 tineau s experience with the black art and her public 
 defense of it was a notorious Victorian scandal. Mar 
 garet s visit to her was in the nature of an assignment. 
 She had to report back to the Tribune readers on the 
 
132 Margaret Fuller 
 
 state of Miss Martineau s health. The facts of the 
 story are briefly these. After five years of helpless 
 invalidism, which had baffled the doctors, Miss Mar- 
 tineau had been restored to complete health by a short 
 mesmeric treatment under the direction of Mr. At 
 kinson. As she triumphantly puts it, she had " come 
 back unharmed from the land of dreams, . . . while 
 the medical world was hoping to hear of her insanity/ 
 Naturally the medical world resented her inexplicable 
 cure, and the public resented it also. It took a good 
 deal of courage to be on Miss Martineau s side, but 
 Margaret was on her side and so was Elizabeth 
 Barrett. " Carlyle calls Harriet Martineau quite mad 
 because of her belief in mesmerism," wrote Miss 
 Barrett; " for my own part, I am not afraid to say 
 that I almost believe in mesmerism and quite believe 
 in Harriet Martineau." And Margaret sent her re 
 port on the historic case to the Tribune in these words : 
 " From the testimony of those who were with her in 
 and since her illness, her recovery would seem to be 
 of as magical quickness and sure progress as has been 
 represented." Nevertheless Margaret was somewhat 
 puzzled by the case. She noted in her private journal, 
 " The look of health in her face, but a harried, excited, 
 over-stimulated state of mind." 
 
 The truth about Harriet Martineau s illness, of 
 course, was that it was of an hysterical nature, as 
 
Contacts 133 
 
 Margaret s ill-health was hysterical, and Elizabeth 
 Barrett s, and Thomas Carlyle s, and poor, wasted, 
 brilliant Jane Carlyle s. Harriet Martineau s narra 
 tive of how she fell ill is enough to explain the success 
 of her cure, so far as there was a cure. She lived at 
 home with her mother in the role of a dutiful daughter 
 until the age of thirty-eight. Her mother, being blind 
 and exigent, was a most trying parent. Harriet, in 
 the meantime, had become a celebrated author and an 
 active influence in public affairs. The strain of her 
 home life became unendurable; " Heaven knows," she 
 exclaims, " I never sought fame, and I would thank 
 fully have given it all away in exchange for domestic 
 peace and ease. But there it was ! " Obviously there 
 was no escape from her filial duties but to fall ill, 
 which she did, and with complete thoroughness and 
 success. Broken in health, she was compelled to re 
 main at the seashore separated from her mother, and 
 her condition, in spite of the sea air, made no im 
 provement. She suffered for months from the most 
 terrible dreams, in which she seemed to see her 
 mother fall from a precipice, or a staircase, or a 
 church-steeple, and to feel that it was her fault. She 
 wished to show by these dreams how over-anxious 
 and over-dutiful had been her attendance on her be 
 loved parent, but the modern Freudian recognizes in 
 them the revelation of a secret wish which struggled 
 
134 Margaret Fuller 
 
 for birth into consciousness, and can thereby under 
 stand the intensity of the mental conflict to which the 
 health of the faithful daughter had at last succumbed. 
 But mesmerism was the nearest approach to the truth 
 which the year 1846 offered as a clue to illnesses like 
 these and one must give credit to the intelligence of 
 those who, like Harriet Martineau and Margaret 
 Fuller, took it seriously. 
 
 Margaret apparently was not mesmerized while at 
 Ambleside, though it seems incredible that with her 
 thirst for experience she should have allowed the op 
 portunity to slip. Miss Martineau, who might have 
 tried her hand on Margaret as she did with consid 
 erable success on Charlotte Bronte, was not suffi 
 ciently en rapport with her guest. That is clear. But 
 the fascinating and philosophical Mr. Atkinson, who 
 was responsible for Miss Martineau s cure, was also 
 there and he found in Margaret a most sympathetic 
 listener. " The professed magnetizer with his beaux 
 yeux and extreme sensibility," she wrote, "unable 
 to confer benefit without receiving injury, gave me 
 yet another view of this grand subject." Perhaps 
 Margaret s keen enthusiasm for "the prince of the 
 English mesmerizers " as she called him, did not par 
 ticularly increase her hostess s good-will towards her 
 on this occasion. The rapport between herself and 
 Mr. Atkinson continued excellent, as she afterwards 
 
Contacts 135 
 
 saw a good deal of him in London. Still there is 
 no indication in Margaret s notes that she was mes 
 merized by Mr. Atkinson. Did Miss Martineau fail 
 to encourage it? For she was also in London, and 
 now quite angry with Margaret, who treated her, she 
 said, like a commonplace person. But even without 
 the attainment of the mesmeric rapport, Margaret s 
 enthusiastic appreciation of Mr. Atkinson was not 
 without certain happy results for her widowed state of 
 mind. To a confidential friend at home she wrote, 
 "As soon as I reached England, I found how right 
 you were in supposing there was elsewhere a greater 
 range of interesting character among the men, than 
 with us." She added a description of Miss Mar- 
 tineau s mesmerizer, "with a head for Leonardo to 
 paint ", spoke of some artists she had met, and ended 
 by giving the palm to Mazzini. " By far the most 
 beauteous person I have seen is Joseph Mazzini." At 
 the same time she sent a cool message to Mr. James 
 Nathan, her quondam lover, through a common friend, 
 that she had received his letter, " but was too much 
 involved in the routine of visiting and receiving 
 visitors to allow her mind a moment s repose to reply 
 to it." 
 
 For years Margaret had been greatly impressed 
 by the peculiar invalidism of two English women. 
 " Another interesting sign of the time," she had 
 
136 Margaret Fuller 
 
 written, " is the influence exercised by two women, 
 Miss Martineau and Miss Barrett, from their sick 
 rooms. The lamp of life which, if it had been fed 
 only by the affections, and depended on precarious 
 human relations, would scarce have been able to main 
 tain a feeble glare in the lonely prison, now shines far 
 and wide over the nations, cheering fellow-sufferers 
 and hallowing the joy of the healthful." This was all 
 very well, but in reaching England she found that 
 both of her celebrated invalids, who had been so inde 
 pendent of their affections and of precarious human 
 relations, had suddenly ceased to be invalids, resumed 
 their human relations, and developed their affections. 
 As soon as she left Miss Martineau, she went at once 
 to Miss Barrett with her letters of introduction only 
 to find that she, as well as Miss Martineau, had made 
 a spectacular recovery. Margaret posted a letter back 
 to Mr. Duyckinck in New York at once. " Miss 
 Barrett has just eloped with Browning; she had to 
 elope, Mr. Howe says, from a severe, hard father. 
 The influence of this father seems to have been crush 
 ing. I hope she may now be happy and well, perhaps 
 I shall see them her and Browning in Italy." The 
 elopement of the forty-year-old daughter had brought 
 to light all the details of the father s morbid conduct, 
 how he had mounted guard over the sick-room, had 
 refused to permit his daughter to move from her sofa, 
 
Contacts 137 
 
 and had prayed over her presumably incurable illness. 
 Margaret arrived in London just in time for the 
 avalanche of gossip which followed the astounding 
 elopement. These events naturally gave her much 
 food for thought concerning the psychic cause and 
 cure of illness. And when she herself went to a per 
 formance of Don Giovanni, after having suffered for 
 several days from a severe neuralgic pain and came 
 away realizing that the opera had cured her, she was 
 moved to set down her opinion of these matters in 
 her Tribune letter. " Ah ! if physicians only under 
 stood the influence of the mind over the body, instead 
 of treating, as they so often do, their patients like 
 machines, and according to precedent." 
 
 It would seem as if Margaret had every reason to 
 be impressed by this idea during her visit in England. 
 In the home of the Carlyles, another goal of her 
 pilgrimage, it was the same story of inexplicable 
 physical misery over again. Only in this case, there 
 seemed to be no cure or amelioration in sight. Mar 
 garet must have seen the emotional strain between the 
 Carlyles at its .worst for this was the year when Mrs. 
 Carlyle was ready for desperate remedies, and, but for 
 the restraining influence of Mazzini, might have 
 actually deserted. Mazzini told her to go home and 
 find her solace in communion with her dead parents, 
 which she literally did for another twenty years, untif 
 
138 Margaret Fuller 
 
 she died and was laid beside her father in the Had- 
 dington churchyard. Margaret Fuller visited these 
 sad companions midway of the long, unnatural mar 
 riage described on Mrs. Carlyle s tombstone thus: 
 " For forty years she was the true and ever-loving 
 help-mate of her husband ". It was a sham marriage 
 to the end, owing to Carlyle s impotence, and the ter 
 rible weight of morbidity, the dyspepsia and neuralgia 
 which pursued them like a plague, was the result of the 
 unhealthy asceticism in which they lived. 
 
 To Emerson, the Carlyle menage was idyllic. He 
 had sent Margaret to them with the warmest letters 
 of introduction. Margaret was also introduced by her 
 book on Woman, which Jane Carlyle, along with 
 many other Londoners, had read. " I have been re 
 ceived here with a warmth which surprised me," wrote 
 Margaret to Mr. Duyckinck, " it is chiefly to Woman 
 in the ipth that I am indebted for this." She went to 
 the Carlyles several times, and recognized that the 
 situation was not idyllic by any means. Of Carlyle, 
 she said, " He seems to me quite isolated, lonely as 
 the desert." 
 
 She had never accepted Carlyle at Emerson s valua 
 tion. Her review of Oliver Cromwell had contained 
 many strictures on Carlyle s views of life and she had 
 read some early letters of his which fell into her hands 
 in Liverpool and which contained, she noted, " very 
 
Contacts 139 
 
 low views of life, comfortable and prudential advice 
 as to marriage, envy of riches, thirst for fame avowed 
 as a leading motive." Now at last she saw him face 
 to face in his home at Chelsea. "For a couple of 
 hours," she said, " he was talking about poetry and 
 the whole harangue was one eloquent proclamation of 
 the defects of his own mind. . . . The most amus 
 ing part is when he comes back to some refrain, as 
 in the French Revolution of the sea-green. In this 
 instance, it was Petrarch and Laura, the last word 
 pronounced with his ineffable sarcasm of drawl. 
 Although he said this over fifty times, I could not help 
 laughing when Laura would come, Carlyle running 
 his chin out, when he spoke it, and his eyes glancing 
 till they looked like the eyes and beak of a bird of 
 prey ! Poor Laura ! Lucky for her that her poet had 
 already got her safely canonized beyond the reach of 
 this Teufelsdrock vulture." It is a question whether 
 the " Laura " he so bitterly inveighed against was 
 safely out of reach of all this frustrate vindictive- 
 ness. " Mrs. Carlyle sat by in silence," Margaret 
 said, "who can speak while her husband is there?" 
 The Carlyles gave a dinner party in their Chelsea 
 house for Margaret and George Henry Lewes. It was 
 s fitting that Mr. Carlyle should thus seek to bring 
 together the two foremost Goethe critics of the day. 
 But the meeting was not a success ; certainly there was 
 
140 Margaret Fuller 
 
 no rapport from Margaret s point of view. Lewes was 
 engaged in writing the Life of Goethe which Margaret 
 had once dreamed of writing but had been forced to 
 abandon for school-teaching in Providence. George 
 Eliot was not at the party; she had not yet come to 
 London, being still at home in Coventry with her aged 
 father. Lewes antagonized Margaret Fuller at first 
 sight, as much as he attracted Marian Evans. Mar 
 garet never could endure vivacious men. She de 
 scribed him as " a witty, French, flippant sort of 
 man," and as for his writing a Life of Goethe, she 
 thought that " a task for which he must be as unfit 
 as irreligion and sparkling shallowness can make 
 him." Notwithstanding this priggish denunciation of 
 her fellow-critic, who probably had traits uncom 
 fortably suggestive of her own, Margaret s life and 
 Lewes s developed a certain sympathetic relationship 
 in after years. They were both explained as acting in 
 imitation of Goethe in their unconventional marriages. 
 It is also very probable that George Eliot was more 
 directly influenced by Margaret than by the example 
 of Goethe. The following passage in a letter, written 
 to a friend not long before her departure with Lewes 
 for the continent, seems to prove it. "You know 
 how sad one feels when the great procession has swept 
 by one, and the last notes of its music have died away, 
 leaving one alone with the field and sky. I feel so 
 
Contacts (141 
 
 about life sometimes. It is a help to read such a life 
 as Margaret Fuller s. How inexpressibly touching 
 that passage from her Journal, I shall always reign 
 through the intellect, but the life! the life! oh, my 
 God! shall that never be sweet? I am thankful, as 
 if for myself, that it was sweet at last." Thus Mar 
 garet s life, despite its tragical end, helped Marian 
 Evans to have the courage to live her own. Destiny 
 made her in spite of herself, the ally of this " witty r 
 French, flippant sort of man " after all. 
 
 Margaret and the Springs arrived in Paris in time 
 to spend Christmas there. Here again she found her 
 self not wholly unknown. Her essay on American 
 Literature had been translated into French and pub 
 lished in La Revue Independente, and Margaret was 
 asked by the editor of the journal to write for it after 
 her return to the United States. She saw La Mennais 
 and Beranger and heard Chopin play. " I went to call 
 on La Mennais, to whom I had a letter," she writes. 
 " I found him in a little study ; his secretary was writ 
 ing in a larger room through which I passed. With 
 him was a somewhat citizen-looking, but vivacious, 
 elderly man, whom I was at first sorry to see, having 
 wished for half-an-hour s undisturbed visit to the 
 apostle of Democracy. But how quickly were those 
 feelings displaced by joy when he named to me the 
 great national lyrist of France, the unequaled 
 
142 Margaret Fuller 
 
 Beranger. I had not expected to see him at all, for 
 he is not one to be seen in any show place ; he lives in 
 the hearts of the people, and needs no homage from 
 their eyes. I was very happy in that little study in the 
 presence of these two men, whose influence has been 
 so great, so real." 
 
 One of Margaret s most vivid Parisian adventures 
 was in the dentist s chair. Perhaps because she had 
 failed to try mesmerism in England, she now had to 
 try ether in Paris. " After suffering several days 
 very much with the toothache, I resolved to get rid of 
 the cause of sorrow by the aid of ether; not sorry, 
 either, to try its efficacy, after all the marvelous 
 stories I had heard. The first time I inhaled it, I did 
 not for several seconds feel the effect, and was just 
 thinking, Alas ! this has not power to soothe nerves 
 so irritable as mine, when suddenly I wandered off, 
 I don t know where, but it was a sensation like wan 
 dering in long garden-walks, and through many alleys 
 of trees, many impressions, but all pleasant and 
 serene. The moment the tube was removed, I started 
 into consciousness, and put my hand to my cheek; but, 
 sad! the throbbing tooth was still there. The dentist 
 said I had not seemed to him insensible. He then 
 gave me the ether in a stronger dose, and this time, 
 I quitted the body instantly, and cannot remember any 
 detail of what I saw and did; but the impression was 
 
Contacts 143 
 
 as in the Oriental tale, where the man has his head in 
 the water an instant only, but in his vision a thousand 
 years seem to have passed. I experienced that same 
 sense of an immense length of time and succession of 
 impressions. . . . Suddenly I seemed to see the old 
 dentist, as I had for the moment before I inhaled the 
 gas, amid his plants, in his night-cap and dressing- 
 gown; in the twilight the figure had somewhat of a 
 Faust-like, magical air, and he seemed to say, C est 
 inutile/ Again I started up, fancying that once more 
 he had not dared to extract the tooth, but it was gone. 
 What is worth noticing is the mental translation I 
 made of his words, which my ear must have caught, 
 for my companion tells me he said, C est la moment, 
 a phrase of just as many syllables, but conveying just 
 the opposite sense." 
 
 The climax of Margaret s experiences in Paris, 
 perhaps the real climax of her life, was her meeting 
 with George Sand. At first Madame Sand was at her 
 chateau in the country and Margaret despaired of 
 seeing her. " At last, however, she came ; and I went 
 to see her at her house, Place d Orleans. I found it 
 a handsome modern residence. She had not answered 
 my letter, written about a week before, and I felt a 
 little anxious lest she should not receive me; for she is 
 too much the mark of impertinent curiosity, as well 
 as too busy, to be easily accessible to strangers. I am 
 
144 Margaret Fuller 
 
 by no means timid, but I have suffered, for the first 
 time in France, some of the torments of mauvaise 
 honte, enough to see what they must be to many. 
 
 " The servant who admitted me was in the pic 
 turesque costume of a peasant, and, as Madame Sand 
 afterward told me, her goddaughter, whom she had 
 brought from her province. She announced me as, 
 Madame Salere/ and returned into the anteroom to 
 tell me, Madame says she does not know you. I 
 began to think I was doomed to a rebuff, among the 
 crowd who deserve it. However, to make assurance 
 sure, I said, Ask if she has not received a letter from 
 me? 
 
 "As I spoke, Madame Sand opened the door and 
 stood looking at me an instant. Our eyes met. I 
 shall never forget her look at that moment. The door 
 way made a frame for her figure; she is large, but 
 well-formed. She was dressed in a robe of dark violet 
 silk, with a black mantle on her shoulders, her beau 
 tiful hair dressed with the greatest taste, her whole 
 appearance and attitude, in its simple, and ladylike 
 dignity, presenting an almost ludicrous contrast to the 
 vulgar caricature of George Sand. Her face is very 
 little like the portraits, but much finer; the upper part 
 of the forehead and eyes are beautiful, the lower, 
 strong and masculine, expressive of a hardy tempera 
 ment and strong passions, but not in the least coarse; 
 
Contacts 145 
 
 the complexion olive, and the air of the whole head 
 Spanish (as, indeed, she was born at Madrid, and is 
 only on one side of French blood). All these details 
 I saw at a glance; but what fixed my attention was 
 the expression of goodness, nobleness, and power, that 
 pervaded the whole ; the truly human heart and nature 
 that shone in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, 
 C est vous , and held out her hand. I took it, and 
 went into her little study; we sat down a moment, 
 then I said, II me fait de bien de vous voir , and I 
 am sure I said it with my whole heart, for it made 
 me very happy to see such a woman, so large and so 
 developed a character, and everything that is good 
 in it so really good. I loved, shall always love 
 her. . . . 
 
 " She was very much pressed for time, as she was 
 then preparing copy for the printer; and, having just 
 returned, there were many applications to see her, but 
 she wanted me to stay then, saying, It is better to 
 throw things aside and seize the present moment . I 
 stayed a good part of the day, and was very glad 
 afterwards, for I did not see her again uninter 
 rupted. . . . 
 
 " Her daughter is just about to be married. It is 
 said, there is no congeniality between her and her 
 mother ; but for her son she seems to have much love, 
 and he loves and admires her extremely. . . . 
 
146 Margaret Fuller 
 
 " I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich, so prolific, 
 so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her, too, 
 very much; I never liked a woman better. For the 
 rest, I do not care to write about it much, for I can 
 not, in the room and time I have to spend, express 
 my thoughts as I would ; but as near as I can express 
 
 the sum-total, it is this. S and others who admire 
 
 her, are anxious to make a fancy picture of her, and 
 represent her as a Helena (in the Seven Chords of 
 the Lyre) ; all whose mistakes are the fault of the 
 present state of society. But to me, the truth seems 
 to be this. She has that purity in her soul, for she 
 knows well how to love and prize its beauty; but she 
 herself is quite another sort of person. She needs no 
 defense, but only to be understood, for she has bravely 
 acted out her nature, and always with good intentions. 
 She might have loved one man permanently, if she 
 could have found one contemporary with her who 
 could interest and command her throughout her 
 range; but there was hardly a possibility for that, for 
 such a person. Thus she has naturally changed the 
 objects of her affection, and several times. Also 
 there may have been something of the Bacchante in 
 her life, and of the love of night and storm, and the 
 free raptures amid which roamed on the mountain- 
 tops the followers of Cybele, the great goddess, the 
 great mother. But she was never coarse, never gross, 
 
Contacts 147 
 
 and I am sure her generous heart has not failed to 
 draw some rich drops from every kind of wine-press. 
 When she has done with an intimacy, she likes to 
 break it off suddenly, and this has happened often, 
 both with men and women. Many calumnies upon 
 her are traceable to this cause. 
 
 " I forgot to mention that, while talking, she does 
 smoke all the time her little cigarette. This is now a 
 common practice among ladies abroad, but I believe 
 originated with her. 
 
 " For the rest, she holds her place in the literary 
 and social world of France like a man, and seems full 
 of energy and courage in it. I suppose she has suf 
 fered much but she has also enjoyed and done much, 
 and her expression is one of calmness and happiness." 
 
 Margaret had of course had many varying accounts 
 of George Sand before she saw her face to face. In 
 London she had had the view of Mazzini who was 
 George Sand s great advocate and defender before 
 the British public and to whom Sand seemed the 
 " voice of down-trodden womanhood." Margaret s 
 vision was as little confused by the martyr s halo as 
 by the caricatures; she saw the woman as she was. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 HER DEBT TO NATURE 
 
 ON the journey from Paris to Italy, Margaret made 
 two stops. The first was in Lyons, where she visited 
 the weavers garrets and saw with her own eyes what 
 she had heard of in Paris. The second stop was at 
 Avignon, where, finding " the banks of the Rhone still 
 sheeted with white," she " waded through melting 
 snow to Laura s tomb." 
 
 At last, she was in Italy, at Aries. " I saw the little 
 saxifrage blossoming on the steps of the amphitheater, 
 and fruit trees in flower amid the tombs. Here for 
 the first time I saw the great handwriting of the 
 Romans and its proper medium of stone, and I was 
 content. It looked as grand and solid as I expected, 
 as if life in those days was worth the having, the en 
 joying, and the using." 
 
 Margaret Fuller must be included in the long list 
 of famous people who have loved Italy and Rome with 
 all the ardor of a personal love. This list includes 
 Hannibal and Winkelmann, Shelley and Byron, Eliza 
 beth Barrett and Margaret Fuller, Goethe and Freud. 
 " I may say that only in Rome have I felt what it is 
 
 148 
 
Her Debt to Nature 149 
 
 to be a man," said Goethe in his old age. " Compared 
 with my situation at Rome I may say I have never 
 since known happiness." As a school-mistress at 
 Providence, Margaret had translated these words and 
 they had got into her blood, intensifying a longing 
 early derived from her childhood acquaintance with 
 the classics. All the romanticists of Margaret s gen 
 eration made love to Rome. " Rome, my Rome, city 
 of the soul," said Byron; and amid the austerities of 
 New England life, Margaret s homesickness for Rome 
 developed an actual intention. Rome, the glamorous, 
 the unattainable all imaginative souls who chafed 
 under the repressions of a Puritan civilization dreamed 
 of Rome as the symbol of love and freedom. The 
 motivation of all this passion for a place is analyzed 
 by Freud, out of his own experience, for apparently 
 he has himself known the pains and pleasures of this 
 peculiar Rome-wish. He tells how he used to dream 
 of going to Rome, and adds, " I suppose I shall still 
 have to satisfy this longing by means of dreams for 
 a long time to come." Some years afterwards, he 
 added this illuminating footnote : " I have long since 
 learned that it only requires a little courage to fulfil 
 even such unattainable wishes." This passage from 
 Freud expresses Margaret s feelings, when, after all 
 the long years of delay she at last found herself in 
 the promised land. 
 
150 Margaret Fuller 
 
 But emotional ideals, however firmly rooted in the 
 instincts, cannot stand up empty any more than meal- 
 sacks. Margaret brought to Italy and the Italian 
 situation an educational equipment of which an Italian 
 citizen might well have been proud. She was well- 
 read in Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Foscolo, Alfieri, 
 Manzoni, and Mazzini. Italy was crowded with 
 memories for her ; she had been there so often through 
 the medium of books and the lives of her heroes. 
 " We climbed the hill to Assisi," she writes. " I looked 
 back and saw the carriage toiling up the steep path, 
 drawn by a pair of those light-colored oxen Shelley 
 so much admired. I stood near the spot where Goethe 
 met with a little adventure, which he has described 
 with even more than his usual delicate humor. Who 
 can ever be alone for a moment in Italy ? " All her 
 life had been a preparation for this visit. At last, on 
 her thirty-seventh birthday, her goal was achieved and 
 she found herself in Rome. 
 
 During the month of May, she grew familiar with 
 every aspect of St. Peter s, the view from the dome 
 over the city and " its Campagna, its villas with their 
 cypresses and pines serenely sad as is nothing else in 
 the world." She loved the torch-lit scene of the 
 " stone popes where they lie on their tombs, and the 
 old mosaics, and virgins with gilt caps " . . . " St. 
 Peter s," she said, " is a mixture of sublimest heaven 
 
Her Debt to Nature 151 
 
 with corruptest earth; " the hours she spent there were 
 " the splendidest part of her life." 
 
 In this mood, she encountered a very handsome 
 stranger after vespers on Holy Thursday and walked 
 home with him from the Vatican to the Corso. Mrs. 
 Story wrote a careful account of how Margaret was 
 looking for her friends, the Springs, peering through 
 her glasses at the crowd, when a gallant young Italian 
 came up and offered his services. But the Springs had 
 conveniently disappeared, there was no carriage in the 
 usual place outside, and so the chivalrous stranger 
 escorted the American lady to her lodgings. The next 
 day he was seen walking past the house, after which 
 the affair lost its clandestine air and the young man 
 became conventionally attached to the party as Mar 
 garet s constant caller and attentive escort. 
 
 He turned out to be an impoverished Marchese, / 
 about ten years younger than Margaret, and the 
 youngest son of the family. He had three older 
 brothers, who were in the Papal service, while the old 
 Marquese was the official head of a Roman rione or 
 ward. Thus it appears that the Ossolis were consid 
 erably involved in Roman politics, which must have 
 had a familiar appeal for Margaret. Old Ossoli was 
 in his last illness when she appeared on the scene, and 
 Angelo, still living at home without any definite 
 career, was engaged in nursing his father. The old 
 
i 2 Margaret Fuller 
 
 Marquese died, and Margaret received the young 
 man straight from the hands of his father, as he was, 
 without ability or ambition in any direction, with 
 intense and clinging affections, and with unusual per 
 sonal beauty. An American sculptor in Rome declared 
 that Ossoli was the most beautiful man he had ever 
 seen. 
 
 He was absolutely without vivacity, being reserved 
 and silent in his manners and marked by a rather 
 melancholy expression. Though Margaret often re 
 proached Emerson because he would not laugh " in a 
 cordial human fashion," she never really liked any 
 man who did. Her young Roman, whom she had 
 traveled so far to find, was as much of a Puritan in 
 manners and disposition as if she had found him in 
 Cambridgeport. Writing to her mother, Margaret 
 said that Ossoli had ways that reminded her of her 
 brother Eugene. 
 
 To a bluestocking like Margaret, who had sacri 
 ficed the very best years of her life to putting her 
 brothers through college and who inherited a supreme 
 reverence for the Harvard degree, the ignorance of 
 her Ossoli must have seemed appalling. His educa 
 tion had been in the hands of a lazy priest who had 
 neglected him, so that books and reading played no 
 part in his grown-up life. By the side of the woman 
 who read " at a rate like Gibbon s," her handsome 
 
Her Debt to Nature 153 
 
 lover seemed almost illiterate; but by the side of the 
 average gentleman of his own class in Italy, perhaps 
 his education would have made a much better show 
 ing. One cannot know; one only knows that Mar 
 garet, anxious not to over-praise him in her letters 
 home, for obvious reasons, explained that he had no 
 intellectual interests and no taste for books. Antici 
 pating the first impression he would make on her 
 Transcendental friends, she may have even under 
 estimated his abilities in the hope of creating a fa 
 vorable rather than a disappointing surprise. 
 
 The facts, however, are that Ossoli played the part 
 of a judicious conspirator and a brave officer in the 
 Roman Revolution. But, though he joined the lib 
 erals in fighting the Pope, he clung to his ancestral 
 religion and cherished its fantasies and superstitions. 
 He went regularly to vesper service, even after his 
 marriage, and Margaret, far from discouraging his 
 simple piety, often went with him. She respected 
 what she described as the " profound myths " of the 
 Catholic Church. " Indeed," she remarked, " such 
 things need to be judged of by another standard than 
 the Connecticut Blue-Laws ". Margaret herself had 
 traveled a long way from the Puritanical standards of 
 her early environment. She could comprehend George 
 Sand and the Roman Catholic Church, and knew that 
 humanity included more things than the code of John 
 
154 Margaret Fuller 
 
 Cotton had ever dreamed of. Henry James said, 
 " There might be ways for her of being vivid that 
 were not as the ways of Boston." 
 
 After the meeting with Ossoli in May, Margaret 
 and her friends left Rome in June, journeying north 
 ward. The plan was to visit Assisi, Perugia, Florence, 
 Bologna, Venice, Verona, Mantua, and Milan; after 
 that, Switzerland; then Germany; and from there back 
 to England before returning home. But no sooner 
 had the party arrived in Florence than Margaret began 
 to lay plans for returning to Rome. At first, she de 
 cided to go with her companions as far as Switzer 
 land and then turn back for the autumn. But she 
 ended by falling ill in Venice, and stopping there 
 while the Springs went on according to their original 
 plans. She followed along the same route later, stop 
 ping long enough in Milan to become deeply interested 
 in revolutionary plans in which Milan was already far 
 advanced. She spent the summer s end in Switzer 
 land, and by the first of October was back in Rome 
 and settled for the winter in a furnished room, which 
 she dignified by the name of an " apartment." 
 
 With her decision to desert the Springs, she gave 
 up all the comforts and conveniences of traveling in 
 their company. She wrote to her brother for four 
 hundred dollars and planned to make it last her six 
 months. " I should always suffer the pain of Tantalus, 
 
Her Debt to Nature 155 
 
 thinking of Rome, if I could not see it more thor 
 oughly than I have as yet even begun to." She took 
 a room again in the Corso, where she could see all 
 the motions of Rome " in tranquil companionship, not 
 in the restless impertinence of sight-seeing/ In the 
 same strain, she wrote to Marcus Spring in Germany, 
 which had lost all charm for Margaret. " All other 
 places faded away, now that I again saw St. Peter s 
 and heard the music of the fountains." She found 
 some encouragement for her recklessness in a meeting 
 with William Wetmore Story, also late of Boston, 
 who had finally given up the law for an artist s life 
 in Italy. 
 
 Margaret s intimacy with Angelo Ossoli dated from 
 her return to Rome. Apparently she did not intend to 
 be married to him, for she regarded the marriage as 
 unsuitable in many ways. The difference in their ages 
 and interests and the similarity in their poverty made 
 the union seem impossible. But her fate pursued her 
 swiftly and before Christmas, she knew that she was 
 to have a child. What she had entered upon as a 
 perishable romance would have to be perpetuated as 
 life-long common struggle for existence. Her four 
 hundred dollars for six months was suddenly most 
 pitifully inadequate; Ossoli, it seems, had no resources; 
 and the kind, affectionate Springs were too far away 
 to help. In her crisis, she could look nowhere for 
 
156 Margaret Fuller 
 
 protection and aid. She wrote to her old friend 
 Caroline Sturgis all but the actual facts of her situa 
 tion. " I have known some happy hours, but they 
 all lead to sorrow; and not only the cups of wine, but 
 of milk, seem drugged with poison for me. It does 
 not seem to be my fault, this Destiny; I do not court 
 these things, they come. I am a poor magnet, with 
 power to be wounded by the bodies I attract. . . . 
 
 " When I arrived in Rome, I was at first intoxicated 
 to be here. The weather was beautiful, and many cir 
 cumstances combined to place me in a kind of passive, 
 childlike well-being. That is all over now, and, with 
 this year, I enter upon a sphere of my destiny so dif 
 ficult, that I, at present, see no way out, except through 
 the gate of death. It is useless to write of it; you are 
 at a distance and cannot help me; whether accident 
 or angel will, I have no intimation. I have no reason 
 to hope I shall not reap what I have sown, and do not. 
 Yet how I shall endure it I cannot guess; it is all a 
 dark, sad enigma. The beautiful forms of art charm 
 no more, and a love, in which there is all fondness 
 but no help, flatters in vain." 
 
 The tone of her Tribune correspondence showed 
 the depression of her spirits. She described the 
 Christmas festivities and the worship of the Catholic 
 bambino with touches of realistic irony. " A faint 
 and misty gleam of sun greeted the day on which 
 
Her Debt to Nature 157 
 
 there was the feast of the Bambino, the most venerated 
 date of Rome. ... It has received more splendid 
 gifts than any other idol. An orphan, by my side, 
 now struggling with difficulties [probably the penni 
 less Ossoli] showed me on its breast a splendid jewel, 
 which a doting grandmother thought more likely to 
 benefit her soul if given to the Bambino, than if 
 turned into money to give her grandchildren educa 
 tion and prospects in life." She went again to the 
 grand feast in honor of the Bambino and watched 
 with a peculiar fascination a man who knelt long with 
 bowed head before the image and seemed to her to 
 be in an anguish of prayer, as she said, " either from 
 repentance or anxiety." " I wished I could have 
 hoped the ugly little doll would do him any good/* 
 she added, rather spitefully. 
 
 Her attentions to the rich Bambino during Christ 
 mas week were varied by a visit to another church 
 to see a nun take the veil. " The nun, an elegantly 
 dressed woman of five or six and twenty, pretty 
 enough, but whose quite worldly air gave the idea that 
 it was one of those arrangements made because no 
 suitable establishment could otherwise be given her, 
 came forward, knelt, and prayed. Her confessor, 
 in that strained, unnatural whine too common among 
 all preachers and all countries, praised himself for 
 having induced her to enter on a path which would 
 
158 Margaret Fuller 
 
 lead her fettered steps from palm to palm, from 
 triumph to triumph! Poor thing! She looked as if 
 domestic olives and poppies were all she wanted, and 
 lacking these, tares and wormwood must be her por 
 tion. She was then taken behind a grating, her hair 
 cut, and her clothes exchanged for the nun s vestments ; 
 the black-robed sisters who worked upon her looking 
 like crows or ravens at their ominous feast. . . . 
 The effect on my mind was revolting and painful to 
 the last degree." She dwelt at length on the horror 
 of this young woman s future, in order to reassure 
 herself, no doubt, and ended with the statement that 
 it was her own conviction, that "the snares of the 
 world are less dangerous than the demons of soli 
 tude." Margaret had tried both in her life, and she 
 1 realized that her present situation with its actual dan 
 gers was safer after all than her solitary year of 
 fantasies in Boston, with its midnight visitants from 
 other worlds and its mystic ecstasies. With her char 
 acteristic honesty, she wrote to Emerson, " Some 
 years ago, I thought you were unjust, because you 
 did not lend faith to my spiritual experiences; but I 
 see you were quite right." 
 
 But her consciousness of fulfilment was her only 
 solace in the midst of difficulties. The romantic 
 glamour had fled from her world; the picturesque 
 drama of Catholicism had lost its savor. It was a 
 
Her Debt to Nature 159 
 
 real comfort now to criticize the show. The Church, 
 for all its Madonna worship and its veneration of 
 female saints, did not provide proper seats for women, 
 she said. "All the good seats were for the men in 
 the area below, but in the gallery windows and from 
 the organ loft, a few women were allowed to peep 
 at what was going on. I was one of these exceptional 
 characters." She forgot all about her recent criti 
 cisms of those objectionable Americans who could 
 not appreciate the poetry and symbolism of the 
 Church and joined their company. " There was once 
 a soul in the religion while the blood of its martyrs 
 was yet fresh on the ground, but that soul was always 
 too much encumbered with the remains of pagan 
 habits and customs; that soul is now quite fled else 
 where and in the splendid catafalco, watched by so 
 many white and red-robed snuff-taking, sly-eyed men, 
 would they let it be opened, nothing would be found 
 but bones!" 
 
 Her marriage with Ossoli took place at some date 
 which Margaret never revealed. Her friend, Mrs. 
 Story, afterwards said it had occurred in December, 
 but this could not have been correct, as Margaret 
 would have had no reason in that case for concealing 
 it. This is all the more remarkable, as she must have 
 known in December that the marriage was necessary. 
 Her reluctance to confirm the tie by marriage must 
 
160 Margaret Fuller 
 
 have been exceedingly great, that she should thus 
 have complicated matters by further postponement. 
 
 It was true that a legalized union, openly acknowl 
 edged, involved a pecuniary risk for them. The 
 Ossoli estate had not yet been settled and Margaret s 
 husband would certainly have been cut off from his 
 portion for having married a Protestant and a radical. 
 Afterwards Margaret gave this as her reason for hav 
 ing so long concealed the marriage. " But/* she 
 wrote to her Italian friend, Madame Arconati, " to 
 you, I add, this is only half the truth." She waited 
 until her child was a year old before she made her 
 announcement, and then withheld the date. 
 
 There is not the least hint that the gentlemanly 
 Ossoli shirked the situation in any regard. On the 
 contrary, his fidelity and affection were unswerving. 
 Without doubt Ossoli was in love. Margaret did not 
 find herself at any time in the conventional role of 
 Gretchen; her husband was her ally against society. 
 Whatever the unknown details were, the affair did not 
 turn out as moralists would predict. There is a com 
 mon assumption that a young man cannot entertain 
 a romantic attachment for an older woman. So 
 strongly established is this opinion that we find Mar 
 garet s biographers preoccupied with proofs that 
 Ossoli really did love his American wife and that he 
 did not marry her for her money! Even the testi- 
 
Her Debt to Nature 161 
 
 mony of the American consul at Turin is solemnly 
 brought forward. He wrote to Mr. Emerson, who 
 apparently wanted to be shown, " It is abundantly 
 evident that her young husband discharged all the 
 obligations of his relation to her con amore. His 
 admiration amounted to veneration, and her yearning 
 to be loved seemed at last to be satisfied." Whether 
 the consular seal helped to convince Emerson is un 
 fortunately not on record. 
 
 The puzzle was a double one. It had two members : 
 How could Ossoli marry a woman so much older than 
 himself and altogether without beauty? and, How 
 could Margaret, with all her culture, marry a man 
 without intellect or education? The answer to the 
 puzzle is that he loved her for her age and dignity 
 and authority, she loved him for his youth and beauty. 
 He filled up the place left vacant in her life by her 
 favorite brother Eugene and she restored in his the 
 long-cherished maternal image. Margaret wrote to 
 her mother this description of her husband : " He has, 
 I think, even a more holy feeling about a mother, 
 from having lost his own, when very small. It has 
 been a life-long want with him. He often shows me 
 a little scar on his face, made by a jealous dog, when 
 his mother was caressing him as an infant. He prizes 
 that blemish much." On the basis of these older and 
 more intense relationships, they had discovered a pro- 
 
162 Margaret Fuller 
 
 found affinity for each other. Probably there was 
 something in Margaret which always represented la 
 madre to Ossoli, for all who saw them together re 
 marked on the " veneration " which was a part of his 
 attitude towards her. 
 
 The constancy of Margaret s Italian lover is in 
 striking contrast to the fickleness of Mary Wollstone- 
 craft s American captain. Ossoli was constitutionally 
 faithful just as the dashing Imlay was constitutionally 
 unfaithful. Imlay s behavior conformed to that of 
 the villain in the moral story-books, but Ossoli demon 
 strated that all men do not represent invariably the 
 same erotic type. 
 
 From the time she visited Milan, Margaret was 
 actively involved in the plans for the Roman revolu 
 tion. Her efforts had been enlisted in London, where 
 a plan had been formed, though for some reason aban 
 doned, for Mr. Marcus Spring s party to smuggle 
 Mazzini into Italy. Once settled in Rome for the 
 winter, Margaret enlisted her lover in the republican 
 cause, though all the rest of his family were intensely 
 conservative. He became, like herself, an ardent and 
 loyal supporter of Mazzini and his party. 
 
 From January until Carnival, Margaret was hardly 
 able to leave her room. She attributed her ill-health 
 to the miserable weather and wrote some spirited 
 accounts of the " unspeakably dejecting " Roman 
 
Her Debt to Nature 163 
 
 winter. " It has been dark all day, though the lamp 
 has only been lit half an hour. The music of the day 
 has been, first the atrocious arias, which last in the 
 Corso till near noon, though certainly less in virulence 
 on rainy days. Then came the wicked organ-grinder, 
 who, apart from the horror of the noise, grinds 
 exactly the same obsolete abominations as at home or 
 in England. . . . Within, the three pet dogs of my 
 landlady, bereft of their walk, unable to employ their 
 miserable legs and eyes, exercise themselves by a 
 continual barking, which is answered by all the dogs 
 in the neighborhood. . . . The door-bell rings. 
 Chi e? Who is it? cries the handmaid, with 
 unweariable senselessness, as if anyone would answer, 
 Rogue, or Enemy, instead of the traditionary Amico, 
 Friend. Can it be, perchance, a letter, news of home, 
 or some of the many friends who have neglected so 
 long to write, or some ray of hope to break the clouds 
 of the difficult Future? Far from it. Enter a man, 
 poisoning me at once with the smell of the worst pos 
 sible cigars, not to be driven out, insisting I shall look 
 upon frightful, ill-cut cameos, and worse-designed 
 mosaics, made by some friend of his, who works in a 
 chamber and will sell so cheap. Man of ill-odors and 
 meanest smile! I am no countess to be fooled by 
 you. . . . 
 
 " Pour, pour, pour again, dark as night many peo- 
 
164 Margaret Fuller 
 
 pie coming in to see me because they don t know 
 what to do with themselves. I am very glad to see 
 them for the same reason; this atmosphere is so 
 heavy, I seem to carry the weight of the world on my 
 head and feel unfitted for every exertion. As to 
 eating, that is a by-gone thing; wine, coffee, meat, I 
 have resigned; vegetables are few and hard to have, 
 except horrible cabbage, in which the Romans delight. 
 A little rice still remains, which I take with pleasure, 
 remembering it growing in the rich fields of Lom- 
 bardy, so green and full of glorious light. That light 
 fell still more beautiful on the tall plantations of hemp, 
 but it is dangerous just at present to think of what 
 is made from hemp." 
 
 By May her health and spirits were restored and 
 she was able to work at her writing-table again, set 
 ting down her current impressions. " I sit in my 
 obscure corner, and watch the progress of events. 
 . . . Everything confirms me in my radicalism ; and, 
 without any desire to hasten matters, indeed with sur 
 prise to see them rush so like a torrent I seem to see 
 them tending to realize my own hopes! ... It 
 would appear that the political is being merged in the 
 social struggle: it is well." 
 
 Early in the summer, Margaret left Rome and 
 went up into the Abruzzi mountains. She settled in 
 Aquila, planning to await there the birth of her child 
 
Her Debt to Nature 165 
 
 and to work on her book. June in Aquila was radi 
 antly beautiful. " I am in the midst of a theater of 
 glorious snow-crowned mountains, whose pedestals 
 are garlanded with the olive and mulberry, and along 
 whose sides run bridle-paths, fringed with almond 
 groves and vineyards. The valleys are yellow with 
 saffron flowers; the grain fields enameled with the 
 brilliant blue corn-flower and red poppy. . . . The 
 spirits of the dead crowd me in most solitary places." 
 Most of her time was devoted to writing, but several 
 hours of each day were spent out of doors, in walks 
 or in riding on a donkey. She amused herself by tell 
 ing the peasants the legends of their own saints and 
 the peasants were disturbed about her. " E sempre 
 sola soletta," they said, " eh perche? " 
 
 She made the acquaintance of an old nobleman who 
 showed her in his family archives some manuscript 
 letters of Tasso. But as the summer advanced she 
 grew very lonely. " If it were only possible to be 
 nearer to you," she wrote to Ossoli, " for, except for 
 the good air and the security, this place does not please 
 me." In July she moved down into the foot-hills, and 
 settled herself in the village of Rieti, which could be 
 reached by diligence from Rome in one night s 
 journey. 
 
 In Rieti, her hard times set in. At first, she saw 
 only the picturesque side of her retreat, " a little, red- 
 
1 66 Margaret Fuller 
 
 brown nest/ settled by the aborigines of Italy, " long 
 before Rome was." ..." The rapid Velino makes 
 almost the circuit of its walls, on its way to Terni. 
 I had my apartment shut out from the family, on the 
 bank of this river, and saw the mountains, as I lay 
 on my restless couch. There was a piazza, too, or, 
 as they call it here, a loggia, which hung over the 
 river, where I walked most of the night, for I could 
 not sleep at all in those nights. In the wild autumn 
 storms, the stream became a roaring torrent, con 
 stantly lit up by lightning flashes, and the sound of its 
 rush was very sublime. I see it yet as it swept away 
 on its dark green current the heaps of burning straw 
 which the children let down from the bridge." Over 
 this bridge came the diligence from Rome, bringing 
 letters and journals from Ossoli and sometimes, on 
 Sunday mornings, the dark young captain himself. 
 " Do not fail to come/ says one of Margaret s letters, 
 " I shall have your coffee warm. You will arrive 
 early, and I can see the diligence pass the bridge from 
 my window/ 
 
 But Rieti was a village and in some respects not 
 unlike Cambridgeport, as Margaret discovered to 
 her cost. "At the barber s, the druggist s, the 
 cafe, they sit and digest the copious slander, chief 
 product of this, as of every little hive of men," she 
 said. Doubtless they suspected some irregularity in 
 
Her Debt to Nature 167 
 
 the relations between the English lady, as they took 
 her to be, and her handsome Roman husband. They 
 also thought that all Inglesi were exceedingly rich and 
 plundered poor Margaret in every way. These im 
 pressions and suspicions prepared the way for serious 
 consequences when Margaret later left her baby there 
 and was cut off from all communication during the 
 siege of Rome. 
 
 From the early part of August, the child was ex 
 pected. And now a sudden turn in political events 
 threatened to deprive Margaret of her only friend. 
 Pio Nono ordered the civic guard, in which Ossoli 
 was now captain, to go to the defense of Bologna. 
 " My state is the most deplorable that can be," wrote 
 the young man. " I have had an extraordinary 
 struggle. If your condition were not such as it is, I 
 could decide more easily, but in the present moment, 
 I cannot leave you." To which Margaret replied, "If 
 it is possible for you to wait for two or three weeks, 
 the public state will be determined, as well also 
 mine, and you can make your decision with more 
 tranquillity. ... It troubles me much that I can 
 tell you nothing certain of myself, but am still in the 
 same waiting state. ... If you do not come, I shall 
 expect a letter from you on Sunday, . . . also the 
 last of those Milanese papers. Poor friends, shut up 
 there. I wish so much for some certain intelligence of 
 
1 68 Margaret Fuller 
 
 their fate. . . . Adieu, dear; our misfortunes are 
 many and unlocked for, not often does destiny demand 
 a greater price for some happy moments. Never do 
 I repent of our affection, and for you, if not for me, 
 I hope that life has still some good in store." 
 
 The Pope rescinded the order to the troops, and 
 Margaret, in her great relief, found herself a little 
 better. But she could not take much satisfaction in 
 the fact. " It troubles me that this seems rather an 
 indication that I must wait yet longer/* she wrote. 
 " Wait! That is always hard. But if I were sure 
 of doing well I should wish much to pass through 
 this trial before your arrival; yet when I think that 
 it is possible for me to die alone, without the touch 
 of one dear hand, I wish to wait yet longer." 
 
 The child was born on Tuesday, September 5, 1848. 
 He was baptized with the name of Angelo Eugene 
 Philip, for his father, his mother s brother Eugene, 
 and the late Marquese, his grandfather. On Thurs 
 day, the mother was tormented by his crying; on 
 Saturday, she began to take pleasure in watching him ; 
 at the end of twelve days, she was tracing resem 
 blances to his father and herself. At the end of three 
 weeks, she was quite in love with him. The thought 
 of leaving him with strangers became most painful. 
 " He is always so charming, how can I ever, ever 
 leave him ? I wake in the night, I look at him, I think, 
 
Her Debt to Nature 169 
 
 oh! it is impossible to leave him." She was pleased 
 that the child was a boy, though she could not justify 
 her partiality. " As was Eve, at first, I suppose every 
 mother is delighted by the birth of a man-child. There 
 is a hope that he will conquer more ill and effect more 
 good, than is expected from girls. This prejudice in 
 favor of man does not seem to be destroyed by his 
 shortcomings for ages." In the solitude and loneli 
 ness of Rieti, the tendency was for her to center all 
 her affection and attention upon the child; so that, 
 after an absence from him, she had to admit that the 
 removal of her maternal solicitude had not been alto 
 gether bad for him. " I see that he is more serene, 
 is less sensitive, than with me, and sleeps better," she 
 said, on her return after a separation. 
 
 Early in November, when the mountains and ra 
 vines were covered with snow, Margaret returned to 
 Rome. The baby was left with his wet-nurse who put 
 him into little black caps and made him into a real 
 peasant bambino. Margaret s journey proved a dan 
 gerous one, for the Tiber had overflowed its banks 
 and the approaches to Rome were swimming in water. 
 Meadows and roads shone like a sheet of silver in the 
 moonlight. Swimming and plunging, the horses 
 reached the gate at last and the diligence was stopped 
 by the customs officers. Margaret alighted and 
 walked to the Villa Ludovisi and stood looking at the 
 
170 Margaret Fuller 
 
 dark myrtle shrubberies and the pale statues under the 
 Roman moon. Her principal emotion was surprise at 
 finding herself again alive and well in the city she so 
 much loved. " Is it not cruel that I cannot earn six 
 hundred dollars a year living here ? " was her pas 
 sionate thought. 
 
 She took a room at No. 60, Piazza, Barberini, the 
 " quiet, little upper chamber " in which Mrs. Story 
 tells of finding her in March, 1849. Here Margaret 
 spent the winter working on her history of contempo 
 rary events and sending long and detailed accounts 
 to the columns of the Tribune. Her circumstances 
 seemed unchanged, though it was apparent to the 
 Storys that she lived in the most extreme poverty. 
 The faithful Ossoli was as usual in attendance and 
 the Storys were aware that the two were on an inti 
 mate footing. For Margaret wrote to William Story 
 in November soon after her return to Rome, " I have 
 . . . passed this past month of fine weather most 
 delightfully in revisiting my haunts of the autumn 
 before. Then, too, I was uncommonly well and 
 strong; it was the golden period of my Roman life. 
 ... To you I may tell, that I always go with 
 Ossoli, the most congenial companion I ever had for 
 jaunts of this kind. We go out in the morning, car 
 rying the roast chestnuts from Rome; the bread and 
 wine are found in some lonely little osteria ; and so 
 
Her Debt to Nature 171 
 
 we dine; and reach Rome again, just in time to see it, 
 from a little distance, gilded by the sunset." 
 
 But it was not until summer, during the terrible 
 month of the siege, that Margaret told Mrs. Story 
 about her marriage and the child s existence. 
 
 In the summer, communication with Rieti became 
 irregular and was finally broken off. " I often seemed 
 to hear Angelino calling to me amid the roar of the 
 cannon and always his tone was of crying," writes 
 Margaret. Day after day, she stood in the long queue 
 at the post-office under the burning sun, but no news 
 came. Her remittances to Rieti had stopped; there 
 was no longer any way of sending money, even if she 
 had had any, which is doubtful. The ignorant foster- 
 mother at Rieti, not unnaturally disposed to suspect 
 the motives of Nino s mysterious parents, became 
 alarmed and wrote a letter to Margaret in which she 
 threatened to abandon the child altogether if money 
 was not sent immediately. The money, wherever it 
 came from, was instantly dispatched; perhaps it was 
 the Storys who came to the rescue. Margaret after 
 wards declared that all her work during the months 
 of separation from her child had been valueless. " Of 
 at least two volumes written at that time, no line 
 seems of any worth . . . the position of a mother 
 separated from her only child is too frightfully un 
 natural." And yet at the end of this harrowing 
 
172 Margaret Fuller 
 
 experience, when the siege was over and the republic 
 in ruins, Margaret waited to send Mazzini out of the 
 city into safety before she went to the rescue of her 
 little Nino. A mother is after all a complex human 
 being. 
 
 At one time, fearing that both Ossoli and herself 
 might succumb to the bombardment, Margaret begged 
 the Storys to take care of Angelino. The certificate 
 which she showed to Mrs. Story on this occasion and 
 which Mrs. Story afterwards described is impossible 
 to explain. It was written in Latin on parchment and 
 signed by a priest; and it stated that Angelo Eugene 
 Ossoli was the legal heir of whatever title and for 
 tune should come to his father. This was the paper 
 which Mr. Higginson referred to as a marriage cer 
 tificate, thereby provoking from McPhail the sardonic 
 comment that " the name of the heir is not usually 
 specified in such writings." The impressive-looking 
 document, which Margaret herself may have helped 
 to compose and which was signed by the priest who 
 had married them, was a pathetic and ineffectual 
 attempt on her part to outwit what she referred to as 
 the " social inquisition of the United States." A 
 good strong lie would have served her better but it 
 was not in her nature. Because her conscience was so 
 clear, she could not feel the necessity for denying her 
 actions. 
 
Her Debt to Nature 1173 
 
 When the news of Margaret s marriage reached 
 America in the fall of 1849, Fredrika Bremer was 
 staying with the Springs in New York. Not having 
 known Margaret personally, she was present at the 
 social inquisition in the role, more or less, of an out 
 sider. In her letters to her sister she gives us glimpses 
 of what occurred. " A report has reached this coun 
 try that she [Margaret Fuller] has connected herself 
 with a young man, she herself is no longer young, 
 being upward of forty, and a Fourierist or socialist 
 marriage, without the external ceremony, is spoken 
 of; certain it is that the marriage remained secret, 
 and that she has a child, a boy. . . . All this has 
 furnished subject for much conversation among her 
 friends and her enemies." 
 
 At first Fredrika was inclined to side with those 
 who suspected the worst whatever the worst might 
 be. " Margaret Fuller, * she informed her sister, 
 " has in her writings asserted the right of w r oman to 
 her own free development, and to liberty in many cases 
 where, although conformable to the strictest moral 
 code, it would yet be offensive to many in this so- 
 called free country." But later on, she professed to 
 be entirely convinced that Margaret s marriage was 
 quite regular and conventional and enthusiastically 
 told her sister that later news had vindicated the loyal 
 trust of Margaret s old friends. As one reads 
 
174 Margaret Fuller 
 
 Fredrika s second letter, one can imagine the kind 
 and affectionate Springs had been at work behind the 
 scenes. They also sent Margaret a check as a present 
 for her little boy. 
 
 But there still remained one question which puzzled 
 Fredrika. She had heard the pros and cons in the 
 social inquisition and now she was allowed to read 
 Margaret s letters to Rebecca Spring, in which the 
 champion of woman s rights described her experiences 
 with love and maternity. " She had been described 
 to me as not sufficiently feminine," says Fredrika, 
 puzzled. " She seems to me almost too much so, too 
 much concentered in that one phase of her being." 
 
 The one question which, it appears, neither Fred 
 rika nor the inquisition propounded to themselves 
 was this: after all, what is feminine? 
 
CHAPTER X 
 THE REVOLUTIONIST 
 
 As Margaret repeatedly declared, her heart and her 
 ambition were not in her writing. They were in 
 politics. She was an excellent conspirator, combin- 
 ing, as she did, a perfectly sincere and truthful 
 nature with the utmost self-control in the keeping of 
 secrets. Emerson referred to this quality of hers in 
 the letter of introduction which he sent to Carlyle. " I 
 need not, and yet perhaps I need say, that M. F. is 
 the safest of all possible persons who ever took pen 
 in hand; Prince Metternich s closet not closer nor half 
 so honorable/* This recommendation had less interest 
 perhaps for the Carlyles than it had for Mazzini 
 whom she met at their house. The Chief had 
 great need of safe and reliable friends in those days, 
 when he controlled a whispering gallery which ran 
 from London to Italy and could outstrip the govern 
 ment itself in the speed of its messages. 
 
 Mazzini trusted women especially. He said that 
 he inherited his " republican instincts " from his 
 mother, and in his long life of exile and loneliness, 
 women were among his closest friends and counsellors. 
 
 175 
 
1 76 Margaret Fuller 
 
 Jane Carlyle, George Sand, Giulia Modena, and Mar 
 garet Fuller were among his conspicuous and influential 
 friends. He preached feminism to the Italian work- 
 ingmen, who needed it sadly enough, in all truth, in 
 these words : " Love and respect woman. Look to her 
 not only for comfort, but for strength and inspiration 
 and the redoubling of your intellectual and moral 
 powers. Blot out from your mind any idea of supe 
 riority ; you have none. There is no inequality between 
 man and woman; but as often is the case between 
 two men, only different tendencies and special voca 
 tions. Woman and man are two notes without which 
 the human chord cannot be struck." 
 
 And in England, he preached George Sand to the 
 prudish public opinion which again was sadly in 
 need of his peculiar mission. " Thanks be to God," 
 he said, " George Sand is a woman. ... In the 
 question ... of the emancipation of woman, of 
 the determination of her duties and her rights in the 
 world, the materials for decision were wanting to us. 
 . . . All that she feels, all that she dreams, all that 
 she pursues; what sanctifies her or makes her free, 
 what weighs upon her and transforms her true nature, 
 in the present arrangement of society, a woman only 
 could tell us. ... Madame Sand is the first who 
 has boldly entered the arena. . . . As a woman, she 
 has declared to us the secret of her sex, its inward 
 
The Revolutionist 177 
 
 life in all its phases, under all circumstances, and she 
 has thus prepared the way to a just conception of the 
 special mission reserved to her sex of the duties and 
 special rights which have fallen to its share." 
 
 A man who could write like this could not fail to 
 win Margaret s allegiance. From the first moment of 
 meeting him in London, she was absolutely devoted. 
 In a certain sense, she was more strongly attached to 
 Mazzini than she was to Ossoli, and if she had had 
 to choose between them, Ossoli would certainly have 
 been left in peace with his conservative family. Mar 
 garet was with the Chief against the world. One 
 evening in London Mazzini was with her when 
 Carlyle, having just returned from a visit to Lord 
 Ashburton s, also called. Margaret sat by silently 
 while Carlyle belabored Mazzini s idealism with scorn 
 and invective. Jane Carlyle was also present, and 
 also silent. " We all felt distant from him," says 
 Margaret, naively including Carlyle s wife. At last 
 Mrs. Carlyle turned to Margaret and said, " These are 
 but opinions to Carlyle; but to Mazzini, who has 
 given his all, and helped bring his friends to the scaf 
 fold in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of life 
 and death." 
 
 While the revolution in Rome was at its height and 
 Mazzini was hard pressed by enemies and weighted 
 by discouragements, Margaret one day sent him a 
 
178 Margaret Fuller 
 
 letter which has been often quoted by Mazzini s 
 biographers as typical of the warm loyalty he inspired 
 in women. " What emboldens me," she wrote, " is 
 the persuasion that the best friends, in point of sym 
 pathy and intelligence, the only friends of a man of 
 ideas and of marked character, must be women. 
 You have your mother, no doubt you have others, 
 perhaps many. Of that, I know nothing; only I like 
 to offer also my tribute of affection. When I think 
 that only two years ago you thought of coming into 
 Italy with us in disguise, it seems very glorious that 
 you are about to enter republican Rome as a Roman 
 citizen. . . . 
 
 " Dear Mazzini, you do not return to sleep under 
 the sod of Italy, but to see your thoughts springing 
 up all over the soil. . . . You speak of few and 
 late years , but some full ones still remain. A cen 
 tury is not needed, nor should the same man, in the 
 same form of thought, work too long on an age. He 
 would mold and bind it too much to himself. . . , : 
 Men like you, appointed ministers, must not be less 
 earnest in their work. Yet to the greatest, the day, 
 the moment is all their kingdom. God takes care of 
 the increase. Farewell ! For your sake I could wish 
 at this moment to be an Italian and a man of action." 
 
 It has been said that Mazzini s political ideas were 
 all contained in the writings of Dante. If this be true, 
 
The Revolutionist 179 
 
 his leading ideas had been familiar to Margaret from 
 her earliest youth. He was to her the new incarna 
 tion of the republican tradition which had been wor 
 shiped by father and daughter in the Groton farm 
 house. The defender of Brutus and the lover of 
 Beethoven had naturally developed into the disciple 
 of Mazzini. The ideals which blazed forth in the fiery 
 pamphlets of " Young Italy " she had long ago learned 
 to reverence in Cambridgeport, when Timothy Fuller 
 fared forth to air them in Fourth of July orations. 
 
 Rome was a part of Mazzini s religion. " Rome 
 has always been a sort of talisman for me," he said. 
 He believed that it was the mission of Rome to lead 
 in the social regeneration of Europe. "After the 
 Rome of the Emperors, after the Rome of the Popes, 
 will come the Rome of the People." The people, he 
 believed, must form the universal family; and only 
 after the republicanization and unification of Europe 
 would true social equality be possible. He had the 
 passionate patriotism of the exile, desiring intensely 
 that Italy should become the first republic of Europe. 
 For the realization of these ideals, he gave up the 
 quiet literary vocation which appealed so strongly to 
 him and assumed the toils and burdens of a political 
 agitator and revolutionary leader. Considering Maz 
 zini s position in history, it is rather surprising to find 
 Emerson writing to Margaret at the climax of 
 
i8o Margaret Fuller 
 
 Mazzini s career in Rome and asking her if she did 
 not wish that Italy had a great man. Emerson evi 
 dently took Mazzini at Carlyle s valuation. Margaret 
 replied without hesitation, " Mazzini is a great man. 
 In mind, a great poetic statesman; in heart, a lover; 
 in action, decisive and full of resource as Caesar." 
 
 Early in March of 1849, Mazzini came to Rome and 
 went at once to visit Margaret in her quiet little upper 
 chamber in the Piazza Barberini. Ossoli was present, 
 and Mazzini confided to them thus early his fears for 
 the ultimate success of the revolution. The next day, 
 Margaret wrote to Marcus Spring, " Last night Maz 
 zini came to see me. You will have heard how he 
 was called to Italy, and received at Leghorn like a 
 prince, as he is. It is expected that, if the republic 
 lasts, he will be President. . . . 
 
 " The labels bearing, in giant letters, Giuseppe 
 Mazzini, cittadino Romano, are yet up all over Rome. 
 . . . Last night I heard a ring ; then somebody speak 
 my name ; the voice struck upon me at once. ... He 
 stayed two hours, and we talked, though rapidly, of 
 everything. ... If anyone can save Italy from her 
 foes, inward and outward, it will be he. But he is 
 very doubtful whether this is possible; the foes are 
 too many, too strong, too subtle." This was Mar 
 garets account of the visit. Presumably she told him 
 about her personal affairs and the child at Rieti on 
 
The Revolutionist 181 
 
 this occasion, for she had friends within the revolu 
 tionary party who knew about her situation all the 
 time. Naturally she would have told her story^ to 
 the amiable Italian, as he was known to have the 
 gift of receiving confidences from his women 
 friends. 
 
 It was worthy of Margaret s critical intelligence 
 that she could see the shortcomings of her idol and 
 frankly define his limitations. She herself never lost 
 sight of the economic aspect of public events. In her 
 study of the position of her sex, she had emphasized 
 the effect of economic, much more than the effect of 
 political, subjection, and, to her mind, Mazzini did 
 not sufficiently concern himself with economic factors. 
 While Mazzini lingered with the spirit of English 
 liberalism, Margaret s mind was sweeping forward 
 with the current of French socialism. One finds her 
 writing to the Tribune like this : " Mazzini has a mind 
 far in advance of his times in general, and his nation 
 in particular. . . . And yet Mazzini sees not all; 
 he aims at political emancipation ; but he sees not, per 
 haps would deny, the bearing of some events, which 
 even now begin to work their way. Of this, more 
 anon; but not today, nor in the small print of the 
 Tribune. Suffice it to say, I allude to that of which 
 the cry of Communism, the system of Fourier, and 
 so forth are but forerunners/ Margaret foresaw that 
 
1 82 Margaret Fuller 
 
 the " man of property " [her phrase] in France 
 would crush the Roman revolution with the assistance 
 of the " rich English traveler," who " thinks of his 
 own twenty-mile park and the crowded village of 
 beggars at its gate and muses : I hope to see them all 
 shot yet, these rascally republicans V 
 
 In this point of view, Margaret stood with Italian 
 revolutionists like the Princess Belgiojoso. Her close 
 association with this titled lady helped somewhat to 
 gloss over her adventures in the eyes of the " social 
 inquisition." But those Americans who regarded 
 Margaret as a female Garibaldi should have known 
 the career of the Milanese Princess. She had the 
 combined aggressiveness of a Florence Nightingale 
 and an Emma Goldman. Henry James says she was 
 something of a " bounder," but then one has to re 
 member that Henry James used such words to de 
 scribe, not condemn. Certainly Christine Trivulzio of 
 Belgiojoso was one of the most assertive of her sex. 
 She had everything: rank, fortune, brains, and per- 
 r-^onality; and she spent them all in the service of 
 the revolution. In Milan, she conducted a socialist 
 experiment on her estate ^published pQlitical pamphlets 
 and wrote them and supported a radical newspaper; 
 and maintained a company of soldiers in the Milanese 
 uprising. After a long exile in Paris, she returned to 
 aid Mazzini in Rome; and when all was lost, fled to 
 
 J 
 
The Revolutionist 183 
 
 Constantinople and earned her living by teaching lan 
 guages. 
 
 When the siege of Rome began in April, 1849, she 
 took charge of the hospitals and put them in order. 
 It was no small feat. The priests, who had been in 
 charge, were turned out and a regime of women was 
 installed. With a genius for organization, the Princess 
 revolutionized the hospitals within forty-eight hours 
 and reduced them to a state of cleanliness, order, and 
 discipline hitherto unheard of. In this exploit, she 
 was the forerunner of Florence Nightingale, who, 
 some years later, reformed the hospitals at Scutari. 
 But with the failure of the revolution, the priests 
 moved in again and the old disorder and misrule again 
 prevailed, as if no demonstration of a better way had 
 ever taken place. * / 
 
 Margaret Fuller was one of the chief assistants of 1 
 this organizing Princess. On April 30, Margaret re 
 ceived the following communication : " Dear Miss 
 Fuller: You are named Regolatrice of the Hospital 
 of the Fate-Bene Fratelli. Go there at twelve, if the 
 alarm bell has not rung before. When you arrive 
 there, you will receive all the women coming for the 
 wounded, and give them your directions, so that you 
 are sure to have a certain number of them night and 
 day. May God help us. Christine Trivulzio of 
 Belgiojoso." 
 
184 Margaret Fuller 
 
 This was Margaret s official position throughout 
 the siege. She spent eight hours daily in the wards 
 and frequently added night duty as well. Her self- 
 sacrificing devotion to the wounded and their grateful 
 appreciation of her services has been dwelt upon at 
 length by her biographers. It was a part of her 
 peculiar gift to inspire young men with courage. But 
 nursing was not after all her especial contribution. 
 Her opportunity was the revolution itself and her task 
 was its vindication. 
 
 But, while she pleaded for Mazzini s ideals in her 
 New York newspaper, her soul was privately appalled 
 at the terrible human cost. She wrote to William 
 Henry Channing, " You say, you are glad I have had 
 this great opportunity for carrying out my principles. 
 Would it were so! I found myself inferior in forti 
 tude and courage to the occasion. I know not how 
 to bear the havoc and anguish incident to the struggle 
 for these principles. I rejoiced that it lay not with 
 me to cut down the trees, to destroy the Elysian gar 
 dens, for the defense of Rome; I do not know that I 
 could have done it. And the sight of those far nobler 
 growths, the beautiful young men, mown down in 
 their stately prime, became too much for me. I for 
 got the great ideas to sympathize with the poor 
 mothers, who had nursed their precious forms, only 
 to see them all lopped and gashed." For the first time, 
 
The Revolutionist 185 
 
 she was alienated in spirit from Mazzini; as the 
 dreadful battle proceeded she saw less and less of 
 him. A letter from Rebecca Spring, who was a 
 Quaker pacifist, moved her to write a half-hearted 
 defense of Mazzini s course, but she could not keep 
 up her martial spirit to the end. " Yet the agonies 
 of that baptism of blood, I feel, oh, how deeply! In 
 the golden June days of Rome, consistent in no way, 
 I felt I should have shrunk back I could not have 
 had it shed." 
 
 Meanwhile her letters to the Tribune gave a 
 spirited narrative of events. Her description of the 
 demonstration on the Quirinal which preceded the 
 Pope s flight to Gaeta is a typical example of her 
 vigorous pictures. " I returned to the house, which is 
 near the Quirinal. On one side, I could see the palace 
 and gardens of the Pope, on the other the Piazza 
 Barberini and street of the Four Fountains. Pres 
 ently I saw the carriage of Prince Barberini drive hur 
 riedly into his courtyard gate, the footman signing to 
 close it, a discharge of firearms was heard, and the 
 drums of the Civic Guard beat to arms. 
 
 " The padrona ran up and down, crying with every 
 round of shot, Jesu Maria, they are killing the Pope! 
 O poor Holy Father! Tito, Tito/ (out of the win 
 dow to her husband), what is the matter? 
 
 " The lord of creation disdained to reply. 
 
1 86 Margaret Fuller 
 
 " O Signora ! pray, pray, ask Tito what is the 
 matter? 
 
 " I did so. 
 
 " I don t know, Signora; nobody knows. 
 
 " Why don t you go on the mount and see ? 
 
 " * It would be an imprudence, Signora ; nobody 
 will go. 
 
 " I was just thinking to go myself, when I saw a 
 poor man borne by, badly wounded, and heard that 
 the Swiss were firing on the people." 
 
 On the 9th of February, 1849, at one o clock in 
 the morning the Republic was proclaimed, to the ring 
 ing of all the bells of Rome. Margaret did not 
 idealize the situation but grasped its sordid realities. 
 " Early next morning I rose and went forth to ob 
 serve the Republic. Over the Quirinal I went, through 
 the Forum, to the Capitol. There was nothing to be 
 seen except the magnificent calm emperor, the tamers 
 of horses, the fountain, the trophies, the lions, as 
 usual; among the marbles, for living figures, a few 
 dirty, bold women, and Murillo boys in the sun just as 
 usual. I passed into the Corso ; there were men in the 
 liberty-caps, of course the lowest and vilest had been 
 the first to assume it; all the horrible beggars perse 
 cuting as impudently as usual." Then she went to 
 hear Mazzini address the Assembly. " He said, We 
 will conquer; whether Rome will, this time, is not to 
 
The Revolutionist 187 
 
 me certain, but such men as Mazzini conquer always, 
 conquer in defeat." She believed in the march of 
 the republic through Europe and prophesied it in 
 these words : " The struggle is now fairly thoroughly 
 commenced, between the principle of democracy and 
 the old powers, no longer legitimate. That struggle 
 may last fifty years, and the earth be watered with 
 the blood and tears of more than one generation, but 
 the result is sure. All Europe, including Great Britain, 
 where the most bitter resistance of all will be made, 
 is to be under republican government in the next 
 century." 
 
 It fell to her share to counteract the propaganda 
 stories about anarchy and disorder in Rome. As the 
 interventionists closed in on the republic, these " fe, 
 fo, fum stories ", as she called them, multiplied. In 
 dignantly, she declared how she, a woman, alone and 
 unprotected, went about from one end of Rome to 
 the other with perfect security and that her friends 
 sent out their little children with nurses as usual. 
 Never had there been so little crime, " never was 
 Rome so truly tranquil, so nearly free from gross ill, 
 as this winter." She exposed the methods by which 
 the Oscurantists and interventionists sought to pro 
 mote riots and disorder. For example, men who ap 
 peared in the street and attracted a crowd by behaving 
 as if they were famishing, were arrested by the Civic 
 
1 88 Margaret Fuller 
 
 Guard and proved to be well-paid agents. A ridicu 
 lous story which appeared in foreign newspapers to 
 the effect that red flags were on all the Roman houses 
 as a sign that the Romans were athirst for blood drew 
 forth a humorous protest, " These flags are put up 
 at the entrance of those streets where there is no bar 
 ricade as a signal to coachmen and horsemen that they 
 may pass freely. There is one on the house where 
 I am, in which is no person but myself, who thirst 
 for peace, and the Padrone, who thirsts for 
 money." 
 
 Her description of the excellent morale of the poor 
 people under the humane influence of the republic was 
 keyed to their own psychology : " Yes, it is true, they 
 cry ; ... we ought not to lie ; we should not try to 
 impose upon one another. We ought rather to prefer 
 that our children should work honestly for their 
 bread, than get it by cheating, begging, or the prosti 
 tution of their mothers. It would be better to act 
 worthily and kindly, probably would please God more 
 than the kissing of relics. We have long darkly felt 
 these things were so, now we know it." Yet her keen 
 observation and honest judgment would not permit her 
 to pass over in silence the " mob of Rome," the 
 " unheeding cabbage-sellers, who never had a thought 
 before beyond contriving how to satisfy their animal 
 instincts for the day." 
 
The Revolutionist 189 
 
 Without much hope, perhaps, she tried to induce 
 her country to recognize the Roman republic. Repub 
 lics were few in those days, she thought they should 
 hang together. " Some of the lowest people have 
 asked me," she wrote, " Is it not true that your 
 country had a war to become free? Yes/ * Then 
 why do they not feel for us ? She stated the case 
 for recognition in straightforward American terms. 
 [( The suffrage has been correct here, the proportion 
 of votes to the whole population was much larger 
 . . . than it is in our own country at the time of 
 contested elections. ... If any misrepresentations 
 have induced America to believe, as France affects to 
 have believed, that so large a vote could have been 
 obtained by moral intimidation, the present unanimity 
 of the population in resisting such immense odds, and 
 the enthusiasm of their every expression in favor of 
 the present government, puts the matter beyond a 
 doubt. . . . Since this is the case, surely our coun 
 try, if no other, is bound to recognize the present gov 
 ernment so long as it can sustain itself/ But the 
 attitude of the nations was just the opposite. The 
 best blood of Rome, she said bitterly, would " run 
 along the stones, without one nation in the world to 
 defend, one to aid, scarce one to cry out a tardy 
 Shame ! We will wait, whisper the nations, and 
 see if they can bear it. Rack them well to see if they 
 
190 Margaret Fuller 
 
 are brave. // they can do without us, we will help 
 them." 
 
 The surrender came to her at last as a relief from 
 the bloodshed which had grown intolerable. On Mon 
 day evening, July 2, she learned that the French were 
 preparing to cross the river and take possession of 
 the city. " I went into the Corso with some friends," 
 she writes. " The lancers of Garibaldi galloped along 
 in full career. . . . We followed them to the piazza 
 of St. John Lateran. . . . The sun was setting, the 
 crescent moon rising, the flower of the Italian youth 
 were marshaling in that solemn place. . . . They 
 had all put on the beautiful dress of the Garibaldi 
 legion, the tunic of bright red cloth, the Greek cap, 
 or else round hat with Puritan plume. Their long 
 hair was blown back from resolute faces; all looked 
 full of courage. . . . They had weighed life and all 
 its material advantages against liberty, and made their 
 election. ... I saw the wounded, all that could go, 
 laden upon their baggage cars. . . . The women 
 were ready; their eyes were resolved, if sad. The 
 wife of Garibaldi followed him on horseback. He 
 himself was distinguished by the white tunic. . . . 
 He went upon the parapet, and looked upon the road 
 with a spy-glass, and, no obstruction being in sight, 
 he turned his face for a moment back upon Rome, 
 then led the way through the gate. Hard was the 
 
The Revolutionist 191 
 
 heart, stony and seared the eye, that had no tear for 
 that moment. . . . And Rome, anew the Niobe! 
 Must she lose also these beautiful and brave, that 
 promised her regeneration, and would have given it, 
 but for the perfidy, the overpowering force, of the 
 foreign intervention ? " 
 
 On the morning of July 4, the French troops 
 entered Rome. The population remained indoors 
 with windows closed; whenever a French ofHcer or 
 soldier entered a cafe, the Italians silently rose and 
 went out. " In two days of French order ," Mar 
 garet wrote, "more acts of violence have been com 
 mitted than in two months under the Triumvirate." 
 
 Mazzini was still in Rome, and stubbornly refused 
 to leave the city. He walked about the streets, expos 
 ing himself to arrest by the French. But for some 
 reason they dared not seize him. Margaret Fuller 
 had not seen him during the last two weeks of the 
 siege. Now she went to search for him and found 
 him in the apartment of Gustavo Modena, the actor. 
 " In two short months," she writes, " he had grown 
 old; all the vital juices seemed exhausted; his eyes 
 were all blood-shot; his skin orange; flesh he had 
 none; his hair was mixed with white; his hand was 
 painful to the touch; but he had never flinched, never 
 quailed; had protested in the last hour against sur 
 render; sweet and calm, but full of a more fiery pur- 
 
1 92 Margaret Fuller 
 
 pose than ever ; in him I revered the hero, and owned 
 myself not of that mold." 
 
 It was Margaret Fuller and Giulia Modena who at 
 last persuaded him to leave Rome, and it was Jane 
 Carlyle received and comforted him when he went 
 back to London. 
 
 After Mazzjni was safe, Margaret remained another 
 day in Rome and went over the scene of the conflict. 
 She saw with her own eyes the awful inequalities of 
 the combat, the superior numbers and organization of 
 the French against the sheer valor of the Italians. 
 Her beloved Italy had been doomed, not at the end 
 when Garibaldi decided on surrender and Mazzini 
 resisted it, but from the very first. " A Contadini 
 showed me where thirty-seven braves are buried be 
 neath a heap of wall that fell upon them in the shock 
 of one cannonade. A marble nymph with broken arm 
 looked sadly that way from her sun-dried fountain; 
 some roses were blooming still, some red oleanders, 
 amid the ruin. . . . This was in the Vascello. I 
 then entered the French ground, all mapped and hol 
 lowed like a honeycomb. A pair of skeleton legs pro 
 truded from a bank of one barricade; lower, a dog 
 had scratched away its light covering of earth from 
 the body of a man, and discovered it lying face up 
 ward all dressed; the dog stood gazing on it with an 
 air of stupid amazement." 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 1850 
 
 ON the day when the French entered Rome, Margaret 
 and Ossoli sat in her chamber and refused to look 
 out of the window. The Roman husband was weep 
 ing. They had lost everything; they were empty- 
 handed indeed. " Private hopes of mine are fallen 
 with the hopes of Italy," Margaret wrote; "I have 
 played for a new stake, and lost it." 
 
 She went to the American ambassador and begged 
 him to get horses for her, that she might post immedi 
 ately to Rieti. On arriving there, she found the ten- 
 months-old Nino in such a sad condition of malnu 
 trition that it seemed to her impossible that he could 
 live. The nurse s milk had failed and she had fed 
 the infant on bread and wine. Margaret could only 
 believe that this was a deliberate betrayal of her 
 trust, though the woman had probably but followed 
 the dictates of her own ignorance. At any rate the 
 child had wasted away to nothing and was too weak 
 to lift his hand. He had all but succumbed to a com 
 bination of untoward circumstances which Margaret 
 
 193 
 
194 Margaret Fuller 
 
 could not have foreseen. " This last plot against 
 me has been so cruelly, so cunningly wrought, that I 
 shall never acquiesce," she wrote. " I submit, because 
 useless resistance is degrading, but I demand an ex 
 planation." 
 
 It was only after several weeks of devoted nursing 
 that the child showed signs of returning health. While 
 his life still hung in the balance she had a desperate 
 thought which she afterwards confessed. If Angelino 
 should die, she would conceal the fact of his existence 
 and announce her marriage "as if it were something 
 new." Her dread of the " social inquisition " was 
 so great that, in spite of her intense maternal tender 
 ness, she could entertain this passing fantasy of 
 escape from its impending terrors. But when she 
 knew that the child would live, she shouldered the 
 difficult task ahead of her. She chose to be non 
 committal rather than to lie. Perhaps Mary Woll- 
 stonecraft would have scorned the indirection to 
 which Margaret was driven. But then Mary s strug 
 gle was with her lover, while Margaret s was with 
 society. Besides, the Irish woman had some freedoms 
 which the Puritan woman could never achieve. 
 
 Margaret and her husband had left Rome precipi 
 tately. The French issued an order that all foreigners 
 who had aided the republic should depart within 
 twenty-four hours. And Angelo Ossoli, who had 
 
7850 195 
 
 commanded a battery on the Pincian hill and fought 
 for Mazzini s party until the last hour of surrender, 
 could not safely remain in Rome. From Rieti they 
 made their way to Florence, where the Austrians were 
 in possession. Margaret had formerly expressed a 
 prejudice against Florence, " It seems a kind of 
 Boston to me, the same good and the same ill ; I have 
 had enough of both." But now she was only anxious 
 to be permitted to remain there. The Austrian police 
 threatened at first to make them move on, but in the 
 end allowed them to stay. Margaret was under 
 police surveillance while she remained in Florence, and 
 no longer engaged in political activities. She was 
 immersed in domestic cares and in the writing of her 
 history of the revolution. 
 
 At this point Margaret took her husband s name, 
 and decided after some hesitation to assume the title 
 of " Marchesa." The title was thought by some of 
 her American critics to explain a good deal. Of 
 course Margaret was bedazzled by a European title, 
 for had she not as a child idealized herself as a prin 
 cess ? But Margaret must have known how numerous 
 marchesas were in Italy, and that her mercenary, lying 
 landlady in the Piazzo Barberini was a marchesa ; and, 
 knowing this, she was probably less bedazzled by the 
 title than the untraveled persons who considered her 
 so. " The fact is," she wrote to a friend, " it looks 
 
196 Margaret Fuller 
 
 to me silly for a radical like me to be carrying a title; 
 and yet, while Ossoli is in his native land, it seems 
 disjoining myself from him not to bear it. It is a 
 sort of thing that does not naturally belong to me, and, 
 unsustained by fortune, is but a souvenir even for 
 Ossoli. Yet . . . for him to drop an inherited title 
 would be, in some sort, to acquiesce in his brothers 
 disclaiming him, and to abandon a right he may pas 
 sively wish to maintain for his child. ... If Ossoli 
 should drop the title, it would be a suitable moment 
 to do so on becoming an inhabitant of Republican 
 America." All of which sounds very sensible and 
 sincere and not at all " snobbish " and bedazzled. 
 
 The Ossolis lived in Florence from October until 
 the following June, no doubt incurring a debt by 
 doing so. They had a little apartment overlooking 
 the Piazza. Santa Maria Novella. There was a grate- 
 fire in the sitting-room and a Roman lamp on the 
 table, beside which Margaret and her husband sat 
 reading in the evening. Their only luxuries were 
 their principles. While the Austrians paraded and 
 beat their drums in the Piazza, below, Ossoli wore 
 the uniform of the defeated within doors, the brown 
 and red coat of the Civic Guard. He and Margaret 
 were greatly depressed by the atmosphere of reaction 
 in which Florence was submerged. Their ardent re 
 publicanism, their affection for the child, and their 
 
1850 197 
 
 mutual love were the strong bonds between them. 
 When they went out, they frequently went their 
 separate ways : Ossoli, to his vesper services and cafes 
 and Margaret to the society of English and American 
 friends. 
 
 The Brownings were in Florence and Margaret 
 met them there for the first time. Mrs. Browning s 
 child was several months younger than Margaret s. 
 The meeting between the two middle-aged mothers 
 piques the imagination. What did they think of each 
 other ? What did Mrs. Browning say about Margaret 
 and Margaret s motherhood in that paper which she 
 afterwards wrote and which was so unaccountably 
 lost? We only know that the Brownings, like every 
 one else, were impressed by Margaret s brilliant 
 powers of conversation, and wondered at the com 
 paratively poor account of her mind and personality 
 given by her writings. 
 
 During her winter in Florence, Margaret completed 
 her history of the Roman Revolution. Mrs. Browning 
 said, " It would have been more equal to her faculties 
 than anything she had ever yet produced." There is 
 every reason for believing this to be true. Here she 
 was in her favorite field of politics; she had herself 
 taken part in the secret work of preparation and had 
 shared the counsels of the leaders. In Rome, Ossoli 
 had gleaned for her the news of the cafes daily; 
 
198 Margaret Fuller 
 
 through his family connections, he knew the views of 
 the Papal politicians and through his secret member 
 ship in the clubs of " Young Italy ", he followed the 
 course of the revolutionary group. " He has been a 
 judicious observer of all that passed before his eyes," 
 said Margaret, who evidently valued his assistance. 
 She herself had witnessed the battles of the siege, had 
 watched the French bombs falling around her, had 
 nursed the wounded, and had helped to close the eyes 
 of the dying republic. Mazzini and Mieckiewicz were 
 her personal and confidential friends. 
 
 Garibaldi she knew chiefly through his Legionaries 
 and their attitude toward him. The Legionaries 
 themselves she knew in an intimate way. She had 
 nursed them in the hospitals and heard their stories 
 of the leader. She had once encountered a company 
 of them in a lonely country inn and had tamed them 
 for the terrified landlord. " Give these good men 
 wine and bread on my account," she said majestically; 
 " for after their ride they must need refreshment." 
 Making respectful bows to her, they sat down to 
 lunch, and gave her an account of their journey. 
 Margaret had learned another aspect of the Legion 
 aries, owing to the fact that little Nino s nurse was 
 the loveliest young woman in the village of Rieti. 
 The passion and violence of these primitive Italian 
 natures inspired no terror and horror in her but a 
 
i 8 50 199 
 
 great deal of sympathy and understanding. She 
 could have written about the Legionaries with knowl 
 edge and insight. 
 
 In addition to her personal observations and expe 
 riences, she had the scholar s equipment for her task. 
 Her father s influence had given her the historical 
 perspective for the events of 1848. The ideals of lib 
 erty from Brutus to Dante in Italy, and from Rous 
 seau to Fourier in France, had formed the chief 
 materials of her education and the chief interests of 
 her maturity. Now she added the study of Louis 
 Blanc s Ten Years and Lamartine s Girondists. " I 
 am anxious to do historical justice to facts and per 
 sons," she wrote. That her book was a work of 
 journalism, she as good as tells us. " I take no pains 
 but let the good genius guide my pen." Every morn 
 ing, after she had washed and dressed the baby, she 
 sat down and wrote out what came into her mind on 
 the subject of the social and political struggle of 
 Rome. This does not lessen our interest in what the 
 good genius told her to write, but just the contrary. 
 It would be vastly interesting to read. Margaret had 
 been preparing for this task for forty years; she 
 should have done it easily and well and without 
 agonizing when the time came. 
 
 Certain it is that her book must have emphasized 
 one important aspect of Mazzini s political idealism 
 
aoo Margaret Fuller 
 
 which subsequent and more impressive histories have 
 failed to stress. This was his zeal for the republican 
 form of government. It has come about that the his 
 tory of Italian unity and Mazzini s place in it has 
 been interpreted by English liberal writers. These 
 historians have usually represented the point of view 
 that a constitutional monarchy does not essentially 
 differ from a republic. As a matter of fact, Maz- 
 zini s republicanism was a vital part of his political 
 philosophy; he saw in the spread of republics an es 
 sential step toward the United States of Europe, to 
 which he already looked forward. It was natural that 
 Margaret Fuller, as her father s daughter and the 
 pupil of Thomas Jefferson, should understand Maz- 
 zini s passion for republics and his ardent belief in 
 their necessity. Her hereditary sympathies were on 
 that side, and she must have seen the practical signifi 
 cance of the leader s republican convictions. 
 
 Her book was completed in the spring of 1850, and 
 Margaret made preparations to return to America and 
 find a publisher. It may not be amiss to refer here 
 to Hawthorne s amazing statement that the lamented 
 history (lost with Margaret at sea) never existed at 
 all. Since this opinion is contained in a standard 
 biography and a familiar " reference " work, it can 
 not be overlooked. But enough has already been said 
 concerning Hawthorne s hysterical prejudice against 
 
201 
 
 Margaret to explain this final fantasy of his unhappy 
 hatred, so that we need not take it too seriously. 
 
 eling, a sailing vessel from Leghorn to New York 
 loaded with rags and marble. As the journey would 
 last two months, she took a white goat on board to 
 supply Angelino with milk. A young Italian girl 
 named Celesta Pardena, who was on her way to 
 domestic service in America, was engaged to help take 
 care of the baby during the voyage. Horace Sumner 
 of Boston, who had adored Margaret since his stu 
 dent days at Brook Farm and who had spent the 
 winter in Florence in order to be near her, was also 
 of the party. He and Ossoli planned to exchange 
 English and Italian lessons during the voyage. The 
 prospects of the trip, with all its economies, was not 
 unpleasing. 
 
 Yet Margaret set sail in a mood of the utmost de 
 pression and foreboding. " It has long seemed, that, 
 in the year 1850, I should stand on a plateau in the 
 ascent of life, where I should be allowed to pause for 
 a while, and take more clear and commanding views 
 than ever before. Yet my life proceeds as regularly 
 as the fates of a Greek tragedy, and I can but accept 
 the pages as they turn." In view of what actually 
 happened, her letters written on the eve of the voyage 
 
2O2 Margaret Fuller 
 
 seem almost prophetic. " I am absurdly fearful/ she 
 said, " and various omens have combined to give me 
 a dark feeling. I am become indeed a miserable 
 coward for the sake of Angelino. I fear heat and 
 cold, fear the voyage, fear biting poverty. I hope I 
 shall not be forced to be as brave for him, as I have 
 been for myself, and that if I succeed to rear him, he 
 will be neither a weak nor a bad man. But I love him 
 too much. In case of mishap, however, I shall perish 
 with my husband and my child and we may be trans 
 ferred to some happier state/ 
 
 Margaret indeed had good reason to fear the eco 
 nomic struggle ahead of her. The maintenance of an 
 indigent Italian nobleman and a young child was 
 almost an impossible undertaking in those days, when 
 an unmarried gentlewoman could scarcely support 
 herself. Mrs. Story put it accurately enough when 
 she said, " All I know is that Margaret will have to 
 exert herself." It was true that Margaret had for 
 merly earned a generous salary on the Tribune; but 
 with the odor of a " Fourieristic " marriage clinging 
 to her skirts, she was now a very different person. 
 Mr. Greeley loved political and economic rebels but 
 had no tolerance at all for those who allowed their 
 independence of thought to invade the realm of mar 
 riage. How many of her old friends could she expect 
 to stand by her in the future, and, of those, how 
 
203 
 
 many would be able to help her to remunerative em 
 ployment? These were unanswered and as yet un 
 answerable questions with which Margaret must have 
 occupied herself a great deal. " But I think there will 
 remain for me a sufficient number of friends to keep 
 my heart warm, and to help me earn my bread," she 
 wrote hopefully to Mrs. Story. 
 
 These were actual and well-grounded fears. But 
 she had no objective reasons for dreading the voyage 
 itself, so far as one can discover. Of course anyone 
 may entertain an abnormal and superstitious fear of 
 the sea and its perils; but Margaret had crossed on 
 the Cambria four years before with all the courage 
 of a normal passenger. It is most likely that she now 
 preferred to let her apprehensive thoughts dwell on 
 the perils of the voyage rather than on the trials and 
 dangers of her new life in America. 
 
 The Elizabeth sailed from Leghorn on the seven 
 teenth of May. Margaret passed her fortieth birth- j 
 day on the sixth day out. Two days later, the captain 
 fell ill of the smallpox and as the ship was nearing 
 Gibraltar on the morning of June 3, he died. He 
 was buried in deep water at sunset. 
 
 Margaret described the scene of the burial in a letter 
 to Marcus Spring. " You cannot think how beautiful 
 the whole thing was : the decent array and sad rev 
 erence of the sailors; the many ships with their ban- 
 
204 Margaret Fuller 
 
 ners flying; the stern pillar of Hercules all bathed in 
 roseate vapor; the little white sails diving into the blue 
 depths with that solemn spoil of the good man, when 
 he had been so agonized and gasping as the last sun 
 stooped." 
 
 In this letter, mailed at Gibraltar, she told how she 
 had carried her baby into the sick man s room before 
 they knew the nature of his disease and feared now 
 for the child s life. " It is vain by prudence to seek 
 to evade the stern assaults of destiny. I submit/ 
 This mood of acquiescence was coming to be a per 
 sistent one. 
 
 After a week in quarantine, the vessel proceeded 
 under the command of the mate. The fatalities of the 
 remainder of the voyage have been often related. 
 Margaret s child succumbed to the smallpox as she 
 had feared and for days his life was despaired of. 
 But he recovered at last, and for a brief interval mis 
 fortune stayed its hand. Then came the last act of 
 the tragedy, the shipwreck of the Elizabeth just as 
 she was about to enter the port of New York. 
 
 On the eve of landing, a strong gale arose. The 
 inexperienced mate lost his bearings and the ship 
 was driven on a sand-bar off Fire Island. The Carrara 
 marble in the hold completed the wreck. The vessel 
 at once began to break up but remained afloat ten 
 hours, from three o clock in the morning until one 
 
1850 205 
 
 in the afternoon. A howling gale continued all the 
 while and mountainous seas whipped and tortured the 
 groaning vessel. When the final crash came, Mar 
 garet and her husband went down with the ship and 
 their bodies disappeared and were never recovered. 
 The body of Margaret s child was washed up naked 
 on the sands, and was later taken to Mt. Auburn by 
 relatives and buried beside his New England grand 
 father. The manuscript of her book on the Roman 
 revolution vanished without a trace. 
 
 The news of the tragedy sent a shock of horror 
 through the literary world of that day. In the midst 
 of the lamentations and eulogies, Margaret s friends 
 were outraged by the attitude of the mate of the 
 Elisabeth. He said that the tragedy was Mar 
 garet s own fault. But this was disposed of as an 
 effort in his own defense, because he had left the ship 
 while his passengers were still on board. But the 
 accounts of all the other survivors show that he had 
 grounds for his statement. In one particular their * 
 stories all agreed, and this was that Margaret had j 
 exerted almost no effort from the beginning to the / 
 end to save herself and her family. Her behavior/ 
 gave the impression of acquiescence in her fate. 
 
 The shipwreck was near the shore. According to 
 Bayard Taylor, who went down to survey the scene, 
 the vessel was not more than fifty yards distant from 
 
206 Margaret Fuller 
 
 the sands. When morning came after the disaster of 
 the^-night, those on board could see the people on the 
 shore. They saw a life-boat brought out, but no effort 
 was made to man it. Very early in the day it be 
 came evident to the victims on the wreck that no 
 help was to be expected from the shore and that only 
 by their own efforts could they be rescued. It was 
 a situation in which desperate expedients and supreme 
 courage alone could help. But Margaret remained a 
 passive spectator of approaching death until the end. 
 
 On the other hand, Mrs. Hasty, the wife of the 
 deceased captain and a sorrowing widow, made the 
 most desperate efforts to save her life and succeeded. 
 All the heroism and all the initiative of the occasion 
 were hers. When the cabin began to break up, it was 
 she who summoned help from the forecastle and who 
 led the way in making the perilous passage across the 
 canting deck. And it was she who volunteered to go 
 first when the time came to try the planks. 
 
 It appears that a council of crew and passengers 
 was held in the forecastle when all hope of help from 
 the shore was given up. A plan was proposed and 
 agreed to by all, including Margaret, that each of the 
 passengers should bestride a plank, rigged up with 
 rope handles and that a seaman, swimming behind, 
 should steer the frail craft toward the shore. Mrs. 
 Hasty led the way, with the second-mate swimming 
 
2 7 
 
 behind her, and though half -drowned they at last 
 reached the sands. It was now Margaret s turn to 
 go, but she refused. The mate (now the commanding 
 officer) used all his powers of persuasion. He would 
 himself take the child, and Margaret and her husband 
 could go with two seamen. But she steadily refused 
 to leave the ship, giving as her reason that she would 
 not be separated from her husband and child. Ossoli, 
 who had fought in the most exposed positions during 
 the siege of Rome and whose physical courage was 
 beyond suspicion, permitted her to take the lead as 
 usual. Her strange paralysis was allowed to decide 
 the fate of her whole family. Stricken with a pas 
 sivity, which was afterwards described as Christian 
 fortitude, she awaited the end. 
 
 At last in desperation, the commander gave the 
 order for the crew to leave the ship. Four sailors 
 still remained aboard, together with Margaret, Ossoli, 
 Nino, and Celesta Pardena. Ossoli prayed with the 
 young Italian girl; the two simple-minded children of 
 the Church clung to its comfort and solace to the last 
 hour. Margaret sat at the foot of the main mast, clad 
 in a nightgown, her long hair loosened and whipped 
 by the winds. She held her child in her arms, wrapped 
 in shawls. The last words she was heard to say were, I 
 " I see nothing but death before me, I shall never ! 
 reach the shore." j 
 
208 Margaret Fuller 
 
 When the steward, who had remained aboard, saw 
 that the main mast was about to fall, he seized the 
 child, almost by main force, from Margaret s grasp 
 and plunged into the sea with it. Their dead bodies 
 were washed upon the beach soon afterwards, still 
 warm. Ossoli and Celesta clung for a moment at the 
 rigging and then went down together. Margaret 
 went down alone. 
 
 Many years before she had once written, "If all 
 the wrecked submitted to be drowned, the world would 
 be a desert/ This is a literal description of how she 
 ultimately met her death. She " submitted to be 
 drowned." Her death had in it the elements of pagan 
 acquiescence, of consenting to her destiny. 
 
 By a strange coincidence of mischances, no records 
 of her foreign life survived. A trunk, which was 
 washed upon the beach, contained Margaret s cor 
 respondence with Ossoli, in Italian, during her stay 
 in Rieti. Beyond this, practically nothing re 
 mained. 
 
 Within a year or so, a memorial volume was pro 
 jected by Margaret s New England friends. Giuseppe 
 Mazzini and Mr. and Mrs. Browning were invited to 
 contribute. Carlyle wrote to Emerson, " Browning 
 spoke a long while to me, with emphasis, on the sub 
 ject [Margaret and her d Ossoli] ... I said he 
 ought to send these reminiscences to America; . . . 
 
1850 209 
 
 his answer gave me the impression there had been 
 hindrance somewhere. " What could the hindrance 
 have been ? At any rate, it was surmounted and both 
 Robert Browning and Elizabeth Browning wrote out 
 their reminiscences of Margaret as they had known 
 her in Florence and sent them to America. They re- 
 reatedly assured everyone who asked them about it 
 afterwards that they did write. But the papers never 
 came to light. They were mysteriously lost and no 
 explanation of the loss was ever forthcoming. Fur 
 thermore, Mazzini s reminiscences, which he also wrote 
 and sent to America, unaccountably disappeared. 
 Like the Brownings, he afterwards assured inquirers 
 that he had sent a contribution for the Memoirs to 
 America. With one accord, these interesting manu 
 scripts all went astray in the mail. The coincidence 
 strains our credulity. Is it not more likely that an 
 unknown censor interfered? It seems very probable 
 that Mazzini and the Brownings might have written 
 of Margaret s life in Italy with a frankness which 
 did not accord with American standards. What 
 Browning might have said, emphatically, of Margaret 
 and her d Ossoli; what Mrs. Browning might have 
 spoken of Margaret and her Nino; what Mazzini 
 might have written of Margaret in Rome over all 
 this one can now only spec ulate. From comprehending 
 witnesses like these, something significant might well 
 
2IO Margaret Fuller 
 
 be expected, glimpses of the kind of woman Margaret 
 really was, revelations through the impression she 
 made on personalities with the large tolerance of life 
 which belongs to genius. 
 
 It was by her personality rather than her work that 
 
 /she impressed herself on her generation. But the con- 
 
 | quest of a personality by a woman and a daughter of 
 
 I Puritanism was arjieroic achievement. It meant the 
 
 (overthrow of respectabilities and sacrosanctities on 
 
 every hand and a degree of resolution which is not 
 
 supposed to reside in a truly feminine nature. 
 
 There were strange contradictions in her life which 
 were a puzzle to her age. Her inconsistencies of 
 health and fluctuations of energy were baffling to those 
 who knew her best. Though always an invalid, she 
 did the work of three women and sometimes " worked 
 better when she was ill." She gave an impression 
 of abundant vitality and a vast fund of energy. Yet 
 there were moments when her energy strangely for 
 sook her, as when she gave herself up without a 
 struggle to the waves. These things were manifesta 
 tions of hysteria, and Margaret had long been known 
 to have had a neurotic constitution. According to the 
 Freudian psychology, the source of her hysteria was 
 a secret which she kept from herself, from her own 
 consciousness. " Nature keeps so many secrets," she 
 once said, referring to the concealment of her mar- 
 
i 8 so 211 
 
 riage, " that I had supposed the moral writers exag 
 gerated the dangers and plagues of keeping them ; but 
 they cannot exaggerate." But the dangers and plagues 
 are greatly enhanced when this conflict with society 
 becomes a conflict within one s own mental life. As 
 Margaret kept the date of her marriage a secret to 
 evade the social censor, she had in earliest childhood 
 undertaken a far more dangerous concealment, the 
 concealment from the inward censor of an erotic ele 
 ment in her love for a deeply reverenced father. Yet 
 with her whole conscious nature, Margaret loved the 
 truth and never ceased from following it. " I feel 
 the strength to dispense with all illusions," she said; 
 " I will stand ready and rejoice in the severest proba 
 tions." In this kind of ordeal she was profoundly 
 courageous. 
 
 She took for her chief interests in life two sub 
 jects which were in her day regarded as outside of 
 woman s sphere. Her favorite themes were love and 
 politics. Nowadays she would be permitted to take an 
 interest in politics but she would still find that love 
 was for her sex a forbidden topic. 
 
 The general cast of her political views was deter 
 mined far back in her childish years, when Timothy 
 Fuller had ripped out sarcasms against the Allies who 
 had put down Jacobinism in France and restored 
 Bourbonism instead. Margaret s mind received then 
 
212 Margaret Fuller 
 
 a permanent impression, which caused her to stand, 
 thirty years later, as she did, with the forces of young 
 Italy against papal Bourbonists of Rome. 
 
 She was a passionate advocate of economic reforms 
 and women s rights. For women also, she held, the 
 career should be open to talent. " Another century," 
 she wrote, " and I might ask to be made Ambassador 
 myself, tis true, like other Ambassadors, I would 
 employ clerks to do most of the duty." Indeed, Mar 
 garet would have made an excellent ambassador. One 
 who unites the ability to appreciate Tasso manuscripts 
 with the power to tame Garibaldi s Legionaries is not 
 found for the Italian embassy every day. 
 
 In the psychology of love, she was a pioneer. 
 Though it is considered womanly to love and un 
 womanly not to love, to take an intelligent and out 
 spoken interest in the subject is quite another matter. 
 A woman should open her mouth and shut her eyes. 
 Margaret had too much curiostiy, too much veracity, 
 and too little naivete to please the ideas of the 
 parochial society in which she lived. Even liberal- 
 minded Transcendental sts who regarded the devil as 
 a superstition, believed in the existence of the " baser 
 instincts" and the extirpation of the "lower im 
 pulses " by the higher will-power. 
 
 To Margaret s way of thinking, confirmed and 
 strengthened by the influence of Goethe, the vast 
 
213 
 
 separation between good and evil impulses in human 
 nature was not so clear. Neither did she believe that 
 the baser instincts could be refined away through a 
 series of easy victories, although she was anything 
 but a materialist in her conception of love. She be 
 lieved in the hunger of the affections, because she had 
 experienced it. " Imperfect as love is," she wrote 
 in the last year of her life, " I want human beings to 
 love, as I suffocate without." Though she did not 
 generalize from her experience, she did acknowledge 
 the fulfilment of the law in her own case and thereby 
 set an example of admitting the emotional necessities 
 of life. 
 
 Her biographers often speak of this characteristic 
 of Margaret s nature as if it were the exceptional 
 trait of her unusual disposition. As a matter of fact, 
 it is a universal trait of normal human nature, and 
 Margaret s originality lay in the frank admission of 
 it. Acknowledging her debt to nature, she had the 
 good sense to pay as she could, and, to use her own 
 words, " not calculate too closely ". Her life was a 
 vindication of her belief, as an intellectual woman, in 
 the reality of the instinctive life; as it was also a vin 
 dication of her belief, as an instinctive woman, in the 
 reality of the intellectual life. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 LITERARY WORKS OF MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI 
 
 In the order of their production 
 
 Eckermann s Conversations with Goethe. Translation. Speci 
 mens of Foreign Standard Literature, Vol. IV. Boston, Mil 
 liard, Gray and Co., 1839. 
 
 Correspondence of Fr dulein Gunderode and Bettina von Arnim. 
 Joint translation with Minna Wesselhoeft. Boston, Burnham, 
 1861. 
 
 The Dial; a magazine for literature, philosophy, and religion. 
 Edited by Margaret Fuller, R. W. Emerson, and George Rip- 
 ley. Boston, 1840-1844. 
 
 Summer on the Lakes, in 1843. Boston, Little Brown, 1844. 
 
 Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Introduction by Horace 
 Greeley. Boston, Jewett, 1855. 
 
 Literature and Art: Essays. Introduction by Horace Greeley. 
 New York, Fowler and \Vells, 1852. 
 
 Life Without and Life Within: Essays. New York, Tribune 
 Association, 1869. 
 
 Love Letters, 1845-1846. Introduction by Julia Ward Howe. 
 New York, Appleton, 1903. 
 
 At Home and Abroad, or, Things and Thoughts in America and 
 Europe. New York, Tribune Association, 1869. 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES. 
 
 Caroline W. Ball. Historical Pictures: Margaret Fuller. Boston, 
 Lee and Shepard, 1860. 
 
 R. W. Emerson, W. H. Charming, and J. F. Clarke. Memoirs 
 of Margaret Fuller Ossoli. New York, Tribune Association, 
 1869. 
 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Margaret Fuller Ossoli. Bos 
 ton, Houghton Mifflin, 1884. 
 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Margaret Fuller, in Eminent 
 Women of the Age. Hartford, Betts, 1869. 
 
 Julia Ward Howe. Margaret Fuller (Marquesa Ossoli). Bos 
 ton, Roberts, 1883. 
 
 Andrew Macphail. Margaret Fuller, in Essays in Puritanism. 
 Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1905. 
 
 PSYCHOLOGICAL SOURCES. 
 
 S. Ferenczi. Contributions to Psychoanalysis. Boston, Badger, 
 1916. 
 
 217 
 
21 8 Bibliography 
 
 Sigmund Freud. Delusion and Dream. New York, Moffat Yard, 
 
 1917- 
 The Interpretation of Dreams. New York, 
 
 Macmillan, 1912. 
 Leonardo da Vinci. New York, MofTat Yard, 
 
 1916. 
 Horace Westlake Frink. Morbid Fears and Compulsions. New 
 
 York, Moffat Yard, 1918. 
 Mary Keyt I sham. Real Womanliness the Basis of a Career. 
 
 New York Times Magazine. November 28, 1915. 
 Ernest Jones. Papers on Psychoanalysis. London, Bailliere Tin- 
 
 dall, 1913. 
 
 C. G. Jung. Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology. Edited 
 by Dr. Constance Long. London, Bailliere Tin- 
 dall, 1916. 
 
 Psychology of the Unconscious. Introduction by 
 Beatrice M Hinkle, M.D, New York, Moffat 
 Yard, 1916. 
 
 GENERAL SOURCES 
 
 John Quincey Adams. Memoirs. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1874- 
 
 1877. 
 
 Matilde Blind. George Eliot. Boston, Roberts. 1883 
 Frederick Augustus Braun. Margaret Fuller and Goethe. New 
 
 York, Holt, 1910. 
 
 Margaret Fuller s Translation and 
 Criticism of Goethe s Faust. 
 Journal of English and Ger 
 manic Philology, April, 1914. 
 Fredrika Bremen Homes of the New World. New York, 
 
 Harper, 1854. 
 Albert Brisbane, Social Destiny of Man. Philadelphia, Stoll- 
 
 meyer, 1840. 
 Jane Welsh Carlyle. Letters and Memorials. New York, Scrib- 
 
 ner s, 1883. 
 Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Correspondence. 
 
 Boston, Osgood, 1883. 
 
 Richard V. Carpenter. Margaret Fuller in Nothern Illinois. 
 Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society. Springfield. 
 January, 1910 
 G. K. Chesterton. Robert Browning. New York, Macmillan, 
 
 ioo3. 
 Lydia Maria Child. Memoirs of Mme. de Stael and M me. Roland. 
 
 New York, C. S. Francis, 1847. 
 J. W. Cross. George Eliot s Life as Related in her Letters and 
 
 Journals. New York, Harper, 1855. 
 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson. Historic Notes of Life and Letters in 
 
 Massachusetts. Atlantic Monthly, 
 October, 1883. 
 
 Mary Moody Emerson. Atlantic 
 Monthly, December, 1883. 
 
Bibliography 219 
 
 Eliza Ware Farrar. Recollections of Seventy Years, Boston, 
 Osgood, 1866. 
 
 Margaret Fuller. Letter to E. A. Duyckinck. Manuscript ; New 
 York Public Library. 
 
 Octavius B. Frothingham. Transcendentalism in New England. 
 Boston, American Unitarian Association, 1876. 
 
 H. C. Goddard. New England Transcendentalism, in Cambridge 
 History of American Literature. New York, Putnam, 1917. 
 
 William Godwin. Memoirs of Mary W oilstone craft Godwin, 
 author of " A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Phila 
 delphia, Carey, 1799. 
 
 Horace Greeley. Recollections of a Busy Life. New York, 
 Tribune Association, 1869. 
 
 Horace Greeley and Robert Dale Owen. Discussion of the Law 
 of Divorce. In Recollections. New York, Tribune Associa 
 tion, 1869. 
 
 Horace Greeley and H. J. Raymond. Association Discussed, or 
 the Socialism of the Tribune Examined. New York, Harper, 
 
 1847. 
 
 Frank Harris. Carlyle, in Contemporary Portaits. New York, 
 Kennerley, 1915. 
 
 Julian Hawthorne. Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife. Bos 
 ton, Osgood, 1885. 
 
 Nathaniel Hawthorne. Blithedale Romance. Boston, Osgood, 
 1852. 
 
 Morris Hillquit. History of Socialism in the United States. 
 New York, Funk and Wagnalls, 1903. 
 
 Henry James. William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Bos 
 ton, Houghton Mifflin, 1903. 
 
 Bolton King. History of Italian Unity. London, Nisbet, 1899. 
 Massini. New York, Dutton, 1902. 
 
 Karl Knortz. Brook Farm und Margaret Fuller. New York, 
 Bartsch, 1886. 
 
 James Russell Lowell. Fable for Critics. New York, Putnam, 
 1848. 
 
 Harriet Martineau. "Autobiography. Boston, Osgood, 1877. 
 
 Society in America. New York, Harper, 
 1837. 
 
 Giuseppe Mazzini. George Sand, in Critical Essays. London, 
 
 Smith Elder, 1891. 
 
 Letters to the Italian Working Class. Lon 
 don, Smith Elder, 1891. 
 
 James Parton. Life of Horace Greeley. Boston, Osgood, 1869. 
 
 Frank B. Sanborn. Recollections of Seventy Years. Boston, 
 Badger, 1909. 
 
 L. C. Scott. Life and Letters of Christopher Pearse Cranch. 
 Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1917. 
 
 Charles Sotheran. Horace Greeley and other Pioneers of Ameri 
 can Socialism. New York, Humboldt Publishing Co., 1892. 
 
22O Bibliography 
 
 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. History of 
 Woman Suffrage. New York, Fowler and Wells, and Roches 
 ter, Susan B. Anthony. 1881-192. 
 
 Frank Preston Stearns. The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Haw 
 thorne. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1906. 
 
 George Robert Stirling Taylor. Mary W oilstone craft. New 
 York, John Lane, 1911. 
 
 Lilian Whiting. The Brownings, Their Life and Art. Boston, 
 Little Brown, 1911. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Adams, John Quincy, 8, 30, 85 
 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 46, 61 
 Anthony, Susan B., 81, 109 
 Atkinson, H. A., 134, 135 
 
 / 
 
 Beethoven, 49, 100, 179 
 Belgiojoso, Princess, 182, 183 
 Beranger, 141, 142 
 Blithedale Romance, 90 
 Boston, 77 
 
 Bremer, Fredrika, 125, 173, 174 
 Brentano, Bettina, 37 
 Brisbane, Albert, 106 
 Bronte, Charlotte, 134 
 Brook Farm, 88, 89, 90 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 
 
 48, 132, 136, 137, 197, 209 
 Browning, Robert, 136, 209 
 Brutus, 40, 199 
 
 Cambridge, I, 28, 29 
 
 Cambridge History of Ameri 
 can Literature, in 
 
 Carlyle, Jane, 80, 133, 137-139, 
 176, 192 
 
 Carlyle, Thomas, n, 34, 99i 
 104, i? 3, 137-139, 208, 209 
 
 Catholicism, 158, 159 
 
 Channing, William Henry, 34, 
 42, 61, 106, 184 
 
 Clarke, James Freeman, 34 
 
 Concord, 61, 93, 101 
 
 Conversations, 61-67 
 
 Cooper, Fenimore, 119 
 
 Dante, 178, 199 
 
 Declaration of Sentiments, 80 
 de Stael, Mme., 33 
 Dial, The, 95-97, 99 
 Divorce, Greeley on, 108, 109 
 Duyckinck, E. A., 136, 138 
 
 Eckermann s Conversations, 47 
 
 Eliot, George, 140, 141 
 Emerson, Mary Moody, 101, 
 
 102 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 21, 23, 
 
 38, 61, 64, 66, 85, 95-104, 161, 
 
 175 
 Essays on Puritanism, 23 
 
 Fable for Critics, 121 
 
 Farrar, Mrs. Eliza, 35, 44 
 
 Ferenczi, S., 65 
 
 Florence, 195 
 
 Fourier, 68, 69, 89, 90, 127, 
 
 199 
 
 Francis, Lydia Maria, 33, 34 
 Freud, Sigmund, 23, 149 
 Freudian psychology, 37, 133, 
 
 134, 137, 210 
 
 Fuller, Abraham, 5, 6, 44 
 Fuller, Eugene, 42, 80, 152, 161 
 Fuller, Margaret, ambition, 31; 
 
 birth, i ; conversations, 61- 
 
 67; death, 206, 208; demons, 
 
 42, 53; dreams, 16-19; edi 
 torship, 95-99; education, 12- 
 14; fantasies, 20, 21 51-56; 
 feminism, 42, 57, 70-83 ; Gro- 
 ton farm, 40; hysteria, 19, 22- 
 
 26, 210, 21 1 ; love affairs, 
 
 27, 28; marriage, 159-162; 
 motherhood, 168, 169; pre 
 cocity, 13, 14; republicanism, 
 12, 179, 180, 187, 189, 109, 
 200, 211, 212; school life, 28- 
 30; teaching, 47; travels, 102, 
 104, 125-143 
 
 Fuller, Mrs. Margaret, 9, 10 
 Fuller, Timothy, 1-3, 5-9, 16, 
 
 43, 211 
 
 Garibaldi, 190 
 
 Garibaldi s Legionaries, 198, 
 199 
 
 221 
 
222 
 
 Index 
 
 Goethe, 47, 52, 100, 101, 139, 
 
 140, 212, 213 
 
 Gotendorf, see James Nathan 
 Greeley, Horace, 57, 59, 103, 
 
 105-111, 119, 121-124, 202 
 Greeley, Mrs., 107-109 
 Giinderode, Canoness, 37 
 
 Harbinger, The, 96 
 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 90-95, 
 
 200, 20 1 
 Hedge, Frederick Henry, 13, 
 
 34, 40, 98 
 Higginson, Thomas Went- 
 
 worth, 5, 6, 13, 23, 25, 31, 35, 
 
 59, 90, 172 
 Howe, Julia Ward, 13, 23 
 
 James, Henry, 92, 154, 182 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 7, 40, 200 
 
 La Mennais, 141 
 
 Lewes, George Henry, 139-141 
 
 Liberalism, 87, 93 
 
 London Reform Club, 127, 
 128 
 
 Longfellow, Henry Wads- 
 worth, 47, 120, 121 
 
 Love Letters of Margaret 
 Fuller, in 
 
 Lowell, James Russell, 121, 122 
 
 Marlanna, 28-30 
 
 Marriage, Greeley on, 108, 109, 
 
 202, 203 
 Martineau, Harriet, 44, 64, 129- 
 
 136 
 Mazzini, 135, 137, 162, 175-182, 
 
 191, 192, 199, 200 
 McPhail, Andrew, 23, 172 
 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller 
 
 Ossoli, 82, 117 
 Mesmerism, 131-135 
 Modena, Giulia, 176, 192 
 Mott, Lucretia, 65 
 
 Nathan, James, 113, 114, 115- 
 
 117 
 
 New York, 104 
 North American Phalanstery, 
 
 127 
 
 Ossoli, Angelo Eugene, 168, 
 
 172, I93;i95, 204, 205 
 Ossoli, Giovanni Angelo, 151- 
 
 154, 159-162, 167, 168, 193- 
 
 197, 207, 208 
 Ossoli, Margaret Fuller, see 
 
 Margaret Fuller 
 
 Paine-Godwin circle, 68 
 Papers on Literature and Art, 
 
 117 
 
 Parker, Theodore, 99 
 Peabody, Elizabeth, 63 
 Prostitution, 77-79 
 Puritanism, 5, 87, 93 
 
 Raymond, H. J., 122-124 
 Rieti, 165-167 
 Ripley, George, 88, 96 
 Ripley, Mrs., 89 
 Romanticism, 35, 36 
 Rome, 148, 149, 179 
 Rousseau, 68, 199 
 
 Salem, 4, 93 
 
 Sand, George, 58, 84, 85, 143- 
 
 147, 176 
 Seneca Falls Convention, 63, 
 
 & 
 
 Socialism, 87, 93, 122-124 
 Society in America, 129-131 
 Spring, Marcus, 106, 125-128 
 worth, 5, 6, 12, 23, 25, 31, 
 
 Spring, Rebecca, 82, 125, 126, 
 
 174, 185 
 
 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 65 
 Story, W. W., 122, 155, 170, 
 
 171 
 Story, Mrs. W. W., 151, I59 
 
 170-172, 202 
 Sturgis, Caroline, 156 
 Summer on the Lakes, 102 
 Sumner, Horace, 201 
 
 Taylor, Bayard, 205 
 Times, New York, 124 
 Tribune, New York, 105-107, 
 
 117-124 
 Transcendentalism, 85-87, 96, 
 
 97 
 
Index 
 
 223 
 
 Transcendentalists, 
 84-90 
 
 The, 67, 
 
 Vindication of the Rights of 
 Woman, 68 
 
 Walpole, Horace, 82 
 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 10, 27, 
 58, 116, 162, 194 
 
 Woman in the Nineteenth Cen 
 tury, 2, 63, 67, 94 
 Women, occupations of, 69, 70 
 Women, political rights of, 80 
 Women, status of, 59-61 
 Wordsworth, 126 
 
 Xantippe, 107 
 
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