Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli

Chapter 19: personal traits.

Among the topics of the evening, phrenology was introduced, and Mr. Neal expressed a wish to give what might be termed a topical illustration of his favorite theory. Miss Fuller slowly uncoiled the.heavy folds of her light brown hair and submitted her haughty head to his sentient fingers. The masterly analysis which he made of her character, its complexities and contradictions, its heights and its depths, its nobilities and its frailties, was strangely lucid and impressive, and helped one who knew her well to a more tender and sympathetic appreciation of her character and career, a character which only George Eliot could have fully appreciated and portrayed.

Providence journal, July 24, 1876.

Many men, including some of the most gifted in our American community, have since tried their hands on Margaret Fuller's head; and they have given such varying results as their point of observation might justify. With ready recognition of my own inferiority to them as respects personal knowledge, I find myself, after long and patient study of her writings, forming conclusions sometimes different from theirs. I do not think that Mr. Emerson, with his cool and tranquil temperament, always did quite justice to the ardent nature that flung itself against him; and it seems to me that her other biographers have sometimes been too much influenced by their own point of contact with her to see that the self-culture which brought her to them was by no means the whole of her aim. Let me, therefore, consider her character rather more minutely.

It is to be remembered, in the first place, that her life was always saddened by the feeling that she had been defrauded of her childhood by too forced a precocity and deprived of her rightful health through mismanagement. Under this disadvantage she led thenceforward a life of constant checking and restriction, not as to pleasures, for which she rarely sighs in her diaries, but as to doing her appointed work in the world and employing the talents given her. Rising in the morning, as Emerson says of all of us, “with an appetite that could eat the solar system like a cake,” she soon finds herself restricted as to food [301] and wholly wanting in digestion. With the largest views as to the aims and destiny of her nation, she was obliged to see the timid and the pessimists work on while she was fettered. There are many who, because they cannot do the great things, refuse to do the little ones; she was ready to lavish herself on the smallest; no one ever saw a more devoted daughter, sister, friend; and only her diary and a very few intimates knew how much this cost her or how she yearned for something more. With inexorable frankness she saw that even her resignation was often a kind of despair, even the alms she gave were only a miserable substitute for the larger work she longed to do; and thus much she often expressed, not only to herself but to others.

She thought that we human beings ought not, as she wrote to Mr. Emerson (in 1839), “to suppress the worst or select the best of ourselves,” but to be “altogether better.” Even her own good deeds thoroughly dissatisfied her, and she often points out in her diaries that what passes for virtue in her is only the resigned acceptance of what seems to her subordinate and unsatisfactory. Her life, so far from being selfish, overflowed with constant acts of private kindness; she was incessantly bearing burdens for others, but she was haunted, as many other strong natures have been, by the spirit of Emerson's couplet,--

He who feeds men serveth few,
He serves all who dares be true.

I went to walk with Richard, then sang psalm tunes with Lloyd, then wrote to Aunt Mary. When I have not joyous energy in myself, I can do these little things for others; very many of my attentions are of this spurious sort; they are my consolations; the givers [of gratitude] who thank me are deceived. But what can I do? I cannot always upbear my life all alone. The heart sinks and then I must help it by persuasions that it is better for others I should be here and theirs. It is mere palliative, I know.

In earliest days how many night-hours have found me thus. I was always so lonely. I used to cheer myself with my piano. I wish I had it now.

When no gentle eye-beam charms,
No fond hope the bosom warms,
Of thinking the lone mind is tired,
Nought seems bright to be desired,
Music, by thy sails unfurled,
Bear me to thy better world;
O'er the cold and weltering sea
Blow thy breezes warm and free,
By sad sighs they ne'er were chilled,
By skeptic spell were never stilled.

Ms. Diary, 1844.

Again she writes, at the same period, she having then various classes to teach :--

Did not get home till just before my class came. Was obliged to lie on the bed all the time they were [303] with me. It was the last time, and they were pleasant. They love me and fancy I am good and wise. Oh that it gave me more pleasure to do a little good, and give a little happiness. But there is no modesty or moderation in me.

Ms. Diary, 1844.

These extracts are quite inconsistent, I think, with the charge most commonly made against Margaret Fuller,--that of vanity and undue self-absorption. It must always be remembered that some previous descriptions of her have been in a manner warped by the fact that they proceeded from the most gifted and intellectual persons whom she knew; all these persons being almost always men whom she met under a certain amount of intellectual excitement, to whom she showed her brightest aspirations, her deepest solicitudes. It was in the very nature of such a description that the every-day aspects should be left out; that we should see chiefly the seeress, the dreamer, the student. She writes reproachfully to a cultivated friend after an interview, “You seemed to consider me as some tete exaltee, at the hour when I was making bitter sacrifices to duty.” Could a memoir have been made up out of her letters to her mother, full of suggestions about flower bulbs, plans as to the larder, and visions of a renovated silk dress; or could we have before us a long series of the sensible, warm-hearted, motherly letters she wrote every week to her absent younger brothers, the whole effect produced would have been [304] very different. The complaint is constantly made that all her attainments and her self-culture did not bring her happiness. It is asking a great deal of any single woman to be positively happy in the presence of tormenting ill-health, poverty, and a self-sacrificing habit that keeps her always on the strain. It is even something to ask of a person, under such circumstances, that she should be habitually cheerful and hopeful. That this last was the predominant tone of Margaret Fuller's daily life is proved by all her more familiar letters and by the general testimony of those who knew her best. No doubt, in her diaries, there are passages which record depression and sometimes almost morbid periods of self-inspection and self-reproach. That is what diaries are made for; they exist in order that imaginative and passionate natures may relieve themselves by expressing these moods, and may then forget them and proceed. The trouble comes when sympathetic biographers elevate these heights and depths into too great importance and find the table-lands of life uninteresting. There never was a year of Margaret Fuller's life, after her precocious maturity, when the greater part of it was not given to daily, practical, commonsense labor, and this usually for other people.

All periods have their fashions. It does not mar our impression of the admirable capacity and self-devotion of Abigail Adams that she signed her early letters to her husband, John Adams, as “Portia.” It was the fashion of the time; and [305] when Margaret Fuller afterwards tried to write out her imaginative and mystical side under the name of “Leila,” it belonged to that period also; a period when German romance was just beginning to be translated, and Oriental poetry to be read. These were her dreams, her idealities; but when it was a question how to provide schoolbooks and an overcoat for her little brother, no other of ten children ever set about the business with less of haziness or indefniteness of mind. If I have seemed in this book to bring my heroine down from the clouds a little; it is simply because I have used the materials at my command, and have tried to paint her as she was; a being not fed on nectar and ambrosia, after all, but on human nature's daily food.

It may be asked why, with this daily and noble self-devotion she was not universally beloved. It can be very briefly told: she wanted tact. As some essentially selfish persons go through the world winning all hearts by merely possessing that quality, so others are always underrated for want of it. There is a story told of her, that at a party given expressly for her in Cambridge she took a piece of cake from a plate offered, and then impulsively replaced it with the remark, “I fear there will not be enough to go round,” thereby giving more offense than if she had personally appropriated the whole plateful. It was this simple and not always judicious honesty of purpose which accounted for her frequent failure to attract at [306] first sight, while there have been few women — I at least have never known any woman — who left behind an affection so deep and strong. It is now thirty years since her death, and there is scarcely a friend of hers who does not speak of her with as warm a devotion as if she had died yesterday.

If Margaret Fuller was strict and unflinching in her judgments of other people, it was because she was so, above all, in dealing with herself. This is seen on every page of her diaries, which record the very heights and depths of a nature as yet uncontrolled and passionately aspiring. Feeling her own powers and capacities, she also recognized her limitations; but her statements of these two sides of the question might be wholly detached, and so gave the appearance of more moodiness than really existed. At any rate, moody or not, they were sincere. A lady once said to me of the Fuller family: “Their only peculiarity was that they said openly about themselves the good and bad things which we commonly suppress about ourselves and express only about other people.” This was true, as has been said, about the elder Fullers, even in public; it was true of Margaret Fuller in her diaries. She was an acute analyst of character, and again and again in her various diaries we come upon sketches delineating the traits of each person in the room. Some of these are printed in the Dial.¹ She always includes herself, and is usually more unflattering [307] to herself than to anybody else. This may be called self-consciousness, but it certainly does not imply vanity; it quite as often takes the form of an almost excessive humility.

It would be easy to illustrate all this at great length from her unpublished papers. The most presumptuous passage about herself that I have been able to find is this, which bears no date. In speaking of Shelley's “Defense of Poesie,” just read, she expresses her joy at finding that he had taken the matter up very much from the point of view she had been presenting in her conversations. “At least,” she says, “I have all the great thoughts, and whatever the world may say, I shall be well received in the Elysian fields.” Fuller Mss. i. 588. Yet this follows close upon a passage expressing her admiration of Shelley's prose style and her utter despair of ever being able to write like him; she can only console herself by thinking that in conversation, at least, she had met him on his own ground. Soon after follow, again and again, passages like these, written at different times:--

I feel within myself an immense power, but I cannot bring it out. I stand a barren vine-stalk; no grape will swell, though the richest wine is slumbering in its roots.

Fuller Mss. i. 589.

I have just about enough talent and knowledge to furnish a dwelling for friendship, but not enough to deck with golden gifts a Delphos for the world.

Fuller Mss. i. 593.

As I read Ellery [Channing] my past life seems a [308] poor excuse for not living; my so-called culture a collection of shreds and patches to hide the mind's nakedness. Cannot I begin really to live and think now?

Fuller Mss. i. 597.

How many authors, surrounded by a circle of admiring friends, are found to have descended, in their secret diaries, to quite such depths of humility as appear in these extracts?

Another point where I should diverge strongly from the current estimate of Margaret Fuller is in the prevailing assumption that her chief aim at any period of her life was self-culture. The Roman thread in her was too strong, the practical inheritance from her parentage too profound, for her to have ever contented herself with a life of abstraction. The strong training that came from her father, the early influence of Jefferson's letters, all precluded this. What she needed was not books but life, and if she ever expressed doubts of this need, she always came back to it again. “Is it not nobler and truer,” she wrote in 1842 to W. H. Channing, “to live than to think?” Ms. Here it is that she sometimes chafes under the guidance of Emerson; always longs to work as well as meditate, to deal with the many, not the few, to feel herself in action. This made it the best thing in her Providence life to have attended the Whig caucus, and made her think, on board the French war-vessel, that she would like to command it; this made her delight in studying [309] Western character; this led her to New York, where the matter — of-fact influence of Horace Greeley simply confirmed what had been so long growing. Like the noble youth in her favorite Jean Paul's “Titan,” she longed for an enterprise for her idle valor. She says in her fragment of autobiographical romance:--

I steadily loved this [Roman] ideal in my childhood, and this is the cause, probably, why I have always felt that man must know how to stand firm on the ground before he can fly. In vain for me are men more, if they are less, than Romans.

Again and again she comes back in her correspondence to this theme, as when she writes to W. H. Channing (March 22, 1840):--

I never in life have had the happy feeling of really doing anything. I can only console myself for these semblances of actions by seeing that others seem to be in some degree aided by them. But oh! really to feel the glow of action, without its weariness, what heaven it must be!

Ms.

Again she writes to the same friend, contrasting the meditative life of Socrates and the active life of Jesus Christ:--

Again, after a day in the woods with Emerson's “Nature,” --reading it through for the first time to herself, Mr. Emerson himself having originally read it aloud to her,--she thus writes to him (April 12, 1840):--

The years do not pass in vain. If they have built no temple on the earth, they have given a nearer view of the city of God. Yet would I rather, were the choice tendered to me, draw the lot of Pericles than that of Anaxagoras. And if such great names do not fit the occasion, I would delight more in thought-living than in living thought. That is not a good way of expressing it either, but I must correct the press another time.

Ms.

This feeling led her to criticise more than once, as we have seen, her friend's half cloistered life at Concord. Describing in one of her letters some speech which called for action, perhaps Kossuth's, she says:--

Read these side by side with Waldo's paragraphs and say, is it not deeper and truer to live than to think? [311] . . . Yet is his [Emerson's] a noble speech! I love to reprove myself by it.

Ms. (W. H. C.)

As I read her letters and diaries, it seems plain that her yearning desire, during her whole life, was not merely to know but to do. She was urged on by an intense longing, not for a selfish self-culture, nor even for self-culture in its very widest sense, but for usefulness in her day and generation.

“He who alone knoweth,” she writes in August, 1843,

will affirm that I have tried to work wholehearted, from an earnest faith, yet my hand is often languid and my heart is slow;--I must be gone, I feel, but whither? I know not: if I cannot make this plot of ground yield corn and roses, famine must be my lot forever and forever, surely.

Ms. (W. H. C.)

In accordance with this thought, she felt that this country must create, as it has now done, its own methods of popular education, especially for the training of girls. She wrote in her “Summer on the Lakes:” --

Methods copied from the education of some English Lady Augusta are as ill suited to the daughter of an Illinois farmer as satin shoes to climb the Indian mounds... Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil.

Summer on the Lakes, p. 47.

Had this protest come from an ignorant per. [312] son, it would have simply amounted to turning one's back on all the experience of the elder world. Coming from the most cultivated American woman of her day, it meant that there was something worth more than culture — namely, original thoughts and free action. Whatever else she was, she was an American.

These are the reasons for thinking that neither the charge of vanity nor of undue self-culture can be sustained against Margaret Fuller. And this is said after reading many hundred pages of her letters and journals. They are clearly written, in a hand quite peculiar, not a little formal, and as it were jointed rather than flowing, and not greatly varying throughout her whole life. She is always clear in style where she takes pains to be clear, is even business-like where she aims at that, and knows how to make herself emphatic without the aid of underscoring; indeed she abstains from this to an extent which would quite amaze Mr. Howells. To be sure, she was not at all one of those charming, helpless, inconsequent creatures whom he so exquisitely depicts; she demanded a great deal from life, but generally knew what she wanted, stated it effectively, and at last obtained it. It was indeed fortunate for her younger brothers and sisters that she was of this constitution. She lived at a time when life in America was hard for all literary people, from the absence of remuneration, the small supply of books, the habit of jealousy among authors, and [313] the lingering prevalence of the colonial spirit, which she battled stoutly to banish. It was especially hard for women in that profession because there were few of them, their early education was won at great disadvantage, and much was conceded reluctantly that now comes as a matter of course. Were she living to-day her life would be far smoother; she would find plenty of remunerative work, fair recognition, and kindly sympathy. On the other hand, she would have to adapt herself to a somewhat different world, for she would not be surrounded by that ardent and effusive social atmosphere which prevailed throughout the limited world of Transcendentalism. It was a fresh, glowing, youthful, hopeful, courageous period, and those who were its children must always rejoice that they were born before it faded away.

My friend Mr. O. B. Frothingham, the only direct historian of the Transcendental period, has failed, in my judgment, to give more than the husk and outside of it, although for this his book is valuable. The trouble was that he was neither a part of that great impulse nor immediately its child; in the day of Transcendentalism he was looking in a different direction and had no sympathy for its aims; and yet he was not quite far enough away to view it in perspective. To its immediate offspring, even if of a younger race, it bequeathed a glow and a joy that have been of life-long permanence. I have noticed that most of those who, [314] were nurtured under that influence have had the good fortune to grow old slowly; their world is still poetic; the material achievements, the utilitarian philosophy of later years may come or go, leaving their ideal, their confidence, their immortal hope unchanged. And now that much which Transcendentalism sought is fulfilled, and that which was ecstasy has — as Emerson predictedbecome daily bread, its reminiscences mingle with all youth's enchantments, and belong to a period when we too “toiled, feasted, despaired, were happy.”

And as for Margaret Ossoli, her life seems to me, on the whole, a triumphant rather than a sad one, in spite of the prolonged struggle with illness, with poverty, with the shortcomings of others and with her own. In later years she had the fulfillment of her dreams; she had what Elizabeth Barrett, writing at the time of her marriage to Robert Browning, named as the three great desiderata of existence, “life and love and Italy.” She shared in great deeds, she was the counselor of great men, she had a husband who was a lover, and she had a child. They loved each other in their lives, and in their death they were not divided. Was not that enough?