Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
[459] See Wendell, _Literary History of America_, p. 348.
[460] See “Letter to the Members of the Twenty-Eighth Congregational
Society of Boston,” in Weiss, _Life and Correspondence of Theodore
Parker_, Vol. II, Appendix II, p. 482. This account of his “Experience
as a Minister” constitutes a brief intellectual autobiography, of first
importance to the student of Parker.
[461] This phrase of Parker’s was probably the source of Lincoln’s
phrase.
[462] See “The Law of God and the Statutes of Men,” in _Additional
Speeches_, Vol. II, p. 181.
[463] Quoted in Weiss, Vol. II, p. 488.
Chapter V • Margaret Fuller • Rebel
The fame of Margaret Fuller has waned greatly since her vivid
personality was blotted out in the prime of her intellectual
development. Misunderstood in her own time, caricatured by unfriendly
critics, and with significant facts of her life suppressed by her
friends out of a chivalrous sense of loyalty, the real woman has been
lost in a Margaret Fuller myth and later generations have come to
underestimate her powers and undervalue her work. Yet no other woman
of her generation in America is so well worth recalling. She was
the completest embodiment of the inchoate rebellions and grandiose
aspirations of the age of transcendental ferment; for to the many
grievances charged against the times by other New England liberals, she
added the special grievance of the stupid inhibitions laid upon women.
Transcendental radical and critic, like Emerson and Thoreau and Parker,
she was feminist also; and to the difficult business of freeing her
mind from the Cambridge orthodoxies, she added the greater difficulty
of freeing her sex.
The written record that Margaret Fuller left is quite inadequate to
explain her contemporary reputation. In no sense an artist, scarcely
a competent craftsman, she wrote nothing that bears the mark of high
distinction either in thought or style. Impatient of organization and
inadequately disciplined, she threw off her work impulsively, not
pausing to shape it to enduring form. Yet she was vastly talked about,
and common report makes her out to have been an extraordinary woman
who creatively influenced those with whom she came in contact. Like
Alcott, her power lay in brilliant talk. Her quick mind seems to have
been an electric current that stimulated other minds to activity, and
created a vortex of speculation wherever she passed. Hungry for ideas,
intellectually and emotionally vibrant, she caught her inspirations
from obscure impulses of a nature thwarted and inhibited from normal
unfolding; and in her sensitive oscillations she was often drawn
away from polar principles to which she would later swing back. There
was quite evidently a fundamental unrest within her, a conflict of
impulses, that issued in dissatisfaction; and this contradiction was
aggravated by intense emotions, which both quickened her mind and
distorted it.
A product of Cambridge bookishness, Margaret Fuller was both a wonder
and a riddle to a generation that made little account of the psychology
of sex. She was commonly looked upon as an intellectual monstrosity,
the most fearful of Yankee bluestockings, and a later Bostonian has
gone so far as to suggest that she was “an unsexed version of Plato’s
Socrates” (Wendell, _Literary History of America_, p. 300). But to
present-day psychology her character is an extraordinarily suggestive
document, and a recent critic has read her seeming contradictions
like an open book.[464] Before Miss Anthony’s penetrating analysis
the Margaret Fuller myth vanishes, and a very real, natural, and
unfortunate woman takes its place. She came of vigorous stock,
independent, outspoken, opinionated. Her grandfather was a clergyman
who was unfrocked by his church for being lukewarm in the Revolutionary
War. Her father, Timothy Fuller, and her four uncles, worked their
way through Harvard. In Timothy Fuller there was a large measure of
Puritan grimness and severity that locked the door on the passions of
his heart, that none might know of them; yet there seems to have been
a volcano in the man who held off the world so brusquely. The rebel
was strong in him. The Fullers were not of Brahmin stock and had no
wish to please their social superiors. While a Harvard undergraduate,
Timothy Fuller turned Jeffersonian republican and lost his place as
first honor man by joining in an undergraduate protest against certain
hated regulations. As a lawyer and politician he repudiated respectable
Federalism, and although he was representative in Congress for four
terms and enjoyed certain other offices, his non-conformity in the end
cost him dear. No doubt he had counted on that, for he was stubborn oak
that might break but would not bend. The tragedy of Margaret Fuller’s
life seems to have been sketched before in the life of Timothy Fuller.
To an extraordinary degree the daughter was the child of the father,
in ideas and sympathies as well as blood. Like him she was a rebel,
but for the daughter to turn rebel involved greater hazards than
for the father. Her sex was a heavy handicap, for the experience of
Fanny Wright and Lucretia Mott had revealed that American chivalry
had definite bounds; it did not shield the woman who ventured beyond
the pale. Yet considering her blood and training, how could she help
thus venturing into freer fields without? From her earliest years her
father treated her as a comrade and gave her the training of a boy. In
her studies he dealt with her as James Mill dealt with his brilliant
son. Perhaps it was a mistake to force her into the rigid groove of
classical learning when she should have been playing with her dolls.
From it she got very unusual acquisitions, but overstimulation broke
her health, and isolation turned her mind in upon itself and made her
the victim of somnambulism and freaks of imagination. The result was
the development, on one side of her nature, of a female counterpart
of Cotton Mather--precocious, domineering, moody, visionary, given to
long hours of greedy reading, gorging herself on books and well-nigh
ruining her intellectual digestion as well as her health. Against this
unfortunate overstimulation her vigorous nature struggled for years,
and never quite successfully. Her emotions were forever embroiling
her intellect. To conceive of her as sexless is curiously to miss the
point of her emotionalism. She was rather the victim of sex. Her ardent
friendships with other women, her flashes of mystical experience, her
fondness for children, her love of luxury and creature comforts, her
eager love affair with James Nathan who unchivalrously found safety in
flight, her friendship with Mazzini and her more intimate friendship
with Count Ossoli, that ended in an unconventional marriage after her
situation rendered it necessary--such reactions can be explained on
no other hypothesis. Her ardent nature was the victim of disastrous
frustrations, rendered the more acute by premature development. If
she had married early, as Harriet Beecher did, and her excessive
energy had been turned into domestic channels, her life must have been
less tragic, whatever the effect might have been on her intellectual
development.
The acutest contemporary analysis of her contradictory character is
that given by her friend William Henry Channing, who found his clue in
the clash between endowment and environment:
Here was one fond as a child of joy, eager as a native of the
tropics for swift transition from luxurious rest to passionate
excitement, prodigal to pour her mingled force of will, thought,
sentiment, into the life of the moment, all radiant with
imagination, longing for communion with artists of every age in
their inspired hours, fitted by genius and culture to mingle as an
equal in the most refined circles of Europe, and yet her youth and
early womanhood had passed away amid the very decent, yet drudging,
descendants of prim Puritans. Trained among those who could have
discerned her peculiar power, and early fed with the fruits of
beauty for which her spirits pined, she would have developed into
one of the finest lyrists, romancers and critics, that the modern
literary world has seen. This she knew; and this tantalization of
her fate she keenly felt. (_Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli_,
by R. W. Emerson, W. H. Channing, and J. F. Clarke, Vol. II, pp.
36-37.)
This disastrous clash between endowment and environment is strikingly
exemplified in her delight in Europe when at thirty-four she found
herself there--in her admiration for Georges Sand, and in particular
the extravagance of her love for Rome, where her starved heart found
satisfactions she had long dreamed of. “Italy receives me as a
long-lost child, and I feel myself at home here,” she wrote in 1847;
and a few weeks later, “I find how true was the lure that always drew
me towards Europe. It was no false instinct that said I might here
find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need. Had I only come ten
years earlier! Now my life must be a failure, so much strength has
been wasted on abstractions, which only came because I grew not in the
right soil” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 225). She was too eagerly pagan to be
satisfied with either Puritan or Yankee Cambridge. The pale ethicism of
New England was thin gruel for such an appetite for life. Even Emerson
she found cold, and her stomach rebelled at the food he throve on. But
this was only half the story; the other half was this:
But the tragedy of Margaret’s history was deeper yet. Behind the
poet was the woman,--fond and relying, the heroic and disinterested
woman. The very glow of her poetic enthusiasm was but an outflush
of trustful affection; the very restlessness of her intellect was
the confession that her heart had found no home. A “book-worm,”
a “dilettante,” a “pedant,” I had heard her sneeringly called;
but now it was evident that her seeming insensibility was virgin
pride, and her absorption in studying the natural vent of emotions,
which met no object of life-long attachment. At once, many of her
peculiarities became intelligible. Fitfulness, unlooked-for changes
of mood, misconceptions of words and actions, substitutions of
fancy for fact ... were now referred to the morbid influence of
affections pent up to prey upon themselves. And, what was still
more interesting, the clue was given to a singular credulousness,
by which, in spite of her unusual penetration, Margaret might be
led away blindfold. As this revelation of her ardent nature burst
upon me, and ... I saw how faithful she had kept to her life
purposes,--how patient, gentle, and thoughtful of others, how
active in self-improvement and usefulness, how wisely dignified she
had been,--I could not but bow to her in reverence. (_Ibid._, Vol.
II, p. 37.)
The inchoate rebellions in her heart were stimulated and given form by
her reading. From the English, French, and German romantics she drew
much of her intellectual food. The long hours spent with her father
over Jefferson’s letters were the best of preparation for Rousseau
and Mary Wollstonecraft, and French romanticism provided an excellent
introduction to the German. Her emotions were in high ferment when she
came upon the German school, and she yielded her heart to it without
reserve. Novalis, Richter, above all Goethe, became a passion and
swept her along the path that Hedge and James Freeman Clarke were
following. For years she gathered materials for a life of Goethe, but
a feeling of self-distrust held back the project. Her love for him was
the great literary enthusiasm of her life. “It seems to me,” she wrote
in 1832, “as if the mind of Goethe had embraced the universe.... I am