Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
enchanted while I read. He comprehends every feeling I have ever had
so perfectly, expresses it so beautifully; but when I shut the book,
it seems as if I had lost my personal identity; all my feelings linked
with such an immense variety that belongs to things I had thought
so different” (_ibid._, Vol. I, p. 119). Later, with more critical
analysis of Goethe, she found her enthusiasm modifying; she was
repelled by his calm, aloof intellectuality;[465] but she never wavered
in loyal recognition of his commanding powers.
Her romantic idealism was in full career when the transcendental
movement caught her up and put its stamp upon her. It came as an
emotional appeal to the vague aspirations of a life inadequately
motivated, and she threw herself eagerly into the new philosophy
and became the most hectic of its expounders. The intellectual
foundations of her transcendentalism were so slight in comparison
with the equipment of Hedge and Parker as scarcely to justify her
pretentions to their fellowship. But what she lacked in knowledge of
Kant and Fichte she made up in enthusiasm, and none questioned her
right to speak for the group. The editorship of the _Dial_ provided a
convenient safety valve for her energy, but it neither absorbed her nor
sufficed to satisfy her limitless desires. She needed to espouse a
cause more concrete and dramatic, personal in its demands, calling for
high sacrifice. Abolitionism was at hand, but it repelled her by its
narrow dogmatisms. Garrison was never a hero of hers. She regarded him
with “high respect” for his “noble and generous” course; but “he has
indulged in violent invective and denunciation till he has spoiled the
temper of his mind” (“Frederick Douglass,” in _Life Without and Life
Within_, p. 122). Later, when she was in Europe, she looked back half
regretfully at her indifference to the movement.
How it pleases me here to think of the Abolitionists! I could never
endure to be with them at home; they were so tedious, often so
narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone. But, after
all, they had a high motive, something eternal in their desire and
life. (_Memoirs_, Vol. II, p. 229.)
Even Brook Farm repelled her as much as it attracted her. Though
she loved many of the members, bore her share in the discussions
preliminary to its establishment, and often visited there, she would
not join the venture. She had had enough of farm life at Groton. To
open a road to Utopia with a common plow was, perhaps, too prosaic a
business for her romantic nature, and when the Fourier Phalanx was
introduced she grew skeptical. Fourierism seemed to her too mechanical
a conception, in spite of her sympathy for the humanitarian spirit that
lay behind it. As she looked back upon it from the vantage point of her
French experience, she modified her judgment somewhat, although the old
transcendental bias that Emerson had voiced still colored her views.
The more I see of the terrible ills which infest the body politic
of Europe, the more indignation I feel at the selfishness or
stupidity of those in my own country who oppose an examination of
these subjects,--such as is animated by the hope of prevention.
Educated in an age of gross materialism, Fourier is tainted by its
faults; in attempts to reorganise society, he commits the error
of making soul the result of health of body, instead of body the
clothing of the soul; but his heart was that of a genuine lover
of his kind, of a philanthropist in the sense of Jesus; his views
are large and noble; his life was one of devout study on these
subjects, and I should pity the person who, after the briefest
sojourn in Manchester and Lyons, the most superficial acquaintance
with the population of London or Paris, could seek to hinder a
study of his thoughts, or be wanting in reverence for his purposes.
(_Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 206.)
It was in part from Fourier, certainly from the collectivistic
theories discussed so generally by the transcendental group, that
she received her equipment for the cause which, more than any other
except the dramatic Roman revolution, appealed to the deeper rebellions
of her soul. She had dealt much with the woman question in her
“Conversations,” and in 1844 she published _Woman in the Nineteenth
Century_, a work that made a great stir in America. The “little book
was the first considered statement of feminism in this country”
(Katharine Anthony, _Margaret Fuller_, p. 80), and its novelty was
emphasized by its boldness. The question of woman’s place had emerged
sharply from the Abolition movement, when the appearance of women on
the platform had aroused opposition even from radical reformers, and
Angelina Grimké had encountered insults when she spoke at Abolition
meetings. But Margaret Fuller was the first since Mary Wollstonecraft,
fifty years before, to undertake a reasoned defense of the claims of
woman to emancipation from man-made custom. It was a somewhat shocking
book to fling at respectable Boston bluestockings--male as well as
female--for not only did she discuss equality of economic opportunity
and equality of political rights for women, but she went further and
spoke frankly about sex equality, marriage, prostitution, physical
passions--pretty much everything that was taboo in Boston society. It
was a bold thing to do, needing more courage even than to engage in a
Fourieristic onslaught upon the conventions of private property. Only a
first-class rebel would have had the temerity to offer such morsels to
wagging tongues.
This was her parting shot at a world that had done its best to stifle
her. Thenceforth her field was to broaden out immensely. In 1844 she
went to New York to live in the family of Horace Greeley and write
critical reviews for _The Tribune_--a shift that marked the beginning
of her intellectual maturity, the end of her mystical sentimentalism.
She was thirty-four years of age, and she plunged vigorously into the
work of criticism, never perhaps very successfully, certainly never
with high distinction. Her judgments were penetrating and individual,
she awakened some Cambridge animosities by her comment on certain
Cambridge poets, but she was not a notable critic. A fine craftsmanship
she never attained. A light touch she could never command. Nevertheless
the experience was sobering. Honest, practical Horace Greeley, with
his pugnacious fondness for social reform, was an excellent antidote
to Concord transcendentalism; and an awakening sociological interest
discovered ample opportunities in New York for the expression of her
mother-instinct. She took to her stormy bosom the inmates of Sing Sing
prison, the poor and outcast of the city. At last she went to Europe,
fell in with Mazzini, and found a cause dramatic enough and real enough
to satisfy her rebellious instincts. She was profoundly stirred by the
Roman revolution, took charge of one of the hospitals, and spent her
strength freely. On the tragic failure of the revolt she started home
with her husband and child, only to perish on the sandy shores of Fire
Island--a fate she did not turn her finger to escape. Perhaps it was
well. She had only too good reason to be fearful of her reception and
of the future. Tongues that had wagged before would certainly have
risen to a virtuous gabble over her misadventure in Italy. On the whole
one must be glad that her friends refused to permit her good name to
be thrown to the gossips. Why shouldn’t gentlemen lie stoutly if by so
doing they can cheat the salacious?
A sensitive emotional nature offers the best of social barometers,
and Margaret Fuller’s tragic life, despite its lack of solid
accomplishment, was an epitome of the great revolt of the New England
mind against Puritan asceticism and Yankee materialism. She was the
emotional expression of a rebellious generation that had done with
the past and was questioning the future. Not a scholar like Theodore
Parker, not a thinker like Thoreau, not an artist like Emerson, she was
a ferment of troubled aspiration, an enthusiasm for a more generous
culture than New England had known--the logical outcome of the romantic
revolution which, beginning with Channing’s discovery of humanitarian
France, and leading thence to idealistic Germany, was to break the
indurated shell of life in New England, and release its conscience and
its mind. She was the spiritual child of Jean Jacques even more than of
Goethe--a fact that she eventually came to realize. Writing from Paris
in 1847, she said:
To the ... Chamber of Deputies, I was indebted for a sight of the
manuscripts of Rousseau, treasured in their library. I saw them and
touched them,--those manuscripts just as he has celebrated them,
written on fine white paper, tied with ribbon. Yellow and faded
age has made them, yet at their touch I seemed to feel the fire
of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive, with which
his soul has pervaded this century. He was the precursor of all we
most prize. True, his blood was mixed with madness, and the course
of his actual life made some _detours_ through villainous places;
but his spirit was intimate with the fundamental truths of human
nature, and fraught with prophecy. There is none who has given
birth to more life for this age; his gifts are yet untold; they are
too present with us; but he who thinks really must often think with
Rousseau, and learn him ever more and more. Such is the method of
genius,--to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat
they complain. (_Memoirs_, Vol. II, pp. 206-207.)
The rebel pays a heavy price for his rebellions, as Margaret learned to
her cost. She suffered much in her daily life, but it was her art that
suffered most. She was evidently a far richer nature than her printed
works reveal. Intense in her extravagant demands upon life, a radical
humanitarian in all her sympathies and instincts, generous in response
to whatever was fine and high, living unduly an inner life as became a
daughter of Puritanism--Margaret Fuller was too vivid a personality,
too complete an embodiment of the rich ferment of the forties, to be
carelessly forgotten. The deeper failure of her career--its vague
aspirations and inadequate accomplishment--was a failure that may be
justly charged against the narrow world that bred her. Perhaps no
sharper criticism could be leveled at New England than that it could do
no better with such material, lent it by the gods.
Footnotes
[464] See Katharine Anthony, _Margaret Fuller, A Psychological
Biography_.
[465] See _Life Without and Life Within_, pp. 23-60.
Part IV: Other Aspects of the New England Mind
Chapter I • The Reign of the Genteel
I
The discussion of the New England mind hitherto has kept pretty much
to the outskirts of Boston, to Concord and Roxbury and undistinguished
precincts; it has not penetrated the Back Bay where dwelt the authentic
representatives of Brahminism, nor has it concerned itself greatly
with Cambridge that was a lesser Back Bay. Nevertheless there were
other ideals than those of transcendentalism and social reform in the
New England of the renaissance--ideals of culture, of scholarship, of
_belles lettres_, to which the Brahmin mind contributed, and which
after the subsidence of the ferment came to dominate genteel New
England and for a generation largely influenced American letters. To
the revolutionary aspirations of the forties the Back Bay contributed
little. Brahmin Boston might turn Unitarian with Channing, but it
was at heart neither French romantic nor German idealist; it desired
rather culture for its own sake, and scholarship it regarded as the
handmaid of culture. It hoped of course that righteousness and the