Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  She had in mind not just Cary’s infatuation, but also Ellery’s longtime friendship with Sam Ward, his classmate at the progressive Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, and then for a semester at Harvard before the “good vagabond” Ellery dropped out, protesting the college’s dull curriculum and compulsory chapel services. Leaving college for such reasons was understandable, perhaps noble, but how could anyone give up a close friendship with Sam, the boy-man whom Margaret and Waldo had taken to calling “Raphael” for his precocious talent as a painter and his connoisseurship in the visual arts?

  In hindsight, Margaret would come to admit that she had a tendency to think she had “gone so much further with a friend than I really have.” But for a time during the summer of 1839, as she was approaching thirty and Sam just twenty-one, Margaret had grieved as profoundly and self-righteously over a loss of connection with the fledgling artist as she had over her doomed passion for George Davis years earlier. The few days she’d spent with Sam Ward in Newport on their way home from the Farrars’ Hudson River excursion the summer before Timothy’s death had deepened in Margaret’s memory into a true meeting of minds and hearts, one that had made her sing “a joyful song,” which, to her consternation, “found no echo” from Sam on his much-anticipated return from Europe.

  “How did you pray me to draw near to you! . . . I poured out my heart to you,” she stormed, as Sam patiently assured her of his wish to remain friends. “You would not be so irreverent as to dare tamper with a nature like mine, you could not treat so generous a person with levity,” she chastised Sam in disbelief when he appeared to be avoiding her company: “if you love me as I deserve to be loved, you cannot dispense with seeing me.” She had learned the “bitterness of checked affections” from George Davis and believed herself to be “incapable of feeling or being content to inspire an ordinary attachment.” With Sam, something extraordinary seemed possible: “We knew long ago that age, position, and pursuits being so different, nothing but love bound us together.” Yet what sort of love?

  Now Sam told Margaret she had never been his inamorata. He had reverenced her all along as he would a mother. Anything else, he told her humbly, would “spoil” him for his “part on life’s dull scene,” or—she must have been shocked to hear—“call up the woman” in him. Sam Ward would not play the role she envisioned for him: the young aesthete, her fond follower, her chivalric lover. In fact, he had given up thoughts of becoming a painter, always more Margaret’s idea than his, to work for Baring Brothers, the English banking firm for which his father served as American representative, and he had moved to New York City to oversee the office there. Margaret struggled to accept Sam’s career decision and his verdict on their “love”: “You have given me the sacred name of Mother, and I will be so indulgent, as tender, as delicate (if possible) in my vigilance, as if I had borne you beneath my heart instead of in it.” However else the blow affected her, like other setbacks it prompted some of her most florid prose.

  And then she learned, along with Waldo, that the year before, Sam had fallen in love with Anna Barker, Margaret’s “star of stars,” while the two were traveling in Europe. It was in order to establish himself on solid financial ground, to win Anna’s hand, that Sam had settled in New York. Now Margaret wrote to him, “I understand all perfectly.” To save her dignity, she delivered to Sam a Waldo-like pronouncement: “though I might grieve that you should put me from you in your highest hour and find yourself unable to meet me on the very ground where you had taught me most to expect it . . . the knowledge I have of your nature has become a part of mine, the love it has excited will accompany me through eternity.”

  But Waldo also loved, in his way, both Anna and Sam—and Cary Sturgis. Waldo admired Anna Barker as extravagantly as Margaret did. He met her on a rare visit to Willow Brook in Jamaica Plain where Anna was staying with Margaret in the early fall of 1839. On his return home, Waldo could only complain of the flimsy “strip of paper” in his journal that “remains to me to record my introduction to Anna Barker.” “Few days of my quiet life,” he wrote, “are so illustrated & cheered as were these two in which I enjoyed the frank & generous confidence of a being so lovely, so fortunate, & so remote from my own experiences.” Once again Margaret had shown him that a “new person is to me ever a great event,” as he wrote not just in his journal that evening, but also in “Friendship.” In the essay, though, which he revised through the fall and winter, he continued the sentence enticingly: “A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have given me delicious hours.” And then, pulling back: “But the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action is very little modified.”

  The news of Anna and Sam’s attachment, not yet an engagement, had followed fast on that first meeting. Two weeks later, after a visit to Concord from Margaret and Bronson Alcott—“Cold as I am,” Waldo wrote in his journal, “they are almost dear”—the story was out. Margaret had confided “to my private ear a chronicle of sweet romance, of love & nobleness which have inspired the beautiful & brave.” But he added a qualification: Margaret’s portrayal of her own role in the tale “mingled a shade of discontent” with “my joy” in “that which thou toldest me O eloquent lady, of thy friends & mine.” Privately he speculated that Margaret’s professed eternal, selfless love for Sam could not survive the “wear & tear of years” and would “be succeeded by another & another & the new will sport with the old.” Still, he guessed, knowing Margaret, “it will never be nothing.” And he had yet to become thoroughly acquainted with Sam Ward, the “young man of promising character and prosperous fortunes” who had so captivated Margaret, who seemingly had won the heart of the matchless Anna Barker (“The wind is not purer than she is,” Waldo still believed), and who, perhaps intentionally, had managed to evade Waldo at every opportunity until they met by chance in the White Mountains on holiday in late summer, when Sam was fending off Margaret’s ardent letters.

  Now, as may have happened several years earlier with Margaret, Sam fell under Waldo Emerson’s spell. With the cooling fall weather, the “chill wind and rain” that matched Margaret’s mood of despond, Anna traveled south for the winter to her family’s new home in New Orleans, and Sam quit his job with Baring Brothers to stay on in Boston, entering into long conversations with Waldo by his fireside while together they studied Sam’s portfolio of prints from Italy—and, with Margaret’s encouragement, writing poetry for The Dial. Sam felt he had made his point after a year’s servitude in New York; Anna had given him permission to open a private correspondence, a strong indicator of her eventual acceptance of his suit. He was ready to give up the “vexation” of business, the “life that is rather my death,” as he had written to Eliza Farrar while laboring in New York City. Maybe, with his family’s wealth to rely on, Sam could live as Waldo Emerson did, keeping morning hours in his study, tending a vegetable garden in the afternoons, entertaining a parade of high-minded guests with an enchanting wife and children to ornament the scene—without the onerous lecture engagements or publishers’ deadlines. When he traveled to New Orleans the following spring, it was to announce these new plans to Anna as he asked her to marry him.

  Her answer—or her father’s—was no. She must marry a man with a steady income of his own or remain in the family circle to serve her aging parents. Stunned but unwilling to settle into the harness once more, Sam traveled north, stopping to see Ellery Channing in Illinois, only to discover the “bird has flown” again, back to Boston. By June of 1840, Sam was in Boston too, sick with the “ague” —“emaciated,” by Margaret’s account when she saw him in recovery in early July, but all “the more dear” and in a “gentle, celestial, not hopeful, but faithful” mood. Anna would return soon as well.

  With their own hearts aimed high—at fervid, spiritualized friendship—Waldo and Margaret imagined Anna’s refusal of Sam “implied another resolution,” as Waldo later phrased it
in a letter to Cary Sturgis, to the promiscuous desires among the band of five. In Margaret, the news revived the hope, crushed by Sam’s rejection, of an intimate pentangle. Writing to Cary Sturgis in the wake of her disappointment the previous summer, Margaret had described Anna as her “eldest and divinest love” and explained to Cary that “I thought of all women but you two as my children, my pupils, my play things . . . You two alone I would have held by the hand.” With “Mr E for the representative of religious aspiration” and “one other of Earth’s beauty”—Sam Ward—“I thought my circle would be as complete as friendship could make it.” Perhaps it was still to be.

  Waldo’s expectations were similar, if revolving around himself rather than Margaret, and he did his best to realize them. Margaret detected his growing enthusiasm as Anna’s arrival drew near. She had received two letters from Waldo by midsummer, Margaret wrote to Cary, in which he was “soaring like an eagle, skimming like a swallow,” although, she added sardonically, “never with me, nor in the depths.” Margaret took the opportunity to press her case with Waldo for at least a tripartite bond, declaring herself and Cary “willing” to be his “friends in the full & sacred sense,” but charging Waldo with “a certain inhospitality of soul,” a tendency to “remain apart critical, & after many interviews still a stranger.” She had put him on notice.

  Waldo recognized the accusation: “I count & weigh, but do not love.” He was willing to “confess to the fact of cold & imperfect intercourse”—conversation, he meant—“but not,” he defended himself in a letter to Cary, “the deficiency of my affection. If I count & weigh, I love also.” He continued, almost gushing: “I cannot tell you how warm & glad the naming of your names”—Margaret’s and Cary’s—“makes my solitude . . . With all my heart I would live in your society I would gladly spend the remainder of my days in the holy society of the best the wisest & the most beautiful[.] Come and live near me whenever it suits your pleasure.”

  When Anna reached Boston in August, Waldo invited all three women—Margaret, Anna, and Cary—for a long weekend stay in Concord, traveling to Cambridge himself with “a good horse” and “caryall” to escort the trio back to his home. What followed were “three golden days,” he wrote afterward to Cary, acknowledging “the debt of so much love to you all & severally.” What transpired on those three days? Waldo left clues in a poem titled simply “The Visit,” suggesting a kind of conversational convergence of souls:

  More fleet than waves or whirlwinds go . . .

  Hearts to hearts their meaning show . . .

  Single look has drained the breast,

  Single moment years confessed.

  “I thought she had looked the world through for a man as universal as herself,” he wrote of Anna Barker to Cary, “& finding none, had said, ‘I will compensate myself for my great renunciation as a woman by establishing ideal relations: Not only Raphael shall be my brother, but that Puritan at concord who is reputed at some time to have seen the mighty Gods, I will elect him also.’ And so thinking, she came & covenanted with me that we two should speak the truth to each other.” By the time he’d written the letter, however, Waldo had heard the “strange news” from Anna, the astonishing “new fact,” that she’d changed her mind and accepted Sam Ward’s proposal. The two would marry in a month: Sam had acquiesced to her father’s offer of a banking job in Boston and a home on fashionable Louisburg Square to go with it. Anna had stopped Waldo “at the church door in Cambridge,” in the “midst of the Phi Beta crowd” at Harvard’s summer’s end commencement, to tell him. Anna, whose “angel has appeared at all the doors melted my reserves & prepared me to say things never before spoken,” Waldo sorrowed.

  The duration of a glance

  Is the term of convenance . . .

  Waldo registered the news “with a certain terror.” The scene of his own inspirational address three years earlier was now also the setting of his baffled hopes. “She does not feel any fall,” Waldo marveled of Anna’s reversal, her betrayal of this Concord Puritan. “There was no compunction written on either of their brows,” he noted of the couple. He could only confide in his “dear sister” Cary his regret that Sam and Anna, “these shining examples of Denial,” had not “kept that starry road” of covenanted celibacy, “ideal relations,” transcendent friendship: “I think we should all have worshipped them with weeping eyes.” In his distress, he turned now to Cary alone, asking her to “be my saint & purify me wholly.”

  Left suddenly on the margins of the court she herself had assembled, Margaret had no choice but to parley with Waldo Emerson. Indeed there had been, as he wrote in his letter of apology after disrupting Margaret’s Conversations, “years of dereliction.” Certainly there were times when Margaret’s friendship with Waldo had warranted effusions. During her first spring at Willow Brook, after she had passed up Waldo’s offer to help her settle nearby in Concord, or even to board in the Emerson house, she had written to him of the wild geranium and hawthorn blooming in the countryside at Jamaica Plain, a Shakespearean dithyramb: “If you will come this week I will crown you with something prettier than willow, or any sallow . . . You can have a garland of what fashion you will[.] Do but come.” But more often than not, Waldo did not come. He preferred to meet Margaret on his own ground. And there too she confounded him.

  “Persons were her game,” Waldo knew, but Margaret played the game of friendship by different rules than his. “The higher the style we demand of friendship,” Waldo proposed in his essay, “the less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world.” For Waldo, when all was said and done, friendship and its benefits accrued in the solitary mind, not in company at the common table or fireside—or in playful floral coronations. At times he found Margaret devious: “What a spendthrift you are, o beautiful Corinne! What needless webs you weave, what busy arts you ply.” Yet he also knew her desire for connection to be sincere, if beyond his capacity to meet. She wanted an “absolute all-confiding intimacy between her & another.” He was wary of being caught in her web of interdependence.

  As early as Margaret’s first summer of teaching in Providence, when the tone of their letters turned comradely, Waldo had been alarmed by her “flesh and blood” demands on his sympathy when she paid him a visit in Concord at the end of her summer term and readily opened her full emotional burden to him. Margaret was then still reconciling herself to the change of circumstances brought on by her father’s sudden death. “Life is a pretty tragedy especially for women,” Waldo had written in his journal at the time. “On comes a gay dame of manners & tone so fine & haughty that all defer to her as to a countess, & she seems the dictator of society. Sit down by her, & talk of her own life in earnest, & she is some stricken soul with care & sorrow at her vitals.” Of Margaret’s “care & sorrow” he did not wish to know. “We are armed all over with these subtle antagonisms,” he wrote to her afterward, attempting to explain what he knew had turned out to be a disappointing visit, “which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, & translate all poetry into such stale prose.”

  Even more distasteful to him was the way he saw Margaret and other women conversing with each other as they gathered in his parlor: no sooner had the “stricken soul” confessed her woes than her companion “in return . . . disburdens into her ear the story of her misery, as deep & hopeless as her own.” Such an exchange was about as far from the ideal of friendship Waldo espoused as could be imagined, yet it was what Margaret sought from him—a connection through mutual understanding and sympathy—and that, at times, unwilling as he was to admit it, Waldo coveted for himself. For Margaret knew Waldo suffered too, though he presented a “cold pedantic self” to his parlor guests or argued for a Dial “measuring no hours but those of sunshine.” After age thirty, “a man wakes up sad every morning,” he had written in his journal, for no one else to read; but Margaret sensed his melancholy. She had published his beloved Ellen’s poems in The Dial, as well as poetry and essays written by his two favorite brothers, Ch
arles and Edward, once his closest friends, both lost to tuberculosis within five years of Ellen’s death in 1831. Margaret had enabled his mourning, sustained Waldo in his loss. Why wouldn’t he meet her in the same way, allow her into his heart?