The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

by Elizabeth Hardwick

  In Concord, visiting the Emerson house, the second Mrs. Emerson—not a beauty like Ellen, who died young of tuberculosis—experiences the discomforts arising from the presence of a husband-adorer and disciple in the house, waiting for him to be free to inspire, to read his poems aloud, to take a nature walk. Hurt feelings, tears; Mrs. E. asks Margaret to take a walk with her one evening and M. answers that she cannot because she is going to walk with Mr. E. That sort of thing.

  And the inevitable “friendship” discussions with Emerson, heavy with feeling on Margaret Fuller’s side. She wants some sort of exclusiveness, recognition: “I am like some poor traveller of the desert, who saw, at early morning, a distant palm, and toiled all day to reach it”—followed by a transparent Persian fable, which Emerson pretends not to understand. And, another letter,

  I have felt the impossibility of meeting far more than you; so much, that if you ever know me well, you will feel that the fact of my abiding by you thus far, affords a strong proof that we are to be much to one another. . . . How often have I left you despairing and forlorn. This light will never understand my fire.

  Emerson in his memoir does not avoid analysis of this disconcerting appeal for more, more.

  Our moods were very different; and I remember, that, at the very time when I, slow and cold, had come fully to admire her genius, and was congratulating myself on the solid good understanding that subsisted between us, I was surprised at hearing it taxed by her with superficiality and halfness. She stigmatised our friendship as commercial. It seems her magnanimity was not met.

  Together they began The Dial in 1840, with Margaret Fuller as the editor for two years. It was a Transcendentalist forum, “to lift men to a higher platform.” Criticism, it was felt, would be most useful to the soul of the country, and, not to be forgotten, criticism is what the group was able to compose and thus to celebrate Genius and the Transcendental calling.

  Fuller offered an essay on Goethe, the supreme genius, a defense against accusations of immortality and egotism. Her essay is intense and rather more parochial than it need be, except for being addressed to an audience alarmed and distrustful. “Pardon him, World, that he was too worldly. Do not wonder, Heart, that he was so heartless. Believe, Soul, that one so true, as far as he went, must yet be initiated into the deeper mysteries of Soul.”

  Emerson thought the Goethe essay her best, and Professor Perry Miller views it as a moment in history. Here Margaret brashly defends Werther against the prevailing American opinion that it was a foul corrupter of youth; and she praises The Elective Affinities, which American men regarded as the nadir of sensual depravity. Viewed in this perspective, Margaret’s essay is a basic document in the history of intellectual freedom in the United States.

  The work on The Dial exhausted her, and Emerson assumed the editing for the next two of the magazine’s four years. “I remember, after she had been compelled to relinquish the journal into my hands, my grateful wonder at the facility with which she assumed the preparation of laborious articles that might have daunted the most practised scribe.”

  CONVERSATIONS

  The famous gatherings in Boston in which Margaret Fuller led and instructed a number of well-bred women began in the rooms of Miss Elizabeth Peabody on West Street. The object was “to pass in review the departments of thought and knowledge, and endeavor to place them in due relation to one another in our mind.” Since eloquence was the leader’s gift, she had to do a good deal of orating to pinch the minds of her fellow explorers into speech. The account of one conversation that survives is a comedy, and perhaps that is why it survives. The topic was “What Is Life?” Pushed and prodded, a Miss C. replied, “It is to laugh, or cry, according to our organization.”

  “Good,” said Fuller, “but not grave enough.”

  Another reply by Mrs. E., perhaps the second Mrs. Emerson, who was an attendant, “ ‘We live by the will of God, and the object of life is to submit,’ and went on into Calvinism.”

  When pressed to give her own idea of what life is, M. F. began with “God as Spirit, Life, so full as to create and love eternally, and yet capable of pause.”

  The conversations were said to spread her fame about town. She dressed for them and assumed a sibylline manner quite extraordinary. Some thought she got the idea from Bronson Alcott’s everlasting questioning and his Orphic Sayings. But what seems more likely is that the conversations were a sort of reduced, miniature, and homebound wish for a platform, and a platform such as Emerson had in his lectures in this hall and that, in little towns and cities. She, too, could speak on the great subjects, but Miss Peabody’s parlor, excitable as it was in the hour before noon, with the wives of the great men, Mrs. Bancroft, Mrs. Child, Mrs. Parker, and various Misses looking on, was the only lyceum available.

  The second part of Margaret Fuller’s life was to last only six years, from 1844 until her death in 1850. Act 2 was overcrowded with incident after the pastoral, repetitive Act 1, which was book after book, the same friends, much talk, letters, reviews, and the management of The Dial. In spirit, it was a sort of treadmill of enthusiasms for Goethe, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Raphael, mythology, the classics, French socialism—all written down, somewhere. “Her pen was a non-conductor” merely signified her flat failure as a poet, which of course she had struggled with also. Emerson continued to think of her as a talker, a parlor orator, or even as a monologist “who seldom admitted others upon an equal ground with herself.” She could also gossip, which frightened him. “The crackling of thorns under the pot.”

  In The Dial, she published “The Great Lawsuit—Man versus Men; Woman versus Women.” The article was much expanded and elaborated into Woman in the Nineteenth Century, published in 1845. And then she left Boston for New York, thought at the time to be an outpost in the intellectual life. “The high priestess of Transcendentalism cut her ties with the provincial homeland,” Perry Miller wrote.

  “Let them [women] be sea-captains if they like.” This offhand swat to seafaring Massachusetts, the China trade, the widow’s walk at the top of the house, the codfish cake for breakfast, remains the best-known statement in Margaret Fuller’s long, prolix defense of women. The work was completed in less than two months, during a vacation in a Hudson River town, and probably written without a library, except for the one in her head. It is a compendium of custom relating to women, ancient and modern opinion buried in poetry, literary allusion, and common observation. The index lists Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante, Desdemona, Petrarch, Plato, Spinoza, Swedenborg, Xenophon, and many others. The author herself appears in the disguise of a certain Miranda, well educated, taught honorable self-reliance from the cradle, privileged in learning and preparation for independence of thought; and not hindered by beauty from the development of talents and sense of self. “She was fortunate in a total absence of those charms which might have drawn to her bewildering flatteries, and in a strong electric nature, which repelled those who did not belong to her, and attracted those who did.”

  It is a bookish book, a fundamental document in the history of feminist thought. An intense, pleading tone, elevated, careful not to give offense, but determined. The strong and dignified women of literature and history—Iphigenia, Antigone, Britomart, the French Revolution’s Madame Roland (“O Liberty, what crimes have been committed in thy name!”)—appeal to her more than the powerful, devious Queen Elizabeth, “without magnanimity of any kind.”

  Margaret Fuller certainly knew Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Here, she makes an unaccountable mistake, seeing Mary Wollstonecraft’s marriage to the prodigious nitwit William Godwin as her best claim upon our attention: “a woman whose existence better proved the need for some new interpretation of woman’s rights, than anything she wrote.”

  Mary Wollstonecraft’s work is much more homely and practical, less rhetorical and less respectful—and more cynical about the world. She despises women brought together in boarding schools; too much giggling and lounging a
bout in dirty undergarments. “Parental affection is, perhaps, the blindest modification of perverse self-love,” and she asserts that the habit of overlooking the faults of one’s parents inclines the child to overlook his own. “The two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other.”

  Mary Wollstonecraft’s worldliness may have offended Margaret Fuller. She does not mention the Vindication, but points instead to Godwin’s book in support of his wife. The omission indicates a distaste, just as distaste, conscious or not, might explain why Emerson in his cramped and complicated essay on Fuller, thought by some to be patronizing but in fact the most alive and brilliant words written about her, never mentions Woman in the Nineteenth Century, the work that established her fame in America and abroad.

  In Fuller’s book, we notice again and again the belief in the “electrical” and “magnetic” element in women’s nature. “Women who combine this organization with genius are very commonly unhappy at the present time.” What makes Woman in the Nineteenth Century affecting beyond its arguments for education, independence, and so on, is the pathos of autobiography lurking in the text. Even the often lamented diversions into higher learning and allusion show the will to transcendence. She herself, in the wide sweep of her being, is the best American woman the nineteenth century had to offer; and she is, for all that, merely a phenomenon, an abandoned orphan. That is part of what the book means to say.

  Emerson on Margaret Fuller: “A complacency that seemed the most assured since the days of Scaliger.” Also, “the presence of a rather mountainous ME.” Who can doubt it? But what the whole span of her life shows is that she got it all from being around Boston at the trans-figuring moment and would have lost it all had she not escaped. She was a sort of stepchild, formed and deformed by Concord, by the universalism and the provincialism. Emerson notes this so-willing adaptation to the best of the intellectual landscape, as well as its gradual unsuitability, not only to the fact that she was a woman who had to earn her living, but to her nature. Among other things, she was not a solitary, not a gardener.

  I think most of her friends will remember to have felt, at one time or another, some uneasiness, as if this athletic soul craved a larger atmosphere than it found; as if she were ill-timed and mis-mated, and felt in herself a tide of life, which compared with the slow circulation of others as a torrent with a rill.

  She was altogether too familiar in the minds of New Englanders. They loved her—the word is not too strong even for Emerson’s feelings. Noble, truthful, faithful, brave, honest: The words appear again and again in what was written and said about her. Yet it is the fate of an eccentric to be repetitive in the hometown. There is no intermission. Each appears in his hat and coat and tics day after day. The first thing to be noticed as she moves to New York and then to Europe is that she is no longer quite so noticeable, so fixed and peculiar, perhaps because being one of many, even if Poe, a New York acquaintance, divided the world into men, women, and Margaret Fuller. Above all, Transcendentalism—“going to heaven in a swing” as one mocker put it—nearly turned her into a fool.

  She moved to New York in December 1844, invited by Horace Greeley to be a professional book reviewer for The New York Tribune and also to contribute general articles; and invited by Mrs. Greeley to stay with them in their house in the Turtle Bay section of the city. For the paper she wrote reviews and “pieces” on just about everything: the theater, concerts, prisons, asylums, poor women, institutions. Her reviews were, for the most part, short and quickly written. She gives too much space to the novels of Charles Brockden Brown and too little to James Fenimore Cooper and the stories of Hawthorne, although she is generally favoring in her glances. She made a striking attack on Longfellow as “artificial and imitative.” As a critic, she does not have the mind for the details of a work but rather for its general effect, and so there is a sameness in the language and a tendency, strong, to moral description of literature. “The atmosphere of his verse refreshes,” and again, “a lively though almost sensuous delight in the beautiful,” “the richness and freshness of his materials,” and so on. She has little notion of the power of William Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico.

  The most interesting of the critical pieces in the Tribune is a cool and sly rebuke to Emerson’s Essays: Second Series. A maddening part of the review is taken up with a description of a populace too busy and too shallow to grasp the fineness in its midst. This is followed by an interesting, but again generalized and exhorting, picture of Emerson on the platform. “One who could see man in his original grandeur . . . raising to the heavens the brow and the eyes of a poet.” Yes, Emerson is a father of the country. But then in an indirection, as if some disembodied critic and not herself were speaking: “The essays have also been obnoxious to many charges. . . . The human heart complains of inadequacy, either in the nature or experience of the writer, to represent its full vocation and its deeper needs. . . . These essays, it has been justly said, tire like a string of mosaics or a house built of medals.” A string of mosaics or a house built of medals—one of her best prose moments. At the expense of the master and still a friend to whom she wrote letters up to the end.

  Then the entrance in 1845 of James Nathan, when they were both about thirty-five years old, he being six months or so younger, both unmarried, but he certainly more experienced. Nathan was born in Holstein, Germany, came to New York as a young man, worked in the “commission business,” but, in common with many another, liked to wonder if he had not sold the soul of a poet for, well, what?—“commissions” perhaps. He had blue eyes, played the guitar, and after a meeting at the Greeleys’, took her to see a plaster model of the city of Jerusalem.

  Alas, she is quite soon set off, on the road again. A large group of letters begins, because the Greeleys didn’t much like Nathan and the two had to meet here and there, missing each other at planned meetings; and as a writer, she has the natural inclination, highly developed, to put every turn of feeling on paper.

  When they went to see the model of Jerusalem, she learned that Nathan was a Jew, and although at times Fuller had shown the inclination of the period to Jewish stereotyping, she takes a quick leap. “I have long had a presentiment, that I should meet—nearly—one of your race, who would show me how the sun of today shines on the ancient Temple—but I did not expect so gentle and civilized an apparition and with blue eyes!”

  A lot is to be discovered. Nathan was in the process of rehabilitating a “maiden” and when the maiden turns out to be his mistress, so far as we can tell from M. F.’s letters, his explanation, too, has to be taken in. “I only wished to be satisfied, and when you told me how you viewed the incident I really was so. Do not think of it ever again.”

  Then Nathan makes an “assault upon her person,” as it was spoken of at the time. She rebuffs him, but here it is possible to think of more complication of feeling, during and after, than most commentators might find evident. She writes to him, of course, and quickly about this “sadder day than I had in all my life.” She had been exposed to “what was to every worthy and womanly feeling so humiliating.” And,

  I know you could not help it. But why had fate drawn me so near you? . . . You have said that there is in yourself both a lower and a higher being than I was aware of. Since you said this, I suppose I have seen the lower! . . . Will you not come with me before God and promise me severe truth, and patient tenderness, that will never, if it can be avoided, misinterpret the impulses of my soul?

  Nathan sends her a little dog, a burdensome gift for one moving here and there in the city and working day and night and writing to him day and night. The letters become quite frenzied with that pitiful wonder of the injured person of what she might have done wrong. Nathan is given to confessions of weakness that interest her, being new, no doubt. “Your hand removes at last the veil from my eyes. It is indeed myself who have caused all ill.” What is unbalancing in this episode is that she is still writing in the transcendental mode of friendship and beauty and perfect trust in wh
ich the “assault”—unthinkable in Boston among familiars—was confusing but quite a new circumstance to think about.

  But the weighty letters, the difficulty of reading them to say nothing of responding, this made its mark, and Nathan took flight to Europe, with the “maiden” along and promising to return. She wrote and received no answer. Did the letter arrive? Had his letter gone astray? When he does write, it is to ask for a favor, and then months pass without a word.

  In 1846, she left the Tribune and sailed at last for Europe, where she still hoped to unite once more with Nathan. In Edinburgh, he wrote that he was being married, but he refused to return her letters, refused even a second request, saying, “I shall do nothing with them but what is right, manly, and honorable.” He promised to destroy the letters but did not do so. His son tried to sell them. In the end, Nathan left a stipulation in his will that they should be published. And published they were, in 1903, a half century after Margaret Fuller’s death, as Love-Letters of Margaret Fuller, with a fatuous, unnecessary introduction by Julia Ward Howe and a swinish “reminiscence” by Nathan, written in 1873 and apparently left with the letters for posterity.

  I cannot suffer their [the letters’] exquisite naturalness and sweetness to sink into the grave. . . . I can wreathe no fresher laurels around the cherished memory of Margaret than by showing, through these letters, 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.