USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 5
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" When I first knew her," he continues, " she wore this circle of friends as a necklace of dia- monds about her neck. ... The confidences given her were their best and she held them to them. She was an active inspiring companion
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and correspondent, and all the art, the thought and the nobleness in New England seemed at that moment related to her and she to it. She was everywhere a welcome guest. The houses of her friends in town and country were open to her and every hospitable attention eagerly offered. Her arrival was a holiday. ... Of personal influence she had, I think, more than any other person I ever knew."
Margaret Fuller honestly believed that not only between men and women can there be deep, passionate love. Witness the following passages from her journal and her letters: " At Mr. G's we looked over prints the whole evening. Nothing fixed my attention so much as a large engraving of Madame Récamier in her boudoir. I have often thought over the intimacy between her and Madame De Staël. It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman and a man with a man. I like to be sure of it, ... for I loved for a time with as much passion as I was then strong enough to feel. Her face was always gleaming before me. . . . I do not love her now with passion, but I still feel towards her as I can to no other woman. I thought of all this as I looked at Madame Récamier."
While sustaining all this remarkable current of affection Margaret was earning her living in the only way then open to women - by school-
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teaching. Her father had died and there was a brood of young brothers to be educated. She was very glad, therefore, to avail herself of the chance which came to her, through Emerson, to teach (1836) in the school which Bronson Alcott had opened in Boston, in a part of the big stone building on that corner of Temple Place now for several years past given over to the R. H. Stearns Company for their headquarters. She was a welcome guest at the choicest parties of which Boston could boast, and we are indebted to her for this picture of the "society" of the day. "Last night I took my boldest peep into the
'Gigman ' world of Boston. I had not been to a large party before, and had only seen said world in half-boots. So I thought, as it was an occasion in which I felt real interest, to wit, a fête given by Mrs. Thorndike for my beautiful Susan, I would look at it for once in satin slippers. Dr. Channing meant to go but was too weary when the hour came. I spent the early part of the evening in reading bits of Dante with him and talking about the material sublime till half-past nine, when I went with Mrs. C. and graceful Mary.
"It was very pretty to look at. So many fair maidens dressed as if they had stepped out of their grandmothers' picture frames, and youths with their long locks, suitable to repre- sent pages if not nobles. Signor Figaro was
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there also. . . . And Daniel the Great (Web- ster), not however, when I saw him, engaged in an operation peculiarly favorable to his style of beauty, to wit, eating oysters. Theo- dore Parker was there, and introduced to me. I had some pleasant talk with him, but before I could get to Spinoza, somebody seized on me and carried me off to quite another S, - to supper. On the whole, it all pleased my eye; my fashionable fellow-creatures were very civil to me, and I went home glad to have looked at this slide in the magic lantern also."
A form of dissipation much more in Mar- garet's line than fancy-dress balls were the meetings of the Transcendental Club and the famous "Conversations " which began (November 6, 1839) at the rooms on West Street where Miss Elizabeth P. Peabody main- tained at this time a circulating library and foreign bookshop. This place had become a kind of Transcendental Exchange where many who had no thought of purchasing books dropped in for the sheer delight that it was to " talk of many things" with the keen-witted little lady who was the proprietor of the shop.1 No better setting could have been devised for the proposed classes, subscriptions to which were ob- tained through the circulation of a letter setting
1 The idea of the Church of the Disciples first occurred to Dr. Clarke in this room.
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forth " the advantages of a weekly meeting for conversation " in a class which should " supply a point of union to well-educated and thinking women, in a city, which, with great pretensions to mental refinement, boasts at present nothing of the kind."
Twenty-five cultivated Boston women were present at the first meeting of Miss Fuller's class, which soon grew to be a famous Boston institution, meeting weekly for five winters to consider everything from vanity to soci- ology. The sessions opened at eleven in the morning, ten or a dozen, besides the leader, usually taking active part in the talk. The leader's own account of the first days, as sent to Emerson and by him quoted in the Mem- oirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, is as follows:
" 25th November, 1839. - My class is pros- perous. I was so fortunate as to rouse at once the tone of simple earnestness, which can scarcely, when once awakened, cease to vibrate."
No reports of the "Conversations " are extant, but this sprightly picture of the eighth meeting, as sent by one who was there to a friend in New Haven, is very pleasantly illumi- nating: " Christmas made a holiday for Miss Fuller's class, but it met on Saturday at noon. . Margaret, beautifully dressed (don't de- spise that, for it made a fine picture), presided with more dignity and grace than I had thought
MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI. From a daguerreotype.
ELIZABETH PEABODY.
From a portrait in the possession of the Eliza- beth Peabody House, Boston.
HARRIET MARTINEAU.
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MASONIC TEMPLE AS IT LOOKED WHEN AT CORNER OF TREMONT STREET AND TEMPLE PLACE. Page 66.
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possible. The subject was Beauty. Each had written her definition and Margaret began with reading her own. This called forth questions, comments and illustrations on all sides. The style and manner, of course, in this are different, but the question, the high point from which it was considered, and the earnestness and sim- plicity of the discussion as well as the gifts and graces of the speakers, gave it the charm of a Platonic dialogue. There was no pretension of pedantry in a word that was said. The tone of remark and question was simple as that of children in a school class; and, I believe, every one was satisfied."
Not quite everyone; not Harriet Martineau, for instance, whom Margaret had come to know through her friend Mrs. John Farrar, and to whom, upon the publication of the book, Society in America, Margaret protested that undue emphasis had there been placed upon the anti-slavery movement. This Miss Mar- tineau appears to have resented, for when she came to write her Autobiography, she incor- porated in the work the following utterly unfair criticism of the " Conversations: " "The difference between us [Margaret and herself] was that while she was living and moving in an ideal world, talking in private and discoursing in public about the most fanciful and shallow conceits which the Transcendentalists of Boston
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took for philosophy, she looked down upon persons who acted instead of talking finely, and devoted their fortunes, their peace, their repose and their very lives to the preservation of the principles of the republic. While Mar- garet Fuller and her adult pupils sat ' gorgeously dressed ' talking about Mars and Venus, Plato and Goethe, and fancying themselves the elect of the earth in intellect and refinement, the liberties of the republic were running out as fast as they could go, at a breach which another sort of elect persons were devoting themselves to repair; and my complaint against the ' gorgeous ' pedants was that they regarded their preservers as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and their work as a less vital one than the pedantic orations which were spoiling a set of well-meaning women in a pitiable way."
Now, as a matter of fact, the women in the West Street classes were almost identically the same women of whom Miss Martineau here speaks as "another sort of elect persons." The wives of Emerson and Parker, the only daughter of Channing, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, Mrs. Ellis Gray Loring, and the lady who after- wards became Mrs. Ednah D. Cheney, were among those who sat at Margaret's feet. And they were all ardent workers for the cause of anti-slavery! It was the office of Margaret Fuller to stimulate these women morally and
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mentally, not so much, however, by the dis- cussion of a concrete evil then existing in the world as by deepened appreciation of all that is beautiful in art, in literature and in life.
One aged lady still living, who belonged to the conversation class, has said that the in- fluence of their leader's sympathy upon the thoughts and hopes of those before her was so great that, metaphorically speaking, the lame walked and the blind received their sight. And Mrs. Cheney spoke to me, very enthusiastically, shortly before her death, a few years ago, of all that Margaret Fuller had meant to her - and to many since.
" Her most distinguishing characteristic, next to her love of love," she said, " was her personal magnetism. I myself first came under her spell when she began to hold her 'Conversa- tions.' I was eager enough for any intellectual advantage, but I had imbibed with the thought- lessness of a school girl the common prejudices against Miss Fuller.
"So, though I believed that I should learn from her, I had no idea, when I joined her class with thirty or forty others, that I should esteem, and much more, love her. She was about twenty-five at the time I came under her influence, and I was, I think, sixteen or so.
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" The class used to meet in the morning, and she would talk gloriously on whatever subject, perhaps Greek literature, she had set herself for that day. I early found myself in a new world of thought; a flood of light irradiated all that I had seen in nature, observed in life, or read in books.
" Whatever she spoke of revealed a hidden meaning, and everything seemed to be put in true relation. Her influence might be best expressed by saying that I was no longer the limitation of myself, but I felt that the whole work of the universe was open to me. It was this consciousness of the divinity in the soul, so real to Margaret herself, which gave her that air of regal superiority which was misinterpreted as conceit.
" Perhaps I can best give you an idea of what she was to me by an answer which I made to her. One day, when she was alone with me, and it is as if I could now feel her touch and hear her voice, she said, 'Is life rich to you? ' And I replied, 'It is since I have known you.' Such was the response of many a youthful heart to her, and herein was her wonderful influence. She did not make us her disciples, her blind followers. She opened the book of life and helped us to read it for ourselves. Her intel- lectuality was pronounced, of course. Neither this country nor any other has ever had, I
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believe, a woman of such transcendent con- versational power.
" But she was even more heart than mind. It is her heart, indeed, her intense sympathy with young women, and her close knowledge of all that may come to them of trial and temp- tation, that explains her hold today upon the women of this country. There are Margaret Fuller clubs and Ossoli circles all over this country, you know.
" This is the year of Emerson's centenary, and his influence upon the intellectual life of this country is being everywhere exalted, and properly. But I would venture the opinion that Emerson, great as he undoubtedly is, is not loved by nearly so many people as love Margaret Fuller, who was in a way his contemporary, and who was certainly his friend.
" The last time I went west to lecture, people in the most unexpected places, in Dubuque and other such cities, used to come to me and say, 'Can't you tell me something about Mar- garet Fuller? You knew her,' they say. 'We only know of her. Tell us, then, of her per- sonality, her real self.'
"I told these people what I always say of Margaret, that her strength lay in her per- sonality; nothing that adequately represents her power remains in her writing. Any one who ever came near to her grew very fond
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of her. Her tenderness seems to me her most remarkable characteristic, and of that com- paratively little is known."
At the same time that the Conversations were doing their excellent work to stimulate morally, as well as mentally, the young women of Boston, Margaret Fuller was the prime agent ; in bringing out The Dial, the organ of the Transcendental Club to which allusion has already been made.
Emerson wrote the introduction to the first number and Margaret Fuller the article on " Critics " and that bearing the caption, " All- ston Gallery." For two years she was not only the editor of the sheet but the alert and resource- ful " filler-in " of all space left vacant at the eleventh hour. Nominally she drew a salary of two hundred dollars a year for all this; actually, however, she got little or nothing. Later Emerson took the editorial responsibility, and, after four years of precarious fortune, The Dial expired. Apart from the romantic associations with which its young life was bound up it is interesting today chiefly because it first gave to the world, in its issue of July, 1843, Margaret Fuller's essay which we now know, in book form, under the title, Woman In the Nineteenth Century. This article might almost have been written for one of the ad- vanced feminist magazines of our day, so extraor-
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dinarily fresh is it in tone and so nobly does it present the innate right of woman to real fulness of life. Because the book is rather in- accessible I want to quote here a few of its pro- phetic passages:
" Whether much or little has been done or will be done, [by broadly educated women], whether women will add to the talent of narra- tion the power of systematizing, whether they will carve marble as well as draw and paint is not important. But that it should be acknowl- edged that they have intellects which need developing, that they should not be considered complete if beings of affection and habit alone, is important. Yet even this acknowledgment, rather conquered by woman than proffered by man, has been sullied by the usual selfishness. So much is said of women being better educated that they may become better companions and mothers for men. They should be fit for such companionship. . . But a being of infinite scope must not be treated with an exclusive view to any one relation." And then she quotes with approval, " We must have units before we can have union." After which she goes on to point out that she is urging the greater independence of women not because she dis- believes in marriage but because she believes in it profoundly.
"I wish woman to live first for God's sake,"
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she explains. " Then she will not make an imperfect man her god and thus sink to idolatry. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty. Then, if she finds what she needs in man embodied, she will know how to love and be worthy of being loved. Woman, self-centred, would never be absorbed by any relation; it would be only an experience to her as to man. It is a vulgar error that love, a love is to woman her whole existence. She also is born for Truth and Love in their universal energy."
How far did Margaret Fuller measure up to her own high ideals in this matter of woman's relation to man? Did she, whom we have seen to be one of the most ardently affectionate natures of her time, steadfastly keep herself only for the highest kind of love? In her journal we find her profoundest feeling about this whole matter: "No one loves me. But I love many a good deal and see some way into their eventual beauty. I am myself growing better and shall by and by be a worthy object of love, one that will not anywhere disappoint or need forbear- ance. ... I have no child, and the woman in me has so craved this experience that it has seemed the want of it must paralyze me. I cannot always upbear my life all alone."
Why had she never married? Among the many men with whom she was on warm friendly
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relations was there no man who cared for her supremely and for whom she could care? Her niece has told me of a clever young Portland lawyer who might have been the man. But the first real evidence that we have of such love in her as she would have wished to give the man she might marry is to be found in the letters to James Nathan, whom she met very soon after her removal to New York (in December, 1844) for the purpose of connecting herself with Horace Greeley and his Tribune.
Young Nathan was a Jew and it was this fact, very likely, which prevented his marriage to the woman to whom he undoubtedly made passionate love and from whom this love drew forth as noble love-letters as ever were sent to a man by a woman. But the letters should not have been published and would not have been had Nathan returned them to their writer as she asked him to do after she learned of his approaching alliance with one of his own race. That Margaret suffered a great deal while this love ran its troubled course is evident in almost every line of the letters. "You tell me to rest, mein Leibster," one passage towards the end of the correspondence runs, "but how can I rest when you rouse in me so many thoughts and feelings? What good does it do for you to stay away when, absent or present, every hour you grow upon me and the root strikes to my
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inmost life? There is far more repose in being with you when your look fills my eye and your voice my ear, than in trying to keep still, for then these endless thoughts rush upon me. And then comes, too, that tormenting sense that only a few days more shall we be together, and how can I rest?" 1 So much did Margaret the wise care for this man that she even liked to have him call her a fool! "I don't know that any words from your mouth gave me more pleasure," she writes, "than these, 'You must be a fool, little girl.' It seems so whimsical that they should be addressed to me, who was called on for wisdom and dignity, long before my leading strings were off."
And yet, though he had " approached her, personally, nearer than any other person " and had " touched her heart and thrilled it at the centre," that heart as she proudly points out, " is a large kingdom." She would not let him or any man spoil her life. The last letter in the series is dated July 14, 1846. By the fall of that year the relation between the two had been definitively broken and, with one or two significant allusions in her diary,2 Margaret dismisses the whole matter. As for Nathan, he wedded his coreligionist and had several
1 Reprinted from Love-Letters of Margaret Fuller, Copyright, 1903, by D. Appleton and Company.
2 These allusions are in French and may be examined at the Cambridge Public Library which now owns the Diary.
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children, dying peacefully (in 1889) in his own home at Hamburg, a very rich but blind old man. W. H. Channing, Margaret's biographer, once saw the letters and suggested, as he returned them to their owner, that perhaps it would be well to destroy them. But the one to whom they had been written thought other- wise and, in the summer of 1873, he wrote for them the preface which was used when the correspondence was published by his son fifteen years after his death.
It appears to have been the rebound from this unhappy love affair which precipitated Margaret Fuller into the alliance in which, at last, her hungry heart found abundant solace. She sailed from Boston in August, 1846, to enjoy with friends a long-deferred period of European travel, in the course of which she met Wordsworth, Mazzini, Carlyle, George Sand and many other literary celebrities. In Venice she parted with the friends who had thus far been her companions, and returned to settle in Rome and work for the cause of revolu- tionary Italy. To Emerson she wrote that she had at last found the work for which she had long been looking. She also found now the love which was to crown her life by her marriage to the young Marquis d'Ossoli.
Margaret first met Ossoli in 1847, while at vespers at St. Peter's. The following winter
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she took an apartment in the Corso in Rome, and the young marquis was often there drawn to his new friend by her interest in the republican cause, which he had espoused, as well as by what seems to have been a very real passion on his part. In the intervals of nursing his aged father he ardently pursued his wooing, telling Margaret repeatedly " that he must marry her or be miserable." "She refused to look on him as a lover," relates Mrs. William W. Story, who was her confidant, "and insisted that it was not fitting, - that it was best he should marry a younger woman The was thirty and she was nearly thirty-eight]; that she would be his friend but not his wife. In this way it rested for some weeks, during which we saw Ossoli pale, dejected, and unhappy. He was always with her, but in a sort of hopeless, desperate manner, until at length he convinced her of his love and she married him."
The absurd story which, even today, is re- peated from time to time, that Ossoli was un- educated and that he ill-treated his wife, I should not even refer to were there not always so many people who prefer to think badly of Italians as husbands. He had the education of an Italian gentleman of his time, and if it had been possible to reproduce here the too- faded daguerreotype - the only known picture of him - which Colonel Higginson owns we
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should have seen that Ossoli was exactly the man to love and be loved by Margaret Fuller. A poetic face, his, in which one reads the possi- bility of high patriotism and of the finest chivalry! But he was never able to talk to his wife in her own tongue; their beautiful love-letters, which were saved from the wreck in which they and their baby perished, were all written in Italian. The secrecy of their marriage is by most writers attributed to Ossoli's close relation to the Papal household and by reason of the fact that an alliance with a for- eigner (who was a Protestant) would probably have cut him off from his share of his father's fortune. Colonel Higginson quotes a letter from Mrs. Story which quite effectively gives the lie to those who would believe this strange union not a success, however. " Ossoli's manner towards Margaret was devoted and lover-like to a degree. He cared not how trivial was the service if he might perform it for her. I re- member to have seen him, one morning, after they had been married nearly two years, set off on an errand to get the handle of her parasol mended, with as much genuine knightly zeal as if the charge had been a much weightier one. As he took it he said, 'How sweet it is to do little things for you!' . He never wished her to give up any pleasure because he could not share it, but if she were interested he would go
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with her to any house, leave her and call again to take her home. Such tender unselfish love I have rarely seen before; it made green her days and gave her an expression of peace and serenity which before was a stranger to her."
Margaret herself wrote (February 5, 1850) to Mrs. Marcus Spring, with whom she had gone abroad: "I have expected that those who cared for me simply for my activity of intellect would not care for Ossoli; but those in whom the moral nature predominates would gladly learn to love and admire him and see what a treasure his affection must be to me." 1 Which makes one feel how true a word was that which the American consul in Turin sent to Emerson a year after Ossoli with his wife and child had drowned off Fire Island, "It is abundantly evident that Margaret's young husband dis- charged all the obligations of his relation to her con amore. His admiration amounted to veneration, and her yearning to be loved seemed at last to be satisfied." 2
1 Quoted in Sanborn's Autobiography.
2 Those who care to explore the lengths to which such a yearn- ing to be loved may lead a woman of Margaret Fuller's temperament and are interested to find a psychological explanation for much that is puzzling in Margaret's character, should read Katharine S. An- thony's biographical sketch of this brilliant personality, published by Harcourt, Brace and Howe, of New York.
CHAPTER IV
WHEN THE SLAVE WAS A HERO
I N these present days of social unrest, when a compact minority of American citizens are sure that certain definite things in the government of our country are very wrong, - although regretfully admitting that they see no immediate prospect of their effective better- ment, - it should rebuke their faint-heartedness and cheer their souls to reflect that the great work of that other minority known as Aboli- tionists was accomplished in about thirty years. The men who set this tremendous movement in motion actually lived to see their cause won and were obliged to look about for further evils in need of devoted service!
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