Back Aa

Margaret Fuller (Marchesa Ossoli)

<h3>CHAPTER V.</h3> <h5>WINTER IN BOSTON.—A SEASON OF SEVERE LABOR.—CONNECTION WITH GREENE STREET SCHOOL, PROVIDENCE, R. I.—EDITORSHIP OF THE "DIAL."—MARGARET'S ESTIMATE OF ALLSTON'S PICTURES.</h5> Margaret's removal was to Boston, where a twofold labor was before her. She was engaged to teach Latin and French in Mr. Alcott's school, then at the height of its prosperity, and intended also to form classes of young ladies who should study with her French, German, and Italian. Mr. Alcott's educational theories did not altogether commend themselves to Margaret's judgment. They had in them, indeed, the germ of much that is to-day recognized as true and important. But Margaret considered him to be too much possessed with the idea of the unity of knowledge, too little aware of the complexities of instruction. He, on the other hand, describes her "as a person clearly given to the boldest speculation, and of liberal and varied acquirements. Not wanting in imaginative power, she has the rarest good sense and discretion. The blending of{62} sentiment and of wisdom in her is most remarkable, and her taste is as fine as her prudence. I think her the most brilliant talker of her day." Margaret now passed through twenty-five weeks of incessant labor, suffering the while from her head, which she calls "a bad head," but which we should consider a most abused one. Her retrospect of this period of toil is interesting, and with its severity she remembers also its value to her. Meeting with many disappointments at the outset, and feeling painfully the new circumstances which obliged her to make merchandise of her gifts and acquirements, she yet says that she rejoices over it all, "and would not have undertaken an iota less." Besides fulfilling her intention of self-support, she feels that she has gained in the power of attention, in self-command, and in the knowledge of methods of instruction, without in the least losing sight of the aims which had made hitherto the happiness and enthusiasm of her life. Here is, in brief, the tale of her winter's work. To one class she gave elementary instruction in German, and that so efficiently that her pupils were able to read the language with ease at the end of three months. With another class she read, in twenty-four weeks, Schiller's "Don Carlos,"{63} "Artists," and "Song of the Bell;" Goethe's "Herman und Dorothea," "Götz von Berlichingen," "Iphigenia," first part of "Faust," and "Clavigo;" Lessing's "Nathan der Weise," "Minna," and "Emilia Galotti;" parts of Tieck's "Phantasus," and nearly all of the first volume of Richter's "Titan." With the Italian class she read parts of Tasso, Petrarch, Ariosto, Alfieri, and the whole hundred cantos of Dante's "Divina Commedia." Besides these classes she had also three private pupils, one of them a boy unable to use his eyes in study. She gave this child oral instruction in Latin, and read to him the History of England and Shakespeare's plays in connection. The lessons given by her in Mr. Alcott's school were, she says, valuable to her, but also very fatiguing. Though already so much overtasked, Margaret found time and strength to devote one evening every week to the viva voce translation of German authors for Dr. Channing's benefit, reading to him mostly from De Wette and Herder. Much conversation accompanied these readings, and Margaret confesses that she finds therein much food for thought, while the Doctor's judgments appear to her deliberate, and his sympathies somewhat slow. She speaks of him as entirely without any assumption of superiority{64} towards her, and as trusting "to the elevation of his thoughts to keep him in his place." She also greatly enjoyed his preaching, the force and earnestness of which seemed to her "to purge as by fire." If Margaret was able to review her winter's work with pleasure, we must regard it with mingled wonder and dismay. The range and extent of her labors were indeed admirable, combining such extremes as enabled her to minister to the needs of the children in Mr. Alcott's school, and to assist the studies of the most eminent divine of the day. If we look only at her classes in literature, we shall find it wonderful that a woman of twenty-six should have been able to give available instruction in directions so many and various. On the other hand, we must think that the immense extent of ground gone over involved too rapid a study of the separate works comprised in it. Here was given a synopsis of literary work which, properly performed, would fill a lifetime. It was no doubt valuable to her pupils through the vivifying influence of her enthusiastic imagination, which may have enabled some of them, in after years, to fill out the sketch of culture so boldly and broadly drawn before their eyes. Yet, considered as instruction, it must, from its very extent, have been somewhat superficial.{65} Our dismay would regard the remorseless degree in which Margaret, at this time, must have encroached upon the reserves of her bodily strength. Some physicists of to-day ascribe to women a peculiar power of concentrating upon one short effort an amount of vital force which should carry them through long years, and which, once expended, cannot be restored. Margaret's case would certainly justify this view; for, while a mind so vigorous necessarily presupposes a body of uncommon vigor, she was after this time always a sufferer, and never enjoyed that perfect equipoise of function and of power which we call health. In the spring of the year 1837 Margaret was invited to fill an important post in the Greene Street School, at Providence, R. I. It was proposed that she should teach the elder girls four hours daily, arranging studies and courses at her own discretion, and receiving a salary of one thousand dollars per annum. Margaret hesitated to accept this offer, feeling inclined rather to renew her classes of the year just past, and having in mind also a life of Goethe which she greatly desired to write, and for which she was already collecting material. In the end, however, the prospect of immediate independence carried the day, and she{66} became the "Lady Superior," as she styles it, of the Providence school. Here a nearer view of the great need of her services stimulated her generous efforts, and she was rewarded by the love and reverence of her pupils, and by the knowledge that she did indeed bring them an awakening which led them from inert ignorance to earnest endeavor. Margaret's record of her stay in Providence is enlivened by portraits of some of the men of mark who came within her ken. Among these was Tristam Burgess, already old, whose baldness, she says, "increases the fine effect of his appearance, for it seems as if the locks had retreated that the contour of his strongly marked head might be revealed." The eminent lawyer, Whipple, is not, she says, a man of the Webster class; but is, in her eyes, first among men of the class immediately below, and wears "a pervading air of ease and mastery which shows him fit to be a leader of the flock." John Neal, of Portland, speaks to her girls on the destiny and vocation of woman in America, and in private has a long talk with her concerning woman, whigism, modern English poets, Shakespeare, and particularly "Richard the Third," concerning which play the two "actually had a fight." "Mr. Neal," she says, "does not argue quite fairly, for he uses reason while it{67} lasts, and then helps himself out with wit, sentiment, and assertion." She hears a discourse and prayer from Joseph John Gurney, of England, in whose matter and manner she finds herself grievously disappointed: "Quakerism has at times looked lovely to me, and I had expected at least a spiritual exposition of its doctrines from the brother of Mrs. Fry. But his manner was as wooden as his matter. His figures were paltry, his thoughts narrowed down, and his very sincerity made corrupt by spiritual pride. The poet, Richard H. Dana, in those days gave a course of readings from the English dramatists, beginning with Shakespeare. Margaret writes:— "The introductory was beautiful.... All this was arrayed in a garb of most delicate grace; but a man of such genuine refinement undervalues the cannon-blasts and rockets which are needed to rouse the attention of the vulgar. His naïve gestures, the rapt expression of his face, his introverted eye, and the almost childlike simplicity of his pathos carry one back into a purer atmosphere, to live over again youth's fresh emotions." Her résumé of him ends with these words: "Mr. Dana has the charms and the defects of one whose object in life has been to preserve his individuality unprofaned." Margaret's connection with the Greene Street{68} School in Providence lasted two years. Her success in this work was considered very great, and her brief residence in Rhode Island was crowned with public esteem and with many valued friendships. Her parting from the pupils here was not without tears on both sides. Although engaged to teach the elder girls, Margaret's care had extended over the younger ones, and also over some of the boys. With all she exchanged an affectionate farewell, in which words of advice were mingled. To the class of girls which had been her especial charge she made a farewell address whose impressive sentences must have been long remembered. Here are some of them:— "I reminded them of the ignorance in which some of them had been found, and showed them how all my efforts had necessarily been directed to stimulating their minds, leaving undone much which, under other circumstances, would have been deemed indispensable. I thanked them for the moral beauty of their conduct, bore witness that an appeal to conscience had never failed, and told them of my happiness in having the faith thus confirmed that young persons can be best guided by addressing their highest nature. I assured them of my true friendship, proved by my never having cajoled or caressed{69} them into good. All my influence over them was rooted in reality; I had never softened nor palliated their faults. I had appealed, not to their weakness, but to their strength. I had offered to them always the loftiest motives, and had made every other end subservient to that of spiritual growth. With a heart-felt blessing I dismissed them." In those days appeared Miss Martineau's book on America, of which we may say that its sharply critical tone stirred the national consciousness, and brought freshly into consideration the question of negro slavery, the discussion of which had been by common consent banished from "good" society in the United States. Miss Martineau dared to reprobate this institution in uncompromising language, and, while showing much appreciation of the natural beauties of the country, was generally thought to have done injustice to its moral and social characteristics. While Margaret regarded with indignation the angry abuse with which her friend's book was greeted on this side of the Atlantic, she felt obliged to express to her the disappointment which she herself had felt on reading it. She acknowledges that the work has been "garbled, misrepresented, scandalously ill-treated." Yet she speaks of herself as one of those who, seeing{70} in the book "a degree of presumptuousness, irreverence, inaccuracy, hasty generalization, and ultraism on many points which they did not expect, lament the haste in which you have written, and the injustice which you have consequently done to so important a task, and to your own powers of being and doing." Among other grievances, Margaret especially felt the manner in which Miss Martineau had written about Mr. Alcott. This she could not pass over without comment: "A true and noble man; a philanthropist, whom a true and noble woman, also a philanthropist, should have delighted to honor; a philosopher, worthy the palmy times of ancient Greece; a man whom the worldlings of Boston hold in as much horror as the worldlings of ancient Athens did Socrates. They smile to hear their verdict confirmed from the other side of the Atlantic by their censor, Harriet Martineau." Margaret expresses in this letter the fear lest the frankness of her strictures should deprive her of the regard of her friend, but says, "If your heart turns from me, I shall still love you, still think you noble." In 1840 Margaret was solicited to become the editor of the "Dial," and undertook, for two years, the management of the magazine, which{71} was at this time considered as the organ of the Transcendentalists. The "Dial" was a quarterly publication, somewhat nebulous in its character, but valuable as the expression of fresh thought, stimulating to culture of a new order. Like the transcendental movement itself, it had in it the germs of influences which in the course of the last forty years have come to be widely felt and greatly prized. In the newness of its birth and origin, it needed nursing fathers and nursing mothers, but was fed mostly, so far as concerns the general public, with neglect and ridicule. Margaret, besides laboring with great diligence in her editorship, contributed to its pages many papers on her favorite points of study, such as Goethe, Beethoven, Romantic poetry, John Stirling, etc. Of the "Dial," Mr. Emerson says: "Good or bad, it cost a good deal of precious labor from those who served it, and from Margaret most of all." As there were no funds behind the enterprise, contributors were not paid for their work, and Margaret's modest salary of two hundred dollars per annum was discontinued after the first year. The magazine lived four years. In England and Scotland it achieved a succès d'estime, and a republication of it in these days is about to make tardy amends for the general indifference which allowed its career to terminate so briefly.{72} Copies of the original work, now a literary curiosity, can here and there be borrowed from individuals who have grown old in the service of human progress. A look into the carefully preserved volumes shows us the changes which time has wrought in the four decades of years which have elapsed (quite or nearly) since the appearance of the last number. A melancholy touches us as we glance hither and thither among its pages. How bright are the morning hours marked on this Dial! How merged now in the evening twilight and darkness! Here is Ralph Waldo Emerson, with life's meridian still before him. Here are printed some of his earliest lectures and some of the most admired of his poems. Here are the graceful verses of Christopher P. Cranch, artist and poet. Here are the Channing cousins, nephews of the great man by different brothers, one, William Henry Channing, then, as always, fervid and unrelinquishing in faith; the other, William Ellery, a questioner who, not finding himself answered to his mind, has ceased to ask. Here is Theodore Parker, a youthful critic of existing methods and traditions, already familiar with the sacred writings of many religions. A. Bronson Alcott appears in various forms, contributing "Days from a Diary," "Orphic Sayings," and so on. Here are, from various authors, papers entitled:{73} "Social Tendencies," "The Interior or Hidden Life," "The Pharisees," "Prophecy, Transcendentalism, and Progress," "Leaves from a Scholar's Journal," "Ethnic Scriptures," "The Preaching of Buddha," "Out-World and In-World,"—headings which themselves afford an insight into the direction of the speculative thought and fancy of the time. An article on the Hollis Street Council presents to us the long-forgotten controversy between Rev. John Pierpont and his congregation, to settle which a conference of the Unitarian clergy was summoned. Another, entitled "Chardon Street and Bible Conventions," records the coming together of a company of "madmen, mad women, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-day Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians, and Philosophers," to discuss church discipline and the authenticity of the Bible. Among those present were Dr. Channing, Father Taylor, Mr. Alcott, Mr. Garrison, Jones Very, and Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman. The chronicler says that "the assembly was characterized by the predominance of a certain plain, sylvan strength and earnestness, while many of the most intellectual and cultivated persons attended its councils. Mrs. Little and Mrs. Lucy Sessions took a pleasing and memorable part in the debate, and{74} that flea of Conventions, Mrs. Abigail Folsom, was but too ready with her interminable scroll." In the July number of the year 1842 many pages are devoted to a rehearsal of "the entertainments of the past winter," which treats of Fanny Elssler's dancing, Braham's singing, oratorios, symphony concerts, and various lectures. Among these last, those of Mr. Lyell (afterwards Sir Charles) are curtly dismissed as "a neat article," while those of Henry Giles are recognized as showing popular talent. Among Margaret's own contributions to the "Dial," the article on Goethe and that entitled "The Great Lawsuit" are perhaps the most noteworthy. We shall find the second of these expanded into the well-known "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," of which mention will be made hereafter. The one first named seems to demand some notice here, the fine discrimination of its criticism showing how well qualified the writer was to teach the women of her day the true appreciation of genius, and to warn them from the idolatry which worships the faults as well as the merits of great minds. From a lover of Goethe, such sentences as the following were scarcely to have been expected:— "Pardon him, World, that he was too worldly. Do not wonder, Heart, that he was so heartless.{75} Believe, Soul, that one so true, as far as he went, must yet be initiated into the deeper mysteries of soul. "Naturally of a deep mind and shallow heart, he felt the sway of the affections enough to appreciate their working in other men, but never enough to receive their inmost regenerating influence." Margaret finds a decline of sentiment and poetic power in Goethe, dating from his relinquishment of Lili. "After this period we find in him rather a wide and deep wisdom than the inspirations of genius. His faith that all must issue well wants the sweetness of piety; and the God he manifests to us is one of law or necessity rather than of intelligent love. "This mastery that Goethe prizes seems to consist rather in the skilful use of means than in the clear manifestation of ends. Yet never let him be confounded with those who sell all their birthright. He became blind to the more generous virtues, the nobler impulses, but ever in self-respect was busy to develop his nature. He was kind, industrious, wise, gentlemanly, if not manly." Margaret, with bold and steady hand, draws a parallel between Dante's "Paradiso" and the second part of Goethe's "Faust." She prefers "the{76} grandly humble reliance of old Catholicism" to "the loop-hole redemption of modern sagacity." Yet she thinks that Dante, perhaps, "had not so hard a battle to wage as this other great poet." The fiercest passions she finds less dangerous to the soul than the cold scepticism of the understanding. She sums up grandly the spiritual ordeals of different historical periods:— "The Jewish demon assailed the man of Uz with physical ills, the Lucifer of the Middle Ages tempted his passions; but the Mephistopheles of the eighteenth century bade the finite strive to compass the infinite, and the intellect attempt to solve all the problems of the soul." Among Margaret's published papers on literature and art is one entitled "A Record of Impressions produced by the Exhibition of Mr. Allston's Pictures in the Summer of 1839." She was moved to write this, she says, partly by the general silence of the press on a matter of so much import in the history of American art, and partly by the desire to analyze her own views, and to ascertain, if possible, the reason why, at the close of the exhibition, she found herself less a gainer by it than she had expected. As Margaret gave much time and thought to art matters, and as the Allston exhibition was really an event of historic interest, some consideration{77} of this paper will not be inappropriate in this place. Washington Allston was at that time, had long been, and long continued to be, the artist saint of Boston. A great personal prestige added its power to that of his unquestioned genius. Beautiful in appearance, as much a poet as a painter, he really seemed to belong to an order of beings who might be called "Too bright and good For human nature's daily food." He had flown into the heart of Europe when few American artists managed to get so far. He had returned to live alone with his dreams, of which one was the nightmare of a great painting which he never could finish, and never did. He had kept the vulgar world at a distance from his life and thought, intent on coining these into a succession of pictures which claimed to have a mission to the age. The series of female heads which are the most admirable of his works appeared to be the portraits of as many ideal women who, with no existence elsewhere, had disclosed themselves to him at his dreamy fireside or in his haunted studio. The spirit of the age, in its highest extreme, was upon him, and the wave of supervital aspiration swept him, as it did{78} Channing and Emerson, beyond the region of the visible and sensible. At that day, and for ten years later, one might occasionally have seen in some street of Boston a fragile figure, and upon it a head distinguished by snowy curls and starry eyes. Here was the winter of age; here the perpetual summer of the soul. The coat and hat did not matter; but they were of some quaint, forgotten fashion, outlining the vision as belonging to the past. You felt a modesty in looking at anything so unique and delicate. I remember this vision as suddenly disclosed out of a bitter winter's day. And the street was Chestnut Street, and the figure was Washington Allston going to visit the poet Richard H. Dana. And not long afterwards the silvery snows melted, and the soul which had made those eyes so luminous shot back to its immortal sphere. But, to leave the man and return to the artist. Mr. Allston's real merit was too great to be seriously obscured by the over-sweep of imagination to which he was subject. His best works still remain true classics of the canvas; but the spirit which, through them, seemed to pass from his mind into that of the public, has not to-day the recognition and commanding interest which it then had. Margaret had expected, as she says, to be{79} greatly a gainer by her study of this exhibition, and had been somewhat disappointed. Possibly her expectations regarded a result too immediate and definite. Sights and experiences that enrich the mind often do so insensibly. They pass out of our consciousness; but in our later judgments we find our standard changed, and refer back to them as the source of its enlargement. Margaret was already familiar with several of the ideal heads of which we have spoken, and which bore the names of Beatrice, Rosalie, the Valentine, etc. Of these, as previously seen and studied, she says:— "The calm and meditative cast of these pictures, the ideal beauty that shone through rather than in them, and the harmony of coloring were as unlike anything else I saw, as the 'Vicar of Wakefield' to Cooper's novels. I seemed to recognize in painting that self-possessed elegance, that transparent depth, which I most admire in literature." With these old favorites she classes, as most beautiful among those now shown, the Evening Hymn, the Italian Shepherd Boy, Edwin, Lorenzo and Jessica. "The excellence of these pictures is subjective, and even feminine. They tell us the painter's ideal of character: a graceful repose, with a fitness for moderate action; a capacity{80} of emotion, with a habit of reverie. Not one of these beings is in a state of épanchement. Not one is, or perhaps could be, thrown off its equipoise. They are, even the softest, characterized by entire though unconscious self-possession." The head called Beatrice was sometimes spoken of in those days as representing the Beatrice of Dante. Margaret finds in it nothing to suggest the "Divina Commedia." "How fair, indeed, and not unmeet for a poet's love. But what she is, what she can be, it needs no Dante to discover. She is not a lustrous, bewitching beauty, neither is she a high and poetic one. She is not a concentrated perfume, nor a flower, nor a star. Yet somewhat has she of every creature's best. She has the golden mean, without any touch of the mediocre." The landscapes in the exhibition gave her "unalloyed delight." She found in them Mr. Allston's true mastery,—"a power of sympathy, which gives each landscape a perfectly individual character.... The soul of the painter," she says, "is in these landscapes, but not his character. Is not that the highest art? Nature and the soul combined; the former freed from crudities or blemishes, the latter from its merely human aspect."{81} Allston's Miriam suggests to Margaret a different treatment of the subject:— "This maiden had been nurtured in a fair and highly civilized country, in the midst of wrong and scorn indeed, but beneath the shadow of sublime institutions. Amid all the pains and penances of slavery, the memory of Joseph, the presence of Moses, exalt her soul to the highest pitch of national pride. "Imagine the stately and solemn beauty with which such nurture and such a position might invest the Jewish Miriam. Imagine her at the moment when her lips were unsealed, and she was permitted to sing the song of deliverance. Realize this situation, and oh, how far will this beautiful picture fall short of your demands!" To such a criticism Mr. Allston might have replied that a picture in words is one thing, a picture in colors quite another; and that the complex intellectual expression in which Margaret delighted is appropriate to literary, but not to pictorial art. Much in the same way does she reason concerning one of Allston's most admired paintings, which represents Jeremiah in prison dictating to Baruch:— "The form of the prophet is brought out in such noble relief, is in such fine contrast to the pale and feminine sweetness of the scribe at his{82} feet, that for a time you are satisfied. But by and by you begin to doubt whether this picture is not rather imposing than majestic. The dignity of the prophet's appearance seems to lie rather in the fine lines of the form and drapery than in the expression of the face. It was well observed by one who looked on him, that, if the eyes were cast down, he would become an ordinary man. This is true, and the expression of the bard must not depend on a look or gesture, but beam with mild electricity from every feature. Allston's Jeremiah is not the mournfully indignant bard, but the robust and stately Jew, angry that men will not mark his word and go his way." The test here imagined, that of concealing the eyes, would answer as little in real as in pictured life. Although the method of these criticisms is arbitrary, the conclusion to which they bring Margaret is one in which many will agree with her:— "The more I have looked at these pictures, the more I have been satisfied that the grand historical style did not afford the scope most proper to Mr. Allston's genius. The Prophets and Sibyls are for the Michael Angelos. The Beautiful is Mr. Allston's dominion. Here he rules as a genius, but in attempts such as I have been considering, can only show his appreciation{83} of the stern and sublime thoughts he wants force to reproduce." Margaret is glad to go back from these more labored and unequal compositions to those lovely feminine creations which had made themselves so beloved that they seemed to belong to the spiritual family of Boston itself, and to "have floated across the painter's heaven on the golden clouds of fantasy." From this paper our thoughts naturally revert to what Mr. Emerson has said of Margaret as an art critic:— "Margaret's love of art, like that of most cultivated persons in this country, was not at all technical, but truly a sympathy with the artist in the protest which his work pronounced on the deformity of our daily manners; her co-perception with him of the eloquence of form; her aspiration with him to a fairer life. As soon as her conversation ran into the mysteries of manipulation and artistic effect, it was less trustworthy. I remember that in the first times when I chanced to see pictures with her, I listened reverently to her opinions, and endeavored to see what she saw. But on several occasions, finding myself unable to reach it, I came to suspect my guide, and to believe at last that her taste in works of art, though honest, was not on universal, but on idiosyncratic grounds."{84} <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.