Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438

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Various. Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 438

PHILOSOPHY OF LAUGHTER

MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI.1

THE COUNTER-STROKE

THE TAXES ON KNOWLEDGE

THE VEGETATION OF EUROPE

A HALF-PENNYWORTH OF NAVIGATION

A LONDON NEWSPAPER IN 1667

A SCENE IN BOSTON

THE TONGUE OF FIRE

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The authoress of Woman in the Nineteenth Century, known also in this country by her Papers on Literature and Art, occupied among her own people a station as notable as that of De Staël among the French, or of Rahel von Ense in Germany. Mystic and transcendental as she was, her writings teem with proof of original power, and are the expression of a thoughtful and energetic, if also a wayward and undisciplined, mind. One of the two compilers of these Memoirs (Emerson and W. H. Channing) observes, that his first impression of her was that of a 'Yankee Corinna;' and such is not unlikely to be the last impression of ordinary readers, ourselves among the number. In a letter, dated 1841, we find her saying: 'I feel all Italy glowing beneath the Saxon crust'—an apt illustration of her mental structure and tone of sentiment, compounded of New Worldedness, as represented by Margaret Fuller, and of the feelings of Southern Europe, as embodied in the Marchesa Ossoli. Without at this time pausing to review her literary position, and her influence upon contemporary minds, we proceed to draw from these interesting, but frequently eccentric and extravagantly worded Memoirs, a sketch of her remarkable life-history.

Margaret Fuller was born at Cambridge-Port, Massachusetts, in May 1810. Her father was a shrewd, practical, hard-headed lawyer, whose love for his wife 'was the green spot on which he stood apart from the commonplaces of a mere bread-winning, bread-bestowing existence.' That wife is described as a fair and flower-like nature, bound by one law with the blue sky, the dew, and the frolic birds. 'Of all persons whom I have known, she had in her most of the angelic—of that spontaneous love for every living thing, for man, and beast, and tree, which restores the Golden Age.'2 Mr Fuller, in undertaking the education of his daughter, committed the common error of excessive stimulation—thinking to gain time by forwarding the intellect as early as possible. He was himself a scholar, and hoped to make her the heir of all he knew, and of as much more as might be elsewhere attained. He was a severe and exacting disciplinarian, and permanently marred the nervous system of his child by the system he adopted of requiring her to recite her tasks on his return home at night, which was frequently very late. Hence a premature development of the brain, which, while it made her a youthful prodigy by day—one such youthful prodigy, it has been justly said, is often the pest of a whole neighbourhood—rendered her the nightly victim of spectral illusions, somnambulism, &c.; checked her growth; and eventually brought on continual headaches, weakness, and various nervous affections. As soon as the light was removed from her chamber at night, this ill-tended girl was haunted by colossal faces, that advanced slowly towards her, the eyes dilating, and each feature swelling loathsomely as they came; till at last, when they were about to close upon her, she started up with a shriek, which drove them away, but only to return when she lay down again. 'No wonder the child arose and walked in her sleep, moaning all over the house, till once, when they heard her, and came and waked her, and she told what she had dreamed, her father sharply bade her "leave off thinking of such nonsense, or she would be crazy"—never knowing that he was himself the cause of all these horrors of the night.' Her home seems to have been deficient in the charms and associations appropriate to childhood. Finding no relief from without, her already overexcited mind was driven for refuge from itself to the world of books. She tells us she was taught Latin and English grammar at the same time; in Latin, which she began to read at six years old, her father, and subsequently a tutor, trained her to a high degree of precision, expecting her to understand the mechanism of the language thoroughly, and to translate it tersely and unhesitatingly, with the definite clearness of one perfectly au fait in the philosophy of the classics. Thus she became imbued with an abiding interest in the genius of old Rome—'the power of will, the dignity of a fixed purpose'—where man takes a 'noble bronze in camps and battle-fields,' his brow well furrowed by the 'wrinkles of council,' and his eye 'cutting its way like the sword;' and thence she loved to escape, at Ovid's behest, to the enchanted gardens of the Greek mythology, to the gods and nymphs born of the sunbeam, the wave, the shadows on the hill—delighted to realise in those Greek forms the faith of a refined and intense childhood. Reading was now to her a habit and a passion. Its only rival attraction was the 'dear little garden' behind the house, where the best hours of her lonely child-life were spent. Within the house, everything, she says, was socially utilitarian; her books told of a proud world, but in another temper were the teachings of the little garden, where her thoughts could lie callow in the nest, and only be fed and kept warm, not called to fly or sing before the time. A range of blue hills, at about twelve miles' distance, allured her to reverie, and bred within her thoughts not too deep for tears. The books which exercised most power over her at this period were Shakspeare, Cervantes, and Molière—all three students of the 'natural history of man,' and inspired by fact, not fancy; reconstructing the world from materials which they collected on every side, not spinning from the desires of their own special natures; and accordingly teaching her, their open-eyed disciple, to distrust all invention which is not based on a wide experience, but, as she confesses, also doing her harm, since the child, fed with meat instead of milk, becomes too soon mature. For a few months, this bookish life was interrupted, or varied, by the presence of an English lady, whom Margaret invested with ideal perfections as her 'first friend,' and whom she worshipped as a star from the east—a morning-star; and at whose departure she fell into a profound depression. Her father sought to dispel this rooted melancholy, by sending her to school—a destiny from which her whole nature revolted, as something alien to its innermost being and cherished associations. To school, however, she went, and at first captivated, and then scandalised her fellow-pupils by her strange ways. Now, she surprised them by her physical faculty of rivalling the spinning dervishes of the East—now, by declaiming verses, and acting a whole répertoire of parts, both laughter-raising and tear-compelling—now, by waking in the night, and cheating her restlessness by inventions that alternately diverted and teased her companions. She was always devising means to infringe upon the school-room routine. This involved her at last in a trouble, from which she was only extricated by the judicious tenderness of her teacher—the circumstances attending which 'crisis' are detailed at length in her story of 'Mariana.'

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By this time, she had attracted around her many and devoted friends. Her conversational powers were of a high order, by common consent. Mr Hedge describes her speech as remarkably fluent and correct; but deriving its strength not from fluency, choice diction, wit, or sentiment, but from accuracy of statement, keen discrimination, and a certain weight of judgment; together with rhetorical finish, it had an air of spontaneity which made it seem the grace of the moment: so that he says, 'I do not remember that the vulgar charge of talking "like a book" was ever fastened upon her, although, by her precision, she might seem to have incurred it.' The excitement of the presence of living persons seems to have energised her whole being. 'I need to be called out,' are her words, 'and never think alone, without imagining some companion. It is my habit, and bespeaks a second-rate mind.' And again: 'After all, this writing,' she says in a letter, 'is mighty dead. Oh, for my dear old Greeks, who talked everything—not to shine as in the Parisian saloons, but to learn, to teach, to vent the heart, to clear the head!' Mr Alcott of Boston considered her the most brilliant talker of the day. Miss Martineau was fascinated by the same charm. It is thus characterised by the author of Representative Men: 'Talent, memory, wit, stern introspection, poetic play, religion, the finest personal feeling, the aspects of the future, each followed each in full activity, and left me, I remember, enriched and sometimes astonished by the gifts of my guest.' Her self-complacency staggered many at first—as when she spoke, in the quietest manner, of the girls she had formed, the young men who owed everything to her, the fine companions she had long ago exhausted. 'I now know,' she has been heard to say in the coolest style, 'all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.' Well may Mr Emerson talk of her letting slip phrases that betrayed the presence of 'a rather mountainous me.' Such phrases abound in her conversation and correspondence—mountainous enough to be a hill of offence to the uninitiated and untranscendental. At anyrate, there was no affectation in this; she thoroughly believed in her own superiority; her subscription to that creed was implicit and ex animo. Nor do we detect affectation in her most notable vagaries and crotchets. She loved the truth, and spoke it out—we were about to write, manfully; and why not? At heart, she was, to use the words of an intimate and discerning friend, a right brave and heroic woman—shrinking from no duty because of feeble nerves. Numerous illustrations of this occur in the volumes before us. Thus we find her going from a bridal of passing joyfulness to attend a near relative during a formidable surgical operation—or drawing five hundred dollars to bestow, on a New-York 'ne'er-do-weel,' half-patriot, half-author, always in such depths of distress, and with such squadrons of enemies that no charity could relieve, no intervention save him.

In 1839, she removed from Groton, with her mother and family, to Jamaica Plain, a few miles from Boston; and thence, shortly, to Cambridge and New York. Boston, however, was her point d'appui, and in it she formed acquaintances of every class, the most utilitarian and the most idealistic. In 1839, she published a translation of Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann; in 1841, the Letters of Bettina; in 1843, the Summer on the Lakes—a narrative of her tour to Lake Superior and Michigan. During the same period she was editor of the Dial, since conducted by Emerson and Ripley, and in which appeared her papers on Goethe and Beethoven, the Rhine, the Romaic Ballads, John Sterling's Poems, &c.

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