Margaret Fuller (Howe 1883)/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
When Margaret stepped for the last time across the threshold of her mother's home, she must have had the rare comfort of knowing that she had done everything in her power to promote the highest welfare of those who, with her, had shared its shelter. The children of the household had grown up under her fostering care, nor had she, in any flight of her vivid imagination, forgotten the claims and needs of brothers, sister, or mother. So closely, indeed, had she felt herself bound by the necessity of doing what was best for each and all, that her literary work had not, in any degree, corresponded to her own desires. Her written and spoken word had indeed carried with it a quickening power for good; but she had not even been able so much as to plan one of the greater works which she considered herself bound to produce, and which could neither have been conceived nor carried out without ample command of time and necessary conditions. In a letter written to one of her brothers at this time, Margaret says:—
“If our family affairs could now be so arranged that I might be tolerably tranquil for the next six or eight years, I should go out of life better satisfied with the page I have turned in it than I shall if I must still toil on. A noble career is yet before me, if I can be unimpeded by cares. I have given almost all any young energies to personal relations; but at present I feel inclined to impel the general stream of thought. Let. my nearest friends also wish that I should now take share in more public life.”
The opening now found for Margaret in New York, though fortunate, was by no means fortuitous. She had herself prepared the way thereunto by her good work in the Dial. In that cheerless editorial seat she may sometimes, like the Lady of Shalott, have sighed to see Sir Lancelot ride careless by, or with the spirit of an unrecogized prophet she may have exclaimed, "Who hath believed our report? But her word had found one who could hear it to some purpose.
Mr. Greeley had been, from the first, a reader of this periodical, and had recognised the fresh thought and new culture which gave it character. His attention was first drawn to Margaret by an essay of hers, published in the July number of 1843, and entitled "The Great Lawsuit,—Man versus Men, Woman vesus Women.” This essay, which at a later date expanded into the volume known as Woman in the Nineteenth Century, struck, Mr. Greeley as "the production of an original, vigorous, and earnest mind. Margaret's "Summer on the Lakes" appeared also in the Dial somewhat later, and was considered by Mr. Greeley as "unequalled, especially in its pictures of the prairies and of the sunnier aspects of pioneer life.” Convinced of the literary ability of the writer, he gave ear to a suggestion of Mrs. Greeley, and, in accordance with her wishes and with his own judgment, extended to Margaret the invitation already spoken of as accepted. This invitation, and the arrangement to which it led, admitted Margaret not only to the columns of the Tribune, but also to the home of its editor, in which she continued to reside during the period of her connection with the paper. This home was in a spacious, old-fashioned house on the banks of the East River, completely secluded by the adjacent trees and garden, but within easy reach of New York by car and omnibus. Margaret came there in December 1844, and was at once struck with the beauty of the scene and charmed with the aspect of the antiquated dwelling, which had once, no doubt, been the villa of some magnate of old New York.
If the outside world of the time troubled itself at all about the Greeley household, it must have considered it in the light of a happy family of eccentrics. Upon the personal peculiarities of Mr. Greeley we need not here enlarge. They were of little account in comparison with the character of the man, who himself deserved the name which he gave to his paper, and was at heart a tribune of the people. Mrs. Greeley was herself a woman of curious theories, and it is probable that Margaret, in her new surroundings, found herself obliged in a certain degree to represent the conventional side of life, which her host and hostess were inclined to disregard.
By Mr. Greeley's own account there were differences between Margaret and himself regarding a great variety of subjects, including the use of tea and coffee, which he eschewed and to which she adhered, and the emancipation of women, to which Mr. Greeley proposed to attach, as a condition, the abrogation of such small courtesies as are shown the sex to-day, while Margaret demanded a greater deference as a concomitant of the larger liberty. Mr. Greeley at first determined to keep beyond the sphere of Margaret's fascination, and to burn no incense at her shrine. She appeared to him somewhát spoiled by the “Oriental adoration which she received from other women, themselves per- sons of character and of culture. Her foibles impressed him as much as did the admirable qualities which he was forced to recognize in her. Vain resolution! Living under the same roof with Margaret, he could not but come to know her, and, knowing her, he had no choice but to join the throng of her admirers. To him, as to others, the blemishes at first discerned "took on new and brighter aspects in the light of her radiant and lofty soul.”
“I learned,” says Mr. Greeley, "to know her as a most fearless and unselfish champion of truth and human good at all hazards, ready to be their standard-bearer through danger and obloquy, and, if need be, their martyr."
Mr. Greeley bears witness also to the fact that this ready spirit of self-sacrifice in Margaret did not spring either from any asceticism of temperament or from under-valuation of material advantages. Margaret, he thinks, appreciated fully all that riches, rank, and luxury could give. She prized all of these in their place, but prized far above them all the opportunity to serve and help her fellow-creatures. The imperative drill of press-work was new and somewhat irksome to her. She was accustomed indeed to labour in season and out of season, and in so doing to struggle with bodily pain and weariness. But to take up the pen at the word of command, without the interior bidding of the divine afflatus, was a new necessity, and one to which she found it difficult to submit. Mr. Greeley prized her work highly, though with some drawbacks. He could not always command it at will, for the reason that she could not. He found her writing, however, terse, vigorous, and Practical, and considered her contributions to the Tribune more solid in merit, though less ambitious in scope, than her essays written earlier for the Dial. Margaret herself esteemed them but moderately, feeling that she had taken up this work at a time when her tired faculties needed rest and recreation.
In a brief memorial of Margaret, Mr. Greeley gives us the titles of the most important of these papers. They are as follows: "Thomas Hood,” “Edgar A. Poe," "Capital Punishment," "Cassius M. Clay," “New Year's Day," "Christmas," "Thanksgiving," “St. Valentine's," "Fourth of July," "The First of August"—which she commemorates as the anniversary of slave-emancipation in the British West Indies.
In looking over the volumes which contain these and many others of Margaret's collected papers, we are carried back to a time in which issues now long settled were in the early stages of their agitation, and in which many of those whom we now most revere in memory were living actors on the stage of the century's life. Hawthorne and Longfellow were then young writers. The second series of, Emerson's Essays is noticed as of recent publication. At the time of her writing, it would seem that Emerson had a larger circle of readers in England than in his own country. She accounts for this on the ground that "our people, heated by a partisan spirit, necessarily occupied in these first stages by bringing out the material resources of the land, not generally prepared by early training for the enjoyment of books that require attention and reflection, arc still more injured by a large majority of writers and speakers who lend all their efforts to flatter corrupt tastes and mental indolence." She permits us, however, to “hail as an auspicious omen the influence Emerson has obtained” in New England, which she recognizes as deep-rooted, and, over the younger part of the community, far greater than that of any other person. She is glad to introduce Robert Browning as the author of Bells and Ponegranates to the American public. Mrs. Browning was then Miss Barrett, in regard of whom Margaret rejoices that her task is "mainly to express a cordial-admiration!” and says that she “cannot hesitate to rank her, in vigour and nobleness of conception, depth of spiritual experience, and command of classic allusion, above any female writer the world has yet known." In those poems of hers which emulate Milton and Dante "her success is far below what we find in the poems of feeling and experience; for she has the vision of a great poet, but little in proportion of his classic power."
Margaret has much to say concerning George Sand, and under various heads. In her work on Woman, "she gives the rationale of her strange and anomalous appearance, and is at once very just and very tender in her judgments.
George Sand was then in the full bloom of her repu tation. The light and the shade of her character, as known to the public, were at the height of their contrast. To the literary merit of her work was added the interest of a mysterious personality, which rebelled against the limits of sex, and, not content to be either man or woman, touched with a new and strange protest the imagination of the time.
The inexorable progress of events has changed this, with so much else. Youth, beauty, sex, all imperial in their day, are discrowned by the dusty kind of Time, and ranged in the gallery of the things that were. George Sand's volumes still glow and sparkle on the hook-shelf; but George Sand's personality and her passions are dim visions of the past, and touch us no longer. When Margaret wrote of her, the woman was at the zenith of her power, and the intoxication of her influence was so great that a calm judgment concerning it was difficult. Like a wild Bacchante, she led her chorus of bold spirits through the formal ways of French society, which in her we view were bristling with pruriency and veiled with hypocrisy. Like Margaret's, her cry was, “Truth at all hazards!” But hers was not the ideal truth which Margaret followed so zealously. “So vile are men, so weak are women, so ruthless in passion," were the utterances of her sincerity, Mistress of the revels, she did indeed command a new unmasking at the banquet, thoughtless of the risk of profaning innocent imaginations with sad facts which they had no need to know, and which, shown by such a master of art and expression, might bear with them the danger, fabled in the mingled beauty and horror of the Gorgon's head.
George Sand was saved by the sincerity of her inten tion. Her somnambulic utterances had told of her good faith, and of her belief in things truly human and divine. Her revolutionary indignation was against the really false and base, and her progress was to a position from which she was able calmly to analyze and loftily to repudiate the disorders in which she was supposed to have lost for a time the sustaining power of reason and self-command.
To those of us who remember these things in the vividness of their living presence, it is most satisfactory to be assured of the excellence of Margaret's judgment. The great Frenchwoman, at the period of which we write, appeared to many the incarnation of all the era which her sex could represent. To those of opposite mind she appeared the inspired prophetess of a new era of thought and of sentiment. To Margaret she was neither the one nor the other. Much as she loved genius, that of George Sand could not blind her to the faults and falsities that marred her work. Stern idealist as she was, the most objectionable part of Madame Sand's record could not move her to a moment's injustice or uncharity in her regard.
In Woman in the Nineteenth Century Margaret says,—
"George Sand smokes, wears male attire, wishes to be addressed as mon frère. Perhaps, if she found those who were as brothers indeed, she would not care whether she were brother or sister."
And concerning her writings:—
"This author, beginning like the many in assault upon bad institutions and external ills, yet deepening the experience through comparative freedom, sees at last that the only efficient remedy must come from individual character. “The mind of the age struggles confusedly with these problems, better discerning as yet the ill it can no longer bear than the good by which it may supersede it. But women like Sand will speak now, and cannot be silenced; their characters and their eloquence alike foretell an era when such as they shall easier learn to live true lives. But though such forbode, not such shall be parents of it.. Those who would reform the world must show that they do not speak in the heat of wild impulse; their lives must be unstained by passionate error. They must be religious students of the Divine purpose with regard to man, if they would not confound the fancies of a day with the requisitions of eternal good."
So much for the woman Sand, as known to Margaret through her works and by hearsay. Of the writer she knew first through her Seven Strings of the Lyre, a rhapsodic sketch. Margaret prizes in this "the knowledge of the passions and of social institutions, with the celestial choice which was above them.” In the romances André and Jacques she traces “the same high morality of one who had tried the liberty of circumstance only to learn to appreciate the liberty of law. . . . Though the sophistry of passion in these books disgusted me, flowers of purest hue seemed to grow upon the dark and dirty ground. I thought she had cast aside the slough of her past life, and begun a new existence beneath the sun of a new ideal." The Lettres d'un Voyageur seem to Margaret shallow,—the work of “a frail woman mourning over her lot.” But when Consuelo appears, she feels herself strengthened in her first interpretation of George Sand's true character, and takes her stand upon the original nobleness and love of right" which even the wild impulses of her fiery blood were never able entirely to oversweep. Of the work itself she says:—
“To many women this picture will prove a true consuelo (consolation), and we think even very prejudiced men will not read it without being charmed with the expansion, sweetness, and genuine force of a female character such as they have not met, but must, when painted, recognize as possible, and may be led to review their opinions, and perhaps to elevate and enlarge their hopes as to 'woman's sphere' and 'woman's mission.'"