Mr. Henry James, Jr., writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne, speaks of the Massachusetts of forty or more
years ago as poor in its æsthetic resources. Works of
art indeed were then few in number, and decorative
industry, in its present extent, was not dreamed of.
But in the intellectual form of appreciative criticism
the Boston of that day was richer than the city of our
own time. The first stage of culture is cultivation,
and the art lovers of that day had sowed the seed of
careful study, and were intent upon its growth and
ripening. If possession is nine points of the law, as it
is acknowledged to be, the knowledge of values may be
said to be nine points of possession, and Margaret and
her friends, with their knowledge of the import of art,
and with their trained and careful observation of its
outward forms, had a richer feast in the casts and
engravings of that time than can be enjoyed to-day by
the amateur, who, with a bric-a-brac taste and blase
feeling, haunts the picture-shops of our large cities,
or treads the galleries in which the majestic ghosts of
earnest times rebuke his flippant frivolity.
We have lingered over these records of Margaret's brilliant youth, because their prophecies aid us greatly in the interpretation of her later life. The inspired maiden of these letters and journals is very unlike the “Miss Fuller” who in those very days was sometimes quoted as the very embodiment of all that is ungraceful and unfeminine. How little were the beauties of her mind, the graces of her character, guessed at or sought for by those who saw in her unlikeness to the popular or fashionable type of the time matter only for derisive comment!
It may not be unimportant for us here to examine a little the rationale of Margaret's position and inquire
