Chapter 10

It appears from his account that Mr. Emerson saw much of Margaret during these years and that she was frequently his guest. "The day," he says, "was never long enough to exhaust her opulent memory; and I, who knew her intimately for ten years,--from July, 1836, till August, 1846, when she sailed for Europe,--never saw her without a surprise at her new powers." She was as busy as he, and they seldom met in the forenoon, but "In the evening, she came to the library, and many and many a conversation was there held," he tells us, "whose details, if they could be preserved, would justify all encomiums. They interested me in every manner;--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."

She was "rich in friends," and wore them "as a necklace of diamonds about her neck." "She was an active and inspiring companion and correspondent, and all the art, the thought and nobleness of New England seemed, at that moment, related to her and she to it. She was everywhere a welcome guest.... Her arrival was a holiday, and so was her abode ... all tasks that could be suspended were put aside to catch the favorable hour, in walking, riding, or boating to talk with this joyful guest, who brought wit, anecdotes, love-stories, tragedies, oracles with her, and, with her broad relations to so many fine friends, seemed like the queen of some parliament of love, who carried the key to all confidences, and to whom every question had been finally referred."

At a later day, when Margaret was in Italy, reports came back that she was making conquests, and having advantageous offers of marriage. Even Mr. Emerson expressed surprise at these social successes in a strange land, but a lady said to him, "There is nothing extraordinary in it. Had she been a man, any one of those fine girls of sixteen, who surrounded her here, would have married her: they were all in love with her."

"Of personal influence, speaking strictly,--an efflux, that is, purely of mind and character," Mr. Emerson thinks she had more than any other person he ever knew. Even a recluse like Hawthorne yielded to this influence. Hawthorne was married to Miss Sophia Peabody in 1842, and began housekeeping in the Old Manse in Concord. The day following their engagement Miss Peabody wrote Miss Fuller addressing her "Dear, most noble Margaret," and saying, "I feel that you are entitled, through our love and regard to be told directly.... Mr. Hawthorne, last evening, in the midst of his emotions, so deep and absorbing, after deciding, said that Margaret can now, when she visits Mr. Emerson spend part of the time with us." A month after the marriage, Hawthorne himself wrote to Margaret, "There is nobody to whom I would more willingly speak my mind, because I can be certain of being understood." Evidently he is not beginning an acquaintance; he already knows Margaret intimately and respects her thoroughly. There is no evidence, I believe, that during her life, he held any different opinion of her.

These facts have become of special interest because, in Italy, eight years after her death, he wrote in his Note-Book, that Margaret "had a strong and coarse nature" and that "she was a great humbug." The most reasonable explanation of this change of view is that Margaret was dead, poor woman, and could not speak for herself; that she had fought with all her might in an Italian Revolution that had failed; that having failed, she and her party were discredited; that her enemies survived, and Hawthorne listened to them. However his later opinions may be explained, the quality of her friends in America, among whom had been Hawthorne himself, is evidence that Margaret was not of a "coarse nature," and it is incredible that a "humbug" could have imposed herself for five years upon those ladies who attended her conversations, not to speak of James Freeman Clarke who was a fair scholar and Dr. Hedge who was a very rare scholar.

Margaret had her weaknesses, which her friends do not conceal. It was a weakness, not perhaps that she overestimated herself; that might be pardoned; but that she took no pains to conceal her high opinion of her abilities and worth. One likes to see an appearance of modesty, and that little deceit Margaret did not practice. On the contrary, Mr. Emerson says, "Margaret at first astonished and then repelled us by a complacency that seemed the most assured since the days of Scaligar.... In the coolest way, she said to her friends, 'I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.'... It is certain that Margaret occasionally let slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who knew her good sense." Col. Higginson quotes a saying about the Fullers, that "Their only peculiarity was that they said openly about themselves the good and bad things which we commonly suppress about ourselves and express only about other people." The common way is not more sincere, but it is pleasanter.

In 1840, the second year of Margaret's Conversations, appeared the first number of _The Dial_, a literary magazine of limited circulation, but destined to a kind of post-mortem immortality. In 1841, the Community of Brook Farm was established. An interesting account of both enterprises, and of Margaret's part in them, is given by Mr. Emerson in a paper found in the tenth volume of his collected Works. In the preliminary discussions leading to both enterprises, Margaret participated. Like Mr. Emerson, she did not have unqualified faith in the Brook Farm experiment and did not join the community, though she had many friends in it, was a frequent visitor, and had the honor to sit for the portrait of "Zenobia" in Mr. Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance.

Her part in _The Dial_ was more prominent. She edited the first two volumes of the magazine, being then succeeded by Mr. Emerson, and she wrote for it a paper entitled "Man vs. Men: Woman vs. Women," afterward expanded and published in a volume under the title, "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," her second and most famous book. Her first book, "Summer on the Lakes," is an account of a charming journey, with the family of James Freeman Clarke and others, by steamboat and farm wagon, as far as the Mississippi. It was a voyage of discovery, and her account has permanent historic interest.

In 1844, Margaret accepted an advantageous offer to become literary editor of the _New York Tribune_, a position which she was admirably qualified to fill. A collection of papers from _The Tribune_, under the title of "Literature and Art," made up her third book, published in 1846, on the eve of her departure for Europe.

During her residence in New York, she became greatly interested in philanthropies, especially in the care of prisoners of her own sex. She visited the jails and prisons, interviewed the inmates, gave them "conversations," and wrought upon them the same miracle which she had so often performed in refined drawing-rooms. "If she had been born to large fortune," said Mr. Greeley, "a house of refuge for all female outcasts desiring to return to the ways of virtue would have been one of her most cherished and first realized conceptions."

Early in her New York residence must also have occurred that rather mysterious love affair with the young Hebrew, Mr. Nathan, who seems first to have charmed her with his music and then with his heart. After nearly sixty years, the letters which she wrote him, full of consuming fire, have at last seen the light. From a passage in one of them, it would seem that marriage was not contemplated by either party, that in theory at least they took no thought of the morrow, the bliss of the moment being held sufficient. Evidently there was no engagement, but no one can doubt that on her part there was love. Of course in this changing world, no such relations can be maintained for ever, and in the end there will be an awakening, and then pain.

In 1846, Margaret realized her life-dream and went to Europe. Destined to a life of adventure, she was accidently separated from her party, and spent a perilous night on Ben Lomond, without a particle of shelter, in a drenching rain, a thrilling account of which she has written. She visited Carlyle and, for a wonder, he let her take a share in the conversation. To Mr. Emerson he wrote, Margaret "is very narrow sometimes, but she is truly high."

On her way to Italy, the goal of her ambition, she visited George Sand and they had such a meeting as two women of genius might. She sailed from Genoa for Naples in February, 1847, and arrived in Rome in May following. There is much to interest a reader in her Italian life, but the one thing which cannot be omitted is the story of her marriage to the Marquis Ossoli. Soon after her arrival in Rome, on a visit to St. Peter's, Margaret became separated from her friends, whom she did not again discover at the place appointed for meeting. A gentleman seeing her distress, offered to get her a carriage and, not finding one, walked home with her. This was the young Marquis Ossoli, and thus fortuitously the acquaintance began, which was continued by occasional meetings. The summer Margaret spent in the north of Italy, and when she returned to Rome, she took modest apartments in which she received her friends every Monday evening, and the Marquis came very regularly.

It was not long however before he confessed his love for her and asked her hand in marriage. He was gently rejected, being told that he ought to marry a younger woman, and that she would be his friend but not his wife. He however persisted, at length won her consent, and they were privately married in December. I follow the account of Mrs. William Story, wife of the artist, then residing in Rome. The old Marquis Ossoli had recently died, leaving an unsettled estate, of which his two older sons, both in the Papal service, were the executors. "Every one knows," says Mrs. Story, "that law is subject to ecclesiastical influence in Rome, and that marriage with a Protestant would be destructive of all prospect of favorable administration."

The birth of a child a year later, at Rieti in the Appenines, whither Margaret had retired, made secrecy seem more imperative; or, as Margaret said, in order to defend the child "from the stings of poverty, they were patient waiters for the restored law of the land." The Italian Revolution of 1848 was then in progress. Ossoli her husband, was a captain in the Civic Guard, on duty in Rome, and the letters which she wrote him at this period of trial, were the only fragments of her treasures recovered from the wreck in which she perished.

Leaving her babe with his nurse, in April following, she visited Rome and was shut up in the siege by the French army which had been sent to overthrow the provisional government and restore the authority of the pope. "Ossoli took station with his men on the walls of the Vatican garden where he remained faithfully to the end of the attack. Margaret had entire charge of one of the hospitals.... I have walked through the wards with her," says Mrs. Story, "and seen how comforting was her presence to the poor suffering men. 'How long will the Signora stay?' 'When will the Signora come again?' they eagerly asked.... They raised themselves up on their elbows to get the last glimpse of her as she was going away."

In the midst of these dangers, Margaret confided to Mrs. Story the secret of her marriage and placed in her hands the marriage certificate and other documents relating to the affair. These papers were afterward returned to Margaret and were lost in the wreck.

The failure of the Revolution was the financial ruin of all those who had staked their fortunes in it. They had much reason to be thankful if they escaped with their lives. By the intervention of friends, the Ossolis were dealt with very leniently. Mr. Greenough, the artist, interested himself in their behalf and procured for them permission to retire, outside the papal territory, to Florence. Ossoli even obtained a small part of his patrimony.

Except the disappointment and sorrow over the faded dream of Italian Independence, the winter at Florence was one of the bright spots in Margaret's life. She was proud of her husband's part in the Revolution: "I rejoice," she says, "in all Ossoli did." She had her babe with her and her happiness in husband and child was perfect: "My love for Ossoli is most pure and tender, nor has any one, except my mother or little children, loved me so genuinely as he does.... Ossoli seems to me more lovely and good every day; our darling child is well now, and every day more gay and playful."

She found pleasant and congenial society: "I see the Brownings often," she says, "and love them both more and more as I know them better. Mr. Browning enriches every hour I spend with him, and is a most cordial, true, and noble man. One of my most prized Italian friends, Marchioness Arconati Visconti, of Milan, is passing the winter here, and I see her almost every day." Moreover she was busy with a congenial task. At the very opening of the struggle for liberty, she planned to write a history of the eventful period, and with this purpose, collected material for the undertaking, and already had a large part of the work in manuscript. She finished the writing in Florence, and much value was set upon it both by herself and by her friends in Italy. Mrs. Story says, "in the estimation of most of those who were in Italy at the time, the loss of Margaret's history and notes is a great and irreparable one. No one could have possessed so many avenues of direct information from both sides."

When the spring opened, it was decided to return to America, partly to negotiate directly with the publisher, but chiefly because, having exhausted her resources, Margaret's pen must henceforth be the main reliance of the little family. It is pathetic to know that, after their passage had been engaged, "letters came which, had they reached her a week earlier, would probably have induced them to remain in Italy."

They sailed, May 17, 1850, in a merchant vessel, the only other passengers being the baby's nurse and Mr. Horace Sumner, a younger brother of Senator Sumner. After a protracted and troubled voyage of two months, the vessel arrived off the coast of New Jersey, on July 18. The "weather was thick.... By nine p. m. there was a gale, by midnight a hurricane," and at four o'clock on the morning of July 19, the vessel grounded on the shallow sands of Fire Island. The captain had died of smallpox on the voyage; his widow, the mate in command of the vessel, and four seamen reached the shore; Mr. Sumner and the Ossolis perished. The cruel part of the tragedy is that it seems probable every soul on board might have been saved. Life-boats, only three miles away, did not arrive until noon; that is, after eight precious hours had passed. Moreover, in a moment of penitence, one of the life-boat crew said, "Oh, if we had known that any such persons of importance were on board, we should have done our best."

Margaret, the name by which she will always be known, had passed her fortieth birthday at sea on this voyage. It seems a short life in which to have crowded so much and such varied experience. She had some trials even in her youth, but for two-thirds of her existence, she might have been considered a favorite of fortune. In later life, she had some battles to fight, but her triumphs were great enough to dazzle a person with more modesty than was her endowment. She suffered in Italy, both for her child left to strangers in the mountains, and for her adopted country, but they were both causes, in which for her, suffering was a joy. She did not desire to survive her husband and child, nor to leave them behind, and, we may say, happily they all went together. "Her life seems to me," says Col. Higginson, "on the whole, a triumphant rather than a sad one," and that is a reasonable verdict, however difficult to render in the presence of such a tragedy as her untimely death.

VI

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

"Is this the little woman who made this great war!" exclaimed President Lincoln when, in 1862, Mrs. Stowe was introduced to him. There was but one woman in America to whom this could have been said without absurdity. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was so conspicuous a factor in bringing on the war which abolished American slavery that to credit these results to Mrs. Stowe was not fulsome flattery but graceful compliment.

There are two excellent biographies of Mrs. Stowe, one published in 1889, by her son, Rev. Charles E. Stowe, and one, in 1897, by Mrs. Annie Fields. That work will hardly need to be done again. The object of this sketch is to study the influences that moulded Mrs. Stowe, to present the salient features of her career, and, incidentally, to discover her characteristic qualities. Her fame rests upon her literary achievements, and these are comparatively well known. Her literary career can hardly be said to have begun until the age of forty and, if this were the only interest her life had for us, we could pass hastily over her youth. It will be found however that her religious development, begun prematurely with her fourth year and continued without consideration or discretion until at seventeen she became a chronic invalid, gives a kind of tragic interest to her earlier years. Her religious education may not have been unique; it may have been characteristic of much of the religious life of New England, but girls set at work upon the problems of their souls at the age of four have seldom attained the distinction of having their biographies written, so that one can study their history.

Harriet, the second daughter and seventh child of Lyman Beecher and Roxanna Foote, was born in Litchfield, Conn., June 14, 1811. There were three Mrs. Lyman Beechers of whom Roxanna Foote was the first. The Footes were Episcopalians, Harriet, sister of Roxanna, being as Mrs. Stowe says, "the highest of High Churchwomen who in her private heart did not consider my father an ordained minister." Roxanna, perhaps not so high-church, held out for two years against Dr. Beecher's assaults upon her heart and then consented to become his wife.

Mrs. Beecher was a refined and cultivated lady who "read all the new works that were published at that day," numbered painting among her accomplishments, and whose house "was full of little works of ingenuity and taste and skill, which had been wrought by her hand: pictures of birds and flowers, done with minutest skill"; but her greatest charm was a religious nature full of all gentleness and sweetness. "In no exigency," says Dr. Beecher, "was she taken by surprise. She was just there, quiet as an angel above." There seems to have been but one thing which this saintly woman with an Episcopalian education could not do to meet the expectations of a Congregational parish, and that was that "in the weekly female prayer-meeting she could never lead the devotions"; but from this duty she seems to have been excused because of her known sensitiveness and timidity.

Mrs. Beecher died when Harriet was in her fourth year, but she left an indelible impression upon her family. Her "memory met us everywhere," says Mrs. Stowe; "when father wished to make an appeal to our hearts which he knew we could not resist, he spoke of mother." It had been the mother's prayer that her sons, of whom there were six, should be ministers, and ministers they all were. One incident Mrs. Stowe remembered which may be supposed to have set Sunday apart as a day of exceptional sanctity. It was that "of our all running and dancing out before her from the nursery to the sitting-room one Sabbath morning and her pleasant voice saying after us, 'Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.'" Such early religious impressions made upon the mind of a child of four would have faded in other surroundings, but it will be seen that Harriet's environment gave no rest to her little soul.

After the death of her mother, the child was sent to her grandmother Foote's for a long visit. There she fell to the charge of her aunt Harriet, than whom, we are told, "a more energetic human being never undertook the education of a child." According to her views, "little girls were to be taught to move very gently, to speak softly and prettily, to say 'Yes ma'am' and 'No ma'am,' never to tear their clothes, to sew and knit at regular hours, to go to church on Sunday and make all the responses, and to come home and be catechised. I remember those catechisings when she used to place my little cousin Mary and myself bolt upright at her knee while black Dinah and Harvey, the bound boy, were ranged at a respectful distance behind us.... I became a proficient in the Church catechism and gave my aunt great satisfaction by the old-fashioned gravity and steadiness with which I learned to repeat it." This early training in the catechism and the responses bore fruit in giving Mrs. Stowe a life-long fondness for the Episcopal service and ultimately in taking her into the Episcopal Church, of which during her last thirty years she was a communicant. Harriet signalized her fifth year by committing to memory twenty-seven hymns and "two long chapters of the Bible," and even more perhaps, by accidentally discovering in the attic a discarded volume of the "Arabian Nights," with which, she says, her fortune was made. It was a much more suitable child's book, one would think, than the Church catechism or Watts's hymns.

At the age of six Harriet passed to the care of the second Mrs. Lyman Beecher, formerly Harriet Porter, of Portland, Maine, apparently a lady of great dignity and character. "We felt," says Mrs. Stowe, "a little in awe of her, as if she were a strange princess rather than our own mamma; but her voice was very sweet, her ways of speaking and moving very graceful, and she took us up in her lap and let us play with her beautiful hands which seemed wonderful things, made of pearl and ornamented with strange rings." It appears she was a faithful mother, though a little severe and repressive. Henry Ward Beecher said of her: "She did the office-work of a mother if ever a mother did"; she "performed to the uttermost her duties, according to her ability"; she "was a woman of profound veneration rather than of a warm loving nature. Therefore her prayer was invariably a prayer of deep yearning reverence. I remember well the impression which it made on me. There was a mystic influence about it. A sort of sympathetic hold it had on me, but still I always felt when I went to prayer, as though I were going into a crypt, where the sun was not allowed to come; and I shrunk from it." To complete the portrait of this conscientious lady who was to have the supervision of Harriet from her sixth year, the following from a letter of one of the Beecher children is worth quoting: "Mamma is well and don't laugh any more than she did." Evidently a rather stern and sobering influence had come into the Beecher family.