Chapter 9

The effects of her training upon her health, Margaret appears to have exaggerated. She thought it had "checked her growth, wasted her constitution," and would bring her to a "premature grave." While her lessons to her father by candle-light continued, there were sleeplessness, bad dreams, and morning headaches, but after this had gone on one year, Mr. Fuller was elected to Congress, spent most of his time in Washington, and a private tutor gave the lessons, presumably at seasonable hours. No one with a "broken constitution" could have performed her later literary labors, and she was not threatened with a "premature grave" when Dr. Frederick Henry Hedge made her acquaintance in Cambridge society. "Margaret," he says, "was then about thirteen,--a child in years, but so precocious in her mental and physical development, that she passed for eighteen or twenty. Agreeably to this estimate, she had her place in society as a full-grown lady. When I recall her personal appearance as she was then, and for ten or twelve years subsequent, I have the idea of a blooming girl of florid complexion and vigorous health, with a tendency to robustness of which she was painfully conscious, and which, with little regard to hygienic principles, she endeavored to suppress and conceal, thereby preparing for herself much future suffering." She had, he says, "no pretensions to beauty then, or at any time," yet she "was not plain," a reproach from which she was saved "by her blond and abundant hair, by her excellent teeth, by her sparkling, dancing, busy eyes," and by a "graceful and peculiar carriage of her head and neck." He adds that "in conversation she had already, at that early age, begun to distinguish herself, and made much the same impression in society that she did in after years," but that she had an excessive "tendency to sarcasm" which frightened shy young people and made her notoriously unpopular with the ladies.

At this period Margaret attended a seminary for young ladies in Boston. Cambridge was then, according to Col. Higginson, a vast, sparsely settled village, containing between two and three thousand inhabitants. In the Boston school, Dr. Hedge says, "the inexperienced country girl was exposed to petty persecutions from the dashing misses of the city," and Margaret paid them off by "indiscriminate sarcasms."

Margaret's next two years were spent at a boarding school in Groton. Her adventures in this school are supposed to be narrated in her dramatic story entitled "Mariana," in the volume called "Summer on the Lakes." Mariana at first carried all before her "by her love of wild dances and sudden song, her freaks of passion and wit," but abusing her privileges, she is overthrown by her rebellious subjects, brought to great humiliation, and receives some needed moral instructions.

At fifteen, Margaret returned to Cambridge and resumed her private studies, except that, for a Greek recitation, she attended an academy in which Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was then fitting for college. Her day at this period, as she gives it, was occupied thus: she rose before five, walked an hour, and practiced at the piano till seven: breakfasted and read French till eight; read Brown's philosophy, two or three lectures, till half past nine; went to school and studied Greek till twelve; recited, went home, and practiced till two; dined; lounged half an hour, read two hours in Italian, walked or rode, and spent her evenings leisurely with music or friends. Plainly she ought to have been one of the learned women of her generation.

A school composition of Margaret impressed her fellow pupil, Dr. Holmes, as he relates, with a kind of awe. It began loftily with the words, "It is a trite remark," a phrase which seemed to the boy very masterful. The girls envied her a certain queenliness of manner. "We thought," says one of them, "that if we could only come into school in that way, we could know as much Greek as she did." She was accustomed to fill the hood of her cloak with books, swing them over her shoulder, and march away. "We wished," says this lady, "that our mothers would let us have hooded cloaks, that we might carry our books in the same way."

It is known that Margaret had several love affairs and, in a later letter, she refers to one which belongs to this period, and which appears to have been the first of the series. She meets her old adorer again at the age of thirty and writes to a friend who knew of the youthful episode. He had the same powerful eye, calm wisdom, refined observation and "the imposing _maniere d'etre_ which anywhere would give him influence among men"; but in herself, she says, "There is scarcely a fibre left of the haughty, passionate, ambitious child he remembered and loved."

Though a precocious girl and in a way fascinating, there is evidence that Margaret was crude and unformed socially, due perhaps to the habit of considering her mother as a negligible quantity. Cambridge ladies preserved an unpleasant portrait of the child as she appeared at a grand reception given by Mr. Fuller to President Adams in 1826, "one of the most elaborate affairs of the kind," says Col. Higginson, "that had occurred in Cambridge since the ante-revolutionary days of the Lechmeres and Vassals." Margaret ought to have been dressed by an artist, but apparently, a girl of sixteen, she was left to her own devices. She appeared, we are told, with a low-necked dress badly cut, tightly laced, her arms held back as if pinioned, her hair curled all over her head, and she danced quadrilles very badly. This escapade was not allowed to repeat itself. Certain kind and motherly Cambridge ladies took the neglected child in hand, tamed her rude strength, and subdued her manners. Col. Higginson mentions half a dozen of these excellent ladies, among them his mother, at whose feet "this studious, self-conscious, overgrown girl" would sit, "covering her hands with kisses and treasuring every word."

Chief among Margaret's motherly friends was Mrs. Eliza Farrar, wife of a Harvard professor, an authoress of merit, "of uncommon character and cultivation, who had lived much in Europe, and who, with no children of her own," became a kind of foster-mother to Margaret. She had Margaret "constantly at her own house, reformed her hairdresser, instructed her dressmaker, and took her to make calls and on journeys." Margaret was an apt pupil, and the good training of these many Cambridge mothers was apparent when, ten years later, Mr. Emerson made her acquaintance. "She was then, as always," he says, "carefully and becomingly dressed, and of lady-like self-possession."

The seven years in Cambridge, from Margaret's fifteenth to her twenty-third year, though uneventful, were, considering merely the pleasure of existence, the most delightful of her life. She was a school-girl as much or as little as she cared to be; her health, when not overtaxed, was perfect; her family though not rich, were in easy circumstances; her father was distinguished, having just retired from Congress after eight years of creditable service; and, partly perhaps from her father's distinction, she had access to the best social circles of Cambridge. "In our evening reunions," says Dr. Hedge, "she was always conspicuous by the brilliancy of her wit, which needed but little provocation to break forth in exuberant sallies, that drew around her a knot of listeners, and made her the central attraction of the hour. Rarely did she enter a company in which she was not a prominent object." Her conversational talent "continued to develop itself in these years, and was certainly" he thinks, "her most decided gift. One could form no adequate idea of her ability without hearing her converse.... For some reason or other, she could never deliver herself in print as she did with her lips." Emerson, in perfect agreement with this estimate says, "Her pen was a non-conductor." The reader will not think this true in her letters, where often the words seem to palpitate. Doubtless the world had no business to see her love letters, but one will find there a woman who, if she could speak as she writes, must have poured herself out in tidal waves.

Dr. Hedge was struck by two traits of Margaret's character, repeatedly mentioned by others, but to which it is worth while to have his testimony. The first was a passionate love for the beautiful: "I have never known one who seemed to derive such satisfaction from beautiful forms"; the second was "her intellectual sincerity. Her judgment took no bribes from her sex or her sphere, nor from custom, nor tradition, nor caprice."

Margaret was nineteen years old when Dr. James Freeman Clarke, then a young man in college, made her acquaintance. "We both lived in Cambridge," he says, "and from that time until she went to reside in Groton in 1833, I saw her or heard from her almost every day. There was a family connection between us, and we called each other cousins." Possessing in a greater degree than any person he ever knew, the power of magnetizing others, she had drawn about her a circle of girl friends whom she entertained and delighted by her exuberant talent. They came from Boston, Charlestown, Roxbury, Brookline, and met now at one house and now at another of these pleasant towns. Dr. Hedge also knows of this charming circle, and says, "she loved to draw these fair girls to herself, and make them her guests, and was never so happy as when surrounded in company, by such a bevy."

With all her social activity, Margaret kept up her studies at a rate that would be the despair of a young man in college. "She already, when I first became acquainted with her," says Dr. Clarke, "had become familiar with the masterpieces of French, Italian, and Spanish literature," and was beginning German, and in about three months, she was reading with ease the masterpieces of German literature. Meanwhile, she was keeping up her Greek as a pastime, reading over and over the dialogues of Plato. Still there is time for Mr. Clarke to walk with her for hours beneath the lindens or in the garden, or, on a summer's day to ride with her on horseback from Cambridge to Newton,--a day he says, "all of a piece, in which my eloquent companion helped me to understand my past life and her own."

We cannot wonder that, at the age of twenty-three, Margaret reluctantly left Cambridge where there was so much that she loved, and went with her family to a farm in Groton where, with certain unpleasant school-girl memories, there was nothing that she loved at all. In 1833, at the age of sixty-five Mr. Fuller retired from his law practice and bought an estate in Groton, with the double purpose of farming his lands for income, and, in his leisure, writing a history of the United States, for which his public life had been a preparation, and towards which he had collected much material. Margaret's most exacting duties were the education of the younger children, which left her much time for her favorite studies. She had correspondents by the score; her friends visited her; Cambridge homes were open to her; and Mrs. Farrar took her on a delightful journey to Newport, Hudson River and Trenton Falls. Still we cannot add the two years in Groton to her happy period, because she allowed herself to be intensely miserable. Six years later, in a moment of penitence, she said of this period, "Had I been wise in such matters then as now, how easy and fair I might have made the whole."

She fought her homesickness by overwork, so that Emerson says, "her reading in Groton was at a rate like Gibbon's," and she paid the penalty of her excesses by a serious illness which threatened to be fatal, and from which perhaps she never fully recovered. It was some consolation that her father was melted to an unwonted exhibition of tenderness, and that he said to her in this mood, "My dear, I have been thinking of you in the night, and I cannot remember that you have any faults. You have defects, of course, as all mortals have, but I do not know that you have a single fault."

Events were soon to make this remark one of her dearest memories. In a short time, death separated the father and child, who had been so much to each other. In 1835, Mr. Fuller fell a victim to cholera, and died in three days. For a year or more, Margaret's heart had been set upon a visit to Europe for study; the trip had been promised by her father; it had been arranged that she should accompany her friends, the Farrars; but the death of Mr. Fuller dissolved this dream, and, in her journal, solemnly praying that "duty may now be the first object and self set aside," she dedicates her strength to her "mother, brothers, and sister." No one can read the "Memoirs" without feeling that she kept her vows.

The estate of Mr. Fuller finally yielded $2,000 to each of the seven children, much less, Margaret says, than was anticipated. With reason, she wrote, "Life, as I look forward, presents a scene of struggle and privation only." In the winter, at Mrs. Farrar's, Margaret met Mr. Emerson; the summer following she visited at his house in Concord. There she met Mr. Alcott and engaged to teach in his school in Boston.

Margaret Fuller's visit at Mr. Emerson's in 1836 had for her very important consequences. It was the first of many visits and was the beginning of an intimacy which takes its place among the most interesting literary friendships in the history of letters. To this friendship Col. Higginson devotes a separate chapter in his biography of Margaret, and in the "Memoirs," under the title of "Visits to Concord," Mr. Emerson gives a charming account of it in more than a hundred pages.

Mr. Emerson was by no means the stranger to Margaret that she was to him. She had sat under his preaching during his pastorate at the Second Church in Boston, and "several of his sermons," so she wrote to a friend, "stood apart in her memory like landmarks in her spiritual history." It appears that she had failed to come to close quarters with this timid apostle. A year after he left his pulpit, she wrote of him as the "only clergyman of all possible clergymen who eludes my acquaintance."

When, at length, she was invited to Concord, it was as Mrs. Emerson's guest, not as his: "she came to spend a fortnight with my wife." However, at last she was under his roof. "I still remember," he says, "the first half hour of her conversation.... Her extreme plainness,--a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids,--the nasal tone of her voice--all repelled; and I said to myself, we shall never get far.... I remember that she made me laugh more than I liked.... She had an incredible variety of anecdotes, and the readiest wit to give an absurd turn to whatever passed; and the eyes, which were so plain at first, soon swam with fun and drolleries, and the very tides of joy and superabundant life."

The practical outcome of the visit was an engagement to teach in Mr. Alcott's school. Under date of August 2, 1836, Mr. Alcott writes, "Emerson called this morning and took me to Concord to spend the day. At his house, I met Margaret Fuller ... and had some conversation with her about taking Miss Peabody's place in my school." That is to say, Mr. Emerson had in his house a brilliant young lady who, by stress of circumstances, wanted a situation; he had a friend in Boston in whose school there was a vacancy; Mr. Emerson, at some pains to himself, brought the parties together. Nor was this the last time that Mr. Emerson befriended Margaret.

It appears from Mr. Alcott's diary that Miss Fuller began her engagement with January, that she taught Latin and French at the school, and French, German, and Italian to private classes. For a class of beginners, she "thought it good success," she says, "when at the end of three months, they could read twenty pages of German at a lesson, and very well." An advanced class in German read Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea, Goetz von Berlichingen, Iphigenia, and the first part of Faust, "three weeks of thorough study," she calls it, "as valuable to me as to them."

The class in Italian went at an equal pace. At the same time she had three private pupils, to one of whom, every day for ten weeks, she taught Latin "orally,"--in other words, Latin conversation. In her leisure, she "translated, one evening every week, German authors into English for the gratification of Dr. Channing." It is to be hoped that she was paid for this service, because she found it far from interesting. "It is not very pleasant," she writes, "for Dr. Channing takes in subjects more deliberately than is conceivable to us feminine people."

In the spring of 1837, Margaret accepted an invitation to teach in a private academy in Providence, R. I.--four hours a day, at a salary of $1,000. We are not told how this invitation came to her, but it is not difficult to detect the hand of Mr. Emerson. The proprietor of the school was an admirer of Emerson, so much so that he brought Emerson from Concord in June following, to dedicate a new school building. His relation to both parties makes it probable that Margaret owed her second engagement, as she did her first, to the good offices of Mr. Emerson.

She taught in this school with success, two years, "worshipped by the girls," it is said, "but sometimes too sarcastic for the boys." The task of teaching, however, was irksome to her, her mind was in literature; she had from Mr. Ripley a definite proposition to write a "Life of Goethe," a task of which she had dreamed many years; and she resigned her position, and withdrew from the profession of school-teacher, at the end of 1838. Her life of Goethe was never written, but it was always dancing before her eyes and, more than once, determined her course.

In the following spring, Margaret took a pleasant house in Jamaica Plain, "then and perhaps now," Col. Higginson says, "the most rural and attractive suburb of Boston." Here she brought her mother and the younger children. Three years later, she removed with them to Cambridge, and for the next five years, she kept the family together, and made a home for them. In addition to the income of the estate, she expected to meet her expenses by giving lessons. Two pupils came with her from Providence, and other pupils came for recitations, by whom she was paid at the rate of two dollars an hour.

With these resources the life in Jamaica Plain began very quietly and pleasantly. To be quiet however was not natural to Margaret. Besides, she had fallen upon what, intellectually, were stirring times. It was at the high tide of the Transcendental movement. William Henry Channing who, like Margaret, was a part of it, says, "the summer of 1839 saw the full dawn of this strange enthusiasm." As he briefly defines it "Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples, was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the living God in the soul." Its disciples, says Mr. Channing, "were pleasantly nick-named the 'Like-minded,' on the ground that no two were of the same opinion." Of this company, he says, "Margaret was a member by the grace of nature.... Men, her superiors in years, in fame and social position, treated her more with the frankness due from equal to equal, than the half condescending deference with which scholars are wont to adapt themselves to women.... It was evident that they prized her verdict, respected her criticism, feared her rebuke, and looked to her as an umpire." In speaking, "her opening was deliberate, like the progress of a massive force gaining its momentum; but as she felt her way, and moving in a congenial element, the sweep of her speech became grand. The style of her eloquence was sententious, free from prettiness, direct, vigorous, charged with vitality."

It was a saying of hers that if she had been a man, she would have aspired to become an orator, and it seems probable she would not have aspired in vain. The natural sequel to the occasional discussions of the summer was the formation of a class of ladies for Conversation, with Margaret as the leader. This class contained twenty-five or thirty ladies, among whom were Mrs. George Bancroft, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, Mrs. Horace Mann, Mrs. Theodore Parker, Mrs. Waldo Emerson, Mrs. George Ripley, and Mrs. Josiah Quincy. The first series of thirteen meetings was immediately followed by a second series; they were resumed the next winter and were continued with unabated interest for five years.

The subjects considered in these celebrated Conversations ranged over a very wide field, from mythology and religion, poetry and art, to war, ethics, and sociology. If Margaret had not been brilliant in these assemblies, she would have fallen short of herself as she has been represented in the Cambridge drawing-rooms. As reported by one of the members of the class, "Margaret used to come to the conversations very well dressed and, altogether, looked sumptuously. She began them with an exordium in which she gave her leading views,"--a part which she is further said to have managed with great skill and charm, after which she invited others to join in the discussion. Mr. Emerson tells us that the apparent sumptuousness in her attire was imaginary, the "effect of a general impression made by her genius and mistakenly attributed to some external elegance; for," he says, "I have been told by her most intimate friend, who knew every particular of her conduct at the time, that there was nothing of especial expense or splendor in her toilette."

Mr. Emerson knew a lady "of eminent powers, previously by no means partial to Margaret," who said, on leaving one of these assemblies, "I never heard, read of, or imagined a conversation at all equal to this we have now heard." Many testimonies have been brought together, in the "Memoirs," of the enthusiasm and admiration created by Margaret in these Conversations. They were probably her most brilliant achievements, though, in the nature of the case, nothing survives of them but the echo in these recorded memories of participants.

Mr. Emerson says that "the fame of these conversations" led to a proposal that Margaret should undertake an evening class to which gentlemen should be admitted and that he himself had the pleasure of "assisting at one--the second--of these soirees." Margaret "spoke well--she could not otherwise,--but I remember that she seemed encumbered, or interrupted, by the headiness or incapacity of the men." A lady who attended the entire series, a "true hand," he says, reports that "all that depended on others entirely failed" and that "even in the point of erudition, which Margaret did not profess on the subject, she proved the best informed of the party." This testimony is worth something in answer to the charge that Margaret's scholarship was fictitious, that she had a smattering of many things, but knew nothing thoroughly. She seems to have compared well with others, some of whom were considered scholars. "Take her as a whole," said Mr. Emerson's informant, "she has the most to bestow on others by conversation of any person I have ever known."

For these services, Margaret seems to have received liberal compensation, though all was so cordial that she says she never had the feeling of being "a paid Corinne." For the conversations with ladies and gentlemen, according to Mrs. Dall who has published her notes of them, the tickets were $20 each, for the series of ten evenings.