Yet these were all to a certain extent indirect influences. Can I utter without trembling the two names which sit upon the thrones of female power in the Old World and the New? I mean Charlotte Bronté and Margaret Fuller. I wish I could confer a proper emphasis upon my words, when I say that the publication of "Jane Eyre" formed the chief era in the literature of women since that literature began. Into it was compressed all the feeling and experience of a very remarkable life,—feeling and experience entertained without the smallest sense of responsibility to the conventional world. The life of the author touched the restrictions of society, as the spheral curves touch the tangents which square them, so slightly as never to impair its wonderful individuality. Who would not seek a wife like Jane Eyre? Who does not rejoice in the smallest detail of that sparkling and varied courtship? Think of those words of Rochester, when, holding her with the grasp of a madman, he says, "Never was any thing at once so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand. I could bend her with my finger and thumb. And what good would it do, if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye; consider the wild, resolute, free thing looking out of it, defying me with more than courage,—with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it, the savage beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only set the captive free. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven, before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit, with will and energy and virtue and purity, that I want, not alone your brittle frame."
And from what literature, of ancient or modern growth, shall we match Jane's answer, when passion presses, crying, "Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?"
"I care for myself," is the indomitable reply: "the more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained, I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God, sanctioned by man. I will hold by the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad, as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation. They are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigor. Stringent are they? Inviolate they shall be. If, at my individual convenience, I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth, so I have always believed; and, if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane, with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count. Pre-conceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by. There I plant my foot!"
Other women have been brave and pure, but this woman was an Abdiel. Never had she faltered in her life, never encountered a sham but to crush it. We did not know what freedom meant, till we had this book. Its advent was an era, not merely in the literature, but in the life, of woman. Its welcome, so profound, so stirring, betrayed the secrets of womanly nature. Do you remember how you sat and discussed this book, far into the night?—how you wondered whether man or woman wrote it?—how the women it enfranchised looked their scorn when you suggested the first possibility?—how your temper and feeling, and sense of justice, were roused by it? All this was because a life resolute and free poured itself out between those covers. A woman delicate, cleanly, quaint, secured the polished purity of every page. Will you start, if I ask you who ever stated the Woman's-Rights' argument with the serene force of the little lace-mender in the "Professor"? Do you not envy her and her husband the happy English home secured by their united labors? Ah! when she gave us later that exquisite miniature of her sister Emily which she called "Shirley," that noble bit of Rubens color which she named "Villette," the same flood of womanly thought and feeling poured through the prayer,—the same flood, though we no longer started as when we first heard society's signal gun, and saw her whole fleet hoist the flag of distress. Women ought to buy that old stone house upon the hillside, set in among the tombs, and framed in purple heather. The lives which began and ended there have hedged it in with laurels. Read this life and these works, and learn what fortunes hang upon a noble living. Read them, that you may learn how to cheer the world with what is natural and dignified, to do your Master's work, regardless of narrow criticism or still disdain. The host of imitators who stand about Charlotte Bronté's still-open grave are the best tribute to the power that went out from her,—a power tempered by the sweetest personal graces, by a housekeeping delicate and pure and tasteful, which never lets us dream of Jane in her school at Morton, of Shirley in her peach-room parlor, of the lace-mender at the professor's desk, or Lucy Snowe in the first class of Paul Emanuel, as otherwise than brilliant in cleanliness and order. I turn reluctantly from a life so well known, and now, thank God, beginning to be so well understood.
I do not treat of Margaret Fuller as a literary power; for, whatever may be her rank in this respect, she does not exert a tithe of the influence in this way, which attaches to the idea of her as a person, to herself as the centre of the radiant and shining group of women who were known as "Margaret's friends."
Her "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" is a scholarly, refined, and noble plea for the freedom of her sex. In point of ability, no book can be named with it, if we except that of Madame d'Héricourt. It has an advantage over that of Mary Wollstonecraft, in being, so far as the author could make it, a complete statement; but it is written so much more from the stand-point of thought and feeling, that it has had a far more limited influence. There is not a word in the "Vindication" which the most simple might not read as he ran, and, reading, understand; but much of the "Nineteenth Century" depends upon a critical scholarship, and an evasive delicacy of sentiment and thought, which elude the common grasp. Precious passages have become axioms. "Let her be a sea-captain, if she will," has a power in both hemispheres; for it has been justified to learned and simple, by Captain Betsy, of the Scotch schooner, "Cleotus," and the sweet and noble woman who so lately carried an American ship round Cape Horn. The life of Margaret Fuller is in everybody's hands; but not even Boston women appreciate her personal influence. Who else could be expected to understand it? Her very existence was a stimulus to endeavor; and hundreds of women become practical "Exaltadas," because they saw the position she was permitted to hold. "I always know a Boston woman," said a rough German miner to me, beyond Lake Huron: "she always has Margaret Fuller's stamp upon her;" and I felt that his words were true. We have missed her sadly since she was taken from us. Ever memorable will be the "Life and Writings," which revive our memories better than they satisfy our demands. "It will be seen," she once wrote, "that my youth was not unfriended, since those great minds came to me in kindness." We have not been unfriended either, since she was permitted to come to us. If I were to characterize her in two words, it would be as "Truth-teller and Truth-compeller." She not only spoke what she thought, in her own way, let it be abrupt or gentle, but she compelled us to do the same. There was something in her presence which tore away all disguises: even unconscious pretension could not bear it. We were soon made to feel whether we had any right to our own thoughts. "What I especially admired in her," says Dr. Hedge, "was her intellectual sincerity. Her judgments took no bribe from her sex or sphere, nor from custom nor tradition nor caprice. She valued truth supremely, both for herself and others. The question with her was, not what should be believed, nor what ought to be true, but what is true. Her 'yes' and 'no' were never conventional; and she often amazed people by a cool and unsuspected dissent from the commonplaces of popular acceptation."
"Truth-teller and Truth-compeller,"—the words seem to fall like the shadow of Omnipotence, a noble fillet for a woman's forehead. What a noble character that must have been, which inspired the remark made after her marriage:—
"Her life, since she went abroad, is wholly unknown to me; but I have an unshaken trust, that what Margaret did she can defend." An "unshaken trust,"—such words are a challenge to all noble living. In great and small matters, we are told, she was a woman of her word, and so gave those who conversed with her the unspeakable comfort which flows from plaindealing. "I walk over burning ploughshares, and they sear my feet, yet nothing but truth will do," she says; and again, in a letter to a friend: "My own entire sincerity in every passage of life gives me a right to expect that I shall be met by no unmeaning phrases or attentions."
I enlarge upon this trait of character, for I think it Margaret's due. Everybody here knows her reputation as a scholar: few know her character as a woman. In beautiful keeping with this trait was her letter to Miss Martineau, after the publication of her book upon this country.
"When Jouffroy writes his lectures," she says, "I am not conversant with all his topics; but I can appreciate his lucid style and admirable method. When Webster speaks on the currency, I do not understand the subject; but I do understand his mode of treating it, and can see what a blaze of light flows from his torch. When Harriet Martineau writes about America, I often cannot test that rashness and inaccuracy of which I hear so much; but I can feel that they exist. A want of soundness and patient investigation is found throughout the book; and I cannot be happy in it, because it is not worthy of my friend.