Margaret Fuller (Marchesa Ossoli)

by Julia Ward Howe

"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 an undervaluation 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[133] and somewhat irksome to her. She was accustomed indeed to labor 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 new 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[134] 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 Mr. Emerson's "Essays" is noticed as of recent publication. At the time of her writing, it would seem that Mr. 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, are 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 Mr. 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 Pomegranates" to the American public. Mrs. Browning was then Miss Barrett, in regard of whom Margaret rejoices that her task is "mainly to[135] express a cordial admiration!" and says that she "cannot hesitate to rank her, in vigor 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 reputation. 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 hand of Time, and ranged in the gallery of the things that were. George Sand's volumes[136] still glow and sparkle on the bookshelf; 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 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 is 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 intention. 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[137] 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 evil 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.