Practical questions in plenty the days and months brought her to settle,—questions requiring all her wisdom, and sometimes more than all. None recurs with more frequency, at one period, in her journals, than the debate with herself, whether she shall make literature a profession. Shall it be woman, or shall it be artist?
WOMAN, OR ARTIST?
Margaret resolved, again and again, to devote herself no more to these disappointing forms of men and women, but to the children of the muse. 'The dramatis personæ' she said, 'of my poems shall henceforth be chosen from the children of immortal Muse. I fix my affections no more on these frail forms.' But it was vain; she rushed back again to persons, with a woman's devotion.
Her pen was a non-conductor. She always took it up with some disdain, thinking it a kind of impiety to attempt to report a life so warm and cordial, and wrote on the fly-leaf of her journal,—
'"Scrivo sol per sfogar' l'interno."'
'Since you went away,' she said, 'I have thought of many things I might have told you, but I could not bear to be eloquent and poetical. It is a mockery thus to play the artist with life, and dip the brush in one's own heart's blood. One would fain be no more artist, or philosopher, or lover, or critic, but a soul ever rushing forth in tides of genial life.'
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'26 Dec., 1842.—I have been reading the lives of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and of Sir Kenelm Digby. These splendid, chivalrous, and thoughtful Englishmen are meat which my soul loveth, even as much as my Italians. What I demand of men,—that they could act out all their thoughts,—these have. They are lives;—and of such I do not care if they had as many faults as there are days in the year,—there is the energy to redeem them. Do you not admire Lord Herbert's two poems on life, and the conjectures concerning celestial life? I keep reading them.'
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'When I look at my papers, I feel as if I had never had a thought that was worthy the attention of any but myself; and 'tis only when, on talking with people, I find I tell them what they did not know, that my confidence at all returns.'