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.
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.