From: The Woman and The Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life & Writings (1994)
Author: Bell Gale Chevigny, Margaret Fuller
Published: Northeastern University Press 1976; 1994 Boston
FULLER’S WRITINGS
10. On Genoa and Naples [May 29, 1847]
Writing her first impressions of Naples for the Tribune, Fuller subscribed to the then typical tourist’s distinction between eternal Italy and the degraded contemporary Italian. In the north, bad weather and Mazzini’s contacts combined to reverse the judgment. (One of the passionate Genoese faces here praised belonged to Mazzini’s mother, Maria. Fiercely devoted to her son, she was so taken by Fuller that she hinted to Mazzini that they should marry, forcing him to remind her of his vow of celibacy.)
The excessive beauty of Genoa is well known, and the impression upon the eye alone was correspondent with what I expected, but alas! the weather was still so cold I could not realize that I had actually touched those shores to which I had looked forward all my life, where it seemed that the heart would expand, and the whole nature be turned to delight. Seen by a cutting wind, the marble palaces, the gardens, the magnificent water-view of Genoa failed to charm, “I saw, not felt, how beautiful they were.” Only at Naples have I found my Italy, and here not till after a week’s waiting-not till I began to believe that all I had heard in praise of the climate of Italy was fable, and that there is really no Spring anywhere except in the imagination of poets. For the first week was an exact copy of the miseries of a New-England spring; a bright sun came for an hour or two in the morning just to flatter you forth without your cloak, and then-and then-came up a villainous, horrible wind, exactly like the worst East wind of Boston, breaking the heart, racking the brain and turning hope and fancy to an irrevocable green and yellow hue in lieu of their native rose.
However, here at Naples I have at last found my Italy; I have passed through the Grotto of Pausilippo, visited Cuma, Baia, and Capri—ascended Vesuvius, and found all familiar, except the sense of enchantment, of sweet exhilaration this scene conveys.
and yet all new, as if never yet described, for Nature here, most prolific and exuberant in her gifts, has touched them all with a charm unhackneyed, unhackneyable, which the boots of English dandies cannot trample out, nor the raptures of sentimental tourists daub or fade. Baia had still a hid divinity for me, Vesuvius a fresh baptism of fire, and Sorrento—oh Sorrento was beyond picture, beyond poesy, for the greatest Artist had been at work there in a temper beyond the reach of human art . . . .
At Genoa and Leghorn, I saw for the first time Italians in their homes. Very attractive I found them, charming women, refined men, eloquent and courteous. If the cold wind hid Italy, it could not the Italians. A little group of faces, each so full of character, dignity, and what is so rare in an American face, the capacity for pure, exalting passion, will live ever in my memory-the fulfilment of a hope! . . .
At Leghorn we changed the boat, and, retracing our steps, came now at last to Naples,—to this priest-ridden, misgoverned, full of dirty, degraded men and women, yet still most lovely Naples,—of which the most I can say is that the divine aspect of Nature can make you forget the situation of Man in this region, which was surely intended for him as a princely child, angelic in virtue, genius and beauty, and not as a begging, vermin-haunted, image-kissing Lazzarone. [Dispatches, pp. 129-30]
11. To Thomas Hicks, April 23, 1847
Soon after arriving in Rome, Fuller wrote this letter, which has never before been published, and whose immodesty and insistence has apparently embarrassed her biographers. Wanting to believe she was gentled by Italy, most of them have ignored the letter; the few who cite it omit or soften the more aggressive phrases and pass it off as a letter to Ossoli, glossing over the fact that he could not read English. Moreover, the existence in the Houghton Library of an unsigned letter which is clearly a reply to Fuller’s letter has gone unremarked. The fact that Fuller wrote such an ardent letter to another man after meeting Ossoli (if indeed she met him during Easter week at the beginning of April as is generally believed) explodes the reassuring myth that her feeling for him was immediate and complete. With the utmost cordiality and regret, Fuller’s correspondent replied on May 4:
It was melancholy to read your thought that we shall know each other but a short time. But if we are kindred as you say, and our horoscope in some respects the same, now that we have met, can we ever be separated? You speak of my youth; is it by years then that Life is measured? Do you not perceive that my heart has grown gray? that the passion which sometimes lights my dull eye is like the smile found upon the lips of dead children? It is you who are young for every pulse of your being is full and warm with Love. Why would you be endeared to me? I am the child of autumn . . . . Do you not see that I cannot make you happy? May I hope not to offend you in writing so? [Houghton MS]
A postscript—“Kind enough to tell Eddy that I shall not be in the Studio today”—provided the clue which led me to other letters by Thomas Hicks, an American painter, and I found that the writing was by the same hand. Fuller met Hicks, who was, ironically, only twenty-three years old, when she first came to Rome; later she praised his work and his zeal for social reform in letters to an influential friend and to the Tribune. When she went to Rieti to have her baby, she sent her papers to Hicks for safekeeping. During the siege of Rome, he painted her portrait; after her death, he refused to part with it or her letters, which he told Ellen Channing were “sacredly confidential.” In later years, Hicks became a prosperous portraitist, painting many famous people, including Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Dear Youth
You do not come to see me, so I can think of no way but this which is so awkward to pay the little debt of the other day. I do not know what you paid, if more than this money, you must tell me.
I do not understand why you do not seek me more, you said you were too hard at work and had not time. I tried to believe you, because you seem to me like one who always wishes to speak the truth exactly, but I could not. I can always find time to see any one I wish to; it seems to me it is the same with every one.
You are the only one whom I have seen here in whose eye I recognized one of my own kindred. I want to know and to love you and to have you love me: you said you have no friendliness of nature but that is not true; you are precisely one to need the music, the recognition of kindred minds. How can you let me pass you by, without full and free communication. I do not understand it, unless you are occupied by some other strong feeling. Very soon I must go from here, do not let me go without giving me some of your life. I wish this for both our sakes, for mine, because I have so lately been severed from congenial companionship, that I am suffering for want of it, for yours because I feel as if I had something precious to leave in your charge.
When we are together it does not seem to me, as if you were insensible to all this? Am I mistaken yet, after I had been with you, I could not meet you the next day as I wanted to, at the Palazzo Borghese I mean. I wanted to speak to you with frank affection, and I could not. Something prevents what is it? answer [Houghton MS]
12. On the high tide of the Pope’s popularity, May 1847
Hicks’ rejection of Fuller was apparently eclipsed by her excitement over life in Rome. In her early enthusiasm for the rapport between the new Pope and the people, we note that her identification is with the Pope rather than the people. This passage is from a Tribune dispatch.
I have heard owls hoot in the Colosseum by moonlight, and they spoke more to the purpose than I ever heard any other voice upon that subject. I have seen all the pomps and shows of Holy Week in the Church of St. Peter, and found them less imposing than an habitual acquaintance with the place with processions of monks and nuns stealing in now and then, or the swell of vespers from some side chapel. I have ascended the dome and seen thence Rome and its Campagna, its villas with their cypresses and pines serenely sad as is nothing else in the world, and the fountains of the Vatican garden gushing hard by. I have been in the Subterranean to see a poor little boy introduced, much to his surprise, to the bosom of the Church; and then I have seen by torch-light the stone Popes where they lie on their tombs, and the old mosaics, and Virgins with gilt caps. It is all rich and full,—very impressive in its way. St. Peter’s must be to each one a separate poem.
The ceremonies of the Church have been numerous and splendid during our stay here; and they borrow unusual interest from the love and expectation inspired by the present Pontiff. He is a man of noble and good aspect, who, it is easy to see, has set his heart upon doing something solid for the benefit of Man. But pensively, too, must one feel how hampered and inadequate are the means at his command to accomplish these ends. The Italians do not feel it, but deliver themselves, with all the vivacity of their temperament, to perpetual hurras, vivas, rockets, and torch-light processions. I often think how grave and sad must the Pope feel, as he sits alone and hears all this noise of expectation.
A week or two ago the Cardinal Secretary published a circular inviting the departments to measures which would give the people a sort of representative council. Nothing could seem more limited than this improvement but it was a great measure for Rome. At night the Corso, in which we live, was illuminated, and many thousands passed through it in a torch-bearing procession. I saw them first assembled in the Piazza del Popolo, forming around its fountain a great circle of fire. Then, as a river of fire, they streamed slowly through the Corso, on their way to the Quirinal to thank the Pope, upbearing a banner on which the edict was printed. The stream of fire advanced slowly with a perpetual surge-like sound of voices; the torches flashed on the animated Italian faces. I have never seen anything finer. Ascending the Quirinal they made it a mount of light. Bengal fires were thrown up, which cast their red and white light on the noble Greek figures of men and horses that reign over it. The Pope appeared on his balcony: the crowd shouted three vivas; he extended his arms: the crowd fell on their knees and received his benediction; he retired, and the torches were extinguished, and the multitude dispersed in an instant. [Dispatches, pp. 135-37]
13. To William Henry Channing, May 7, 1847
This letter is among several written at the time which disclose a dramatic and conscious reworking of values, made necessary by Fuller’s determination “ to know the common people and to feel truly in Italy” and to better know herself.
I write not to you about these countries, of the famous people I see, of magnificent shows and places. All these things are only to me an illuminated margin on the text of my inward life. Earlier, they would have been more. Art is not important to me now. I like only what little I find that is transcendentally good, and even with that feel very familiar and calm. I take interest in the state of the people, their manners, the state of the race in them. I see the future dawning; it is in important aspects Fourier’s future. But I like no Fourierites; they are terribly wearisome here in Europe; the tide of things does not wash through them as violently as with us, and they have time to run in the tread-mill of system. Still, they serve this great future which I shall not live to see. I must be born again. [Memoirs, II, 209]
14. On tributes to women in Italy, August 9, 1847
Although Fuller later expressed disappointment in most Italian women, whenever she found them in positions of strength or spotted any promise of it, as during her summer tour in 1847, she made enthusiastic notes; these items were in a Tribune dispatch.
Before reaching Perugia, I visited the Etrurian tomb, which is a little way off the road; it is said to be one of the finest in Etruria. The hillside is full of them, but excavations are expensive and not frequent. The effect of this one was beyond my expectations; in it were several female figures, very dignified and calm as the dim lamp-light fell on them by turns. The expression of these figures shows that the position of woman in these states was noble. Their Eagles’ nests cherished well the female Eagle who kept watch in the eyrie. . . .
Passing from Florence, I came to BOLOGNA,—learned Bologna, indeed an Italian city, full of expression, of physiognomy—so to speak. A woman should love Bologna, for there has the spark of intellect in Woman been cherished with reverent care. Not in former ages only, but in this, Bologna raised a woman who was worthy to the dignities of its University, and in their Certosa they proudly show the monument to Clotilda Tambroni, late Greek Professor there. Her letters, preserved by her friends, are said to form a very valuable collection. In their Anatomical Hall is the bust of a woman, Professor of Anatomy. In Art they have had Properzia di Rossi, Elizabetta Sirani, Lavinia Fontana, and delight to give their works a conspicuous place.
In other cities the men alone have their Casino dei Nobili, where they give balls converzazioni, and similar entertainments. Here women have one, and are the soul of society.
In Milan, also, I see in the Ambrosian Library the bust of a female Mathematician. These things make me feel that if the state of Woman in Italy is so depressed, yet a good will toward a better is not wholly wanting. These things, and still more the reverence to the Madonna and innumerable female Saints, who if, like St. Teresa, they had intellect as well as piety, became counselors no less than comforters to the spirits of men. [Dispatches, pp. 141, 143]
15. To Caroline Sturgis, August 22, 1847
In this letter from Bellagio on Lake Como, Fuller’s notions of being “ out of” the body and of a body transcendent may puzzle the modem reader; her repudiation of pain and of busy intellectuals will not. Revised and with mention of Mrs. Greeley and the Springs omitted, this letter is in the Memoirs (II, 216-17).
Dearest Carrie,
. . . I remember I wrote to you from Rome in the first weeks, when I was suffering terrible regrets and could not yet find myself at home in Italy. I do not know whether you ever received that letter, but if not, I would not go back upon those things.
Rome was much poisoned for me so, but after a time; its genius triumphed and I became absorbed in its peculiar life. Again I suffered from parting, and have since resolved to return and pass at least a part of the winter.
People may write and prate as they please about Rome, they cannot convey thus a portion of its spirit. It must be inhaled wholly, with the yielding of the whole heart. It is really something
Those last glorious nights in which I wandered about amid the old walls and columns or sat by the fountains in the Piazza del Popolo, or by the river, were worth an age of pain both after and before only one hates pain in Italy.
Tuscany I did not like so well; it is a great place to study thoughts, the history of character and art. Indeed there I did really begin to study as well as gaze and feel. But I did not like it. Florence is more in its spirit like Boston, than like an Italian city. I knew a good many Italians, but they were busy and intellectual, not like those I had known before. But Florence is full of really good, really great pictures. There first I saw some of the great masters. Andrea del Sarto, in particular, one sees only there, and he is worth much. His wife, whom he always paints, and for whom he was so infatuated, reminds me of Mrs. Greely [sic], she has just the same bad qualities, and in what is good the same wild nature, or the same of what is called deviltry. . . .
At Venice, the Springs left me, and it was high time, for I had become quite insupportable. I was always out of the body, and they, good friends, were in. I felt at times a wicked irritation against them for being the persons who took me away from France, which was no fault of theirs. Since I have been alone I have grown reasonable again; indeed in the first week floating about in [a] gondola, I seemed to find myself again . . . .
In Milan I stayed awhile and knew some radicals, young, and interested in ideas. Here, on the lake, I have fallen into contact with some of the high society, duchesses, marquises and the like. My friend here is a Marchioness who bears the name of Visconti, by my side I have formed connection with a fair and brilliant Polish lady, born Princess Radzivill, it is rather pleasant to come a little on the traces of these famous histories, also both these ladies take pleasure in telling me of spheres so unlike mine and do it well . . . . [Houghton MS]
16. On Austrian rule and need for revolution, October 1847
Returning from the lakes to Milan, Fuller found the city elated by the arrival of a new pro-Italian archbishop and outraged at the marching, on a flimsy pretext, of Austrian troops across the border of Lombardy into the Papal States. For the first time, in a dispatch to the Tribune, she spoke of the inevitability of revolution.
The Austrian rule is always equally hated, and time, instead of melting away differences, only makes them more glaring. The Austrian race have no faculties that can ever enable them to understand the Italian character; their policy, so well contrived to palsy and repress for a time, cannot kill, and there is always a force at work underneath which shall yet, and I think now before long, shake off the incubus. The Italian nobility have always kept the invader at a distance; they have not been at all seduced or corrupted by the lures of pleasure or power, but have shown a passive patriotism highly honorable to them. In the middle class ferments much thought-a capacity for effort; in the present system it cannot show itself, but it is there; it ferments, and will yet produce a wine that shall set the Lombard veins on fire when the time for action shall arrive. The lower part of the population is in a dull state indeed; the censure of the press prevents all easy, natural ways of instructing them; there are no public meetings, no free access to them by more instructed and aspiring minds:—the Austrian policy is to allow them a degree of material well-being, and though so much wealth is drained from the country for the service of the foreigner, yet enough must remain on these rich plains comfortably to feed and clothe the inhabitants. Yet the great moral influence of the Pope’s action, though obstructed in their case, does reach and rouse them, and they, too, felt the thrill of indignation at the occupation of Ferrara. The base conduct of the police toward the people when, at Milan, some youths were resolute to sing the Hymn in honor of Pius IX. when the feasts for the Archbishop afforded so legitimate an occasion—roused all the people to unwonted feeling; the nobles protested, and Austria had not courage to resist as usual. She could not sustain her police, who rushed upon a defenceless crowd that had no share in what excited their displeasure, except by sympathy, and, driving them like sheep, wounded them in the backs. Austria feels that there is now no sympathy for her in these matters; that it is not the interest of the world to sustain her. Her policy is, indeed, too thoroughly organized to change except by revolution; its scope is to serve, first, a reigning family instead of the people; second, with the people to seek a physical in preference to an intellectual good; and, third, to prefer a seeming outward peace to an inward life. This policy may change its opposition from the tyrannical to the insidious; it can know no other change, yet do I meet persons who call themselves Americans-miserable, thoughtless Esaus, unworthy their high birthright—who think that a mess of pottage can satisfy the wants of Man, and that the Viennese listening to Strauss’s waltzes, the Lombard peasant supping full of his polenta, is happy enough. Alas! I have the more reason to be ashamed of my countrymen, that it is not among the poor, who have so much toil that there is little time to think, but those who are rich, who travel—in body, that is, they do not travel in mind—absorbed at home by the lust of gain, the love of show, abroad they see only the equipages, the fine clothes, the food—they have no heart for the idea, for the destiny of our own great nation: how can they feel the spirit that is struggling now in this and others of Europe? [Dispatches, pp. 153-54]
17. On Rome and a National Guard for Florence, October 18, 1847
The Italians’ response to the creation of a National Guard in Florence prompted Fuller’s first comparison with the early days of the American Republic. She closed this letter by urging her fellow countrymen to offer some token of sympathy, suggesting, for instance, a cannon to be called the Amerigo or Columbo and “to be used by the Guard for salutes on festive occasions, if they should be so happy as to have no more serious need.” (Such exhortations helped spur the first mass meeting in America in support of Italian unity. It took place on November 29 at the Broadway Tabernacle, and Greeley was one of the sponsors.)
In the Spring, when I came to Rome, the people were in the intoxication of joy at the first serious measures of reform taken by the Pope. I saw with pleasure their childlike joy and trust: I saw with pleasure the Pope, who has not in his expression the signs of intellectual greatness so much as of nobleness and tenderness of heart, of large and liberal sympathies. Heart had spoken to heart between the Prince and the People; it was beautiful to see the immediate good influence of human feeling, generous designs, on the part of a ruler: he had wished to be a father, and the Italians, with that readiness of genius that characterizes them, entered at once into the relation; they, the Roman people, stigmatized by prejudice as so crafty and ferocious, showed themselves children, eager to learn, quick to obey, happy to confide.
Still, doubts were always present whether all this joy was not premature. The task undertaken by the Pope seemed to present insuperable difficulties. It is never easy to put new wine into old bottles, and our age is one where all things tend to a great crisis, not merely to revolution but to radical reform. From the people themselves the help must come, and not from princes: in the new state of things there will be none but natural princes, great men. From the aspirations of the general heart, from the teachings of conscience in individuals, and not from an old ivy-covered church long since undermined, corroded by Time and gnawed by vermin, the help must come. Rome, to resume her glory, must cease to be an ecclesiastical Capital; must renounce all this gorgeous mummery, whose poetry, whose picture charms no one more than myself, but whose meaning is all of the Past and finds no echo in the Future. Although I sympathized warmly with the warm love of the people, the adulation of leading writers, who were so willing to take all from the hand of the prince, of the Church, as a gift and a bounty instead of implying steadily that it was the right of the people, was very repulsive to me. The Moderate party, like all who, in a transition state, manage affairs with a constant eye to prudence, lacks dignity always in its expositions; it is disagreeable and depressing to read them . . . .
I arrived in Florence, unhappily, too late for the great fete of the 12th September, in honor of the grant of the National Guard. But I wept at the mere recital of the events of that day, which, if it should lead to no important results, must still be hallowed for ever in the memory of Italy for the great and beautiful emotions that flooded the hearts of her children. The National Guard is hailed with no undue joy by Italians, as the earnest of Progress, the first step toward truly national institutions and a representation of the people. Gratitude had done its natural work in their hearts; it had made them better. Some days before were passed by reconciling all strifes, composing all differences between cities, districts, and individuals. They wished to drop all petty, all local differences, to wash away all stains, to bathe and prepare for a new great covenant of brotherly love, where each should act for the good of all. On that day they all embraced in sign of this-strangers, foes, all, exchanged the kiss of faith and love; they exchanged banners as a token that they would fight for, would animate, one another. All was done in that beautiful poetic manner peculiar to this artist people, but it was the spirit, so great and tender, that melts my heart to think of. It was the spirit of true religion-such, my Country; as welling freshly from some great hearts in thy early hours, won for thee all of value that thou canst call thy own, whose ground-work is the assertion, still sublime though thou hast not been true to it, that all men have equal rights, and that these are birth-rights, derived from God alone.
I rejoice to say that the Americans took their share in this occasion, and that Greenough-one of the few Americans who, living in Italy, takes the pains to know whether it is alive or dead; who penetrates beyond the cheats of tradesmen and the cunning of a mob corrupted by centuries of slavery, to know the real mind, the vital blood, of Italy—took a leading part. I am sorry to say that a large portion of my countrymen here take the same slothful and prejudiced view as the English, and, after many years’ sojourn, betray entire ignorance of Italian literature and Italian life beyond what is attainable in a month’s passage through the thoroughfares . . . . In reference to what I have said of many Americans in Italy, I will only add that they talk about the corrupt and degenerate state of Italy as they do about that of our slaves at home. They come ready trained to that mode of reasoning which affirms that, because men are degraded by bad institutions, they are not fit for better. [Dispatches, pp. 155-56, 158-59]
18. To Richard Fuller, October 29, 1847
Settled in cheap lodgings on Via del Corso and learning Roman economies from Ossoli, Fuller reported to her brother Richard, always her mainstay for financial help in Europe. For the Memoirs (II, 221), the editors saw fit to substitute for her unseemly and thrice reiterated happiness “I . . . am contented” and to excise her pert reference to their own class as “the mob.” (Fuller’s frequent reference to the pleasure of being jostled by the “vivacious” and “good-humored” Roman crowd must have been equally mystifying.) Her last sentence was intended to comfort Richard, who was breaking an engagement; and these were the words that Emerson found so haunting and baffling to his wish to see an honest woman in his dear friend (VI:7).
. . . I am trying all I can to economize in these little things, anxious to keep the Roman expenses for six months within the limits of four hundred dollars. Rome is not as cheap a place as Florence, but then I would not give a pin to live in Florence. We have just had glorious times with the October feasts when all the Roman people were out. I am now truly happy here really in Rome, so quiet and familiar no longer, like the mob, a staring, sight-seeing stranger riding about finely dressed in a coach to see the Muses and the Sibyls. I see these things now in the natural manner and am happy. Yes I am happy here.
Goodbye, dear Richard, heaven bless you and show you how to act. Keep free of false ties they are the curse of life, I find myself so happy here alone and free. [Houghton MS]
19. To Ralph Waldo Emerson, December 20, 1847
The struggle for subsistence combined with the drowsiness of the first month of pregnancy (probably still unrecognized) gave this letter its initially depressed tone. Fuller’s resentment of the need to exert herself and her curiously prophetic image lend credence to the notion that she submitted to drowning two and a half years later. Quarreling with this interpretation is the resolute good sense of the ending.
Nothing less than two or three years, free from care and forced labor, would heal all my hurts, and renew my life-blood at its source. Since Destiny will not grant me that, I hope she will not leave me long in the world, for I am tired of keeping myself up in the water without corks, and without strength to swim. I should like to go to sleep, and be born again into a state where my young life should not be prematurely taxed.
Italy has been glorious to me, and there have been hours in which I received the full benefit of the vision. In Rome, I have known some blessed, quiet days, when I could yield myself to be soothed and instructed by the great thoughts and memories of the place. But those days are swiftly passing. Soon I must begin to exert myself, for there is this incubus of the future, and none to help me, if I am not prudent to face it. So ridiculous, too, this mortal coil,—such small things!
I find how true was the lure that always drew me towards Europe. It was no false instinct that said I might here find an atmosphere to develop me in ways I need. Had I only come ten years earlier! Now my life must be a failure, so much strength has been wasted on abstractions, which only came because I grew not in the right soil. However, it is a less failure than with most others, and not worth thinking twice about. Heaven has room enough, and good chances in store, and I can live a great deal in the years that remain. [Memoirs, II, 224-25]
20. On Americans in Europe, abolitionists at home [January 1, 1848]
In her New Year’s letter for the Tribune, written in mid-November, Fuller caricatured the ignorance of most American tourists. (A fragment in the Memoirs [II, 222], surely her covering letter to Greeley for this dispatch, explained, “Since I have experienced the different atmosphere of the European mind, and been allied with it, nay, mingled in the bonds of love, I suffer more than ever from that which is peculiarly American or English.”) But she found far warmer praise than before for the abolitionists and—perhaps with Mazzini’s reinforcement—for dedicated youth.
The American in Europe, if a thinking mind, can only become more American. In some respects it is a great pleasure to be here. Although we have an independent political existence, our position toward Europe, as to Literature and the Arts, is still that of a colony, and one feels the same joy here that is experienced by the colonist in returning to the parent home. What was but picture to us becomes reality; remote allusions and derivations trouble no more: we see the pattern of the stuff, and understand the whole tapestry. There is a gradual clearing up on many points, and many baseless notions and crude fancies are dropped. Even the post-haste passage of the business American through the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers, and ignorant valets de place, unable to hold intercourse with the natives of the country, and passing all his leisure hours with his countrymen, who know no more than himself, clears his mind of some mistakes-lifts some mists from his horizon.
There are three species: first, the servile American—a being utterly shallow, thoughtless, worthless. He comes abroad to spend his money and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to have fashionable clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, which he wins importance at home by retailing among those less traveled, and as uninformed as himself. I look with unspeakable contempt on this class—a class which has all the thoughtlessness and partiality of the exclusive classes in Europe, without any of their refinement, or the chivalric feeling which still sparkles among them here and there. However, though these willing serfs in a free age do some little hurt, and cause some annoyance at present, it cannot last: our country is fated to a grand, independent existence, and as its laws develop, these parasites of a bygone period must wither and drop away.
Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling and proud of—he knows not what—He does not see, not he, that the history of Humanity for many centuries is likely to have produced results it requires some training, some devotion, to appreciate and profit by. With his great clumsy hands only fitted to work on a steam-engine, he seizes the old Cremona violin, makes it shriek with anguish in his grasp, and then declares he thought it was all humbug before he came, and now he knows it; that there is not really any music in these old things; that the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they are young and alive. To him the etiquettes of courts and camps, the ritual of the Church, seem simply silly-and no wonder, profoundly ignorant as he is of their origin and meaning. Just so the legends which are the subjects of pictures, the profound myths which are represented in the antique marbles, amaze and revolt him; as, indeed, such things need to be judged of by another standard than that of the Connecticut Blue-Laws. He criticises severely pictures, feeling quite sure that his natural senses are better means of judgment than the rules of connoisseurs—not feeling that to see such objects mental vision as well as fleshly eyes are needed, and that something is aimed at in Art beyond the imitation of the commonest forms of Nature. This is Jonathan in the sprawling state, the booby truant, not yet aspiring enough to be a good school-boy. Yet in his folly there is meaning; add thought and culture to his independence, and he will be a man of might: he is not a creature without hope, like the thick-skinned dandy of the class first specified.
The Artistes form a class by themselves. Yet among them, though seeking special aims by special means, may also be found the lineaments of these two classes, as well as of the third, of which I am now to speak.
3d The thinking American—a man who, recognizing the immense advantage of being born to a new world and on a virgin soil, yet does not wish one seed from the Past to be lost. He is anxious to gather and carry back with him all that will bear a new climate and new culture. Some will dwindle; others will attain a bloom and stature unknown before. He wishes to gather them clean, free from noxious insects. He wishes to give them a fair trial in his new world. And that he may know the conditions under which he may best place them in that new world, he does not neglect to study their history in this. . . .
. . . But we must stammer and blush when we speak of many things. I take pride here that I may really say the Liberty of the Press works well, and that checks and balances naturally evolve from it which suffice to its government. I may say that the minds of our people are alert, and that Talent has a free chance to rise. It is much. But dare I say that political ambition is not as darkly sullied as in other countries? Dare I say that men of most influence in political life are those who represent most virtue or even intellectual power? Is it easy to find names in that career of which I can speak with enthusiasm? Must I not confess in my country to a boundless lust of gain? Must I not confess to the weakest vanity, which bristles and blusters at each foolish taunt of the foreign press; and must I not admit that the men who make these undignified rejoinders seek and find popularity so? Must I not confess that there is as yet no antidote cordially adopted that will defend even that great, rich country against the evils that have grown out of the commercial system in the old world? Can I say our social laws are generally better, or show a nobler insight into the wants of man and woman? I do, indeed, say what I believe, that voluntary association for improvement in these particulars will be the grand means for my nation to grow and give a nobler harmony to the coming age. But it is only of a small minority that I can say they as yet seriously take to heart these things; that they earnestly meditate on what is wanted for their country,—for mankind,—for our cause is indeed, the cause of all mankind at present. Could we succeed, really succeed, combine a deep religious love with practical development, the achievements of Genius with the happiness of the multitude, we might believe Man had now reached a commanding point in his ascent, and would stumble and faint no more. Then there is this horrible cancer of Slavery, and this wicked War, that has grown out of it. How dare I speak of these things here? I listen to the same arguments against the emancipation of Italy, that are used against the emancipation of our blacks; the same arguments in favor of the spoliation of Poland as for the conquest of Mexico. I find the cause of tyranny and wrong everywhere the same—and lo! my Country the darkest offender, because with the least excuse, foresworn to the high calling with which she was called,-no champion of the rights of men, but a robber and a jailer; the scourge hid behind her banner; her eyes fixed, not on the stars, but on the possessions of other men.
How it pleases me here to think of the Abolitionists! I could never endure to be with them at home, they were so tedious, often so narrow, always so rabid and exaggerated in their tone. But, after all, they had a high motive, something eternal in their desire and life; and, if it was not the only thing worth thinking of it was really something worth living and dying for to free a great nation from such a terrible blot, such a threatening plague. God strengthen them and make them wise to achieve their purpose!
I please myself, too, with remembering some ardent souls among the American youth who, I trust, will yet expand and help to give soul to the huge, over fed, too hastily grown-up body. May they be constant. “Were Man but constant he were perfect!” it has been said; and it is true that he who could be constant to those moments in which he has been truly human-not brutal, not mechanical-is on the sure path to his perfection and to effectual service of the Universe.
It is to the youth that Hope addresses itself, to those who yet burn with aspiration, who are not hardened in their sins. But I dare not expect too much of them. I am not very old, yet of those who, in life’s morning, I saw touched by the light of a high hope, many have seceded. Some have become voluptuaries; some mere family men, who think it quite life enough to win bread for half a dozen people and treat them decently; others are lost through indolence and vacillation. Yet some remain constant. “I have witnessed many a shipwreck, yet still beat noble hearts.”
I have found many among the youth of England, of France—of Italy also—full of high desire, but will they have courage and purity to fight the battle through in the sacred, the immortal band? Of some of them I believe it and await the proof. If a few succeed amid the trial, we have not lived and loved in vain.
To these, the heart of my country, a Happy New Year! [Dispatches, pp. 161-63, 165-66]
21. On a nun taking the veil, December 30, 1847
In 1847, the Roman Christmas season blended the traditional religious ceremonies with political oratory and revolutionary enthusiasm over Verdi’s inflammatory operas. Fuller’s Tribune account of December 30 was cheerful except for her description of a novice taking the veil. No doubt her delight in Ossoli’s intimacy informed her rage at this irreversible captivity.
On Sunday, I went to see a nun take the veil. She was a person of high family; a princess gave her away, and the Cardinal Ferreti, Secretary of State, officiated. It was a much less effective ceremony than I expected from the descriptions of travelers and romance-writers. There was no moment of throwing on the black veil; no peal of music, nor salute of cannon. The nun, an elegantly dressed woman of five or six and twenty, pretty enough, but whose quite worldly air gave the idea that it was one of those arrangements made because no suitable establishment could otherwise be given her, came forward, knelt, and prayed; her confessor, in that strained, unnatural whine, too common among preachers of all churches and all countries, praised himself for having induced her to enter on a path which would lead her fettered steps “from palm to palm, from triumph to triumph.” Poor thing! she looked as if the domestic olives and poppies were all she wanted; and, lacking these, tares and wormwood must be her portion. She was then taken behind a grating, her hair cut, and her clothes exchanged for the nun’s vestments; the black-robed sisters who worked upon her, looking like crows or ravens at their ominous feasts. All the while the music played, first sweet and thoughtful, then triumphant strains.—The effect on my mind was revolting and painful to the last degree. Were monastic seclusion always voluntary, and could it be ended whenever the mind required a change back from seclusion to common life, I should have nothing to say against it; there are positions of the mind which it suits exactly, and even characters that might choose it all through life; certainly to the broken-hearted it presents a shelter that Protestant communities do not provide; but where it is enforced or repented of no hell could be worse; nor can a more terrible responsibility be incurred than by him who has persuaded a novice that the snares of the world are less dangerous than the demons of solitude. [Dispatches, pp. 179-80]
22. To Caroline Sturgis Tappan, January 11, 1848
A single record survives of Fuller’s feelings upon discovering she was pregnant. Her confession is obscured by being imbedded in travelogue and by its melodramatic opacity of diction. The complaints were apparently so familiar that they did not awaken the suspicion of Caroline Sturgis, who was also distracted by her marriage one month before to William Tappan; Fuller did not explain herself to her confidante for another year.
My life in Lombardy and Switzerland was a series of beautiful pictures dramatic episodes, not without some noble genuine life in my own soul. The time when I wrote to you from Como I had a peaceful external existence. I floated on the lake with my graceful Polish countess, hearing her stories of heroic sorrow, and I walked in the delicious gardens of the villas with many another summer friend. Red banners floated; children sang and shouted; the lakes of Venus and Diana glittered in the sun. The pretty girls of Bellaggio, with their coral necklaces, all brought flowers to “the American countess” and “hoped she would be as happy as she deserved.” Whether this cautious wish is fulfilled I know not, but certainly I left all the glitter of life behind at Como.
My days at Milan were not unmarked. I have known some happy hours; but they all lead to sorrow; and not only the cups of wine but of milk, seem drugged with poison for me. It does not seem to be my fault, this destiny; I do not court these things, they come. I am a poor magnet with power to be wounded by the bodies I attract.
Leaving Milan, I had a brilliant day in Parma. I had not known Correggio before; he deserves all his fame. I stood in the parlor of the Abbess, the person for whom all was done, and Paradise seemed opened by the nymph, upon her car of light, and the divine children peeping through the vines. Sweet soul of love! I should weary of you, too; but it was glorious that day.
I had another good day, too, crossing the Apennines. The young crescent moon rose in orange twilight, just as I reached the highest peak. I was alone on foot; I heard no sound; I prayed.
At Florence, I was very ill. For three weeks, my life hung upon a thread. The effect of the Italian climate on my health is not favorable. I feel as if I had received a great injury. I am tired and woe-worn; often, in the bed, I wish I could weep my life away. However, they brought me gruel, I took it, and after a while rose up again. In the time of the vintage, I went alone to Sienna. This is a real untouched Italian place. This excursion, and the grapes, restored me at that time.
When I arrived in Rome, I was at first intoxicated to be here. The weather was beautiful, and many circumstances combined to place me in a kind of passive, childlike well-being. That is all over now, and, with this year, I enter upon a sphere of my destiny so difficult, that I, at present, see no way out, except through the gate of death. It is useless to write of it; you are at a distance and cannot help me;—whether accident or angel will, I have no intimation. I have no reason to hope I shall not reap what I have sown, and do not. Yet how I shall endure it I cannot guess; it is all a dark, sad enigma. The beautiful forms of art charm no more, and a love, in which there is all fondness, but no help, flatters in vain. I am all alone; nobody around me sees any of this. My numerous friendly acquaintances are troubled if they see me ill, and who so affectionate and kind as Mr. and Mrs. S[tory]? [Letters, V, 42- 43]
23. To Costanza Arconati Visconti, January 14, 1848
Sharply contrasting with the morbid anxiety in her letter to her best friend at home is the angry vivacity of this one to her best friend abroad only three days later. Mazzini had written and Fuller translated a widely circulated letter to Pius IX urging him to lead a new Europe. “Do not contaminate yourself with diplomacy, make no compact with fear, with expediency, with the false doctrines of a legality, which is merely a falsehood invented when faith failed,” Mazzini urged. “Do not fear excesses from the people once entered upon this way; the people only commit excesses when left to their own impulses without any guide whom they respect. Do not pause before the idea of becoming a cause of war. . . . The unity of Italy is a work of God . . . . It will be fulfilled, with you or without you.” (In private, the Pope is said to have complained, “They want me to be a Napoleon, and I am only a poor country parson” [G. O. Griffith, Mazzini: Prophet of Modern Europe, p. 175].) It is hardly surprising that the Countess Arconati wrote Fuller that she had found Mazzini’s letter “presumptuous,” but she took no offense at Fuller’s reply below, and said only that she would try to love Mazzini for her sake.
What black and foolish calumnies are these on Mazzini! It is as much for his interest as his honor to let things take their course, at present. To expect anything else, is to suppose him base. And on what act of his life dares any one found such an insinuation? I do not wonder that you were annoyed at his manner of addressing the Pope; but to me it seems that he speaks as he should,-near God and beyond the tomb; not from power to power, but from soul to soul, without regard to temporal dignities. It must be admitted that the etiquette, Most Holy Father, &c., jars with this. [Memoirs, II, 233]
24. On Sicilian insurrection and Roman weather, January 1848
The tension inherent in the political situation and in Fuller’s personal life crackled in the frenetic and witty asperity of her second dispatch in January. (The orphan by her side in the church of Ara Coeli was Ossoli.)
Sicily is in full insurrection; and it is reported Naples, but not sure. There was a report, day before yesterday, that the poor stupid King was already here, and had taken cheap chambers at the Hotel d’Allemagne, as indeed it is said he has always a turn for economy when he cannot live at the expense of his suffering people. Day before yesterday, every carriage that the people saw with a stupid-looking man in it they did not know, they looked to see if it was not the Royal runaway. But it was their wish was father to that thought, and it has not as yet taken body as fact. In like manner they report this week the death of Prince Metternich; but I believe it is not sure he is dead yet, only dying. With him passes one great embodiment of ill to Europe. As for Louis Philippe, he seems reserved to give the world daily more signal proofs of his base apostasy to the cause that placed him on the throne, and that heartless selfishness of which his face alone bears witness to any one that has a mind to read it . . . .
To return to Rome: what a Rome!-the fortieth day of rain, and damp, and abominable reeking odors, such as blessed cities swept by the sea-breeze-bitter sometimes, yet indeed a friend-never know. It has been dark all day, though the lamp has only been lit half an hour. The music of the day has been, first the atrocious arias which last in the Corso till near noon, though certainly less in virulence on rainy days. Then came the wicked organ-grinder, who, apart from the horror of the noise, grinds exactly the same obsolete abominations as at home or in England- “The Copenhagen Waltz,” “Home, sweet home,” and all that! The cruel chance that both an English my-lady and a Councilor from one of the Provinces live opposite keeps him constantly before my window, hoping baiocchi . . . . Within, the three pet-dogs of my landlady, bereft of their walk, unable to employ their miserable legs and eyes-exercise themselves by a continual barking, which is answered by all the dogs in the neighborhood. An urchin returning from the laundress, delighted with the symphony, lays down his white bundle in the gutter, seats himself on the curb-stone and attempts an imitation of the music of cats as a tribute to the concert. The door-bell rings. Chi è? “Who is it?” cries the handmaid, with unweariable senselessness, as if any one would answer Rogue or Enemy, instead of the traditionary Amico, Friends. May be, perchance, a letter, news of home, or some of the many friends who have neglected so long to write, or some ray of hope to break the clouds of the difficult Future. Far from it.—Enter a man poisoning me at once with the smell of the worst possible cigars, not to be driven out, insisting I shall look upon frightful, ill-cut cameos, and worse-designed mosaics, made by some friend of his, who works in a chamber and will sell so cheap. Man of ill-odors and meanest smile! I am no Countess to be fooled by you. For dogs they were not even—dog-cheap.
A faint and misty gleam of sun greeted the day on which there is the feast to the Bambino, the most venerated doll of Rome. This is the famous image of the infant Jesus, reputed to be made of wood from a tree of Palestine, and which, being taken away from its present abode—the church of Ara Coeli—retumed by itself, making the bells ring as it sought admittance at the door. It is this which is carried in extreme cases to the bedside of the sick. It has received more splendid gifts than any other idol. An orphan by my side, now struggling with difficulties, showed me on its breast a splendid jewel, which a doting grandmother thought more likely to benefit her soul if given to the Bambino, than if turned into money to give her grandchildren education and prospects in life. The same old lady left her vineyard, not to these children, but to her confessor, a well-endowed Monsignor, who occasionally asks this youth, his godson, to dinner! Children, so placed, are not quite such devotees to Catholicism as the new proselytes of America!—They are not so much patted on the head, and things do not show to them under quite the same silver veil . . . .
Pour, pour, pour again, dark as night-many people coming in to see me because they don’t know what to do with themselves. I am very glad to see them for the same reason; this atmosphere is so heavy I seem to carry the weight of the world on my head and feel unfitted for every exertion. As to eating, that is a bygone thing; wine, coffee, meat, I have resigned; vegetables are few and hard to have, except horrible cabbage, in which the Romans delight. A little rice still remains, which I take with pleasure, remembering it growing in the rich fields of Lombardy, so green and full of glorious light. That light fell still more beautiful on the tall plantations of hemp, but it is dangerous just at present to think of what is made from hemp . . . .
This morning authentic news is received from Naples. The King, when assured by his own brother that Sicily was in a state of irresistible revolt, and that even the women quelled the troops-showering on them stones, furniture, boiling oil, such means of warfare as the household may easily furnish to a thoughtful matron-had, first, a stroke of apoplexy, from which the loss of a good deal of bad blood relieved him. His mind, apparently, having become clearer thereby, he has offered his subjects an amnesty and terms of reform, which, it is hoped, will arrive before his troops have begun to bombard the cities in obedience to earlier orders. [Dispatches, pp. 202, 203-04, 206, 207]
25. On revolution in Paris and Milan, March 29, 1848
The February revolution in Paris inspired in Fuller her fiercest praise for class struggle and her first suggestion that her country had more to learn from it than from the American revolutionary past. The March rising in Milan exposed the insupportably divided loyalties of Pius IX; no sooner had the Italian in him rapturously blessed the troops marching against the Austrians in Milan than the Pope in him realized with anguish that he was warring against fellow Catholics.
This happened last week. The news of the dethronement of Louis Philippe reached us just after the close of the Carnival. It was just a year from my leaving Paris. I did not think, as I looked with such disgust on the empire of sham he bad established in France, and saw the soul of the people imprisoned and held fast as in an iron vice, that it would burst its chains so soon. Whatever be the result, France has done gloriously; she has declared that she will not be satisfied with pretexts while there are facts in the world-that to stop her march is a vain attempt, though the onward path be dangerous and difficult. It is vain to cry Peace, peace, when there is no peace. The news from France, in these days, sounds ominous, though still vague. It would appear that the political is being merged in the social struggle: it is well; whatever blood is to be shed, whatever altars cast down. Those tremendous problems MUST be solved, whatever be the cost! That cost cannot fail to break many a bank, many a heart in Europe, before the good can bud again out of a mighty corruption. To you, people of America, it may perhaps be given to look on and learn in time for a preventive wisdom. You may learn the real meaning of the words FRATERNITY, EQUALITY: you may, despite the apes of the Past, who strive to tutor you, learn the needs of a true Democracy. You may in time learn to reverence, learn to guard, the true aristocracy of a nation, the only really noble,—the LABORING CLASSES.
And Metternich, too, is crushed; the seed of the Woman has had his foot on the serpent. I have seen the Austrian arms dragged through the streets of Rome and burned in the Piazza del Popolo.—The Italians embraced one another and cried, Miracolo, Providenza! the modem Tribune Ciceraucchio fed the flame with faggots; Adam Mickiewicz, the great poet of Poland, long exiled from his country or the hopes of a country, looked on, while Polish women, exiled too, or who, perhaps, like one nun who is here, had been daily scourged by the orders of a tyrant, brought little pieces that had been scattered in the street and threw them into the flames-an offering received by the Italians with loud plaudits. It was a transport of the people, who found no way to vent their joy, but the symbol, the poesy, natural to the Italian mind; the ever-too-wise “upper classes” regret it, and the Germans choose to resent it as an insult to Germany; but it was nothing of the kind; the insult was to the prisons of Spielberg, to those who commanded the massacres of Milan; a base tyranny little congenial to the native German heart, as the true Germans of Germany are at this moment showing by their struggles, by their resolves.
When the double-headed eagle was pulled down from above the lofty portal of the Palazzo di Venezia, the people placed there in its stead one of white and gold inscribed with the name ALT A IT ALIA, and quick upon the emblem followed the news that Milan was fighting against her tyrants-that Venice had driven them out and freed from their prisons the courageous Protestants in favor of truth, Tommaseo and Manin-that Manin, descendant of the last Doge, had raised the Republican banner on the Place St. Mark-and that Modena, that Parma, were driving out the unfeeling and imbecile creatures who had mocked Heaven and Man by the pretence of Government there.
With indescribable rapture these news were received in Rome. Men were seen dancing, women weeping with joy along the street. The youth rushed to enrol themselves in regiments to go to the frontier. In the Colosseum their names were received. Father Gavazzi, a truly patriotic monk, gave them the cross to carry on a new, a better, because defensive crusade. Sterbini, long exiled, addressed them; he said, “Romans, do you wish to go; do you wish to go with all your hearts? If so, you may, and those who do not wish to go themselves may give money. To those who will go, the government gives bread and fifteen baiocchi a day.” The people cried: “We too wish to go, but we do not wish so much; the Government is very poor; we can live on a paul a day.” The princes answered by giving, one sixty thousand, others twenty, fifteen, ten thousand dollars. The people answered by giving at the benches which are opened in the piazzas literally everything; street-pedlers gave the gains of each day; women gave every ornament-from the splendid necklace and bracelet down to the poorest bit of coral; servant girls gave five pauls, two pauls, even half a paul, if they had no more; a man all in rags gave two pauls; “it is,” said he, “all I have.” “Then,” said Torlonia, “take from me this dollar;” the man of rags thanked him warmly and handed that also to the bench, which refused to receive it. “No! that must stay with you,” shouted all present. These are the people whom the traveler accuses of being unable to rise above selfish considerations. Nation, rich and glorious by nature as ever, capable, like all nations, all men, of being degraded by slavery, capable as are few nations, few men, of kindling into pure flame at the touch of a ray from the Sun of Truth, of Life.
The two or three days that followed, the troops were marching about by detachments, followed always by the people, to the Ponte Malle, often farther. The women wept; for the habits of the Romans are so domestic, that it seemed a great thing to have their sons and lovers gone even for a few months. The English—or, at least those of the illiberal, bristling nature—too often met here, which casts out its porcupine quills against everything like enthusiasm ( of the more generous Saxon blood I know some noble examples,) laughed at all this. They have said that this people would not fight; when the Sicilians, men and women, did so nobly they said, “Oh! the Sicilians are quite unlike the Italians; you will see when the struggle comes on in Lombardy, they cannot resist the Austrian force a moment.” I said, “That force is only physical; do not you think a sentiment can sustain them?” They reply, “All stuff and poetry; it will fade the moment their blood flows.” When news came that the Milanese, men and women, fight as the Sicilians did, they said, “Well, the Lombards are a better race, but these Romans are good for nothing; it is a farce for a Roman to try to walk even; they never walk a mile; they will not be able to support the first day’s march of thirty miles, and not to have their usual minestra to eat either.” Now the troops were not willing to wait for the Government to make the necessary arrangements for their march, so at the first night’s station—Monterose—they did not find food or bedding; yet the second night, at Civita Castellana, they were so well alive as to remain dancing and vivaing Pio Nino in the piazza till after midnight. No, Messieurs, Soul is not quite nothing, if Matter be a clog upon its transports.
The Americans show a better, warmer feeling than they did; the meeting in New-York was of use in instructing the Americans abroad! [Dispatches, pp. 211-14]
26. To William Henry Channing, March 29, 1848
To Channing she wrote how the European revolutions fulfilled her personally and first hinted that she contemplated writing their history.
I have been engrossed, stunned almost, by the public events that have succeeded one another with such rapidity and grandeur. It is a time such as I always dreamed of, and for long secretly hoped to see. I rejoice to be in Europe at this time, and shall return possessed of a great history. Perhaps I shall be called to act. At present, I know not where to go, what to do. War is everywhere. I cannot leave Rome, and the men of Rome are marching out every day into Lombardy. The citadel of Milan is in the hands of my friends, Guerriere, &c., but there may be need to spill much blood yet in Italy. France and Germany are not in such a state that I can go there now. A glorious flame burns higher and higher in the heart of the nations. [Memoirs, II, 235]
27. On Mazzini’s return from exile, April 19, 1848
In the Tribune, Fuller celebrated Mazzini’s return to Milan after the “Five Glorious Days.” Weeping at the sight of two thousand deserters from the Austrian army, Mazzini found the people sublime and far beyond the warring workers of Paris. But Fuller, in the flush of her unelaborated socialism, found Mazzini lacking.
It is a glorious time for the exiles who return and reap even a momentary fruit of their long sorrows. Mazzini, too, has been able to return from his seventeen years’ exile, when there was no hour, night or day, that the thought of Italy was banished from his heart—no possible effort that he did not make to achieve the emancipation of his people, and with it the progress of mankind. He returns, like Wordsworth’s great man, “to see what he foresaw.” He will see his predictions accomplishing yet for a long time, for Mazzini has a mind far in advance of his times in general and his nation in particular—a mind that will be best revered and understood when the “illustrious Gioberti” shall be remembered as a pompous verbose charlatan, with just talent enough to catch the echo from the advancing wave of his day, but without any true sight of the wants of man at this epoch. And yet Mazzini sees not all: he aims at political emancipation; but he sees not, perhaps would deny, the bearing of some events, which even now began to work their way. Of this more anon, but not to-day nor in the small print of The Tribune. Suffice it to say, I allude to that of which the cry of Communism, the systems of Fourier, &c., are but forerunners. Mazzini sees already—at Milan, where he is, he has probably this day received the intelligence of the accomplishment of his foresight, implied in his letter to the Pope, which angered Italy by what was thought its tone of irreverence and doubt some six months since. [Dispatches, pp. 224-25]
28. On the Pope’s retreat from revolution, May 7 and 13, 1848
Resuming her Tribune dispatch in May, Fuller summarized the Pope’s career of equivocation, which reached crisis proportions after the Roman troops had left for Milan and culminated in his infamous Allocution of April 29. From his surrender of leadership she derived hope for a new order. Her last dispatch for six months—written before leaving Rome to bear her child in the hills—ended in tender anticipation, using her Tribune signature, an asterisk.
Thus went on from day to day affairs; the Pope kissing the foot of the brazen Jupiter and blessing palms of straw at St. Peter’s; the Circolo Romano erecting itself into a kind of Jacobin Club, dictating programmes for an Italian Diet general, and choosing committees to provide for the expenses of the war. The Civic Guard arresting people who tried to make mobs as if famishing, and being searched were found well provided both with arms and money; the Ministry at their wits’ end, with their trunks packed up ready to be off at a moment’s warning, when the report, it is not yet known whether true or false, that one of the Roman Civic Guard, a well known artist engaged in the war of Lombardy, had been taken and hung by the Austrians as a brigand, roused the people to a sense of the position of their friends, and they went to the Pope to demand that he should take a decisive stand and declare war against the Austrians.
The Pope summoned a consistory; the people waited anxiously, for expressions of his were reported as if the troops ought not to have thought of leaving the frontier, while every man, woman and child in Rome knew, and every letter and bulletin declared, that all their thought was to render active aid to the cause of Italian independence. This anxious doubt, however, had not prepared at all for the excess to which they were to be disappointed.
The speech of the Pope declared that he had never any thought of the great results that had followed his actions; that he had only intended local reforms, such as had previously been suggested by the potentates of Europe; that he regretted the misuse that had been made of his name; and wound up by lamenting over the war-dear to every Italian heart as the best and holiest cause in which for ages they had been called to embark their hopes-as if it was something offensive to the spirit of religion, and which he would fain see hushed up, and its motives smoothed out and ironed over.
A momentary stupefaction followed this astounding performance, succeeded by a passion of indignation, in which the words traitor and imbecile were associated with the name that had been so dear to his people. This again yielded to a settled grief; they felt that he was betrayed but no traitor; timid and weak, but still a sovereign they had adored, and a man who had brought them much good, which could not be quite destroyed by his wishing to disown it. Even of this fact they had no time to stop and think; the necessity was too imminent of obviating the worst consequences of this ill; and the first thought was to prevent the news leaving Rome to dishearten the Provinces and Army before they had tried to induce the Pontiff to wiser resolves, or, if this could not be, to supersede his power.
I cannot repress my admiration at the gentleness, clearness and good sense with which the Roman people acted under these most difficult circumstances. It was astonishing to see the clear understanding which animated the crowd as one man, and the decision with which they acted to effect their purpose. Wonderfully has this people been developed within a year!
The Pope, besieged by deputations, who mildly but firmly showed him that if he persisted the temporal power must be placed in other hands, his ears filled with reports of Cardinals, “such venerable persons,” as he pathetically styles them, would not yield in spirit, though compelled to in act. After two days’ struggle, he was obliged to place the power in the hands of the persons most opposed to him, and nominally acquiesce in their proceedings, while in his second Proclamation, very touching from the sweetness of its tone, he shows a fixed misintelligence of the cause at issue, which leaves no hope of his ever again being more than a name or an effigy in their affairs. . . .
These events make indeed a crisis. The work began by Napoleon is finished. There will never more be really a Pope, but only the effigy or simulacrum of one.
The loss of Pius IX. is for the moment a great one. His name had real moral weight; was a trumpet appeal to sentiment. It is not the same with any man that is left. There is not one that can be truly a leader in the Roman Dominion, not one who has even great intellectual weight.
The responsibility of events now lies wholly with the People, and that wave of Thought which has begun to pervade them. Sovereigns and Statesmen will go where they are carried; it is probable influence will be changed continually from hand to hand, and Government become, to all intents and purposes, representative. Italy needs now quite to throw out her stupid king of Naples, who hangs like a dead weight on her movements. The king of Sardinia and the Grand Duke of Tuscany will be trusted while they keep their present course; but who can feel sure of any sovereign, now that Louis Philippe has shown himself so mad and Pius IX. so blind? It seems as if fate was at work to bewilder and cast down the dignities of the world and democratize Society at a blow. . . .
. . . [W]hile all that was lovely and generous in his life is prized and reverenced, may be drawn from his errors deep instruction as to the inevitable dangers of a priestly or a princely environment, and a higher knowledge may elevate a nobler commonwealth than the world has yet known.
Hoping this era, I remain at present here.—Should my hopes be dashed to the ground, it will not change my faith, but the struggle for its manifestation is to me of vital interest. My friends write to urge my return; they talk of our country as the land of the Future. It is so, but that spirit which made it all it is of value in my eyes, which gave all of hope with which I can sympathize for that Future, is more alive here at present than in America. My country is at present spoiled by prosperity, stupid with the lust of gain, soiled by crime in its willing perpetuation of Slavery, shamed by an unjust war, noble sentiment much forgotten even by individuals, the aims of politicians selfish or petty, the literature frivolous and venal. In Europe, amid the teachings of adversity a nobler spirit is struggling-a spirit which cheers and animates mine. I hear earnest words of pure faith and love. I see deeds of brotherhood. This is what makes my America. I do not deeply distrust my country. She is not dead, but in my time she sleepeth, and the spirit of our fathers flames no more, but lies hid beneath the ashes. It will not be so long; bodies cannot live when the soul gets too overgrown with gluttony and falsehood. But it is not the making a President out of the Mexican war that would make me wish to come back. Here things are before my eyes worth recording, and, if I cannot help this work, I would gladly be its historian.
Returning from a little tour in the Alban Mount, where everything looks so glorious this glorious Spring, I find a temporary quiet. The Pope’s brothers have come to sympathize with him; the crowd sighs over what he has done, presents him with great bouquets of flowers, and reads anxiously the news from the North and the proclamations of the new Ministry. Meanwhile the nightingales sing; every tree and plant is in flower, and the sun and moon shine as if Paradise were already reestablished on earth. I go to one of the villas to dream it is so, beneath the pale light of a * [Dispatches, pp. 227-28, 229, 230-31]
29. To Ralph Waldo Emerson, May 19, 1848
In December, Mazzini had written Fuller that he planned to visit Emerson, who was lecturing in Great Britain at the time. Mazzini admitted he was fearful that Emerson “will lead man too much to contemplation,” which, however necessary for America, was wrong for “our own old World” where a Peter the Hermit was wanted “to appeal to the collective influences” (Emma Detti, Margaret Fuller Ossoli e i suoi Corrispondenti, p. 273). While in Europe, Emerson wrote three times offering Fuller escort home (“How much your letter made me wish to say, come live with me at Concord” [Rusk, Letters, IV, 28]). For Fuller such a reunion was improbable in the extreme; even as she wrote this reply she was packing to flee the inquisitive eyes of her Roman neighbors.
I should like to return with you, but I have much to do and learn in Europe yet. I am deeply interested in this public drama, and wish to see it played out. Methinks I have my part therein, either as actor or historian.
I cannot marvel at your readiness to close the book of European society. The shifting scenes entertain poorly. The flux of thought and feeling leaves some fertilizing soil; but for me, few indeed are the persons I should wish to see again; nor do I care to push the inquiry further. The simplest and most retired life would now please me, only I would not like to be confined to it, in case I grew weary, and now and then craved variety, for exhilaration. I want some scenes of natural beauty, and, imperfect as love is, I want human beings to love, as I suffocate without. For intellectual stimulus, books would mainly supply it, when wanted.
Why did you not try to be in Paris at the opening of the Assembly? There were elements worth scanning. [Memoirs, II, 239]
30. To Costanza Arconati Visconti, May 27, 1848
Even her last side trips to the lovely towns outside Rome fed Fuller’s political preoccupations; in her letter to Arconati she risks offense, predicting the defeat of Orioli, an editor of a moderate journal, and Mamiani (Pius’ minister since he reversed himself), who hoped to keep the republicans at bay by shaping a truly constitutional monarchy.
This is my last day at Rome. I have been passing several days at Subiaco and Tivoli, and return again to the country to-morrow. These scenes of natural beauty have filled my heart, and increased, if possible, my desire that the people who have this rich inheritance may no longer be deprived of its benefits by bad institutions.
The people of Subiaco are poor, though very industrious, and cultivating every inch of ground, with even English care and neatness;—so ignorant and uncultivated, while so finely and strongly made by Nature. May God grant now, to this people, what they need!
An illumination took place last night, in honor of the “lliustrious Gioberti.” He is received here with great triumph, his carriage followed with shouts of “Viva Gioberti, morte ai Jesuiti!” which must be pain to the many Jesuits, who, it is said, still linger here in disguise. His triumphs are shared by Mamiani and Orioli, self-trumpeted celebrities, self-constituted rulers of the Roman states,—men of straw, to my mind, whom the fire already kindled will bum into a handful of ashes.
I sit in my obscure comer, and watch the progress of events. It is the position that pleases me best, and, I believe, the most favorable one. Everything confirms me in my radicalism; and, without any desire to hasten matters, indeed with surprise to see them rush so like a torrent, I seem to see them all tending to realize my own hopes.
My health and spirits now much restored, I am beginning to set down some of my impressions. I am going into the mountains, hoping there to find pure, strengthening air, and tranquillity for so many days as to allow me to do something. [Memoirs, II, 240-41]
31. To Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, August 22, 1848
While Ossoli and the Civic Guard were waiting in Rome for a sign (which never came) from the Pope to march north and deliver the Bolognesi from the invading Austrians, Fuller was waiting in Rieti to deliver her child. Writing after false labor, she begged Ossoli to visit the caffè frequented by republicans to seek news of the young leaders of fallen Milan. (Fuller’s Italian, like Ossoli’s, is ridden with errors.)
I am a little better, dear, but if I can spend the day like this, suffering less, it annoys me though that it seems to mean I must wait still longer.
Waiting!! How boring. But—if I were sure of being all right, I would much prefer to go through this ordeal before your arrival, but when I think that I could die alone without being able to touch a dear hand, I want to wait some more. So I hope for your presence Sunday morning.
I see by the papers that the Pope is holding up the departure of the troops, he is acting as I expected, and I am very glad that you are not joining up yet. Soon these matters will be more certain; you will be able to make decisions more advantageously than now.
See if you hear any details of Milan, wouldn’t it be possible in the Caire degli Belle Arti? I’m very unhappy about the fate of these friends, how they must be suffering now.
I’m also thinking so much of you, I hope that you are less tormented, if we were together it would be a consolation. Now everything is going badly, but it’s not possible that it can go this way always, always. Goodbye, my love. I am sorry that so many days must pass before you come, so many, so many. I am glad that I now have the little portrait, I look at it often. May God protect you. [Houghton MS in Italian; my translation]
32. To Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, October 15, 1848
Six weeks after the birth of Angelino, as his parents called him, news of Mary Rotch’s death heightened Fuller’s anxiety about everything: money; her landlord, Giovanni, in Rieti who was “trying to corrupt Chiara,” the nurse; the legal snarl over baptizing her baby, the anguishing thought of leaving him to resume work in Rome. Twelve days after writing the letter below, she felt the need and capacity for suspending maternal happiness, telling Ossoli: “I also need to be with you and to go another time into the world from which I have been absent five months now.”
My love,
One of the letters you sent me informs me of the death of the old lady, my friend of whom I have spoken to you so often. I have wept so much it has made me ill, but I could not help it. There was not in the world a person more good, more affectionate to me. I have lost a very good friend. The other letters are important, I will tell you of them when you come.
Think always, in seeking a house for me, not to pledge me to stay in Rome. It often seems to me that I cannot stay long without seeing the baby. He is so dear and life seems to me so uncertain; I do not know how to leave my dear ones. Take the apartments for a short time. I need to be in Rome at least a month to write and also to be near you, but I want to be free to return here, if I feel too anxious for him, too miserable.
O love, how difficult is life! But you, you are good, if it were only possible for me to make you happy!
The banker has given me receipts in his letter. Also he wishes to receive the enclosed immediately, will you see that he has it right away; and as to my signature for a bill of exchange in Paris, he says the sooner I send it the better he can do for me.
Do not think for a moment of Giovanni as godfather. It would be, I think, to trust him too far. I do not think him worthy. It is better for you to trust in some one your equal who, like a gentleman will keep your secret. More another time from your M.
Write immediately that you have received this[.] Yesterday the baby seemed to suffer and was troublesome but today he is well and so beautiful.
I have something curious to tell you of Giovanni when you come. [Houghton MS in Italian; my translation]
33. On defeat in the north and Charles Albert, December 2, 1848
In picking up her pen for the Tribune in December, Fuller swiftly recapitulated the collapse, beginning in May, of the war with Austria. She shrewdly foresaw the dangers of the antagonism developed between the troops of Naples and the people of the Papal States and in her harsh analysis of Charles Albert, king of Piedmont, foreshadows his second defeat in the spring of 1849.
. . . The Roman volunteers received the astounding news that they were not to expect protection or countenance from their Prince; all the army stood aghast that they were no longer to fight in the name of Pio. It had been so dear, so sweet to love and reverence really the Head of their Church, so inspiring to find their religion for once in accordance with the aspirations of the soul. They were to be deprived, too, of the aid of the disciplined Neapolitan troops and their artillery, on which they had counted. How cunningly all this was contrived to cause dissension and dismay may easily be seen.
The Neapolitan General Pepe nobly refused to obey, and called on the troops to remain with him. They wavered; but they are a pampered army, personally much attached to the King, who pays them well and indulges them at the expense of his people, that they may be his support against that people when in a throe of Nature it rises and strives for its rights. For the same reason, the sentiment of patriotism was little diffused among them in comparison with the other troops. And the alternative presented was one in which it required a very clear sense of higher duty to act against habit. Generally, after wavering awhile, they obeyed and returned. The Roman States, which had received them with so many testimonials of affection and honor, were not slack to show a correspondent aversion and contempt on their retreat. The towns would not suffer their passage; the hamlets were unwilling to serve them even with fire and water. They were filled at once with shame and rage; one officer killed himself, unable to bear it; in the unreflecting minds of the soldiers, hate sprung up for the rest of Italy, and especially Rome, which will make them admirable tools of tyranny in case of civil war.
This was the first great calamity of the war. But apart from the treachery of the King of Naples and the dereliction of the Pope, it was impossible it should end thoroughly well . . . . [Charles Albert] fought and planned, not for Italy but the house of Savoy, which his Balbis and Giobertis had so long been prophesying was to reign supreme in the new great Era of Italy. These prophecies he more than half believed, because they chimed with his ambitious wishes; but he had not soul enough to realize them; he trusted only in his disciplined troops; he had not nobleness enough to believe he might rely at all on the sentiment of the people. For his troops he dared not have good Generals; conscious of meanness and timidity, he shrank from the approach of able and earnest men; he was only afraid they would, in helping Italy, take her and themselves out of his guardianship. Antonini was insulted, Garibaldi rejected; other experienced leaders, who had rushed to Italy at the first trumpet-sound, could never get employment from him. As to his generalship, it was entirely inadequate, even if he had made use of the first favorable moments. But his first thought was not to strike a blow at the Austrians before they recovered from the discomfiture of Milan, but to use the panic and need of his assistance to induce Lombardy and Venice to annex themselves to his kingdom. He did not even wish seriously to get the better till this was done, and when this was done, it was too late. The Austrian army was recruited, the Generals had recovered their spirits, and were burning to retrieve and avenge their past defeat. The conduct of Charles Albert had been shamefully evasive in the first months . . . .
It is said Charles Albert feels bitterly the imputations on his courage, and says they are most ungrateful, when he has exposed the lives of himself and his sons in the combat. Indeed, there ought to be made a distinction between personal and mental courage. The former Charles Albert may possess, may have too much, of what this still aristocratic world calls “the feelings of a gentleman” to shun exposing himself to a chance shot now and then. An entire want of mental courage he has shown. His decisive battle was made so by giving up the moment Fortune turned against him. It is shameful to hear so many say this result was inevitable, just because the material advantages were in favor of the Austrians. Pray, was never a battle won against material odds? It is precisely such that a good leader, a noble man, may expect to win. Were the Austrians driven out of Milan because the Milanese had that advantage? The Austrians would again have suffered repulse from them, but for the baseness of this man, on whom they had been cajoled into relying: a baseness that deserves the pillory; and on a pillory will the “magnanimous,” as he was meanly called in face of the crimes of his youth and the timid selfishness of his middle age, stand in the sight of posterity. He made use of his power only to betray Milan; he took from the citizens all means of defence, and then gave them up to the spoiler; he promised to defend them “to the last drop of his blood,” and sold them the next minute; even the paltry terms he made he has not seen maintained. Had the people slain him in their rage, he well deserved it at their hands; and all his conduct since had confirmed that sudden verdict of passion.
Of all this great drama I have much to write, but elsewhere, in a more full form, and where I can duly sketch the portraits of actors little known in America. The materials are over-rich. I have bought my right in them by much sympathetic suffering; yet, amid the blood and tears of Italy, ‘t is joy to see some glorious new births.—the Italians are getting cured of mean adulation and hasty boasts; they are learning to prize and seek realities; the effigies of straw are getting knocked down, and living, growing men, take their places. Italy is being educated for the Future, her leaders are learning that the time is past for trust in Princes and precedents-that there is no hope except in Truth and God; her lower people are learning to shout less and think more. [Dispatches, pp. 233-34, 234-35, 236-37]
34. To her mother, November 16, 1848
As soon as she returned to Rome, Fuller wrote a long letter to her mother. So used now to the anomalous combinations of her life, she passed easily from heavy hints at her own motherhood to the pleasures of revenge, from the cruelty of her struggle for bread to the new gentleness of her disposition. (Fuller mistakes the name of the Pope’s confessor here; it was Palma, not Parma.)
* * * Of other circumstances which complicate my position I cannot write. Were you here, I would confide in you fully, and have more than once, in the silence of the night, recited to you those most strange and romantic chapters in the story of my sad life. At one time when I thought I might die, I empowered a person, who has given me, as far as possible to him, the aid and sympathy of a brother, to communicate them to you, on his return to the United States. But now I think we shall meet again, and I am sure you will always love your daughter, and will know gladly that in all events she has tried to aid and striven never to injure her fellows. In earlier days, I dreamed of doing and being much, but now am content with the Magdalen to rest my plea hereon, “She has loved much.”
You, loved mother, keep me informed, as you have, of important facts, especially the worst. The thought of you, the knowledge of your angelic nature, is always one of my greatest supports. Happy those who have such a mother! Myriad instances of selfishness and corruption of heart cannot destroy the confidence in human nature.
I am again in Rome, situated for the first time entirely to my mind. I have but one room, but large; and everything about the bed so gracefully and adroitly disposed that it makes a beautiful parlor, and of course I pay much less. I have the sun all day, and an excellent chimney. It is very high and has pure air, and the most beautiful view all around imaginable. Add, that I am with the dearest, delightful old couple one can imagine, quick, prompt, and kind, sensible and contented. Having no children, they like to regard me and the Prussian sculptor, my neighbor, as such; yet are too delicate and too busy ever to intrude. In the attic, dwells a priest, who insists on making my fire when Antonia is away. To be sure, he pays himself for his trouble, by asking a great many questions. The stories below are occupied by a frightful Russian princess with moustaches, and a footman who ties her bonnet for her; and a fat English lady, with a fine carriage, who gives all her money to the church, and has made for the house a terrace of flowers that would delight you. Antonia has her flowers in a humble balcony, her birds, and an immense black cat; always addressed by both husband and wife as “Amoretto,” (little love!)
The house looks out on the Piazza Barberini, and I see both that palace and the Pope’s. The scene to-day has been one of terrible interest. The poor, weak Pope has fallen more and more under the dominion of the cardinals, till at last all truth was hidden from his eyes. He had suffered the minister, Rossi, to go on, tightening the reins, and, because the people preserved a sullen silence, he thought they would bear it. Yesterday, the Chamber of Deputies, illegally prorogued, was opened anew. Rossi, after two or three most unpopular measures, had the imprudence to call the troops of the line to defend him, instead of the National Guard. On the 14th, the Pope had invested him with the privileges of a Roman citizen: (he had renounced his country when an exile, and returned to it as ambassador of Louis Philippe.) This position he enjoyed but one day. Yesterday, as he descended from his carriage, to enter the Chamber, the crowd howled and hissed; then pushed him, and, as he turned his head in consequence, a sure hand stabbed him in the back. He said no word, but died almost instantly in the arms of a cardinal. The act was undoubtedly the result of the combination of many, from the dexterity with which it was accomplished, and the silence which ensued. Those who had not abetted beforehand seemed entirely to approve when done. The troops of the line, on whom he had relied, remained at their posts, and looked coolly on. In the evening, they walked the streets with the people, singing, “Happy the hand which rids the world of a tyrant!” Had Rossi lived to enter the Chamber, he would have seen the most terrible and imposing mark of denunciation known in the history of nations,—the whole house, without a single exception, seated on the benches of opposition. The news of his death was received by the deputies with the same cold silence as by the people. For me, I never thought to have heard of a violent death with satisfaction, but this act affected me as one of terrible justice.
To-day, all the troops and the people united and went to the Quirinal to demand a change of measures. They found the Swiss Guard drawn out, and the Pope dared not show himself. They attempted to force the door of his palace, to enter his presence, and the guard fired. I saw a man borne by wounded. The drum beat to call out the National Guard. The carriage of Prince Barberini has returned with its frightened inmates and liveried retinue, and they have suddenly barred up the court-yard gate. Antonia, seeing it, observes, “Thank Heaven, we are poor, we have nothing to fear!” This is the echo of a sentiment which will soon be universal in Europe.
Never feel any apprehensions for my safety from such causes. There are those who will protect me, if necessary, and, besides, I am on the conquering side. These events have, to me, the deepest interest. These days are what I always longed for,—were I only free from private care! But, when the best and noblest want bread to give to the cause of liberty, I can just not demand that of them; their blood they would give me.
You cannot conceive the enchantment of this place. So much I suffered here last January and February, I thought myself a little weaned; but, returning, my heart swelled even to tears with the cry of the poet:—
Those have not lived who have not seen Rome . . . .
Is it not cruel that I cannot earn six hundred dollars a year, living here? I could live on that well, now I know Italy. Where I have been, this summer, a great basket of grapes sells for one cent!—delicious salad, enough for three or four persons, one cent,—a pair of chickens, fifteen cents. Foreigners cannot live so but I could, now that I speak the language fluently, and know the price of everything. Everybody loves, and wants to serve me, and I cannot earn this pitiful sum to learn and do what I want.
Of course, I wish to see America again; but in my own time, when I am ready, and not to weep over hopes destroyed and projects unfulfilled.
My dear friend, Madame Arconati, has shown me generous love a contadina, whom I have known this summer, hardly less. Every Sunday, she came in her holiday dress-beautiful corset of red silk richly embroidered, rich petticoat, nice shoes and stockings, and handsome coral necklace, on one arm an immense basket of grapes, in the other a pair of live chickens, to be eaten by me for her sake, (“per amore mio”) and wanted no present, no reward; it was, as she said, “for the honor and pleasure of her acquaintance.” The old father of the family never met me but he took off his hat, and said, “Madame, it is to me a consolation to see you.” Are there not sweet flowers of affection in life, glorious moments, great thoughts?—why must they be so dearly paid for?
Many Americans have shown me great and thoughtful kindness, and none more so than W. S- – – and his wife. They are now in Florence, but may return. I do not know whether I shall stay here or not; shall be guided much by the state of my health.
All is quieted now in Rome. Late at night the Pope had to yield, but not till the door of his palace was half burnt, and his confessor killed. This man, Parma, provoked his fate by firing on the people from a window. It seems the Pope never gave order to fire; his guard acted from a sudden impulse of their own. The new ministry chosen are little inclined to accept. It is almost impossible for any one to act, unless the Pope is stripped of his temporal power, and the hour for that is not yet quite ripe; though they talk more and more of proclaiming the Republic, and even of calling my friend Mazzini.
If I came home at this moment, I should feel as if forced to leave my own house, my own people, and the hour which I had always longed for. If I do come in this way, all I can promise is to plague other people as little as possible. My own plans and desires will be postponed to another world.
Do not feel anxious about me. Some higher power leads me through strange, dark, thorny paths, broken at times by glades opening down into prospects of sunny beauty, into which I am not permitted to enter. If God disposes for us, it is not for nothing. This I can say, my heart is in some respects better, it is kinder and more humble. Also, my mental acquisitions have certainly been great, however inadequate to my desires. [Memoirs, II, 245-48, 250-52]
35. On the Pope’s flight and the condition of women, December 2, 1848
From Fuller’s account of Rossi’s murder in a December dispatch, I include only her careful detailing of the determining circumstances. With barely concealed triumph, she also cited the judgment of “a philosopher”: “I cannot sympathize under any circumstances with so immoral a deed; but surely the manner of doing it was great.” The Romans, she concluded, “took a very pagan view of this act, and the piece presented on the occasion at the theatres was ‘The Death of Nero.’” In all the turmoil, the condition of woman is not forgotten.
I found Rome empty of foreigners: most of the English have fled in affright—the Germans and French are wanted at home—the Czar has recalled many of his younger subjects; he does not like the schooling they get here. That large part of the population which lives by the visits of foreigners was suffering very much—trade, industry, for every reason, stagnant. The people were every moment becoming more exasperated by the impudent measures of the Minister Rossi, and their mortification at seeing Rome represented and betrayed by a foreigner. And what foreigner? A pupil of Guizot and Louis Philippe. The news had just reached them of the bombardment and storm of Vienna. Zucchi, the Minister-of-War, left Rome to put down over-free manifestations in the Provinces, and impede the entrance of the troops of the Patriot Chief, Garibaldi, into Bologna. From the Provinces came soldiery, called by Rossi to keep order at the opening of the Chamber of Deputies. He reviewed them in the face of the Civic Guard; the Press began to be restrained; men were arbitrarily seized and sent out of the kingdom; the public indignation rose to its hight; the cup overflowed.
. . . I believe [Pius IX] really thinks now the Progress movement tends to anarchy, blood, and all that looked worst in the first French Revolution. However that may be I cannot forgive him some of the circumstances of this flight. To fly to Naples to throw himself in the arms of the bombarding monarch, blessing him and thanking his soldiery for preserving that part of Italy from anarchy-to protest that all his promises at Rome were null and void, when he thought himself in safety to choose a commission for governing in his absence, composed of men of princely blood, but as to character so null that everybody laughed, and said he chose those who could best be spared if they were killed; (but they all ran away directly;) when Rome was thus left without any Government, to refuse to see any deputation, even the Senator of Rome, whom he had so gladly sanctioned,-these are the acts either of a fool or a foe. They are not his acts, to be sure, but he is responsible, he lets them stand as such in the face of the world, and weeps and prays for their success.
No more of him! His day is over. He has been made, it seems unconsciously, an instrument of good his regrets cannot destroy. Nor can he be made so important an instrument of ill. These acts have not had the effect the foes of freedom hoped. Rome remained quite cool and composed; all felt that they had not demanded more than was their duty to demand, and were willing to accept what might follow. In a few days all began to say, “Well, who would have thought it? The Pope, the Cardinals, the Princes are gone, and Rome is perfectly tranquil, and one does not miss anything, except that there are not so many rich carriages and liveries.”
The Pope may regret too late that he ever gave the people a chance to make this reflection. . . .
Pray send here a good Ambassador—one that has experience of foreign life, that he may act with good judgment; and, if possible, a man that has knowledge and views which extend beyond the cause of party politics in the United States; a man of unity in principles, but capable of understanding variety in forms. And send a man capable to prize the luxury of living in, or knowing Rome: it is one that should not be thrown away on a person who cannot prize or use it. Another century, and I might ask to be made Ambassador myself (‘tis true, like other Ambassadors, I would employ clerks to do the most of the duty,) but woman’s day has not come yet. They hold their clubs in Paris, but even George Sand will not act with women as they are. They say she pleads they are too mean, too treacherous. She should not abandon them for that, which is not nature but misfortune. How much I shall have to say on that subject if I live, which I hope I shall not, for I am very tired of the battle with giant wrongs, and would like to have some one younger and stronger arise to say what ought to be said, still more to do what ought to be done. Enough! if I felt these things in privileged America, the cries of mothers and wives beaten at night by sons and husbands for their diversion after drinking, as I have repeatedly heard them these past months, the excuse for falsehood, “I dare not tell my husband, he would be ready to kill me,” have sharpened my perception as to the ills of Woman’s condition and remedies that must be applied. Had I but genius, had I but energy, to tell what I know as it ought to be told! God grant them me, or some other more worthy woman, I pray. [Dispatches, pp. 239, 244, 245-46]
36. On the people’s response to the Pope’s absence, January 6 and February 20, 1849
“The unreality of relation between the people and the hierarchy was obvious instantly upon the flight of Pius,” Fuller wrote in the Tribune. The emerging reality now absorbed her in the aftermath of the Pope’s flight. The first passage below is from Fuller’s Roman journal for 1849, the only writing of hers to survive the wreck; the second is from the Tribune.
a . . . . Instead of the Pope comes from him an excommunication against those engaged in the movements of the 15th and 16th of November and in the changes to which they led and are leading in somma, against the major part of Romans in this city or in the provinces. I have not yet seen the document, but it is said to be worded in all the most foolish phrases of ancient superstition. The people received it with jeers, tore it at once from the walls, and yesterday (Saturday) evening carried it in procession through the Corso round a candle’s end, the only light in the procession. They ran along giggling and mumbling in imitation of priestly chants, detachments occasionally digressing to throw copies into some privy. Such is the finale of St. Peterdom . . . . [Houghton MS]
b. The revolution, like all genuine ones, has been instinctive, its results unexpected and surprising to the greater part of those who achieved them. The waters that had flowed so secretly beneath the crust of habit that many never beard their murmur, unless in dreams, have suddenly burst to light in full and beautiful jets; all rush to drink the pure and living draught.
As in the time of Jesus, the multitude had been long enslaved beneath a cumbrous ritual, their minds designedly darkened by those who should have enlightened them, brutified, corrupted amid monstrous contradictions and abuses; yet the moment they hear a word correspondent to the original nature, “Yes, it is true,” they cry. “It is spoken with authority. Yes, it ought to be so. Priests ought to be better and wiser than other men; if they were they would not need pomp and temporal power to command respect. Yes, it is true; we ought not to lie; we should not try to impose upon one another. We should rather our children would work honestly for their bread than get it by cheating, begging, or the prostitution of their mothers. It would be better to act worthily and kindly, probably would please God more than the kissing of reliques. We have long darkly felt that these things were so; now we know it.” [Dispatches, p. 250]
37. On the birth of the Roman Republic, February 20, 1849
In her twenty-eighth dispatch to the Tribune (also sent February 20), Fuller described the opening of the Constitutional Assembly and the proclamation of the Republic on February 9.
Early next morning I rose and went forth to seek the Republic. Over the Quirinal I went, through the Forum to the Capitol. There was nothing to be seen except the magnificent calm emperor, the tamers of horses, the fountain, the trophies, the lions, as usual; among the marbles for living figures, a few dirty, bold women, and Murillo boys in the sun just as usual. I passed into the Corso; there were men in the liberty cap; of course the lowest and vilest bad been the first to assume it; all the horrible beggars persecuting as impudently as usual. I met some English; all their comfort was, “It would not last a month.”—“They hoped to see all these fellows shot yet.”—The English clergyman; more mild and legal, only hopes to see them (as the Ministry, Deputies, &c.) hung.
Mr. Carlyle would be delighted with his countrymen. They are entirely ready and anxious to see a Cromwell for Italy. They, too, think it is no matter what happens in “the back parlor,” when the people starve. What signifies that, if there is “order” in the front? How dare they make a noise to disturb us yawning at billiards!
I met an American. He “had no confidence in the Republic.” Why? Because he “had no confidence in the People.” Why? Because “they were not like our people.” Ah! Jonathan and John—excuse me, but I must say the Italian has a decided advantage over you in the power of quickly feeling generous sympathy, as well as some other things which I have not time now to particularize . . . . I have memoranda from you both in my note-book.
At last the procession mounts the Campidoglio. It is all dressed with banners. The tricolor surmounts the Palace of the Senator; the Senator himself bas fled. The Deputies mount the steps, and one of them reads, in a clear, friendly voice, the following words:
Art. I.—The Papacy bas fallen in fact and in right from the temporal Government of the Roman State.
Art. II.—The Roman Pontifex shall have all the necessary guaranties for independence in the exercise of his spiritual power.
Art. III.—The form of Government of the Roman State shall be a pure Democracy, and will take the glorious name of Roman Republic.
Art. IV.—The Roman Republic shall have with the rest of Italy the relations exacted by a common nationality.
Between each of these expressive sentences the speaker paused; the great bell of the Capitol gave forth its solemn melodies; the cannon answered; while the crowd shouted, viva la Republica! viva Italia!
The imposing grandeur of the spectacle to me gave new force to the thought that already swelled my heart; my nerves thrilled, and I longed to see in some answering glance a spark of Rienzi, a little of that soul which made my country what she is. The American at my side remained impassive. Receiving all his birthright from a triumph of Democracy, he was quite indifferent to this manifestation on this consecrated spot. Passing the Winter in Rome to study Art, he was insensible to the artistic beauty of the scene—insensible to this new life of that spirit from which all the forms he gazes at in galleries emanated. He “did not see the use of these popular demonstrations.”
Again, I must mention a remark of his as a specimen of the ignorance in which Americans usually remain during their flighty visits to these scenes, where they associate only with one another. And I do it the rather as this seemed a really thoughtful, intelligent man; no vain, vulgar trifler. He said—“The people seem only to be looking on; they take no part.”
“What people?” said I.
“Why, these round us; there is no other people.”
There are a few beggars, errand-boys and nurse-maids.
“The others are only soldiers.”
“Soldiers! The Civic Guard; all the decent men in Rome.” . . . [Dispatches, pp. 256-58]
38. To Giuseppe Mazzini, March 3, 1849
This letter to Mazzini probably reached Florence just as he was quietly entering Rome—on foot at night—on March 5. His visit three days later filled her with foreboding. To her mother she wrote, “His life has known one hour of pure joy, but I fear, I fear the entrance into Jerusalem may be followed by the sacrifice” (Houghton MS). And with the Springs she shared her fear that “it is in reserve for him to survive defeat” (Memoirs, II, 263). (Mazzini’s words in the following letter may be translated, “the long exile just begun again, life without comfort except for distant and conflicting affections, and hope long protracted and the desire that begins to become overwhelming finally to sleep in peace since I have not been able to live in my land.”)
Dear Mazzini,
Though knowing you occupied by the most important affairs, I again feel impelled to write a few lines.
What emboldens me is the persuasion that the best friends,—in point of perfect sympathy and intelligence, the only friends,—of a man of ideas and of marked character, must be women. You have your mother; no doubt you have others, perhaps many; Of that I know nothing; only I like to offer also my tribute of affection.
When I think that only two years ago, you thought of coming into Italy with us in disguise, it seems very glorious, that you are about to enter Republican Rome as a Roman Citizen. It seemed almost the most sublime and poetical fact of history. Yet, even in the first thrill of joy, I felt, “He will think his work but beginning now”
When I read from your hand these words “il lungo esilio testè ricominciato, la vita non confortato fuorchè d’affetti lontani e contesi, e la speranza lungamente protratta e il desiderio che comincia a farmisi supremo di dormire finalmente in pace, dache non ho potuto vivere in terra mia.”
When I read these words they made me weep bitterly and I thought of them always with a great pang at the heart. But it is not so, dear Mazzini. You do not return to sleep under the sod of Italy, but to see your thought springing up all over her soil. The gardeners seem to me, in point of instinctive wisdom or deep thought, mostly incompetent to the care of the garden, but an idea like this will be able to make use of any implements, [and,] it is to be hoped will educate, the men by making them work. It is not this, I believe, which still keeps your heart so melancholy, for I seem to read the same melancholy in your answer to the Roman assembly. You speak of “few and late years,” but some full ones still remain; a century is not needed, nor ought the same man, in the same form of thought, to work too long on an age. He would mould and bend it too much to himself, better for him to die and return incarnated to give the same truth aid on yet another side. Jesus of Nazareth died young; but had he not spoken and acted as much truth as the world could bear in his time? A frailty, a perpetual shortcoming, motion in a curve line, seems the destiny of this earth. The excuse awaits us elsewhere; there must be one, for it is true, as said Goethe, that “Care is taken that the trees grow not up into heaven.” Men like you, appointed ministers, must not be the less earnest in their work, yet to the greatest, the day, the moment is all their kingdom. God takes care of the increase. Farewell! For your sake I would wish at this moment to be an Italian and a man of action. But though an American, I am not even a woman of action; so the best I can do is to pray with the whole heart. Heaven bless dear Mazzini, cheer his heart and give him worthy helpers to carry out its holy purposes! [Houghton MS]
39. To Caroline Sturgis Tappan, March 16, 1849
Fuller’s first account of Ossoli and her son, lost like most of her later confessions to others, was written to Caroline Sturgis. Sturgis’ sister, Ellen Hooper—a beloved poet whose self-repression and misery in marriage had always pained Fuller—had recently died; perhaps Fuller’s sisterly grief inspired this confidence. Sturgis’ natural interest was whetted because she was then pregnant with her own first child, and in her reply she evidently compared Angelina’s rustic birth to Jesus’. On March 16, Fuller wrote again, describing her visit to the baby in December, and attached an engraving of the Christ child in heavy swaddling, and apparently a picture now lost of the holy family traveling to Egypt. (In the Memoirs [II, 266-67], the last paragraph below is presented as part of a letter to Emerson.)
. . . After I wrote to you I went to Rieti. The weather was mild when I set out, but by the fatality that has attended me throughout, in the night changed to a cold, unknown in Italy and remained so all the time I staid. There was, as is common in Italy, no fireplace except in the kitchen. I suffered much in my room with its brick floor, and windows through which came the cold wind freely. My darling did not suffer, because he was a little swaddled child like this and robed in wool besides, but I did very much. When I first took him in my arms he made no sound but leaned his head against my bosom, and staid so, he seemed to say how could you abandon me, what I felt you will know only when you have your own. A little girl who lived in the house told me all the day of my departure he could not be comforted, always refusing the breast and looking at the door; he has been a strangely precocious infant; I think it was through sympathy with me, and that in that regard it may be a happiness for him to be with these more plebeian, instinctive, joyous natures. I saw he was more serene, that he was not sensitive as when with me, and slept a great deal more. You speak of my being happy; all the solid happiness I have known has been at times when he went to sleep in my arms. You say when Ellen’s beautiful life had been so wasted, it hardly seemed worth while to begin another. I had all those feelings too. I do not look forward to his career and his manly life; it is now I want to be with him, before passion, care and bafflings begin. If I had a little money I should go with him into strict retirement for a year or two and live for him alone. This I cannot do: all life that has been or could be natural to me is invariably denied. God knows why, I suppose.
I receive with profound gratitude your thought of taking him, if any thing should happen to us. Should I live, I don’t know whether I should wish him to be an Italian or American citizen; it depends on the course events take here politically, but should we die, the person to whom he would naturally fall is a sister of his father a person of great elegance and sweetness but entirely limited in mind. I should not like that. I shall think about it. Before he was born I did a great deal having the idea I might die and all my spirit remain incarnated in him, but now I think I shall live and carry him round myself, as I ride on my ass into Egypt. We shant go so mildly as this set.
You talk about your managers, Carrie, but that was only for a little, presently came kings with gold cups and all sorts of things. Joseph pawned them; with part of the money he bought this nice donkey for the journey; and they lived on the rest till Joseph could work at his trade, we have no donkey and it costs a great deal to travel in diligences and steamers, and being a nobleman is a poor trade in a ruined despotism just turning into a Republic. I often think of Dickens’s marchioness playing whist in the kitchen. So I play whist every where.
Speaking of the republic, you say, do I not wish Italy had a great man. Mazzini is a great man; in mind a great poetic statesman, in heart a lover, in action decisive and full of resource as Cesar. Dearly I love Mazzini, who also loves me. He came in just as I had finished this first letter to you. His soft radiant look makes melancholy music in my soul; it consecrates my present life that like the Magdalen I may at the important hour shed all the consecrated ointment on his head. There is one, Mazzini, who understands thee well, who knew thee no less when an object of popular fear than now of idolatry, and who, if the pen be not held too feebly, will make that posterity shall know thee too. . . . [Houghton MS]
40. To Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, April 4, 1849
With her longing for her child sharpened by the letter to Sturgis, Fuller left Rome at the end of March for a three-week visit to her baby. The household where he lived had become violently unstable; two brothers, Niccolò and Pietro, were given to raging, knife-brandishing fights which she could mediate only temporarily. And everyone in town was in terror of the Garibaldini, who were at this time using Rieti as their headquarters. Committed to Garibaldi and his cause, his legionnaires were actually strictly disciplined and their crimes limited generally to looting monastery kitchens, but in the popular mind they were brigands and killers. Although two weeks later—through the adventures related by Emelyn Story (VI:2d) —Fuller came to admire the legionnaires, at first maternal fear made her accept their exaggerated reputation, as in this letter. This document too led Madeleine Stern to believe that April 4 was Fuller’s and Ossoli’s wedding anniversary. (Fuller’s allusion at the end is to a new paper published by Mazzini, who had just been made one of Rome’s Triumvirs; La Speranza dell’Epoca was the paper of the moderate Mamiani.)
My dear,
How strange it is that we cannot pass this day together. We must pray to be happier another year. Yesterday I had bought small birds for our dinner and I very much hoped to see you; since you didn’t come, I didn’t eat. But today I am not sorry you didn’t come because it’s raining hard again, and Angelino, who was so happy before, so charming that I was wishing every minute for you to see him, today is not well. He was in pain all night with his teeth, and today, poor little thing, he can get no peace. Let’s hope he will be well when you are able to come.
It seems to me that I was sent by God to protect him in these terrible days! Niccola was crazy for more than forty hours, Chiara always crying, desperate. Last night Niccola slept and today is reasonable again. Garribaldi has not passed the border. More Neapolitan troops have arrived in Aquila, and now here come more Roman troops from Terni to reinforce Garibaldi. But here they don’t think that the Neapolitans will enter, but that they’re making a show of force to draw away part of the Roman forces from Terracina, that probably they will invade from Terracina.
Garribaldi has no control over these desperadoes in his band. On Sunday a priest, two citizens and nine of their own were killed, they say. Two bodies were found in the river. The presence of the regular troops could prevent these excesses. But certainly I don’t now have courage to go out alone. Near here is a little garden where I go with Angelino on nice days, I never go out in the road.
Ask Antonia if anyone has been looking for me and please put this note immediately in the post for Florence.
How sorry I am that you had this terrible guard duty through the night. It will be the ruin of your health and how foolishly and thoughtlessly it’s done like everything in Rome as if they were trying to put you off. Get for me right away the paper of Mazzini if you have money for a
41. On war in Rome, May 27, 1849
“The work is done,” Fuller wrote for the Tribune during the May lull in the battle for Rome; “the revolution in Italy is now radical, nor can it stop till Italy becomes independent and united as a republic. “Beginning with her doubts that the revolutionary impulse would prevail in France’s relation to Rome, she ended this thirtieth dispatch by assailing the offensive expediency of the United States in sending a consul to observe the strength of the Roman Republic before recognizing it.
The people of Rome have burnt the Cardinals’ carriages. They took the confessionals out of the churches, and made mock confessions in the piazzas, the scope of which was, “I have sinned, father, so and so.” “Well, my son, how much will you pay to the church for absolution?” Afterward the people thought of burning the confessionals or using them for barricades, but at the request of the Triumvirate they desisted, and even put them back into the churches. But it was from no reaction of feeling that they stopped short, only from respect for the government . . . .
I do not dare to trust that people [the French]. The peasant is yet very ignorant. The suffering workman is frightened as he thinks of the punishments that ensued on the insurrections of May and June. The man of property is full of horror at the brotherly scope of Socialism. The aristocrat dreams of the guillotine always when he hears speak of the people. The influence of the Jesuits is still immense in France. Both in France and England the grossest falsehoods have been circulated with unwearied diligence about the state of things in Italy. An amusing specimen of what is still done in this line I find just now in a foreign journal, where it says there are red flags on all the houses of Rome; meaning to imply that the Romans are athirst for blood. Now, the fact is, that these flags are put up at the entrance of those streets where there is no barricade, as a signal to coachmen and horsemen that they can pass freely. There is one on the house where I am, in which is no person but myself, who thirst for peace, and the padrone, who thirsts for money . . . .
War near at hand seems to me even more dreadful than I had fancied it. True! it tries men’s souls, lays bare selfishness in undeniable deformity. Here, it has produced much fruit of noble sentiment, noble act; but still it breeds vice, too, drunkenness, mental dissipation, tears asunder the tenderest ties, lavishes the productions of earth for which her starving poor stretch out their hands in vain, in the most unprofitable manner. And the ruin that ensues, how terrible. Let those who have ever passed happy days in Rome grieve to hear that the beautiful plantations of Villa Borghese—that chief delight and refreshment of citizens, foreigners, and little children, are laid low, as far as the obelisk. The fountain, singing alone amid the fallen groves, cannot be seen and heard without tears; it seems like some innocent infant calling and crowing amid dead bodies on a field which battle has strewn with the bodies of those that once cherished it. Also the plantations of Villa Salvage on the Tiber, the beautiful avenue on the way from St. John Lateran to La Maria Maggiore, the trees of the Forum are fallen. Rome is shorn of the locks which lent grace to her venerable brow. She looks desolate, profaned. I feel what I never expected to, as if I might by and by be willing to leave Rome.
Then I have, for the first time, seen what wounded men suffer. The night of the 30th April I passed in the hospital, and saw the terrible agonies of those dying or who needed amputation, felt their mental pains, and longing for the loved ones who were away,—for many of these were Lombards, who had come from the field of Novara to fight upon a fairer chance—many were students of the University, who had enlisted and threw themselves into the front of the engagement. (N.B.—The impudent falsehoods of the French general’s dispatches are incredible. The French were never decoyed on in any way. They were received with every possible mark of hostility. They were defeated in open field, the Garibaldi legion rushing out to them, and though they suffered much from the walls, they sustained themselves nowhere . . . . The vanity that strives to cover over these facts is unworthy men . . . . )
I have been out on the loggia to look over the city. All sleeps with that peculiar air of serene majesty known to this city only.—This city that has grown, not out of the necessities of commerce nor the luxuries of wealth, but first out of heroism, then out of faith. Swelling domes, roofs softly tinted with yellow moss—what deep meaning, what deep repose, in your faintly seen outline!
The young Moon climbs among clouds—the clouds of a departing thunderstorm. Tender, smiling Moon! can it be that thy full orb may look down on a smoking, smouldering Rome, and see her best blood run along the stones without one nation in the world to defend, one to aid?—scarce one to cry out a tardy “Shame?” We will wait, whisper the nations, and see if they can bear it. Rack them well to see if they are brave. If they can do without us, we will help them. Is it thus ye would be served in your turn? Beware! [Dispatches, pp. 279, 280, 285]
42. To Ralph Waldo Emerson, June 10, 1849
The false peace, pending false negotiations, ended June 3, when the French, who had announced that they would enter Rome the next day, sprang their attack. (When this letter to Emerson was published in the Memoirs, it gladdened the hearts of French reviewers because the French had argued that their intervention was to expel foreign mercenaries. We note, however, that Fuller said that Romans were few, and elsewhere stressed the presence of men from other Italian states.)
I received your letter amid the round of cannonade and musketry. It was a terrible battle fought here from the first till the last light of day. I could see all its progress from my balcony. The Italians fought like lions. It is a truly heroic spirit that animates them. They make a stand here for honor and their rights, with little ground for hope that they can resist, now they are betrayed by France.
Since the 30th April, I go almost daily to the hospitals, and, though I have suffered,—for I had no idea before, how terrible gunshot-wounds and wound-fever are,—yet I have taken pleasure, and great pleasure, in being with the men; there is scarcely one who is not moved by a noble spirit. Many, especially among the Lombards, are the flower of the Italian youth. When they begin to get better, I carry them books and flowers; they read, and we talk.
The palace of the Pope, on the Quirinal, is now used for convalescents. In those beautiful gardens, I walk with them,—one with his sling, another with his crutch. The gardener plays off all his water-works for the defenders of the country, and gathers flowers for me, their friend.
A day or two since, we sat in the Pope’s little pavilion, where he used to give private audience. The sun was going gloriously down over Monte Mario, where gleamed the white tents of the French light-horse among the trees. The cannonade was heard at intervals. Two bright-eyed boys sat at our feet, and gathered up eagerly every word said by the heroes of the day. It was a beautiful hour, stolen from the midst of ruin and sorrow; and tales were told as full of grace and pathos as in the gardens of Boccaccio, only in a very different spirit,—with noble hope for man, with reverence for woman.
The young ladies of the family, very young girls, were filled with enthusiasm for the suffering, wounded patriots, and they wished to go to the hospital to give their services. Excepting the three superintendents, none but married ladies were permitted to serve there, but their services were accepted. Their governess then wished to go too, and, as she could speak several languages, she was admitted to the rooms of the wounded soldiers, to interpret for them, as the nurses knew nothing but Italian, and many of these poor men were suffering, because they could not make their wishes known. Some are French, some German, and many Poles. Indeed, I am afraid it is too true that there were comparatively but few Romans among them. This young lady passed several nights there.
Should I never return,—and sometimes I despair of doing so, it seems so far off, so difficult, I am caught in such a net of ties here,—if ever you know of my life here, I think you will only wonder at the constancy with which I have sustained myself; the degree of profit to which, amid great difficulties, I have put the time, at least in the way of observation. Meanwhile, love me all you can; let me feel, that, amid the fearful agitations of the world, there are pure hands, with healthful, even pulse, stretched out toward me, if I claim their grasp. [Memoirs, II, 264-66]
43. On the siege of Rome, June 21 and 23, 1849
By June 21, when Fuller began this dispatch, her identification with the Roman struggle was so complete that in the first paragraph below she unconsciously refers to the Italian side as “ours.” Her grief over the loss of life, of Rome, and of the dream of a vindicated and noble people culminated in her despairing death wish.
The eve of the bombardment one or two officers went round with a fine band. It played on the piazzas the Marseillaise and Roman marches; and when the people were thus assembled they were told of the proclamation, and asked how they felt. Many shouted loudly, Guerra, viva la republica Romana! Afterward, bands of young men went round singing the chorus,
Vogliamo Libertà.”
(“We want always one thing; we want liberty.”) Guitars played, and some danced. When the bombs began to come, one of the Trasteverines, those noble images of the old Roman race, redeemed her claim to that descent by seizing one and extinguishing the match. She received a medal and a reward in money. A soldier did the same at Palazzo Spada, where is the statue of Pompey, at whose base great Caesar fell. He was promoted. Immediately the people were seized with emulation; armed with pans of wet clay they ran wherever the bombs fell, to extinguish them. Women collect the balls from the hostile cannon, and carry them to ours. As very little injury has come to life in this way, the people cry, “Madonna protects us against the bombs; she wills not for Rome to be destroyed.”
Meanwhile many poor people are driven from their homes, and provisions are growing very dear. The heats are now terrible for us, and must be far more so for the French. It is said a vast number are ill of fever; indeed it cannot be otherwise. Oudinot [the French general] himself has it, and perhaps this is one explanation of the mixture of violence and weakness in his actions.
He must be deeply ashamed at the poor result to his bad acts, that at the end of two weeks and so much bravado, he has done nothing to Rome, unless intercept provisions, kill some of her brave youth, and injure churches which should be sacred to him as to us. St. Maria Trastevere, that ancient church so full of precious remains, and which had an air of mild repose more beautiful than almost any other, is said to have suffered particularly.
As to the men who die, I share the impassioned sorrow of the Triumvirs. “O Frenchmen!” they wrote, “could you know what men you destroy.—They are no mercenaries, like those who fill your ranks, but the flower of the Italian youth, and the noblest souls of age. When you shall know of what minds you have robbed the world, how ought you to repent and mourn!”
This is especially true of the “Emigrant and Garibaldi legions.” The misfortunes of North and South Italy, the conscription which compels to the service of tyranny all that remain, has driven from the Kingdom of Naples and from Lombardy all the brave and noble youth. Many are in Venice or Rome, the forlorn hope of Italy . . . .
The liberal party in France does what it can to wash its hands of this offence, but it seems too weak and unlikely to render effectual service at this crisis. Venice, Rome, Ancona are the last strong holds of hope, and they cannot stand forever thus unsustained. Night before last a tremendous cannonade left no moment to sleep, even had the anxious hearts of mothers and wives been able to crave it. At morning a little detachment of French had entered by the breach of St. Pancrazio—and entrenched itself in a vineyard.—Another has possession of Villa Poniatowski, close to Porta del Popolo, and attacks and alarms are hourly to be expected. I would like to see the final ones, dreadful as those hours may be, since now there seems no hope from delay. Men are daily slain, and this state of suspense is agonizing.
In the evening ‘tis pretty, though a terror, to see the bombs, fiery meteors, springing from the horizon line upon their bright path, to do their wicked message. ‘Twould not be so bad, meseems, to die of one of these, as wait to have every drop of pure blood, every child-like radiant hope, drained and driven from the heart by the betrayals of nations and of individuals, till at last the sickened eyes refuse more to open to that light which shines daily on such pits of iniquity. [Dispatches, pp. 299-300, 301-02]
44. On Garibaldi’s retreat and the entry of the French, July 6 and 10, 1849
In her last dispatch to the Tribune, written on July 6, two days after the French entered Rome, Fuller investigated the sources of the Italian failure. The glory of resistance and the horror of war both inform her final plea to Americans: “I pray you do something; let it not end in a mere cry of sentiment.” She began by richly compensating for her early mistrust of Garibaldi, who was no longer able to withstand the French cannon and was marching with his men to the aid of Venice.
. . . We followed them to the piazza of St. John Lateran. Never have I seen a sight so beautiful, so romantic and so sad. Whoever knows Rome knows the peculiar solemn grandeur of that piazza, scene of the first triumph of Rienzi, the magnificence of the “mother of all churches,” the Baptistery with its porphyry columns, the Santa Scala with its glittering mosaics of the early ages, the obelisk standing fairest of any of those most imposing monuments of Rome, the view through the gates of the Campagna, on that side so richly strewn with ruins. The sun was setting, the crescent moon rising, the flower of the Italian youth were marshaling in that solemn place. They had been driven from every other spot where they had offered their hearts as bulwarks of Italian independence; in this last stronghold they had sacrificed hecatombs of their best and bravest in that cause; they must now go or remain prisoners and slaves. Where go, they knew not, for except distant Hungary there is not now a spot which would receive them, or where they can act as honor commands. They had all put on the beautiful dress of the Garibaldi legion, the tunic of bright red cloth, the Greek cap, or else round hat with Puritan plume, their long hair was blown back from resolute faces; all looked full of courage; they had counted the cost before they entered on this perilous struggle; they had weighed life and all its material advantages against Liberty, and made their election; they turned not back, nor flinched, at this bitter crisis. I saw the wounded, all that could go, laden upon their baggage cars; some were already pale and fainting, still they wished to go. I saw many youths, born to rich inheritance, carrying in a handkerchief all their worldly goods; the women were ready, their eyes too were resolved, if sad. The wife of Garibaldi followed him horseback, he himself was distinguished by the white boumouse; his look was entirely that of a hero of the middle ages, his face still young, for the excitements of his life, though so many, have all been youthful, and there -is no fatigue upon his brow or cheek. Fall or stand, one sees in him a man engaged in the career for which he is adapted by nature. He went upon the parapet and looked upon the road with a spy-glass, and, no obstruction being in sight, he turned his face for a moment back upon Rome, then led the way through the gate. Hard was the heart, stony and seared the eye that had no tear for that moment. Go! fated, gallant band, and if God care not indeed for men as for the sparrows, most of ye go forth to perish. . . .
I know that many a “respectable” gentleman would be surprised to hear me speak in this way. Gentlemen who perform their “duties to society” by buying for themselves handsome clothes and furniture with the interest of their money, speak of Garibaldi and his men as “brigands” and “vagabonds.” Such are they, doubtless, in the same sense as Jesus, Eneas, and Moses were. To me, men who can throw so lightly aside the ease of wealth, the joys of affection, for the sake of what they deem honor, in whatsoever form, are the “respectable.” No doubt there are in these bands a number of men of lawless minds, and who follow this banner only because there is for them no other path. But the greater part are the noble youths who have fled from the Austrian conscription, or fly now from the renewal of the Papal suffocation, darkened by the French protection.
As for the protectors, they entirely threw aside the mask, as it was always supposed they would, the moment they had possession of Rome. I do not know whether they were really so bewildered by their priestly councilors as to imagine they would be well received in a city which they had bombarded, and where twelve hundred men were lying wounded by their assault. To say nothing of the justice or injustice of the matter, it could not be supposed that the Roman people, if it had any sense of dignity, would welcome them. However, I was not out, as what countenance I have I would not give on such an occasion; but an English lady, my friend, told me they seemed to look expectingly for the strong party of friends they had always pretended to have within the walls. The French officers looked up to the windows for ladies, and she being the only one they saw, saluted her. She made no reply. They then passed into the Corso. Many were assembled, the softer Romans being unable to control a curiosity the Milanese would have disclaimed, but preserving an icy silence. In an evil hour, a foolish priest dared to break it by the cry of Viva Pio Nono. The populace, roused to fury, rushed on him with their knives. He was much wounded; one or two others were killed in the rush. The people howled, then, and hissed at the French, who, advancing their bayonets, and clearing the way before them, fortified themselves in the piazzas. Next day the French troops were marched to and fro through Rome to inspire awe in the people, but it has only created a disgust amounting to loathing, to see that, with such an imposing force, and in great part fresh, the French were not ashamed to use bombs also, and kill women and children in their beds. Oudinot, then, seeing the feeling of the people, and finding they pursued as a spy any man who so much as showed the way to his soldiers—that the Italians went out of the cafés if Frenchmen entered; in short, that the people regarded him and his followers in the same light as the Austrians, has declared the state of siege in Rome—the press is stifled; everybody is to be in the house at 9½ P.M., and, whoever in any way insults his men, or puts any obstacle in their way, is to be shot.
The fruits of all this will be the same as elsewhere; temporary repression will sow the seeds of perpetual resistance; and never was Rome in so fair a way to be educated for the Republican form of Government as now . . . .
Yesterday I went over the scene of conflict. It was fearful even to see the casinos Quattro Venti and Vascello where the French and Romans had been several days so near one another, all shattered to pieces, with fragments of rich stucco and painting still sticking to rafters between the great holes made by the cannonade, and think that men had stayed and fought in them when only a mass of ruins. The French, indeed, were entirely sheltered the last days; to my unpractised eyes the extent and thoroughness of their works seemed miraculous, and gave me first clear idea of the incompetency of the Italians to resist organized armies. I saw their commanders had not even known enough of the art of war to understand how the French were conducting the siege.—It is true their resources were at any rate inadequate to resistance; only continual sorties would have arrested the progress of the foe, and to make them and man the wall their forces were inadequate. I was struck more than ever by the heroic valor of ours, let me say, as I have said all along, for go where I may, a large part ofmy heart will ever remain in Italy. I hope her children will always acknowledge me as a sister, though I drew not my first breath here. A contadini showed me where thirty-seven braves are buried beneath a heap of wall that fell upon them in the shock of one cannonade. A marble nymph, with broken arm, looked sadly that way from her sun-dried fountain, some roses were blooming still, some red oleanders amid the ruin. The sun was casting its last light on the mountains on the tranquil, sad Campagna, that sees one leaf more turned more in the book of Woe. This was in the Vascello. I then entered the French ground, all mapped and hollowed like a honey-comb. A pair of skeleton legs protruded from a bank of one barricade; lower a dog had scratched away its light covering of earth from the body of a man, and discovered it lying face upward all dressed; the dog stood gazing on it with an air of stupid amazement . . . . [Dispatches, pp. 304-05, 305-06, 310]
45. To William Henry Channing, August 28, 1849
Even in the hospitals of Rome, the soldiers’ dedication prepared the martyr myths for the next wave of revolution. The memory of “these true priests of a higher hope,” Fuller wrote in the Tribune, “will console amid the spectacles of meanness, selfishness, and faithlessness which life may yet have in store for the pilgrim” (At Home and Abroad, p. 408). But looking back from Rieti, where her starving baby was fighting for his life, she felt overwhelmed by the struggle.
You say, you are glad I have had this great opportunity for carrying out my principles. Would it were so! I found myself inferior in courage and fortitude to the occasion. I knew not how to bear the havoc and anguish incident to the struggle for these principles. I rejoiced that it lay not with me to cut down the trees, to destroy the Elysian gardens, for the defence of Rome; I do not know that I could have done it. And the sight of these far nobler growths, the beautiful young men, mown down in their stately prime, became too much for me. I forget the great ideas, to sympathize with the poor mothers, who had nursed their precious forms, only to see them all lopped and gashed. You say, I sustained them; often have they sustained my courage: one, kissing the pieces of bone that were so painfully extracted from his arm, hanging them round his neck to be worn as the true relics of to-day; mementoes that he also had done and borne something for his country and the hopes of humanity. One fair young man, who is made a cripple for life, clasped my hand as he saw me crying over the spasms I could not relieve, and faintly cried, “Viva l’Italia.” “Think only, cara bona donna,” said a poor wounded soldier, “that I can always wear my uniform on festas, just as it is now, with the holes where the balls went through, for a memory.” “God is good; God knows,” they often said to me, when I had not a word to cheer them. [Memoirs, II, 269-70]
46. To her mother [August 31, 1849] and [December 15? 1849]
After fleeing to Rieti, Fuller was further crushed by a letter from Greeley beginning, “Ah, Margaret, the world grows dark with us! You grieve, for Rome is fallen;—I mourn, for Pickie is dead.” Writing her mother of this and of her grief gave her the opening she needed to reveal her own story. The second excerpt below is from her next letter to her mother, thanking her for the unqualified support which gave her courage to face others.
a . . . . This brings me to the main object of my present letter,—a piece of intelligence about myself, which I had hoped I might be able to communicate in such a way as to give you pleasure. That I cannot,—after suffering much in silence with that hope,—is like the rest of my earthly destiny.
The first moment, it may cause you a pang to know that your eldest child might long ago have been addressed by another name than yours, and has a little son a year old.
But, beloved mother, do not feel this long. I do assure you, that it was only great love for you that kept me silent. I have abstained a hundred times, when your sympathy, your counsel, would have been most precious, from a wish not to harass you with anxiety. Even now I would abstain, but it has become necessary, on account of the child, for us to live publicly and permanently together; and we have no hope, in the present state of Italian affairs, that we can do it at any better advantage, for several years, than now. . . .
He is not in any respect such a person as people in general would expect to find with me. He had no instructor except an old priest, who entirely neglected his education; and of all that is contained in books he is absolutely ignorant, and he has no enthusiasm of character. On the other hand, he has excellent practical sense; has been a judicious observer of all that passed before his eyes; has a nice sense of duty, which, in its unfailing, minute activity, may put most enthusiasts to shame; a very sweet temper, and great native refinement. His love for me has been unswerving and most tender. I have never suffered a pain that he could relieve. His devotion, when I am ill, is to be compared only with yours. His delicacy in trifles, his sweet domestic graces, remind me of E[ugene]. In him I have found a home, and one that interferes with no tie. Amid many ills and cares, we have had much joy together, in the sympathy with natural beauty,—with our child,—with all that is innocent and sweet.
I do not know whether he will always love me so well, for I am the elder, and the difference will become, in a few years, more perceptible than now. But life is so uncertain, and it is so necessary to take good things with their limitations, that I have not thought it worth while to calculate too curiously.
However my other friends may feel, I am sure that you will love him very much, and that he will love you no less. Could we all live together, on a moderate income, you would find peace with us. Heaven grant, that, on returning, I may gain means to effect this object. He, of course, can do nothing, while we are in the United States, but perhaps I can; and now that my health is better, I shall be able to exert myself, if sure that my child is watched by those who love him, and who are good and pure . . . . [Memoirs, II, 273-75]
b. Dearest Mother,
Of all your endless acts and words of love, never was any so dear to me as your last letter so generous, so sweet, so holy What on earth is so precious as a mother’s love; and who has a mother like mine! . . .
Ossoli wishes you were here, almost as much as I. When there is anything really lovely and tranquil, he often says, “Would not ‘La Madre’ like that?” He wept when he heard your letter. I never saw him weep at any other time, except when his father died, and when the French entered Rome. He has, I think, even a more holy feeling about a mother, from having lost his own, when very small. It has been a lifelong want with him. He often shows me a little scar on his face, made by a jealous dog, when his mother was caressing him as an infant. He prizes that blemish much. [Houghton MS copy and Memoirs, II, 307]
47. To Costanza Arconati Visconti [August 1849]
Fearing that Arconati might not like her friends “to be running about in these blind alleys, “ as she strikingly characterized her behavior later, Fuller wrote her, as soon as she had settled in Florence, with all the candor she could summon and a new clarity about the directness required in friendship.
Reading a book called “The Last Days of the Republic in Rome,” I see that my letter, giving my impressions of that period, may well have seemed to you strangely partial. If we can meet as once we did, and compare notes in the same spirit of candor, while making mutual allowance for our different points of view, your testimony and opinions would be invaluable to me. But will you have patience with my democracy,—my revolutionary spirit? Believe that in thought I am more radical than ever. The heart of Margaret you know,—it is always the same. Mazzini is immortally dear to me—a thousand times dearer for all the trial I saw made of him in Rome;—dearer for all he suffered. Many of his brave friends perished there. We who, less worthy, survive, would fain make up for the loss, by our increased devotion to him, the purest, the most disinterested of patriots, the most affectionate of brothers. You will not love me less that I am true to him.
Then, again, how will it affect you to know that I have united my destiny with that of an obscure young man,—younger than myself; a person of no intellectual culture, and in whom, in short, you will see no reason for my choosing; yet more, that this union is of long standing; that we have with us our child, of a year old, and that it is only lately I acquainted my family with the fact?
If you decide to meet with me as before, and wish to say something about the matter to your friends, it will be true to declare that there have been pecuniary reasons for this concealment. But to you, in confidence, I add, this is only half the truth; and I cannot explain, or satisfy my dear friend farther—I should wish to meet her independent of all relations; but, as we live in the midst of “society,” she would have to inquire for me now as Margaret Ossoli. That being done, I should like to say nothing further on the subject.
However you may feel about all this, dear Madame Arconati, you will always be the same in my eyes. I earnestly wish you may not feel estranged, but, if you do, I would prefer that you should act upon it. Let us meet as friends, or not at all. In all events, I remain
Margaret [Letters, V, 249-50]
48. To Ellen Channing, December 11, 1849
Whatever their relations were earlier, there is evidence in 1849 of great tenderness between Fuller and her sister, both sorely tried mothers. In the month after she wrote this letter from Florence, Fuller was pained to learn that Ellen was to have another child by Ellery, who had fled during her last delivery. “Her courage in sustaining the consequences of her mistaken choice is truly admirable” (Houghton MS), she wrote to Arthur.
. . . You are anxious, my dear Ellen, to know some details of my past history and I should like to gratify you, but I hardly know how. There are some reasons which I cannot explain, further than by the remark that Ossoli is still a member of the Roman Catholic church, why I do not go into all the matter of past history. I cannot, at least at present, tell exactly the facts, so I choose to say nothing. I should be glad if he disengaged himself entirely from the Roman ritual, but I doubt he ever will; his habitual attachment to it is strong, and I do not trouble myself about it as no priest has any influence over his mind.
About him I do not like to say much, as he is an exceedingly delicate person. He is not precisely reserved, but it is not natural to him to talk about the objects of strong affection. I am sure he would not try to describe me to his sister, but would rather she would take her own impression of me, and, as much as possible, I wish to do the same by him. I expect that, to many of my friends Mr. Emerson for one, he will be nothing, and they will not understand that I should have life in common with him. But I do not think he will care; he has not the slightest tinge of self-love; he has throughout our intercourse been used to my having many such ties; he has no wish to be anything to persons with whom he does not feel spontaneously bound, and when I am occupied is happy in himself. But some of my friends and my family who will see him in the details of practical life, cannot fail to prize the purity and simple strength of his character, and, should he continue to love me as he has done, to consider his companionship will be an inestimable blessing to me. I say if, because all human affections are frail, and I have experienced too great revulsions in my own not to know it, yet I feel great confidence in the permanence of his love. It has been unblemished so far, under many trials, especially as I have been more sick, desponding and unreasonable in many ways than I ever was before and more so, I hope, than I ever shall be again. But at all such times, he never had a thought except to sustain and cheer me; he is capable of the sacred love, the love passing that of women, he showed it to his father, to Rome, to me, now he loves his child in the same way. I think he will be an excellent father, though he could not speculate about it, or, in fact about anything.
Our meeting was singular, fateful I may say. Very soon he offered me his hand through life, but I never dreamed I should take it. I loved him and felt very unhappy to leave him, but the connexion seemed so every way unfit, I did not hesitate a moment. He, however, thought I should return to him, as I did. I acted upon a strong impulse. I could not analyze at all what passed in my mind. I neither rejoice nor grieve, for bad or for good, I acted out my character. Had I never connected myself with any one my path was clear, now it is all bid, but in that case my development must have been partial. As to marriage I think the intercourse of heart and mind may be fully enjoyed without entering into this partnership of daily life, still I do not find it burdensome. We get along very well and I find have our better intercourse as much as if we did not buy (unhappily we have nothing to sell) together. The friction that I have seen mar so much the domestic happiness of others does not occur with us, or at least bas not. Then there is the pleasure of always being at hand to help one another.
Still all this I had felt before in some degree. The great novelty, the immense gain to me is my relation with my child. I thought the mother’s heart lived in me before, but it did not. I knew nothing about it. Yet before his birth I dreaded it. I thought I should not survive, but if I did and my child did, was I not cruel to bring another into this terrible world. I could not at that time get any other view. When he was born that deep melancholy changed at once into rapture, but it did not last long, then came the prudential motherhood, then came Mrs. Edgworth, Mrs. Smith. I became a coward, a caretaker not only for the morrow but impiously faithless twenty or thirty years ahead. It seemed wicked to have brought the tender little thing into the midst of cares and perplexities we had not feared in the least for ourselves. I imagined everything; be was to be in danger of every enormity the Croats were then committing upon the babies of Lombardy. The house would be burned over his head, but if he escaped, how were we to get money to buy his bibs and primers. Then his father was to be killed in the fighting, and I to die of my cough. Your hazarding the opinion dear Ellen [tha]t it would have been best to tell Mother any part of [paper torn] till I arrived at some “clearing” however fruitless, and waterless, only shows the impossibility of judging for others in their great trials. I have borne Mother much love, and shown her some, and never more than by standing quite alone, in those strangely darkening days. I grieve she should have suffered now, but that is nothing in comparison with anxiety she might have been made to feel.
During the siege of Rome I could not see my little boy. What I endured at that time in various ways not many would survive. In the burning sun I went every day to wait in the crowd for letters about him. Often they did not come. I saw blood that streamed on the wall where Ossoli was. I have a piece of bomb that burst close to him. I sought solace in tending the suffering men. But when I beheld the beautiful fair young men bleeding to death, or mutilated for life, I felt the wo of all the mothers who had nursed each to that full flower, to see it thus cut down. I felt the consolation, too for those youths died worthily. I was the Mater Dolorosa, and I remembered that the midwife who helped Angelino into the world came from the sign of the Mater Dolorosa. I thought, even if he lives, if he comes into the world at this great troubled time, terrible with perplexed duties, it may be to die thus at twenty years, one of a glorious hecatomb indeed, but still a sacrifice. It seemed then I was willing he should die. But when I really saw him lingering as he did all July and August between life and death, I could not let him go unless I could go with him.
When I saw his first smile, his poor wan feeble smile and more than four weeks we watched him night and day before we saw it, new resolution dawned in my heart, I resolved to live day by day and hour by hour for his dear sake and feed on ashes when offered. So if he is only treasure lent, if he must go as sweet Waldo did, as my little Pickie, as my children do, I shall at least have these days and hours with him. Now he is in the highest health and so gay—we cannot but feel happy in him, though the want of money is so serious a thing. . . .
. . . My love to dear Eliz[abet]h I wish she and Mr Emerson would write to me, but I suppose they dont know what to say. Tell them there is no need to say anything about these affairs if they dont want to. I am just the same for them I was before yr affec sister M. [Houghton MS]
49. To Marcus and Rebecca Spring, December 12, 1849
In a long letter she wrote in Florence to her Quaker friends, the Springs, Fuller tried to sort out her political ideas, to measure how far she had come from their pacifism and how close she could move toward American Fourierism. She also congratulated Marcus on initiating at home a public laundry like the one they had seen in London. At the end of this excerpt, she refers to a loan she had made impetuously in New York to Harro Harring, which even her fear of “the dragon of poverty” could not make her regret. She went on to refuse Marcus’ offer of money, though she begged him to “go to Wiley & Putnam and ask if all that stuff published as my miscellanies is forever to be unprofitable as well as flat and stale.”
Dear Marcus & Rebecca,
. . . I have become a enthusiastic Socialist; elsewhere is no comfort, no solution for the problems of the times. I rejoice in what you tell of some successful practical study at the N[orth]. A[merican]. Phalanx. I wish you had told more explicitly why you return to business in the common way. Was it because you needed more money? or because a truly congenial course was not yet clearly marked out for you? It is an excellent thing you have done about that washing house. Blessed be he who gets one such good thing done while the rest of us are only blundering observing, perhaps learning something. What you say is deeply true about the peace way being the best. If any one see clearly how to work in that way, let him in God’s name. Only if he abstain from fighting against giant wrongs let him be sure he is really once ardently at work undermining them or better still sustaining the rights that are to supplant them. Meanwhile I am not sure that I can keep my hands free from blood. I doubt I have not the strength. Cobden is good, but if he had stood in Kossuth’s place, would he have not drawn his sword against the Austrian? You, Marcus, could you let a Croat insult Rebecca, carry off Eddie to be an Austrian serf; and leave little Marcus bleeding in the dust? Yet it is true that while Moses slew the Egyptian, Christ stood to be spit upon and that Death to man could do no harm. You have the truth—you have the right-but could you act it, Marcus in all circumstances? Stifled under the Roman priesthood would you not have thrown it off with all your force? Would you have waited unknown centuries hoping the moment when you could use another method? If so, you are a Christian; you know I never pretended to be except in dabs and sparkles here and there. Yet the agonies of that baptism of blood I felt, Oh how deeply in the golden June days of Rome. Consistent no way, I felt I should have shrunk back, I could not have had it shed. Christ did not have to see his dear ones pass the dark river; he could go alone; however, in prophetic spirit no doubt, he foresaw the crusades. In answer to what you say of Barro, I wish indeed the little effort I made for him had been wiselier applied. Yet these are not the things one regrets. It does not do to calculate too closely with the affectionate human impulse; we must be content to make many mistakes or we should move too slowly to help our brothers much . . . . [Houghton MS copy]
50. To Caroline Sturgis Tappan [circa December 17, 1849]
Later that month, while gathering the force to face the future, Fuller wrote another long letter, now badly tom, to Carolyn Sturgis. She itemized the many kinds of division life held for her then: motherly pride and fear of spies, literary accomplishment and self-doubt, family outings and curses on the unsuspecting Austrians.
. . . I do not know what to write about [Angelino]: he changes so much; has so many characters; he is like me in that, his father’s character is simple and uniform, though not monotonous, more than are the flowers of spring, flowers of the valley.
He is now in the most perfect rosy health, a very gay impetuous, ardent, but sweet tempered child. He seems to me to have nothing in common with the first baby with its exstatic smiles, its exquisite sensitiveness and a distinction in gesture and attitudes that struck every body. His temperament seems changed by taking the milk of these robust women. His form is robust . . . .
I feel so refreshed by his young life. Ossoli diffuses such a peace and sweetness over every day that I cannot endure to think yet of our future. Too much have we suffered already trying to command it. I do not feel force to make any effort yet. I suppose that very soon now I must do something. I hope I shall feel able when the time comes. I do not yet.
My constitution seems making an effort to rally by dint of much sleep. I had slept so little for a year and a half, during the last months in pregnancy never an hour in peace after the baby’s birth, such anxiety and anguish, when separated from him, I was consumed as by nightly fever. I constantly started up seeming to hear him call me. The last two months at Rome would have destroyed almost any woman then, when I went to him, he was so ill and I was constantly up with him at night, carrying him about, feeding him. At Perugia he began to get better. Then when we arrived here the Police [wanted] to send us away. It was as [much] as three weeks before we could [get] permission to stay. Now for two months we have been tranquil; we have resolved to repose and enjoy being together as much as we cou[ld], in this brief interval, perhaps all we shall ever know of peace. It is very sad we have no money; we could be so quietly happy a while. I rejoice in all Ossoli did but the results, in this our earthly state, are disastrous, especially as my strength is now so much impaired. This much I do hope, in life or death to be no more separated from Angelino. Last winter I made the most vehement efforts at least to redeem the time, hoping thus good for the future. But, of at least two volumes written at that time, no line seems of any worth. I had suffered much constraint, much that was uncongenial, harassing, even agonizing, but this kind of pain found me unprepared. The position of a mother separated from her only child is too frightfully unnatural. . . .
29th . . . The Christmas holidays . . . interest me now through my child as they never did for myself. I like to go out and watch the rising generation who will be his contemporaries. On sunday I went with the Italian friend I mentioned [Arconati] in her carriage to the Cascine, after we had taken the drive, we sat down on a stone seat in the sunny walk to see the people walk by. The Grand Duke and his children, the elegant Austrian officers who will be driven out of Italy when Angelino is a man; Princess Demidoff with her hussars, Harry Sorrequer and his absurd brood; M. de Corceilles who helped betray Rome; many lovely children; many little frisking dogs with their bells. The sun shone brightly on the Amo; a bark moved gently by. All seemed good to the baby. He laid himself back in my arms, smiling, singing to himself, dancing his feet. I hope he will retain some trace in his mind of the perpetual exhilarating picture of Italy . . . . Christmas day I was just up, and Nino all naked on his sofa, when came some beautiful large toys that had been sent him a bird, a horse, a cat that could be moved to express different things. It almost made me cry to see the kind of fearful rapture with which he regarded them, legs and arms extended, fingers and toes quivering, mouth made up to a little round O, eyes dilated; for a long time he did not even wish to touch them. After he began to he was different with all the three: loving the bird; very wild and shouting with the horse, with the cat, putting her face close to his, staring in her eyes, and then throwing her away. Afterwards I drew him in a lottery at a child’s party given by Mrs. Greenough, a toy of a child asleep on the neck of a tiger. The tiger is stretching up to look at the child; this he likes best of any of his toys. It is sweet to see him when he gets used to them and plays by himself, whispering to them, seeming to contrive stories. You would laugh to know how much remorse I feel that I never gave children more toys in the course of my life. I regret all the money I ever spent on myself in little presents for grown people, hardened sinners. I did not know what pure delight could be bestowed . . . . [Houghton MS]
51. To William Henry Channing [circa late July 1849] and December 17, 1849
Although the passages below exist only in copies by another hand, the case for their authenticity is strong, as no one else in Fuller’s circle would have voiced these views; only a few phrases from them have ever been published. No recipient is indicated, but the “dear William” was doubtless Channing. It appears that his candid inquiries about her marriage prompted the sharing of her most intimate thoughts. She expresses in the enigmatic second sentence her abandonment of her old ideal of perfect, even mystical, union and presents a new realistic commitment to a gratifying, if limited, relation. (The letter is postdated in still another hand, “July, 1849.”)
a. What shall I say to you of his father? If earthly union be meant for the beginning of one permanent and full we ought not to be united, for the time was gone when I could more than prefer any man. Yet I shall never regret the step which has given me the experience of a mother and satisfied domestic wants in a most sincere and sweet companion.
Once you said to me in speaking of your two natures “Sometimes I feel as if would fain have been a violet, stilly growing in the precincts of the ancient forest.” That is exactly true of him, my gentle friend, ignorant of great ideas, ignorant of books, enlightened as to his duties by pure sentiment and an unspoiled nature, but never failing in the degree that his nature has once promised.
The tie leaves me mentally free, as I wish him also to remain. I trust in the midst of a false world, we may be able to sustain some degree of truth, though indeed children involve one too deeply, in this corrupt social contract and truth is easier to those who have not them. I however pined too much and was too suffocated without a child of my own. I say again I am not strong as we thought.
b. My love for Ossoli is most pure and tender, nor has any one, except little children or mother, ever loved me as genuinely as he does. To you, dear William I was obliged to make myself known; others have loved me with a mixture of fancy and enthusiasm excited by my talent at embellishing subjects. He loves me from simple affinity; he loves to be with me, and serve and soothe me. Our relation covers only a part of my life, but I do not perceive that it interferes with anything I ought to have or be; I do not feel anyway constrained or limited or that I have made any sacrifice. Younger I might, because I should have been exposed to love some other in a way that might give him pain, but I do not now feel apprehensive of that. There is more danger for him, as he is younger than I; if he should, I shall do all that this false state of society permits to give him what freedom he may need. I have thought a great deal about this; there are things I do not wish to put on paper. I daresay I shall tell them to you when we meet. You speak as if I might return to America without him. I thought of it at one time, knowing it would be very trying for him to go with me, that when I first am with my former friends, he may have many lonely hours. Beside he had then an employment in Rome and we needed the money. I thought I would go and either write for him to come for me, or return to Italy. But now that cannot be. He could not at present re-enter Rome without danger; he is separated from his employment and his natural friends, nor is any career open for him in Italy at present. Then I could not think of taking away the child for several months; his heart is fixed on the child as fervently as mine. Then it would not only be very strange and sad to me to be without his love and care for weeks and months, but I should feel very anxious about him under present circumstances. I trust we shall find means to make the voyage together and remain together. In our country he will have for resources, his walks and quiet communings with nature, which is always so great a part of his life; he will have the child, and I think my family, expecially my mother, will love him very dearly and he will be learning the language with them. I suppose I must myself be engaged in the old unhealthy way, life will probably be a severe struggle. I hope I shall be able to live through it, and not neglect my child, nor Ossoli. He has suffered enough; it has ploughed furrows in his life since first we met. He has done all he could and cannot blame himself. Our destiny is sad; we [must] brave it as we can. I hope we shall always feel mutual tenderness, and Ossoli has a simple child-like piety that will make it easier for him. [Letters, V, 248, 300-01]
52. To Emelyn and William Story, April 16 and May 10, 1850
On May 2, 1850, Fuller was making plans for leaving Italy. “I could have lived here always, full of bright visions, and expanding in my faculties, had destiny permitted,” she wrote Lewis Cass, Jr., the U.S. Charged Affaires in Rome (Kindred Papers, pp. 384-85). Realistic pessimism sets the tone of these letters to the Storys.
a . . . . There is a bark at Leghorn highly spoken of, which sails at the end of this month, we shall very likely take that. You ask me to pass the next year with you in Paris, how mucti I should have liked it, but I find it imperatively necessary to go to the U.S. if I want to have my arrangements made that may free me from care. Will I be more fortunate in person? I do not know, I am ill adapted to push my claims and my pretensions; but, at least, it will not be such slow work passing from disappointment to disappointment as here where I wait upon the Post Office—wait two or three months to know the fate of any proposition. Enough! . . .
I go home prepared to expect everything that is painful and difficult. It will be a consolation to see mother, and my dear brother Eugene whom I have not seen for ten years, hopes to come to New England this summer on that account I wish to go this year. I had already heard from many quarters, dear E., of your letter to the Lowells, it had a very happy effect, & I was pleased that they particularly should take pains to show it as they did. I am glad to have people favorably impressed, because I feel lazy & weak, unlike the trouble of friction or the pain of conquest, still I feel a good deal of contempt for those so easily disconcerted or reassured. I was not a child. I had lived in the midst of that blessed society in a way that entitled me to esteem and a favorable interpretation, where there was doubt about my motives or actions. I pity those who are inclined to think ill, when they might as well have inclined the other way, however let them go: there are many in the world who stand the test; enough to keep us from shivering to death. . . .
[Houghton MS copy]
b. We are upon the move and my head full of boxes, bundles, pots of jelly and phials of medicine. I never thought much about a journey for myself, except to try to return all the things, books especially, which I had been borrowing but about my child I feel anxious lest I should not take what is necessary for his health and comfort on this long voyage, where omissions are irreparable. The unpropitious weather (for after our Siberian winter we have rain all the spring rain from 4th April up to this 10th May,) rainy weather delays us now from day to day, as our ship the “Elizabeth”; (look out for news of shipwreck) cannot finish taking in her cargo till come one or two good days . . . .
I leave Italy with most sad and unsatisfied heart, hoping indeed, to return, but fearing that may not in my “cross-biassed” life be permitted till strength of feeling and keenness of perception be less than during these bygone rich, if troubled, years . . . .
I reread the letter with shame, but really I cannot write to those I prize most. I am so sad and weary leaving Italy that I seem paralyzed. . . . To you may every Fate be propitious as you merit, & may we meet some day in more peace & amid as generous influences as those of Rome . . . . [Houghton MS copy]
53. To Marcus Spring, June 3, 1850
In her farewell note to her close friend, Arconati, Fuller said she should embark composedly, “praying, indeed fervently, that it may not be my lot to lose my babe at sea, either by unsolaced sickness, or amid the howling waves; or that, if I should, it may be brief anguish, and Ossoli, he, and I go together” (Emerson, Notebook on MFO). It was the sickness that struck first after the little family set sail on May 17, 1850. Fuller’s last letter, written on shipboard to the Springs, who had brought her to Europe, was mailed at Gibraltar after the death of the captain, Seth Hasty. Like most of her letters of 1850, this was a conscious farewell.
. . . I had taken passage with Captain Hasty, one who seemed to me one of the best and most highminded of our American men, he showed the kindest interest in me, his wife, an excellent woman, was with him—I thought, during the voyage, if safe, and my child well, to have as much respite from care and pain as sea-sickness would permit. But scarcely was that enemy in some measure quelled, when the captain fell sick. At first his disease presented the appearance of nervous fever. I was with him a great deal—indeed, whenever I could relieve his wife from a ministry softened by great love and the heroism of womanly courage. The last days were truly terrible with disgusts and fatigues; for he died we suppose (no physician has been allowed to come on board to see the body) of confluent small pox. I have seen since we parted great suffering but nothing physical to be compared to this, where the once fair and expressive mould of man is thus lost in corruption before life has fled. He died yesterday morning, and was buried in deep water, the American Consul’s barge towing out one from this ship which bore the body, about six o’clock. It was Sunday a divinely calm soft glowing afternoon had succeeded a morning of bleak cold wind. You cannot think how beautiful the whole thing was—the decent array and sad reverence of the sailors; the many ships with their banners flying the stem pillar of Hercules all veiled in roseate vapor; the little angelwhite sails diving into the blue depths with that solemn spoil of the poor good man so still who had been so agonized and gasping as the last sun stooped.—Yes! it was beautiful but how dear a price we pay for the poems of this world! We shall now be in Quarantine a week, no person permitted to come on board till it is seen whether disease may break out in other cases. I have no good reason to think it will not; yet do not feel afraid. Ossoli has had it, so is safe: the baby is of course subject to injury. In the earlier days before I suspected small pox I carried him twice into the sick-room, at request of the Captain, who was becoming fond of him. He laughed and pointed. He did not discern danger but only thought it odd to see the old friend there in bed. It is vain by prudence to seek to evade the stem assaults of Destiny. I submit. Should all end well, you see we shall be in N. York later than we expected but keep a look-out. Should we arrive safe I should like to see a friendly face. Commend me to dear William and other of my dear friends, especially Jane. And Marcus, Rebecca, Eddie with most affectionate wishes that, joy and peace may continue to dwell in your house adieu and love—as you can
Margaret [Houghton MS copy]
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