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
PART VII
Supplement
CONTEMPORARIES ON FULLER
1. Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Lydia Maria Child, February 15, 1845
“A natural person,—a most rare thing in this age of cant and pretension.” So did Fuller, at sixteen, describe her new friend Lydia Maria Francis (1802-80), already a successful novelist, with whom she was reading de Staël and Locke (Letters, I, 154). The Frugal Housewife won the then Mrs. Child a reputation that was dashed in 1833 by her controversial abolitionist book, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. While Fuller did not yet share Child’s abolitionist views, she explored questions about Native Americans, women, and reform in comparable ways. She reviewed several of Child’s works in the Tribune, and the two women visited each other in New York. Child’s journalism and legal help won Amelia Norman acquittal of the charge of stabbing her seducer; in Woman, Fuller praised Child’s “straight-forward nobleness” for waking the public to the idea that “the perdition of a woman must involve that of a man.” On her side, Child was friendly to Fuller, but privately regretted her egotism, judging it “the consequence of her father’s early injudicious culture, never allowed to forget herself” (Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880, ed. Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland, p. 231). Fuller’s Günderode won her least equivocal praise— “No writer has ever made me so wild with joy, as Bettina” (ibid., p. 211)—but she wrote in advance of the publication of Woman to signal Fuller’s courage.
This is the title of a book now in press in this city, which will be likely to excite a good deal of remark, for and against. It is from the pen of Margaret Fuller, a woman of more powerful intellect, comprehensive thought, and thorough education, than any other American authoress, with whose productions I am acquainted. Her style is vigorous and significant, abounding with eloquent passages, and affluent in illustration; but it is sometimes rough in construction, and its meaning is not always sufficiently clear. This does not arise from affectation, or pedantic elaboration; it is the defect of a mind that has too many thoughts for its words; an excess by no means common, either in men or women. She is a contralto voice in literature: deep, rich, and strong, rather than mellifluous and clear.
The book in question is written in a free energetic spirit. It contains a few passages that will offend the fastidiousness of some readers; for they allude to subjects which men do not wish to have discussed, and which women dare not approach. But the clean-minded will not sneer; for they will see that the motive is pure, and the object is to ennoble human nature.
There is a great deal of unuttered thought and suppressed feeling, concerning the terrible discords of society, as it now exists. The passion of love, divorced from the pure and elevating sentiment, is felt to be unsatisfactory, as well as degrading. More and more earnestly rise the questions, “Is love a mockery, and marriage a sham? What is woman’s true mission? What is the harmonious relation of the sexes?”
This extending murmur of the human heart, this increasing conviction that woman should be the friend, the companion, the real partner of man in all his pursuits, rather than the mere ornament of his parlor, or the servant of his senses, cannot be silenced.
The author of “Woman in the Nineteenth Century,” has uttered noble aspirations on this subject, rather than definite theories. She is wise enough to see, that to purify the atmosphere will gradually affect all forms of life.
I quote a few passages at random, to give some idea of the import and tendencies of the book . . . . [Broadway Journal, February 15, 1845, p. 97; rpt., Critical Essays, p. 7]
2. “Portrait of a Distinguished Authoress,” Edgar Allan Poe, March 8, 1845
Mounting internal and external evidence, Burton R. Pollin argues persuasively (Women and Literature 5 [Spring 1977]: 47-50) that the following lampoon, published in the Broadway Journal and accompanying the caricature by Samuel E. Brown, was written by Poe shortly after Fuller’s coming to New York. Poe extended his joke about the ink being “too blue” in a piece two months later: “When we think very ill of a woman, and wish to blacken her character, we merely call her ‘a blue-stocking.’” Hoboken was the notorious site of duels; Pollin speculates that Poe pretends here to fear Greeley’s chivalric defense of Fuller. She wrote nothing like the ode named in the last sentence; the Transcendentalists as a group are Poe’s target here.
No person of proper feeling can peruse the works of a distinguished author or authoress (the latter is a very absurd word, to be sure, but for that very reason the more necessary,) without an instantaneous desire to make his (or her) personal acquaintance—provided always that the said author (or authoress) has not committed himself (or herself) to the extent of perpetraying [sic] criticisms full of “carping littleness” upon the last “Sonnet to the Katy-Did,” or the next to the last “Sonnet to the Katy-Did’nt,” [sic] composed by the person of proper feeling aforesaid—for, in such a case as we have imagined, the identical “proper feeling” of which we speak, would of course induce the person to get as far away from the critic as possible. But, as a general rule, we are always inquisitive about the physical appearance of a celebrated author; and it is but a sort of corrollary [sic] from this proposition, that if we are prevented by unhappy circumstances, from beholding the author himself, we still entertain a longing to see his portrait. If we cannot see this, we get his autograph if possible—but if this again is not to be discovered, we then regard ourselves as unfortunate beings and subject to an especial dispensation on the part of Providence.
It is with a view of ministering to this very commendable curiosity that we furnish our readers, this week, with the subjoined engraving.—It either is, or ought to be, an accurate portrait of one of the most distinguished of American authoresses. We are not quite sure that we have ever seen a more striking likeness, and we presume it will be recognized at once by all who have ever met the original. We might pick out, perhaps, a few material points of variation, and we would do so upon the spot, were it not for fear of offending the artist, who is an exceedingly sensitive person. But for this, we would say, for example, that the nose is a little—a very little too Grecian.—That the “fine phrenzy” of the eyes has not been preserved so decidedly as it should be—that the chin has too shrewish a character—that the little finger of the left hand is too straight (or perhaps a little too crooked)—that the table is too round the feather of the pen too feathery—and the ink (as far as we can judge of it through a metal ink-stand), too blue. We forebear to give the name of the original, because, in the case of the ladies, an editor must be cautious how he deals in personalities—and we cannot be sure of not having an invitation to Hoboken forthwith. The name, however, is a point of no consequence. The portrait will be recognised the world over—if not, the fault will lie in that rather unusual acidity of expression worn at present by the fair lady, who happens to be engaged in a perusal of one of our criticisms upon her antepenultimate ode “To the Universe.” [Broadway Journal, March 8, 1845, p. 153. Reproduced with permission of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.]
3. Summer on the Lakes and “Miss Fuller and Reformers,” Orestes A. Brownson, October 1844, and April 1845
Orestes Brownson (1803-76) was a volatile and strenuous believer, moving from Universalism to Unitarianism and, in 1844, to Catholicism. Although he once courted the Transcendentalists, hoping to publish their work in his magazine, he became one of Fuller’s more vigorous critics. While he was a radical on class, the menace of change in gender relations made him vituperative. Discerning Fuller’s subversive power in the first passage below, he faults German romanticism. In the second essay, he writes of Woman, “It has neither beginning, middle, nor end, and may be read backwards as well as forwards, and from the centre outwards each way without affecting the continuity of the thought or the succession of the ideas.” This excerpt confronts the twin threat posed by Fuller’s independence of orthodox Christianity and her appropriation of pagan iconography.
a. The publishers tell us that this book has had a very respectable sale, which we are glad to learn, for the writer’s sake. Miss Fuller is a woman of more than ordinary abilities, and, we are told, of rare attainments. She is said to possess remarkable conversational powers, and her conversations, which she has been in the habit of holding, we believe, as a means of meeting her expenses, are represented by her friends to be in the highest degree brilliant, instructive, and inspiring. This we can partly believe, though we have never had the honor of listening to her in her happiest moments. Her writings we do not like. We dislike them exceedingly. They are sent out in a slipshod style, and have a certain toss of the head about them which offends us. Miss Fuller seems to us to be wholly deficient in a pure, correct taste, and especially in that tidiness we always look for in woman. Then, we detest her doctrines. We know nothing more abominable. She is a heathen priestess, though of what god or goddess we will not pretend to say. She is German, heart and soul, save so far as Germany may retain traditionally somewhat of Christianity. We believe no person has appeared among us whose conversation and writings have done more to corrupt the minds and hearts of our Boston community. For religion she substitutes Art; for the Divinity who has made us, and whom we should worship she would give us merely the Beautiful; and for the stem morality of the Gospel, such principles as we may collect from the Wahlverwandtschaften, and Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child. She is, in fact, the high-priestess of American Transcendentalism, and, happily, ministers now at an almost deserted fane.
We admit that she has read much and variously; but her notions are crude, and the materials she has collected lie fermenting in her intellectual stomach, and generate all manner of strange and diseased fancies. She is ill at ease. She has no quiet, no repose. She has no faith, no hope. She now reminds us of the old heathen Euripides, now of the modem skeptic, Byron, and finally, of the cold indifferentism of Goethe dashed on the warm woman’s heart of Bettina Brentano. We see in her a melancholy instance of the fate which awaits a gifted woman in an age of infidelity. All she needs, to be the ornament of her sex, and a crown of blessing to her country, to be at peace with herself and the world, is the firm, old-fashioned Catholic faith in the Gospel. Her soul would then burst its fetters, all her powers would find free scope, and her heart the rest after which it yearns . . . . [Brownson’s Quarterly Review 6 (October 1844), p. 546; rpt., Critical Essays, p. 5]
b. . .. Miss Fuller thinks it is man who has crowded woman one side, and refused her full scope for self-development; and although the sphere in which she moves may really be that most appropriate to her, yet man has no right to confine her to it, and forbid her to take another if she prefer it. She should be as free to decide her own destiny as man is his. All very plausible. But God, and not man, has assigned her the appropriate sphere; and, moreover, we must be ungallant enough to question Miss Fuller’s leading doctrine of the perfect social and political equality of the sexes. She says man is not the head of the woman. We, on the authority of the Holy Ghost, say he is. The dominion was not given to woman, nor to man and woman conjointly, but to the man. Therefore the inspired Apostle, while he commands husbands to love and cherish their wives, commands wives to love and obey their husbands; and, even setting aside all considerations of divine inspiration, St. Paul’s authority is, to say the least, equal to that of Miss Fuller.
Miss Fuller would have all offices, professions, callings, pursuits thrown open to woman as to man; and seems to think that the lost Eden will not be recovered till the petticoat carries it over the breeches. She is quite sure the ancient heathens understood this matter better than we do. They had a juster appreciation of the dignity of woman. Their principal divinities were goddesses, and women ministered in the fane, and gave the responses of the oracles. She is greatly taken with Isis, Sita, Egyptian Sphinx, Ceres, Proserpine. Would she recall these ancient heathen deities, their ancient worship, filled with obscene rites and frightful orgies? Would she restore the Isiac worship? revive that of Syrian Astarte? reestablish the old custom which prevailed at Babylon, according to which every woman, on a certain festival, must prostitute herself to the first comer in honor of the goddess? readopt the old Phoenician method of obtaining marriage portions for dowerless daughters? have carried again in public procession certain pleasant images which Roman dames were eager to crown with wreaths of flowers? or reproduce the wild Bacchantes with loosened tresses and loosened robes, and lascivious satyrs? These and far worse obtained in the worship of those female divinities, and where woman served the fane, and gave the responses of the gods. Has it never occurred to our learned and philosophic lady to ask, if there was not some relation of cause and effect between the part women took in these ancient religions, and these filthy rites and shameful practices? . . . [Brownson’s Quarterly Review 7 (April 1845), pp. 253-54; rpt., Critical Essays, p. 22]
4. Woman in the Nineteenth Century, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, July 27, 1845
In Woman, Fuller called the popular romantic novelist, Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789-1867), “the clearest, wisest, and kindliest” of U.S. writers on women, praising her writing for being “moderate and sane, but never palsied by fear or sceptical caution. “In a letter to Anna Jameson, the British writer Fuller often cited, Sedgwick offers a mixed review.
In the various fermentations that are going on in our community there is much agitation on the subject of women’s rights. A Miss Fuller (Harriet Martineau’s “glorious Margaret Fuller”) has written a book called “Woman in the 19th century” in which she is as plain-spoken as the pentateuch on subjects upon which women have never spoken before. The men are shocked and disgusted and the women rather scared and uncertain what to say, or whether to speak at all. She is a woman of learning and much thought but she sometimes mistakes diversity for originality and untried novelties for great and nobly discovered truth. There are right and admirable suggestions to men and women in her book and she takes a real earnest pleasure in rendering honor to you—to whom from all women honor is due. The cause of Eve’s daughters is making progress here. Laws are enacting in many of the states in their favor . . . . [Catherine Maria Sedgwick Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society]
5. Papers on Literature and Art, Walt Whitman, November 9, 1846
Whitman often quoted passages in Fuller’s “American Literature” and in 1889 said, “She says somewhere—and it is a deep, deep cut—that a country may be full of newspapers, books, and yet not have a literature. Oh! that is a deep, deep cut!—not the less deep for being to all appearance innocent and yet how true—how irrefragably buttressed” (With Walt Whitman in Camden: September 15, 1889-July 6, 1890, ed. Gertrude Traubel and William White, p. 159). A clipping of her Tribune story about her night alone on Ben Lomond was found among Whitman’s papers at his death. In his book on the European revolutions (136-38), Larry Reynolds sees traces of the apocalyptical rhetoric of her final Tribune dispatches (VII:17) in Whitman’s early poem “Resurgemus.”
It is one of the common cantings of a certain set of people to speak of all the higher literary attempts of females—higher, we mean, than sentimental love stories, or weak rhyme—in a tone of supercilious contempt—a sort of “you-are-trenching-on-our-field” manner. Among people thus disposed, these writings of Miss Fuller, (why don’t she print it Susan M. or Sarah M., instead of S. Margaret—which is a sort of frippery way) will doubtless excite other feelings than approval. But we are not thus disposed. We think the female mind has peculiarly the capacity, and ought to have the privilege, to enter into the discussion of high questions of morals, taste, &c. We therefore welcome Miss Fuller’s papers, right heartily. [Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 9, 1846, p. 2]
6. “Stray Leaves from a Seamstress’s Journal,” October 1853
Paulina Wright Davis made the name of Spenser’s heroine signify “Truth in its reformatory agency” when she launched The Una: A Paper Devoted to the Elevation of Woman in 1853. The author of this working-class novella serialized in The Una might have found her complaint addressed in Fuller’s dispatches from Europe (e.g., V:22b).
1846.—Last night I sat up all night, to read a new book, “Woman in the Nineteenth Century, by Miss Fuller.”
Mrs. W. came in to direct about her work, she held this book in her hand; I cast upon it many a longing look; perhaps she saw this, and purposely left it for me. I did not ask for it; not once in my four year’s struggle with the world have I asked a favor, for well I know the distrust and coldness with which we are looked upon; but oh! this hungering and thirsting for reading, for a knowledge of what is going on in the world, it is becoming irrepressible.
This book marks an era in my life. It is as though on its journey I had set up a white stone, to signify a night of rest, a day of thought, a glimpse of the divine life.
I shall never know the author of this work, but she is interested for women, and is groping to the light, that she may aid them, may do them good.
She is the child of genius, and as such, must be an idealist; a veil is between her and the rude, practical, every-day working world. She may write, and teach, and call herself a laborer, but this brings her only into distant relationship with us.
Oh! if she would but come into our attics, our cheerless comfortless homes, where there is nothing beautiful, where the pure air of heaven visits us but scantily, and the sun only glances in to make our poverty the more apparent; if she would see us toiling fourteen and sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, and living on, with no hope for the future, combatting hand to hand, with our destiny; if she would look into the eyes, and down into the souls of the hundreds of pure young girls, that thirst for the bread and water of life that the heart demands, she would find an inspiration for her genius which would give it untold power. She would then realize how difficult, how almost impossible is self development, where there is only the means of keeping soul and body together. . . . [The Una, l (October 1853), p. 150]
7. On Wollstonecraft and Fuller and the Italian letters, George Eliot, October 13, 1855, and May 17, 1856
George Eliot (1819-80) and Fuller had much in common: both unusually learned, they were early promoters and translators of the German romantics; they supported themselves as journalists for about five years, writing frequently on behalf of women; they were close to prominent intellectuals and artists; they lived unmarried and unchaperoned abroad; they chose unconventional unions with men. After reading the Memoirs, Eliot wrote, “It is a help to read such a life as Margaret Fuller’s. How inexpressibly touching that passage from her journal—‘I shall always reign through the intellect, but the life! the life! O my God! shall that never be sweet?’ I am grateful, as if for myself that [her life] was sweet at last.” Eliot proposed in 1852 to write a full-scale article on Fuller’s life. Instead, she published pieces on her works in The Leader. The first, “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” was written after Eliot had settled in with the married George Henry Lewes. Already engaged with the women’s movement, Eliot displays a sometimes cautious, conservative approach in this essay; her avoidance of the more controversial issues in her subjects’ works and of their irregular domestic arrangements perhaps reflects self-protective as well as strategic decisions. Eliot’s professional judgment as a journalist is seen in the second piece, “Margaret Fuller’s Letters from Italy,” which also reflects Eliot’s powerful interest in that country’s history.
a . . . . Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century . . . has been unduly thrust into the background by less comprehensive and candid productions on the same subject. Notwithstanding certain defects of taste and a sort of vague spiritualism and grandiloquence which belong to all but the very best American writers, the book is a valuable one: it has the enthusiasm of a noble and sympathetic nature, with the moderation and breadth and large allowance of a vigorous and cultivated understanding. There is no exaggeration of woman’s moral excellence or intellectual capabilities; no injudicious insistance on her fitness for this or that function hitherto engrossed by men; but a calm plea for the removal of unjust laws and artificial restrictions, so that the possibilities of her nature may have room for full development.
It is interesting to compare this essay of Margaret Fuller’s published in its earliest form in 1843, with a work on the position of woman, written between sixty and seventy years ago—we mean Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman.
. . . There are several points of resemblance, as well as of striking difference, between the two books. A strong understanding is present in both; but Margaret Fuller’s mind was like some regions of her own American continent, where you are constantly stepping from the sunny “clearings” into the mysterious twilight of the tangled forest—she often passes in one breath from forcible reasoning to dreamy vagueness; moreover, her unusually varied culture gives her great command of illustration. Mary Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, is nothing if not rational; she has no erudition, and her grave pages are lit up by no ray of fancy. In both writers we discern, under the brave bearing of a strong and truthful nature, the beating of a loving woman’s heart, which teaches them not to undervalue the smallest offices of domestic care or kindliness. But Margaret Fuller, with all her passionate sensibility, is more of the literary woman, who would not have been satisfied without intellectual production; Mary Wollstonecraft, we imagine, wrote not at all for writing’s sake, but from the pressure of other motives. So far as the difference of date allows, there is a striking coincidence in their trains of thought; indeed, every important idea in the Rights of Woman, except the combination of home education with a common day-school for boys and girls, reappears in Margaret Fuller’s essay.
One point on which they both write forcibly is the fact that, while men have a horror of such faculty or culture in the other sex as tends to place it on a level with their own, they are really in a state of subjection to ignorant and feeble-minded women.
. . . [S]ome of the best things [Margaret Fuller] says are on the folly of absolute definitions of woman’s nature and absolute demarcations of woman’s mission. “Nature,” she says, “seems to delight in varying the arrangements, as if to show that she will be fettered by no rule; and we must admit the same varieties that she admits.” Again: “If nature is never bound down, nor the voice of inspiration stifled, that is enough. We are pleased that women should write and speak, if they feel need of it, from having something to tell; but silence for ages would be no misfortune, if that silence be from divine command, and not from man’s tradition.” . . .
Men pay a heavy price for their reluctance to encourage self-help and independent resources in women. The precious meridian years of many a man of genius have to be spent in the toil of routine, that an “establishment” may be kept up for a woman who can understand none of his secret yearnings, who is fit for nothing but to sit in her drawing-room like a doll-Madonna in her shrine. No matter. Anything is more endurable than to change our established formulae about women, or to run the risk of looking up to our wives instead of looking down on them. Sit divus, dummodo non sit vivus (let him be a god, provided he be not living), said the Roman magnates of Romulus; and so men say of women, let them be idols, useless absorbents of precious things, provided we are not obliged to admit them to be strictly fellow-beings, to be treated, one and all, with justice and sober reverence . . . . Unfortunately, many over-zealous champions of women assert their actual equality with men—nay, even their moral superiority to men—as a ground for their release from oppressive laws and restrictions. They lose strength immensely by this false position. If it were true, then there would be a case in which slavery and ignorance nourished virtue, and so far we should have an argument for the continuance of bondage. But we want freedom and culture for woman, because subjection and ignorance have debased her, and with her, Man . . . .
Both Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft have too much sagacity to fall into this sentimental exaggeration. Their ardent hopes of what women may become do not prevent them from seeing and painting women as they are. [The Leader, 6 (October 13, 1855), pp. 988-89; rpt. Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), pp. 199-206]
b. Every reader of Margaret Fuller’s Life must have felt the superiority of the letters she wrote from Italy over her earlier journals and correspondence. A straining after some unattained effect had given way to calm vigour, and magniloquence to noble simplicity. It was clear that the blossoming time of her nature had come. Her affections had been drawn into their proper channel; her intellect had found its proper soil in the deep rich loam of European civilization, and her wide sympathies had found a grand definite object in the struggles of the Italian people . . . .
[In At Home and Abroad; or, Things and Thoughts in America and Europe], it is again the letters written from Italy which chiefly arrest us. They have indeed a double value, a value not only biographical, but historical. A description, however fragmentary and impedect, of the events in Rome from 1847 to 1849, written on the spot by a foreign resident who could both feel and think forcibly, must have an interest quite apart from any special interest in the writer. It will bring those events nearer to the imagination of the ordinary reader, and help him to make a picture of what has hitherto perhaps been a rough diagram in his mind; and to the historian in search of materials it is likely to contribute some valuable touches . . . . [These letters] have no great merit considered as literature, and we could probably have afforded to neglect them, if Margaret Fuller’s manuscript History of the Italian Revolution had been rescued from the waves; but being, as they are, the only result left to us of her experience and observation in Rome, they are precious. . . .
[Fuller] observed what went forward in the Roman streets with the feeling of an artist, as well as of one who “loved the people well,” and her descriptions have often a fine mixture of the pathetic and the picturesque. [The Leader 7 (May 17, 1856), p. 475]
8. “Margaret Fuller Ossoli,” Caroline Healey Dall, July 1860
The nineteen-year-old amanuensis of Fuller’s 1841 Conversations wrote this retrospective piece on the occasion of the 1860 publication of Life Without and Life Within. At the time, Dall was giving a lecture series calling for the removal of educational and legal barriers to women. Excerpted from her essay below are Dall’s assessments of the received view of Fuller’s father’s rigor, of her arrogance, of Woman, and of her portraits. In b. below, the anonymous manuscript is Dall’s own; in d. the “old portrait” Dall prefers is on the cover of this edition, and the Hicks portrait is the frontispiece.
a. [In her autobiographical romance, Fuller wrote:] “My father’s influence upon me was great, but opposed to the natural unfolding of my character, which was fervent, of strong grasp, and disposed to infatuation and self-forgetfulness.” To foster these peculiarities would have been a worse service than the overstraining, whose results, it seems to us, Margaret naturally enough misjudged, while, by the thorough discipline he maintained, Mr. Fuller brought an influence to bear on her “infatuation,” the benefits of which she never ceased to feel, and came ultimately to understand. With her nightmares and somnambulisms, also, this severe régime and excessive study had little to do. They belong to such natures as hers. They are a part of the dreamy “self-forgetfulness”; and if an occasional indiscretion added to their horrors, they could not have been wholly escaped, under the most tender indulgence, by one of her class. If not overworked by requirements from without, a mind like hers must have overwrought itself.
b. The most common charge brought against Margaret is that of arrogance . . . . The only profitable question is, Did she accept, foster, hug to her bosom her own frailties, or did she in the main, at all events ultimately, see their true nature, and put them under subjection? . . .
. . . From a manuscript for some time in our possession, we copy the following statement—a very fair one it seems to us—of the impression she sometimes made upon truly noble souls.
This statement, nowhere so distinctly made in the Memoirs, but involved in facts to which they bear witness, may for the sake of truth be made once, but for the sake of all honor and nobleness it should be for ever after set aside. We balance it, first, by her own words concerning Carlyle, showing how much more just she could be to others than we are to her, and then by the prayer which Mr. Channing quotes from her Diary, under date of the very hour which rang with complaints of her conceit and coldness.
All this was true of her who wrote it, and who, at the moment of misapprehension, wrote also this truly Christianlike prayer: “Father, let me not injure my fellows during this period of repression. I feel that, when we meet, my tones are not so sweet as I would have them. O let me not wound! I who know so well how wounds can bum and ache should not inflict them. Let my touch be light and gentle. Let me not fail to be kind and tender when need is.” Here her keen intellectuality detected a pharisaic satisfaction in the very humility of her petition, and her truth breaks through to close in these words: “Yet I would not assume an overstrained poetic magnanimity. Help me to do just right, and no more.” Do the records of womanhood show us a finer instance of self-knowledge and humble seeking?
c. “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” . . . is doubtless the most complete, brilliant, and scholarly statement ever made upon this subject. Its terse epigrammatic sentences have furnished more than one watchword to the reformers with whom the author herself was never associated. The book is interesting as the strongest expression of the aggressive and reformatory element in her. She was interested in the social pioneers of whom she often spoke lightly, and it was reserved for Italy to teach her the practical value of an abstract idea.
d. [In Hicks’ portrait painted in Rome] there is great ideality and sweetness in the expression,—a certain look we always hoped would dawn and nestle there. Those who saw her after a mother’s hope had risen in her heart say that this was a good likeness; but we cannot but miss the old portrait, published, we think, in a former edition of “Woman in the Nineteenth Century.” If the later portrait gives an idea of more personal beauty than Margaret possessed, it wholly fails of that majestic, Juno-like curve of the throat, which was more than beauty. If it was, as in the engraved countenance now given us, that her eyes dilated and her lips grew tender when she gazed upon the wounded men in those Italian hospitals, let us know it; but we cannot be satisfied to possess only a likeness which not one of her early friends would recognize. [North American Review 91 (July 1860), pp. 120-23, 127, 129; rpt., Critical Essays, pp. 103, 104-05, 107, 109]
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