Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  Of course Margaret sympathized with this “small minority”—the “Transcendental party,” she called them—who were the first “since the Revolution” to experience a “violent reaction” against the established “mode of culture,” recognizing a half-century after the birth of American democracy that “political freedom does not necessarily produce liberality of mind, nor freedom in church institutions.” New England was finally “old enough,” Margaret understood, and “some there have leisure enough,” she wrote to William in Cincinnati, to look around and decry the “vulgarity of a commercial aristocracy,” to “quarrel with all that is, because it is not spiritual enough.” She was troubled, however, that no motivating principle had emerged from the group other than a habitual negativism, as if it were “the duty of every good man . . . to utter a protest against what is done amiss.” She would aid “these men” in The Dial by “enabling them to express their thoughts, whether I coincide with them or not.” As with the Conversations, Margaret was most interested in promoting a practical, or “true utilitarian,” philosophy, which she hoped to accomplish by providing a vibrant literature to “combat” the “sluggishness, or worldliness” of so many who were “more anxious to get a living than to live mentally and morally.”

  Margaret felt instinctively that “the public wants something positive.” The Dial’s readers would respond to a “noble and full Yea”; and she believed she could deliver it, for “hearts beat so high, they must be full of something, and here is a way to breathe it out quite freely.” More than any others in the Transcendentalist band—for she was one of them, though not one of “these men”—Margaret saw aesthetic culture as a means of personal transformation, even transcendence. This was her gospel. At first, the “something positive” she would offer up was fundamentally a journal of the arts that would speak on a high plane to those with sophisticated tastes, and educate others to an understanding and appreciation of the life-affirming, soul-uplifting aspects of music, art, and literature—the “everlasting yes” that “breathes from the life, from the work of the artist,” as she would write in a Dial essay on the great composers.

  Margaret may have felt alone with this plan within the Transcendentalist circle, but others outside the group saw the same need. The thirty-five-year-old author of Twice-Told Tales, Nathaniel Hawthorne, thought it was “intolerable that there should not be a single belles-lettres journal in New England.” When Margaret met him at a party in Boston shortly after assuming editorship of The Dial, it was on music and sculpture that she held forth; the arrival in Boston of the German pianist Ludwig Rackemann and a show at the Boston Athenaeum gallery, the city’s prime exhibition space, were her latest preoccupations. Hawthorne, who’d attended the party with Sophia Peabody, to whom he was secretly engaged, was as shy as he was handsome, and may have said nothing in return. Two months later, with Sophia out of town, he begged off an invitation to a party hosted by George Bancroft at which Margaret would be present, preferring to avoid the company of “literary lions and lionesses” without the diminutive yet sociable Sophia “in the front of the battle.” But on this evening Sophia, an artist who, like Margaret, suffered from migraines, reported that the couple had “feasted” on quite “another species of fare” than the “Greek roses and oranges” served to the guests: Margaret spoke “like a sybil on the tripod”—one of the maidens at Delphi who seated themselves above a cleft in the Sibylline Rock to relay oracular messages from the deeps.

  Margaret also had Waldo Emerson on her side, holding her to what became their shared mission of presenting a Dial “measuring no hours but those of sunshine.” Waldo was no outsider with the Transcendentalists, but his recent trials had given him an aversion to conflict. And with his resignation from the pulpit and his public advocacy of a personally derived, “conscious” rather than “Christian” spirituality, he had moved more than “a little beyond” (a phrase by which a skeptic had dismissed the whole of Transcendentalism) the sectarian battles that occupied his younger friends in the ministry.

  Initially Waldo promised Margaret only that he would “gladly contribute of my own ink” to help fill up “the book,” as he referred to the first issue. While he’d refused the work of readying articles for the printer, Waldo cheered her on with extravagant praise in her task of recruiting other writers: “your labors shall introduce a new Age . . . & we shall think what you think.” As Margaret’s Conversations took up more of her time through the winter and she suggested delaying The Dial’s first issue until the fall of 1840, Waldo wrote Margaret of his dismay that “this flowing river of your speech is to sweep away so far the fine castle you began to build.” Ultimately they compromised on a July start, and in late April, with her second session of Conversations drawing to a close and her thirtieth birthday just a few weeks off, Margaret started to craft an introductory essay laying out the journal’s intentions to its readers.

  But her nerves began to show. The essay Margaret drafted has not survived, but Waldo’s letter of advice remains: she was too defensive, dwelled too long on The Dial’s merits in comparison to other publications. “We have nothing to do,” Waldo argued, “with the old drowsy Public” that cares for such magazines. The Dial—“our bold Bible for The Young America”—will have “a public of its own,” he felt sure, “a new-born class.” She would do better to emphasize the journal’s “Universal aims” and omit any “preparation for defence & anticipation of enemies”: “Don’t cry before you are hurt.”

  Margaret had already shown her introduction to George Ripley, she told Waldo, and “those parts you thought too fierce,” Ripley “thought not sufficiently so.” She despaired of finding “the golden mean between you.” The criticism stung. “Every body finds fault with me just now, some in one way, some in another,” she confided in her journal. Would “these gentlemen . . . lose faith” in her abilities? She would not “take for final what they say,” she told herself. “I will write well yet; but never, I think, so well as I talk,” she worried. “My voice excites me; my pen never.” In the end, Waldo drafted his own version, speaking for all three as “The Editors to the Reader.” Margaret accepted the piece, worn out from already having composed nearly a third of the entries in the issue herself. Too many of the Transcendental Club coterie were waiting to see which way the critical winds would blow before offering their work to the fledgling publication.

  In his introduction, Waldo took up Margaret’s theme of a second American “revolution,” with “no badge, no creed, no name,” yet “in every form a protest . . . and a search for principles.” The Dial would take its place above the fray, to be heard as “one cheerful rational voice amidst the din of mourners and polemics.” Its authors, for the most part, were not “practised writers,” and the editors had filled the pages by rifling through “the portfolios which friendship has opened to us.” Still, he concluded, from “the beautiful recesses of private thought . . . from the manuscripts of young poets; and from the records of youthful taste commenting on old works of art; we hope to draw thoughts and feelings, which being alive can impart life.”

  The lead article in the first issue was Margaret’s “A Short Essay on Critics,” announcing by way of its placement The Dial’s allegiance to the arts. Arguing for the establishment of a “standard of criticism,” Margaret expanded on ideas that she’d tried out in her Conversation session on the same topic to produce a landmark essay for its time—her pen had not failed her. Yet Waldo, who praised Margaret’s “power & skill” and her “serene” tone, noted a peculiarity. He wondered, was Margaret “designedly concealing the authorship”? Why hide behind “the writer” and “he” rather than employ the first person “I”—and she?

  In the essay, Margaret wrote of the need to discover “the laws of criticism as a science, to settle its conditions as an art.” The best criticism should be more than “mere . . . impressions” or reflexive thoughts “got up to order by the literary hack writer, for the literary mart.” Critics must engage in “conscientio
us research” and make a practice of “going out of themselves to seek the motive, to trace the law of another nature”—to identify the distinctive gifts of the artist whose work was under consideration and the circumstances that inspired creation. In the young American “literary mart,” Margaret’s call for standards was unprecedented, a signal of The Dial’s high ambitions.

  But when it came to gendered nouns and pronouns, Margaret was indeed in a bind. She cited the common misconception that “critics are poets cut down” and then refuted it: “in truth, they are men with the poetical temperament to apprehend, with the philosophical tendency to investigate.” And, in truth, virtually all the critics Margaret could think of, except herself, were men. How could she generalize accurately beyond her own limited experience without using the masculine noun and pronoun? The problem was deeper than one of conventional usage. Not only the critics, but most of the writers, musicians, and artists she admired or had written about so far were men too. The critic, she wrote, is “the younger brother of genius” and “should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three . . . He must have as good an eye and as fine a sense . . . He will teach us to love wisely what before we loved well.”

  Perhaps Waldo was right: she did want to be taken for a male writer—or didn’t mind, for now, if she was. Margaret signed “A Short Essay on Critics” simply “F,” in accordance with the single-initial policy she adopted for all contributors to the issue. Given her choice of words—“In books, in reviews,” she had written, “we wish to meet thinking men”—readers would likely assume that “F” too was a “thinking” man. And by Margaret’s own standards that might have been for the best. “True manliness,” she wrote in the essay—a combination of “firmness in his own position” and the “power of appreciating the position of others”—“alone can make the critic our companion and friend.”

  Could a woman writer, a female critic, be manly? Margaret had argued to the women in her Conversation class that there was no “quality in the masculine or feminine mind that did not belong to the other.” But it was one thing to hold forth on female equality in front of a group of sympathetic women, and another to take that line as the lone woman assuming leadership of “these men”—the Transcendental revolutionaries—by editing their journal. It was easier to fall back into the old habit of thinking of herself as intellectually male, to imagine herself into a man’s role on life’s stage. When Henry Hedge wrote to say he couldn’t spare the time to provide copy for the first issue because of his low minister’s wage and the burdens of raising a family, she replied, “I know you are plagued and it is hard to write, just so is it with me, for I also am a father.” Margaret saw herself as father to her younger siblings and father to The Dial. She invited Hedge to “write, my friend, write” and “become a godfather” to the new publication.

  Yet there were hints of a more expansive sensibility in this essay. “Nature is ever various, ever new, and so should be her daughters, art and literature.” Art, literature, and all of nature were feminine. The “true manliness” she endorsed was not simply a matter of the critic’s “firmness in his own position,” but was balanced by a more conventionally feminine sympathy for “the position of others” and resulted in companionship with readers. Margaret’s “true man” was a more complicated figure than Waldo Emerson’s masculine ideal, the “self-reliant” loner. Later in the issue, in a lengthy review of an exhibition of Washington Allston’s paintings, Margaret took Waldo’s advice and wrote in the first person, in journal form. The result was an essay that was as “alive” as Waldo’s introduction had promised The Dial’s writing would be: Margaret transferred her vibrant conversation to the page, giving a frank assessment of each painting (some were failures, in her estimation) and sympathizing with Allston’s predicament as a gifted artist “in an unpoetical society” like Boston. She met her own high standards for criticism while addressing readers in an intimate, personal voice.

  “When I look at my papers,” she admitted to Waldo, “I feel as if I had never had a thought worthy the attention of any but myself, and some fond friend.” Yet conversation persuaded her of the value of her ideas: “on talking to people I find I tell them what they did not know” and “my confidence returns.” She also realized that conversation forced her to “adapt myself” to a particular audience; sensing firsthand either comprehension or a lack of it, she could tailor her talk to satisfy. When she wrote, it was “into another world”—the far-off land of the writers she thought of as her peers, the European intellectuals who did know what Margaret knew. She still hoped to accomplish “something worthily that belonged to the country where I was born,” she confided in William Channing, yet “how much those of us who have been much formed by the European mind have to unlearn and lay aside if we would act here.” The Dial gave her the opportunity to unify her gifts—her conversational style, her erudition, her bold ideas—and write in a new way to that “new-born” audience, “The Young America,” as it was called into being by the publication itself.

  The rest of the “book” conveyed as intimate and confiding a tone as Margaret’s Washington Allston review, particularly to those who knew the writers. “We shall write constantly to our friends in print now,” Margaret had announced to William Channing as she gathered material for the issue, a task that all too often required her to “urge on the laggards, and scold the lukewarm,” she complained. But those friends made up “a large and brilliant circle.” In this first issue she published, at Waldo’s urging, a short essay and poem by his new Concord friend Henry David Thoreau, the young man he liked to call “my protestor” for his refusal to take up any profession for which his Harvard degree qualified him. She included essays by “party”-liners John Sullivan Dwight and Theodore Parker, “The Religion of Beauty” and “The Divine Spirit in Nature, and in the Soul,” which stressed the aesthetic dimension of spiritual life. Margaret also coaxed Dwight, an accomplished flautist, to write a roundup review, “The Concerts of the Past Winter,” covering performances of Messiah and The Creation at the Handel and Haydn Society’s new Melodeon theater on Washington Street, and Rackemann’s recitals of Chopin and Liszt. It was the beginning of Dwight’s career as a music critic, which would ultimately replace his profession as minister.

  The strongest statement of Transcendentalist “revolution” was Waldo Emerson’s poem “The Problem.” A retelling in verse of his renunciation of the ministry, it was also one of his first poems to appear in print:

  I like a church, I like a cowl,

  I love a prophet of the soul . . .

  Yet not for all his faith can see

  Would I that cowled churchman be.

  Perhaps less evident to outsiders because of the single-initial bylines was another message that carried strongly in Margaret’s selection of The Dial’s poetry: a third of it was written by women. Margaret’s former student Ellen Hooper, James Clarke’s sister, Sarah, and Waldo Emerson’s first wife, Ellen, whose writings Waldo had cherished through the years since her death in 1831, were all represented. Margaret provided several of her own verses, having gained confidence in their quality since James surprised her with publication only a year before. One of these was a sonnet she’d written in response to Washington Allston’s The Bride, a painting of the young biblical Queen Esther. Margaret paired her sonnet with another on the same subject by her friend Sam Ward, back now from Europe. She quoted Sam’s description of the painting as “the story of the lamp of love, lighted, even burning with full force in a being that cannot yet comprehend it.” For her part, Margaret had seen in the painting “a type of pure feminine beauty” and the vision of a “Woman’s heaven”: “Where Thought and Love beam.”

  The one exception to Margaret’s single-initial rule was Bronson Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings,” the self-taught philosopher’s catalogue of inspirational directives on topics from “Aspiration” to “Valor.” He’d borrowed the title from James Freeman Clarke’s W
estern Messenger translation of a five-stanza poem by Goethe (“Destiny,” “Chance,” “Love,” “Necessity,” and “Hope” were Goethe’s headings) and spun out the conceit to fifty entries. Some were brief and gnomic: “Prudence is the footprint of wisdom”; others were long rhapsodic paragraphs, like “Vocation”: “Engage in nothing that cripples or degrades you. Your first duty is self-culture, self-exaltation: you may not violate this high trust . . .”

  Waldo had been the first to read the “Sayings” in manuscript, and he wrote to Margaret of his certainty that “you will not like Alcott’s papers; that I do not like them; that Mr Ripley will not,” yet “I think, on the whole, they ought to be printed pretty much as they stand, with his name in full.” Waldo’s idea was that readers who knew Bronson Alcott would “have his voice in their ear” and catch his “majestical sound.” To others, he admitted, the “Sayings” might come off as “cold vague generalities,” yet he liked their “Zoroastrian style.” Margaret did too—they were “quite grand, though ofttimes too grandiloquent” —and after she’d coaxed Bronson to trim and clarify certain passages, she agreed with Waldo that nothing else they’d been offered spoke so much “in a new spirit.” As the issue went to press, Waldo had been mildly dissatisfied, and needled Margaret. “O queen of the American Parnassus,” he addressed her, “I hope our Dial will get to be a little bad. This first number is not enough so to scare the tenderest bantling of Conformity.”