Wild nature was on the itinerary as well, and Margaret had written to James Nathan, inviting him to join her and the Springs for a tour of the Trossachs in Scotland—the Highlands region of deep-water lochs and towering bens she knew so well from reading Scott and Burns. Instead she received a letter from him stating bluntly that he would not meet her anywhere in Europe. Possibly he was miffed by her stark assessment of his literary prospects, but that no longer mattered. James Nathan told her the main reason outright: he was engaged to marry a young German woman.
“I care not,” Margaret forced herself to write in her journal. “I am resolved to take such disappointments more lightly than I have”—more lightly than surprise announcements in the past from George Davis, James Freeman Clarke, and Sam and Anna Ward. But this betrayal was of an altogether different order. “I ought not to regret having thought other of ‘humans’ than they deserve,” she told herself, acknowledging at last that an inhumane James Nathan had played her for a fool, and she ripped the offending letter to shreds. Perhaps she could turn the episode “to account in a literary way”; then at least something productive would come of what otherwise seemed such a waste of “affections and ideal hopes.” But that impulse was an old one too—what had she gained from the silly tale she’d spun and published anonymously in reaction to the news of George Davis’s engagement?
On the journey from Edinburgh into the Highlands, Margaret insisted on riding in the open air, alone among the baggage on top of the coach, even through an entire day of “drenching” equinoctial rain. Margaret told Rebecca Spring, who had guessed at James Nathan’s treachery long before, that she was enjoying the view and the speed of travel over Scotland’s uncommonly smooth roads. But Rebecca recognized that her headstrong, overqualified governess was also in a reckless, despairing mood.
Margaret’s love for James Nathan had blossomed at a time of unusual productivity, of both professional and physical well-being, and she had very nearly accepted his challenge to establish a “thorough” relation. “Life seems so full so creative; every hour an infinite promise,” she had written to him in the days after their April reconciliation, as she debated with herself—“I cannot keep in mind prohibitions or barriers or fates.” Would things have turned out differently if she’d given in to impulse and responded favorably to James Nathan’s advance? But she had let him go, only to endure another solitary year, attending a second Valentine’s Day soiree at Anne Lynch’s Washington Square mansion “alone, as usual,” she’d commented dejectedly to the sympathetic Elizabeth Oakes Smith as she left the party. In her diary that winter Margaret described an oppressive awareness that “I have no real hold on life,—no real, permanent connection with any soul.” She felt disembodied, like “a wandering Intelligence, driven from spot to spot.” Perhaps her fate was this: to live alone, to “learn all secrets, and fulfil a circle of knowledge,” but never to experience full communion with another being. The prospect “envelopes me as a cold atmosphere. I do not see how I shall go through this destiny. I can, if it is mine; but I do not feel that I can.”
Now she had gone through yet another cycle of raised hopes and disillusionment. How fitting that her betrayer was a German gentleman of means. When Margaret researched her biography of Goethe, she had studied the correspondence of his young friend Bettine von Arnim, her letters to Goethe as well as those to her friend and mentor, the canoness Karoline von Günderode. Margaret had made a partial translation of these last, published by Elizabeth Peabody as a testament to women’s friendships. Margaret had always fancied herself more like the energetic younger Bettine, a would-be writer and acolyte of the great man Goethe; her intuitive grasp of spiritual matters earned Bettine the nickname “Sibyl.” But perhaps it was the older doomed Karoline whose fate Margaret was destined to follow: deserted by her lover, a married university professor of high rank, Karoline had fallen into a depression. Bettine tried to cheer her—the young woman even delivered to her friend a handsome French soldier, an “Officer of Hussars” wearing a high bearskin cap, “the handsomest of all youths,” who offered himself as a lover. Heedless of these efforts, Karoline committed suicide on the banks of the Rhine, stabbing herself in the heart with a silver dagger, having earlier showed Bettine the precise spot just below her breast where she planned to drive the blade home. Such events had once seemed to Margaret unthinkably—safely—distant: women of intellect taking married men as lovers, a young woman procuring a handsome soldier as gigolo for her sorrowing friend, a carefully premeditated suicide. But the enveloping despair Karoline von Günderode felt was not now at all foreign to Margaret.
Trekking up Ben Lomond on a cool September afternoon with Marcus Spring and no guide, Margaret reached the summit and proceeded to “drink in . . . the heavens.” On every side were foothills covered in purple heather, lakes gleaming “like eyes that tell the secrets of the earth,” and in the distance “peak beyond peak” catching “all the colors of the prism” from the shifting light as clouds flew by overhead. On their descent, the path that wound among so many rills and ridges petered out, and Margaret sent Marcus ahead to scout for a bridge she remembered crossing over a spring on the way up. Within minutes the two Americans had become separated, their shouts lost in the twilight. Had Margaret willed herself into this dangerous solitude? Now each headed down the mountain, aiming for the inn far below on the banks of Loch Lomond, but only Marcus reached safety that night.
Darkness fell, and with it a mist obscuring any lights below. Margaret tramped down hillsides, only to turn back after sinking knee-deep into bogs. She lowered herself down rock walls, clinging to heather. Soaking wet and with only a light shawl for warmth, Margaret found herself stranded on a high promontory, hemmed in on three sides by roaring streams. She could go no farther that night, but how would she survive, “all fevered and exhausted”? How escape the fate of a child lost on the same mountain earlier that summer, dead long before his small body was discovered five days later?
For the Tribune letter Margaret composed several days after the ordeal, she framed her “hair-breadth ’scape” as a triumph of Yankee vigor and Transcendental self-reliance. “My only chance,” Margaret decided, “lay in motion . . . my only help in myself.” She paced her rocky perch, refusing to succumb to cold or fatigue, supported by a “feverish strength.” The “mental experience”—which she did not report—was “most precious and profound.” Yet she admitted to having been visited by “visionary shapes” unfurling from “the great body of mist,” doubtless to “come upon me with a kiss pervasively cold as that of Death . . . if I had but resigned myself more passively to that cold, spirit-like breathing!” When the moon rose at two A.M., Margaret permitted herself a few hours’ rest, then rose at first light to battle her way through swarms of biting flies up the hill and across the top of a waterfall, stopping to drink its waters, “good at that time as ambrosia.” She scrambled down more slopes on the other side, mercifully “in the right direction,” until one of a band of twenty shepherds with their dogs in a search party dispatched by the Springs found her.
“I had had my grand solitude,” Margaret announced to her Tribune readers. And the Springs, relieved of their “doubt amounting to anguish,” arranged for a dinner party that evening in the barn behind the inn for all the searchers, with talk of Robert Burns and narrations of other close calls on the majestic peak. “It was sublime indeed—a never-to-be-forgotten presentation of stern, serene realities,” Margaret wrote of the escapade. In a more introspective letter to her brother Richard, she underscored her certainty that she would not have lived “if I had not tried.” She was “glad of the experience, for it was quite a deep one.” Whatever transpired in her “mental experience” when enveloped by “the great body of mist” that night, Margaret now had the self-assurance—the stern serenity—to ask for a “cessation of intercourse” with James Nathan and to request the return of her love letters. All this time she had been testing her own faith, not his. She would not enter into so unequal a
“relation” again.
Despite her pride in what she called “my Yankee method” of survival on Ben Lomond, Margaret had grown impatient with her own country, where “life rushes wide and free,” and all too often headlong down blind alleys. The black suffrage measure she supported in New York had been soundly defeated soon after her editorial appeared, and national politics boded even worse, as President James Polk led the country into an expansionist war with Mexico in hopes of annexing Texas as a slave state. It was all backward, Margaret wrote in one of her last Tribune columns before leaving for Europe: “the feeble Mexicans” were “fighting in defense of their rights,” and “we” Americans “for liberty to do our pleasure.” Her hopes “as to National honor and goodness” were “almost wearied out”; she could only “turn to the Individual and to the Future for consolation.” The few signs of advance she saw were in the “heightening and deepening” of “the cultivation of individual minds,” Margaret told her readers in her “Farewell” column, and in “the part which is [to be] assigned to Woman in the next stage of human progress.” Precisely what indicators she found of woman’s progress Margaret did not say—although she could well have cited her own front-page editorials, themselves a remarkable advance for women in public discourse.
As for individuals, a large measure of Margaret’s purpose in traveling to Europe was to meet the writers and radicals whose work she’d admired from afar and test their minds in conversation. Margaret told Sam Ward, who reported the exchange to Waldo Emerson, that “she had seen all the people worth seeing in America” and was ready to extend her circle of acquaintance. This might have sounded like a compliment to Waldo and Sam, except for an additional remark Sam recalled: Margaret’s boast that “there was no intellect comparable to her own” in the United States, and she would have to look elsewhere to find her equal. Perhaps Margaret had known Sam would pass along the comment, intending to prick Waldo for his failure to acknowledge the worth of her move into journalism—“making some good strokes in a good cause,” as she thought of it. But others shared what might have seemed an inflated self-opinion. Maria Child was “glad Margaret Fuller has gone to Europe,” she wrote to their mutual friend the Brook Farm investor Frank Shaw. “She is a woman of the most remarkable intellect I ever met with.”
Arriving in London in early October, at what turned out to be the off-season for literary socializing, was discouraging at first. Many of the writers to whom she’d been carrying letters of introduction were out of town; Elizabeth Barrett had just “eloped” with Robert Browning to Italy, escaping from “a severe hard father,” Margaret learned. En route from Scotland in late September, Margaret had glimpsed enough of Glasgow’s poor in several hours—“especially women, dressed in dirty, wretched tatters, worse than none”—to report that the city “more resembles an Inferno than any other we have yet visited”; she had been lowered by bucket into the mouth of a mineshaft at Newcastle, finding deplorable conditions, not just for the coal miners but for their cart horses, permanently quartered below ground. Ferreting out the literati of London was more difficult than conducting humanitarian field research, yet tremendously rewarding once she succeeded.
“I found how true for me was the lure that always drew me towards Europe,” Margaret wrote as soon as she could make the time to pen a letter to Cary Sturgis, “how right we were in supposing there was elsewhere a greater range of interesting character among the men.” Although she had found “no Waldo”—Margaret may have hoped Cary would pass along this estimation as a corrective—and “none so beautiful” as William Channing or Sam Ward, she had met numerous “persons of celebrity and others that will attain it ere long.” These included the playwright and poet Richard Henry Horne; the associationist editor of the London Phalanx, Hugh Doherty; and the Swedenborgian philosopher and friend of Henry James Sr., James John Garth Wilkinson. It helped that most had read her Dial essays or Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and all had a “preconceived strong desire to know me.” Favorable reviews of Papers on Literature and Art had begun to appear in London journals, and while Margaret regretted that Wiley’s timidity had meant the omission of all her essays on Continental literature and “others of a radical stamp,” their absence seemed to have cost her nothing.
English “habits of conversation” were “so superior to those of Americans,” Margaret wrote to her brother Richard, that she felt able to “come out a great deal more” here “than I can at home”—and her eloquence was returned “proportionately” with interest. Six years earlier, as she commenced her Conversation classes, Margaret had written in her journal about the discomfort that her verbal superiority sometimes brought her, when “a woman of tact & brilliancy like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men.” Men “are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we get our knowledge, &, while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel, & fly, & dart hither & thither, & seize with ready eye all the weak points, like Saladin”—the legendary swordsman—“in the desert.” Back then in Boston, Margaret had failed to rouse her women students to spar with men in mixed conversation, and the men, tramping on in their pedantry, had held the group to an impasse. But in “European society,” Margaret wrote in a letter to Waldo Emerson summarizing her experiences, she felt entirely “in my element”: “so many of the encumbrances are cleared away that used to weary me in America, that I can enjoy a freer play of faculty, and feel, if not like a bird in the air, at least as easy as a fish in water.”
Margaret spent many of her London evenings with William and Mary Howitt, married writers who shared the editorship of the People’s Journal. At their home she met a trio of young women, including the Howitts’ oldest daughter, Anna, all of whom had “chosen the profession of an artist.” The watercolor portraitist Margaret Gillies explained to Margaret the difficulty of mastering the craft when “men will not teach girls drawing with any care” and rules of propriety prevented female students from sketching live models in the nude, so essential to rendering the human form with accuracy. Margaret particularly admired the twenty-five-year-old Eliza Fox, daughter of the “celebrated” editor of the Monthly Repository William J. Fox, who had determined not to marry in favor of leading a “noble independent life” devoted to art. In her letter to Cary Sturgis, Margaret “lamented” that Cary had not made a similar decision to “embark on the wide stream of the world” as an artist, making the most of her own talent and setting an example for other women “who needed it so much.” Margaret suspected rightly that Cary, then on the eve of her marriage to William Tappan, would soon join the expanding group of friends and former students who had made “the miserable mistake” of marrying impulsively out of a desire to settle into domestic life. One Concord friend had confided in Margaret her conviction that if women “waited long enough to think about it they would never marry.”
The Howitts, contented with their partnership as writers and reformers, seemed a different kind of couple, but Thomas and Jane Carlyle offered a daunting example of a marital mismatch along the lines of Waldo and Lidian Emerson, although Jane Carlyle—“full of grace, sweetness and talent”—provided a much more sympathetic example to Margaret of a misunderstood wife, and Thomas Carlyle—“very Titanic, and anti-celestial” in his oppressive bluster—a far less attractive sage. Margaret had been prepared to find the author, whose brilliant novel of ideas Sartor Resartus Waldo Emerson had shepherded into print in the United States, intimidating—but not to see him talk over every one of his guests, “haranguing” both Margaret (despite Waldo’s testimony in a letter of introduction that she was “full of all nobleness . . . an exotic in New England . . . our citizen of the world” ) and the man who became the hero of her six-week stay in London, the exiled Italian activist Giuseppe Mazzini.
The Genovese patriot had been so long in exile that he introduced himself to Margaret as “Joseph” in fluent English. Nearly two decades earlier, Mazzini had served a jail term in Savona for his insurrectionist writings. While in prison, he had c
onceived the Young Italy movement, an underground society that counted as many as sixty thousand members on the peninsula and in exile, united in the goal of making “One, Independent, Free Republic” of the country’s several states and kingdoms, most of them under the control of the pope or an Austrian, Spanish, or French sovereign. A contemporary of Waldo Emerson’s, but the psychological opposite of Margaret’s stay-at-home mentor, the gaunt, eagle-eyed man of ideas—and action—was eluding a death sentence for his role as leader of a failed uprising in northern Italy in 1833, resulting in the execution of a dozen of his comrades. Margaret had already praised Mazzini’s political writings in the Tribune, and she had learned his story from a novel she reviewed by the Danish revolutionary Harro Harring, who had joined Mazzini in the fighting and later turned the charismatic leader into a character in his novel. She was well prepared, as an American politician’s daughter, to admire this man who dedicated himself to restoring the republican principles she had cherished since childhood to the country that had initiated them in its long-lost golden age. For Margaret, Mazzini represented both heroic Individual and hoped-for Future.
Joseph Mazzini seemed drawn to Margaret as well. He invited her to attend the fifth anniversary exhibition at a school he’d founded for poor Italian boys rescued from the streets of London, where they had been forced to work as organ grinders, and he asked her to speak to the assembled students and dignitaries. After just a few conversations with the exiled patriot, Margaret had mastered his rhetoric of “one nation, one republic” well enough to deliver it with an American slant to an English audience. “Beyond any other country, save ancient Greece,” Margaret declared, Italy had done more to “awaken the love of the beautiful and the good, and thus refine the human soul.” How could anyone “capable of thought on the subject, be indifferent to the emancipation of this fair land from present degradation?”
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