A Mountainous Me - Refreshment and Instruction - Some benighted Beings - The Aspirations of Mr. Nathan - Mr. Nathan's Belief in Providence - A Propensity of strong-minded Ladies - Asses and Amaranths - Miss Fuller and Mr. Ward - The Man of Mind – A natural male feeling
A FOGGY EVENING IN THE MONTH OF October, 1846, had we peered through a window into the dining-room of a certain house in Chelsea, which was filled always with a shaggy Highland-cattle-like odour of homespun materials and by a Scotch mist of tobacco smoke, we might have seen a successful dinner-party in full blast. The host was Thomas Carlyle, the guest of honour an American lady of thirty-six, Miss Margaret Fuller, the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century and the first editor of The Dial.
This chaste, passionate, and high-principled woman, at once splendid and ridiculous, was the direct outcome of the movement towards the Emancipation of Women, a movement in which learned, trousered and vivacious ladies like George Sand made presents of themselves with the same frequency, cheapness and indiscrimination as that with which other ladies present Christmas cards. This caused them to be collected with great eagerness by sex-snobs, who, unlike all other snobs, or collectors, prefer the ubiquitous to the rare.
Miss Fuller's principles, but not her behaviour, were derived from ladies such as these, and her friend Mr. Emerson tells us that Margaret 'Was always a most earnest, devoted champion of the Emancipation of Women, from their past and present condition of inferiority, to an independence on men. She demanded for them the fullest recognition of Social and Political Equality with the rougher sex; the freest access to all stations, professions, employments, which are open to men. To this demand I heartily acceded. It seemed to me however that her clear perceptions of abstract right were often overborne in practice by the influence of education and habit; that while she demanded absolute equality for women, she exacted a deference and courtesy from men to women, as women, which was entirely inconsistent with that requirement.
'So long as a lady shall deem herself in need of some gentleman's arm to conduct her properly out of a dining-room or ballroom, so long as she shall consider it dangerous or unbecoming to walk half a mile alone by night, I cannot see how the Woman's Rights theory is ever to be more than a logically defensible abstraction ... Whenever she (Margaret) said or did anything implying the usual demands of woman on the courtesy and protection of manhood, I was apt, before complying, to look her in the face and exclaim with marked emphasis - quoting from her Woman in the Nineteenth Century - "Let them be Sea-Captain if they will."' However, according to Mr. Emerson's letter introducing her to Mr. Carlyle, she was 'a wise, sincere and accomplished, and one of the most entertaining of women, one of the noblest of women', although her appearance, according to the same gentleman's memoirs of her published after her death, 'had nothing prepossessing. Her extreme plainness,' he continued, 'a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids, the nasal tone of her voice, all repelled. It is to be said that Margaret made a disagreeable first impression on most persons, including those who afterwards became her best friends, to such an extent that they did not wish to remain in the same room with her. This was partly the effect of her manners, which expressed an overweening sense of power and slight esteem of others.'
Mr. Emerson, however, admired Miss Fuller's 'severity of truth', for 'I have known her' he wrote, 'mow down the crop of evil, like the angel of retribution itself, and could not sufficiently admire her courage. My friends told me of a verdict, pronounced upon Mr. ____ at Paris, which they said was perfectly tremendous. They themselves sat breathless; Mr. ____ was struck dumb; his eyes fixed on her with wonder and amazement, yet gazing too with an attention which seemed like fascination. When she had done he still looked to see if she was to say more, and when he found she had really finished, he arose, took his hat, said faintly "I thank you," and ]eft the room.' Miss Fuller was in no doubt as to her own mental attainments and Mr. Emerson tells us that 'she would let slip, with all the innocence imaginable, some phrase betraying the presence of a rather mountainous ME, in a way to surprise those who knew her great sense'.
Mr. Emerson was however grateful to her for he, owing to his years of arduous mental toil, had almost lost the 'capacity to laugh', and Mrs. Emerson, deciding that he must make a new and thorough study of this useful accomplishment under the careful tutorship of Margaret Fuller, had invited that lady for a fortnight's visit, and had insisted that the two sages should take a daily walk together, with the result that the lessons were, after a while, crowned with comparative success. I can imagine the happy chatter, the gay badinage about metempsychosis and Goethe, Locke, English metaphysics, Racine, Korner, Truth, Liberty for Woman, Carlyle and Liberty for Man, the Christian religion, Plato, Socrates, Bigelow's Elements, Jacob's Letters to Fichte, which constituted those Lessons in Laughter. I can imagine too the spell of ordinariness which came over the Emerson household during these brief respites from Wisdom.
At first Mr. Emerson did not find the lessons easy, for he tells us that he 'was, at that time, an eager scholar of ethics and had tasted the sweets of solitude and stoicism, and I found something profane in the hours of amusing gossip into which she drew me'. Hollow sounds, as from an owl in a metaphysical holly-bush, an owl imprisoned in the mausoleum of Goethe, were heard floating over the woodlands. Then the sounds grew lighter, took on a more shrill and batlike note. In the end, however, though slowly and painfully, the accomplishment to which I have referred was restored to Mr. Emerson through the tutelage of Margaret, and now he had passed his teacher on to his friend Carlyle, in the hope perhaps that he also might derive some benefit of the same kind.
Mr. Carlyle however would not allow himself to receive any instruction of any kind, and Miss Fuller tells us that 'it is the usual misfortune of such marked men, happily not one invariable or inevitable, that they cannot allow other minds room to breathe, and show themselves in their atmosphere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest. Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition, not only by his wit, and onset of words, resistless as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority, raising his voice, and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow freedom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a manly resistance to his thought.' Still, Mr. Carlyle would not allow Miss Fuller to speak, and Miss Fuller was used to talking uninterrupted and to interrupting others. 'The worst of hearing Carlyle,' she assured her correspondent, 'is that you cannot interrupt him. I understand the habit of haranguing has increased very much upon him, so that you are a perfect prisoner when he has once got hold of you. To interrupt him is a physical impossibility. If you get a chance to remonstrate for a moment, he raises his voice and bears you down. True, he does you no injustice, and, with his admirable penetration sees the disclaimer in your mind, so that you are not morally delinquent; but it is not pleasant to be unable to utter it.'
Another guest at this dinner-party, was 'a witty French, flippant sort of man, author of a History of Philosophy, and now writing a Life of Goethe, a task for which he must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling shallowness can make him. But he told stories admirably, and was allowed sometimes to interrupt Carlyle for a little.' This irreligious sparkling shallowness caused the witty flippant sort of man, whose name was George Henry Lewes, to enter into a menage with that monument of lightness George Eliot.
The inability to interrupt seems to have been a great problem in literary circles, in the year 1846. For Miss Martineau, immediately before Miss Fuller's meeting with Wordsworth, which took place a month or so before her inability to interrupt Carlyle, warned her that 'He does all the talking, and never knows the name of the person he is addressing. He talks mostly about his poems and he is pretty sure to take the visitor to see the terrace where he has composed so many'. But then Miss Martineau did not entirely approve of her neighbours. She could, and did, give Margaret other and equally important information about the author of the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality. In the winter he wore a long cloak, a Scotch bonnet and great goggles. Usually a score of children ran along after him, coaxing him to cut switches out of the hedge for them. A curious combination of economy and generosity he was. If you dropped in to tea you were likely not to have enough cream to put into it, and yet Wordsworth gave away all the milk the household did not want to cottagers perfectly well able to buy their own. If you dropped in for any other meal, you were greeted with 'You are very well welcome to have a cup of tea with us, but if you want any meat you must pay for it.'
Others of Miss Martineau's neighbours were hardly respectable, but like a comfortable Christian woman Miss Martineau said no more about them than would destroy their reputation for respectability and enhance her own. Take the Coleridges, for example. The poet's son, Hartley, had died of drink. De Quincey was not only on the verge of starvation, but, according to his virtuous neighbour, was in such a state that 'when he lived at Keswick he drank five or six wineglasses of laudanum a night. Coleridge was to blame for that of course, for De Quincey ran across him shortly after he came down from Oxford, and Coleridge was then drinking his tumblerful a day.'
After these revelations, we cannot for a moment doubt that Miss Martineau, with her striking virtues, was a more valuable inhabitant of the world than the authors of the Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, and the Confessions of an Opium Eater.
Margaret Fuller however was not as critical of these benighted beings as was Miss Martineau, and she was glad to be in Europe, because her life in Boston must remind her of the imaginary being, clothed in actual flesh, whom she had lost.
Two years before Margaret Fuller's journey to Europe she had fallen passionately in love with a young gentleman named James Nathan, who came from Hamburg. Mr. Nathan was younger than Miss Fuller, was pale, had long dark hair, played the guitar, spent his days in the City, and talked about the Soul. He was consistently and profitably misunderstood as we shall see. 'His was no plebeian mind,' Miss Bell informs us in her book on Margaret Fuller. 'Not for him the utilitarian life, where leisure was considered a waste of time and graceful indolence the pastime of fools and women. He felt a little out of place in the world of lower Broadway.'
The work-shy and superior Mr. Nathan spent a good deal of time in being melancholy with the aid of Margaret, and between them developed one of those innocently incestuous brother-and-sister relationships which are always so grateful and convenient to the gentleman, so shattering to the nerves and dignity of the lady.
At first the nature of Mr. Nathan's behaviour had not allowed Margaret to guess that she was his sister. Do gentlemen, she wondered, when the nature of the relationship had been made abundantly clear, pour blackberry blossoms into the laps of their sisters? She fancied not. Blackberry blossoms, though they are frail, seem to hold in them some promise of fruition, however cold, belated and hard. However, Mr. Nathan proved to her that she was wrong; for after some time he discovered that she had no money, and this fact made their relationship clearer than ever. They had, he said, a spiritual affinity. He proposed that it should be recognized, that their relationship came from within, although I imagine that this high spiritual life was interspersed, even then, by interludes of a distressing tenderness.
At last, owing partly to overwork, partly to the wrack and worry and general wear and tear of this inhibited incest, Miss Fuller's face began to show increased signs of her age, and these signs were noted by Mr. Nathan with distress and a profound distaste for the misunderstanding which had caused them. He meanwhile had been giving a good deal of time to the contemplation of himself, his prospects, his outlook, etc ... and the result was that, in Miss Fuller's eyes, his face was sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, though a prejudiced observer might have said that he was suffering from an enlarged liver. His curls, too, were less luxuriant than formerly. But these signs of mental pain only made the woman who loved him move more closely to him, with a deeper, more foolish, phoenix-like love.
The disillusioned Mr. Nathan began to pick quarrels with Miss Fuller, but she replied only: 'You shall upbraid me to the stars, and I feel sure that you will not find me incompetent.' This irritated Mr. Nathan so much that he found more and more faults in her.
At last he wrote and told her that he was about to leave America and return to Europe, and this drove Margaret to despair, for she did not know what this might mean, or if he would ever return. Then, as she read his long and extremely noble letter, at last, at the very end of that letter, she found the heart which had inspired it. Mr. Nathan needed money because he wished to explore the East, and be the first to navigate the Dead Sea. Also, he wanted to go to Jerusalem. Margaret, he felt, might ask her rich and influential friends for some money which would make these aspirations possible. He would be glad, too, if she would take charge of his Newfoundland pup Josey, and the irresistible guitar.
The money was, of course, forthcoming; Margaret saw to that; and for some time Mr. Nathan was too busy packing and making arrangements for the explorations to pay her a visit. But at last, just a week before he sailed he found time to come and see her, bringing Josey and the guitar, and explaining that he would carry her letters with him wherever he went.
When he had gone, Margaret, in her loneliness and sadness, wrote: 'I have lost my dear companion, the first I ever had who could feel every better side of life and beauty as exquisitely as myself.'
Other sides of life and beauty, however, were occupying the thoughts of Mr. Nathan, and, although Margaret wrote often, two months passed before a letter reached her in return. But then how noble was the letter, and how long! 'Let me lie down and die,' exclaimed Mr. Nathan, 'rather than my presence abet falsehood.' It was not till the end of that long letter, that the unpractical and unworldly Mr. Nathan enquired if his correspondent would secure for him a letter of introduction from Mr. George Bancroft, the Minister of Marine, and place Mr. Nathan's articles on travel under the editorship of Mr. Greeley.
The months passed and Mr Nathan's letters grew fewer and fewer: her heart knew that the tone of those rare letters had changed. Perhaps, she might have broken the bond that held her, but although Mr. Nathan felt himself as free as air, it would have injured his high ideals to see any signs of such a frailty on the part of woman, whose legendary fidelity is her birthright, bestowed upon her by heaven. What an inspiration is this fidelity to Man, supporting as it does his belief in human nature on those many occasions when he is weighed down by the disillusionment brought about by the contemplation of his own lack of fidelity. Besides, any shadow cast on Mr. Nathan's belief in Woman would have been particularly tragic at this moment, since - although Margaret did not know this - he was about to marry another and a younger woman. Margaret wrote to him, 'You will love me as much, as long, and as carefully as you can, will you not?'
The months dragged on, and it was only a fortnight before Margaret sailed for Europe that she received his reply to this letter. He had arrived in Hamburg, where he was the centre of attention, the guest of honour at dinner-parties and receptions ... but his funds were exhausted. Where could he get a book published? Would Margaret see to it that Mr. Greeley 'published this? ... Then comes this sublime and characteristic touch, showing all Mr. Nathan's childlike and beautiful gift for casting other people's bread upon the waters: 'As for Josey' (his Newfoundland pup), 'if he is too much trouble and if Mr. March cannot keep him for me and you know of no other person that will, just have him sold at auction, or run loose away, or what he may do, a kind Providence will have a care of him'. When Margaret was in Edinburgh, she received another letter from this childlike believer. She too might run loose away, or do what she might do, and a kind Providence would have a care of her, for Mr. Nathan was soon to be married to the younger lady.
But Mr. Nathan would not entrust the letters, that the celebrated older lady had written him, to the care of Providence. They might, he thought, prove valuable yet. In answer to her request that he would return these pledges of her affection, he wrote, 'My loving regard is and was too sincere and earnest and holy as to change with any new ties or external events ... And to permit me to part with things so dear, so suddenly. Let me entreat you to let the spiritual offspring of our friendship remain in the home they were born to and intended for, until on our return to New York we will talk the matter over more fully and fairly. In the meantime, let me assure you, they enjoy the sacredness and privacy of this uninterrupted and uninterfered with from any foreign alliance or relationship, and that at our meeting there I shall do nothing but what is right, manly and honourable.' Anxious to add one further incitement to madness, he proclaimed that he felt 'a deep admiration for your great, superior well-stored mind, an equally true regard for the integrity, profundity, and holiness of your character and for the many womanly virtues and sentiments of your capacious heart and true love for the purity of your soul, from which noble source I have drawn many deep inspirations'.
It may be that the thought of these letters written to the unworldly Mr. Nathan, gnawed into Miss Fuller's mind as she sat, listening to the thunder of Carlyle's talk, and being allowed, once an hour or so, to speak, 'enough to free my lungs and change my position, so that I did not get tired'. Or perhaps she thought of the difference between her repressed childhood and youth, and the freedom that had come to her by way of her friendship with such people as the Emersons, and Horace Greeley and his wife. She was in many ways a remarkable woman, and we find ourselves agreeing with Emerson's verdict that, although 'Margaret often loses herself in sentimentalism, here was a head so creative of new colours, of wonderful gleams, so iridescent that it piqued curiosity and stimulated thought and communicated mental activity to all who approached her; though her perceptions were not to be compared to her fancy, and she made numerous mistakes. Her integrity was perfect, and she was led and followed by love, and was really bent on truth, but was too indulgent to the meteors of her fancy.'
She lived, indeed, a life full of noble ideals, backfisch nonsense and moonshine, silly cloying over-emotionalized friendships and repressed loves, (friendship being often disguised as love, and love as friendship), extreme mental and moral courage, and magnificent loyalty to her ideals, friends, and loves.
Miss Fuller's life was one mass of symbolism; even the magnificent and tragic shipwreck with which her life, together with those of her young Italian husband and her baby boy ended, was symbolic. It is impossible not to feel an embarrassed sympathy, and a kind of affection for her, since the whole record of her life leaves us with the impression of a certain nobility and uprightness, blurred over by an overheated nervous sensibility masquerading as imagination. She had a certain non-productive intellect, and considerable rectitude, but these qualities were balanced, to some degree, by her almost incomparable silliness. As in the case of nearly all remarkable women, opinions were strongly divided about her, and one hostile biographer exclaimed that her writing was 'a striking illustration of the propensity of all strong-minded ladies to Monster Nothings'. Miss Fuller took an untiring interest in everything and everybody, including herself, and wrote that 'mine is a large, rich, but unclarified nature. My history presents much superficial temporary tragedy. The woman in me kneels and weeps in tender rapture, the man in me rushes forth, but only to be baffled.'
Alas, this was only too true, and when Miss Fuller enquired of herself and of others: 'Who may understand 'me?' the answer was 'None'.
This unconscious candidate for the attentions of the yet unborn Professor Sigmund Freud was according to her biographer Miss Margaret Bell, 'hungry for soul demonstrations of love ... so hungry that she pressed the flowers passionately to her lips, and to her breast, and tried to imagine that they gave her all she needed'.
Her childhood and early girlhood were not devoid of incident or excitement, for, among other remarkable phenomena, she had been brought face to face with 'an old man in a cocked hat carrying a circular canopy over his head. This was Dr. Popkin, introducing the first umbrella to Cambridge. It was not long till the tax-collector had one, then Professor Hedge was seen carrying one back and forth from lectures.' In spite, however, of these excitements, Miss Fuller longed for experiences of a more romantic spiritual order, in which all symbols were to be mixed together into a rather heavy pudding. For instance, she told her admirers that 'when I first met with the name of Leila, I knew it to be mine. I knew that it meant night - night which brings out truths'. She found, too, that there was much to be said for the symbolism of precious stones, and she became a firm believer in talismans and omens. It appears that she herself was a stone of the masculine gender, a living carbuncle - for carbuncles were divided into two sexes. The female casts out light, the male has light within itself. Mine is the male. Accordingly, when Miss Fuller wrote a letter to a much valued friend, she wore a male carbuncle upon her finger, but when she wrote to a slighter acquaintance, the stone worn would be an onyx or an amethyst, according to the degrees of friendship which prevailed.
This bunkum may, or may not, have been the result of a schoolgirl friendship with a nauseatingly silly English woman. 'I was reading Guy Mannering,' Miss Fuller tells us, 'and my eyes were wet and dim with tears drawn forth by the loss of little Harry Bertram, when an English lady of supreme beauty, who was on a brief visit to that part of America, observing me, approached and accosted me. She did not question me, but fixed on me looks of beautiful love. She did not speak many words; her mere presence was to me a gate of Paradise. I laid my head against her shoulder and wept, dimly feeling that I must lose her and all who spake to me of the same things - that the cold waves would rush over me. She waited till my tears were spent, then, rising, took from a box a bunch of golden amaranths. They were very fragrant. "They came to me", she said, "from Madeira". The departure of the lady threw me into a deep melancholy, from which I was with difficulty aroused. I kept the amaranths during seventeen years. Madeira, for long, long afterwards, was pictured in my imagination as an Island of the Blest. And when ships sailed past the coast, their white wings gleaming in the sunlight, I fancied they might be bound for happy, fortunate Madeira.'
The young men were, at first, less attracted to Miss Fuller's friendship than were women. It is true that one young man, Mr. Henry Hedge, would and did talk about philosophy with her, whilst others listened with a strained expression to her monologues on the subject of Greek mythology, precious stones, Maria Edgeworth, Goethe, and Madame de Stael. But it was a young lady named Anna Barker who was the recipient of confidences such as this: 'I sometimes see myself in a large lull, it is the age of feudalism; a charming company is assembled, and a minstrel is playing on a harp. Torches flicker and now and then one hears the clank of armour, as the sentries at the doorways change their places ... The night wears on; servants bring refreshments, there is a flash of golden goblets and the sound of gold falling at the feet of the minstrel.'
From the preceding passages, and from Miss Fuller's unfortunate love-passages with Mr. Nathan and a previous friend, Mr. Samuel Ward, we can see that European culture, the romance of the Middle Ages, and the Rights of Women, as inculcated by such teachers as Mary Wollstonecraft and the trousered and volatile Madame George Sand, had worked equal havoc with her life. It was, I imagine, as a result of the teaching of these ladies, that she contracted the unfortunate daily habit of sending bouquets of flowers to Mr. Samuel Ward. As a not unnatural result of this habit Miss Fuller was rewarded by the sound of scampering feet, disappearing into the far distance.
When Miss Fuller had waited for several months for some sign from Mr. Ward, she wrote to him the following letter: 'You do not wish to be with me. Why try to hide it from me, from yourself? You are not interested in any of my interests; my friends, my pursuits are not yours ... the sympathetic contemplation of the beautiful in nature, in art, is over for us - that for which I loved you first and which made that love a shrine at which I could rest upon my weary pilgrimage. You come home to go away again, and make a call upon me in the parlour ... You write me to say you could not write before. My heart deceives me widely if this be love.'
Mr. Ward replied, as I imagine, with a letter which agreed with these sentiments, for Margaret, in reply, wrote this letter, inspired by her innate nobility of soul and of heart, which, when that soul and that heart were profoundly moved, could not be smeared over or spoiled by the sentimentality which was the only cause of any foolishness in her:
'My dearest Samuel,
'Although I do not feel able at present to return a full answer to your letter, I will not do myself the injustice of preserving entire silence. Its sincerity of tone is all I asked. As I told you, I should never make any claim upon the heart of any person on the score of past intercourse ... but, on the minds of those who have known me, I have always a claim. My own entire sincerity in every passage of life gives me a claim to expect that I shall never be led by unmeaning phrases or attentions.
'For the rest, believe me, I understand all perfectly, and though I might grieve that you should shut me from you in your highest hour and find yourself unable to meet me on the very ground where you had taught me to expect it, I would not complain that the past had bound either of us at the present.
'I had thought that in ceasing to be intimates, we might cease to be friends. I think so no longer. My attachment was never so deep as now; it is quite unstained by pride or passion; it is sufficiently disinterested for me to be sure of it. Time, distance, different pursuits, may hide you from me, yet will I never forget to be your friend, or to visit your life "with a daily benediction.
'Do not bid yourself remember me, but should an hour come by and by when you have any need of me, you will find me in my place and End me faithful to you.'
But now, unshadowed by Doctor Popkin's and the tax-collector's umbrellas, unshadowed, perhaps, by memories of the strange behaviour of Mr. Ward and Mr. Nathan, this large-souled, noble, but overdramatic lady sat listening to the torrents of Mr. Carlyle's conversation.
At their first meeting, Mr. Carlyle let his American guest down gently, and she, writing of the encounter to Mr. Emerson, had said: 'I admired his Scotch, his way of singing his great full sentences, so that each one was the stanza of a narrative ballad. That evening, he talked of the present state of things in England, giving light, witty sketches of the men of the day, fanatics and others, and some sweet homely stories he told of things he had known of the Scotch peasantry. Of you he spoke with hearty kindness; and he told, with beautiful feeling, a story of some poor farmer, or artisan, in the country, who on Sundays lays aside the cant and care of the dirty English world, and sits reading the Essays, and looking upon the sea.'
How typical of the Victorian age was their conversation. Indeed, it seems to smell of the time, and in feeling, the story of 'the poor farmer, or artisan,' resembles closely Mr. Ruskin's rhapsody over a picture by Mr. Landseer - a shepherd, a rhapsody that was disinterred for us by Miss Margaret Barton and Sir Osbert Sitwell, and enshrined in their joint Victorians. 'Take', said Mr. Ruskin, 'one of the most perfect poems or pictures' (I use the words as synonymous) 'which modern times have seen, "The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner". Here the exquisite execution of the glossy and crisp hair of the dog, the bright, sharp touching of the green bough beside it, the clear painting of the wood of the coffin, and the folds of the blanket, are language - language clear and expressive in the highest degree. But the close pressure of the dog's breast against the wood, the convulsive clinging of the paws, which have dragged the blanket off the trestle, the total powerlessness of the head laid, close and motionless, upon its folds, the fixed and tearful fall of the eye in its utter hopelessness, the rigidity of repose which marks that there has been no motion nor change in the trance of agony since the last blow was struck on the coffin-lid, the quietness and gloom of the chamber, the spectacles marking the place where the Bible was last closed, indicating how lonely has been the life - how unwatched the departure of him who is now laid solitary in his sleep - these are all thoughts - thoughts by which the picture is separated at once from the hundreds of equal merit, as far as mere painting goes, by which it ranks as a work of high art, and stamps its author, not as the neat imitator of the texture of the skin, but as the Man of Mind.'
A Landseer-like smell of homespun, Highland cattle, shaggy lonely shepherds, the liberty of man, and mountain peaks, must have pervaded the conversation, and we may be sure that Margaret enjoyed it. But there was sparkle and fun too, of the order that was countenanced in that age, and Margaret could not forbear giving her former pupil in the difficult accomplishment of laughter a slight rebuke in that connection: 'Carlyle is worth a thousand of you, for that he is not ashamed to laugh when he is amused, but goes on in a cordial human fashion.'
In the few years that remained to Margaret Fuller, years that were to bring her the friendship of Mazzini, a young Italian husband, Count Ossoli, a baby son, and that strange, dramatic and tremendous shipwreck in which she, her husband, and her baby, lost their lives, Margaret remembered, often, her conversations with Carlyle, how the great man, inveighing against poetry, 'came back to some refrain, as in the French Revolution, of the Sea-Green'. In this instance, it was Petrarch and Laura, the last word pronounced with his ineffable drawl of sarcasm. Although he said this 'over fifty times, I could not help laughing when Laura would come, Carlyle running his chin out, when he spoke it, and his eyes glowing till they looked like the eyes and beak of a bird of prey ...'
On another occasion, Mr. Carlyle spent some hours in rebuking Mazzini and Miss Fuller for their 'rose-water imbecilities'.
Scholars have, it seems, always despised this quality; but they are notoriously difficult to please; stupidity and flippancy in women, learning in women, all these offences may, at different times, prove equally unpalatable to them, though the last offence is usually the most unforgivable - largely, I imagine, because it is sometimes a little too readily assumed that heaven deems the charms of the mind to be sufficient of an endowment, and therefore bestows no other. In any case I suspect that the feeling cherished by both Mr. Emerson and Mr. Carlyle towards the learned Miss Fuller was very much the same as that natural male feeling expressed by Mr. Fatigay, in my friend Mr. John Collier's His Monkey Wife, when he learns that his pet monkey has taught herself to spell: 'Come, come, Emily, if you are as clever as all that, you must be sold to perform on the Halls.'
ENGLISH ECCENTRICS
By DAME EDITH SITWELL
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