Margaret Fuller (17 page)

Channing reciprocated by reading Coleridge and Wordsworth aloud and offering his gloss on the poems, as he had done with Elizabeth Peabody some years earlier. For Margaret, these sessions comfortably recalled the nights spent reading with her father and became a means of indirectly mourning Timothy: in devoting her evenings to the older man, she was refusing, unlike so many of her friends in Transcendentalism, to “forget what he has done.”
But she may also have had the pragmatic aim of seeking the blessing of this Boston celebrity—the Unitarian Evangelist—whose views were far more liberal than her father’s. When Margaret returned to Boston on her own in 1836, it was to make a place for herself in a sphere different from her father’s Republican political arena. Reverend Channing was the elder statesman of the movement she hoped to join. When the men and women of Transcendentalism began to speak of her as simply “Margaret,” dropping her surname, she was pleased; for better or worse, she had truly become “Margaret alone,” as she had insisted her father address her so many years ago.

The Reverend George Ripley was one of those who tended to forget Channing—one of the young men Emerson wrote about admiringly as having been “born with knives in their brain,” ready to “dissect” the status quo, maybe even act to undo it.
A few years older than James Clarke and Henry Hedge, Ripley, also a Harvard-trained Unitarian, had taken one of the few available ministerial openings in Boston, at the Purchase Street Church, but felt restless there. He shared Emerson’s view that spiritual reform could not take place within established religious institutions, which were, as Ripley came to believe, “vicious in [their] foundations.”
He didn’t want to go it alone, however; he’d become interested in the writings of European “Associationists” and, with his wife, Sophia Dana Ripley, granddaughter of a Harvard president, dreamed of gathering together like-minded seekers to form an ideal community where they could implement their principles in daily life. In 1836, Ripley was taking a first step by making arrangements to publish a series of books in translation he called Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature; he deliberately planned to include works by Goethe, whose personal peccadilloes seemed to him beside the point. When Ripley learned of Margaret’s plan for a biography, he signed her on, with a three-year deadline, and invited her also to translate for the series Johann Peter Eckermann’s biographical
Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His Life,
which she planned to study closely as part of her research.

But the prospect of payment for these works was far in the future, and her income from the foreign language classes was not enough to support her, let alone send money home. In December, the same month that the first volume of Bronson Alcott’s new
Conversations with Children on the Gospels
appeared in print, Margaret began spending her days at the Temple School, the one-time showplace of Transcendental pedagogy. More than a year earlier, Waldo Emerson had taken a seat on the classroom’s green velvet visitors’ couch, bringing Lidian too, shortly before their wedding in September 1835. Impressed with what he’d seen, Emerson went on to declare Elizabeth Peabody’s
Record of a School
“the only book of facts I ever read” that was as “engaging” as a novel.
Harriet Martineau had listened in on Alcott’s morning dialogues as well and planned to include an account of the school in her book. But by December 1836, the numbers in the school had dwindled from the robust thirty of the year before. The spacious classroom on the second floor of Boston’s towering new Masonic temple, with busts of Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare, and Walter Scott arrayed in its four corners, was beginning to look empty in the weak winter sunlight that filtered through its single enormous Palladian window.

The disaster that Elizabeth Peabody predicted hit fast. After volume two of
Conversations
appeared in February, “Pope” Andrews Norton blasted it as “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene,”
and assailed its author as “an ignorant and presuming charlatan,” either “insane or half-witted.”
The book was “more indecent and obscene,” a second reviewer charged, “than any other we ever saw exposed for sale on a bookseller’s counter.”
By then, Margaret had given up keeping a record of Bronson’s further conversations; he had so far omitted to pay her salary, and while she would make good on her commitment to teach through the end of term in April, she began making plans to leave, as most of the pupils would. For the remainder of the school’s brief existence, Bronson was forced to move into the Masonic temple’s basement, where only a handful of children, including his oldest daughter, Anna, and an African American child whose presence brought even more defections, continued through the following year, after which the Temple School closed and Alcott, who had once dreamed of reforming the American system of education, left the teaching profession for good.

Privately, Margaret had no dispute with Alcott’s philosophy or methods, although she considered him “one-sided” and “impatient of the complex.”
Alcott was a “star of purest ray serene,” she argued to Henry Hedge, whose “elevated aim” had been undercut by his “practical defects”
: he was inclined to become “lost in abstractions, and could not illustrate [his] principles,” she told her former employer outright a few years later.
But Margaret shared Bronson Alcott’s inclination to form collegial relations with his students and had instinctively developed a teaching style that featured the give-and-take of conversation rather than the conventional memorize-and-recite method. Even if she didn’t fully agree with Alcott that her students already possessed profound knowledge, she preferred to cultivate in them—particularly the girls—the ability to express what they learned from her, to ask questions and find the answers.

If Margaret learned anything from working with Alcott, it was to drive a harder bargain when negotiating her terms of employment. When another idealist in the field of education from Providence, Rhode Island, Hiram Fuller (no relation), learned that Margaret was free of her Temple School obligations and offered her work at his new Greene Street School, she insisted on a salary of $1,000 per year, the equal of a Harvard professor’s yearly income, and the freedom to teach as she pleased. A few years younger than Margaret and as charismatic with investors as Alcott had been with his young pupils, Hiram Fuller had successfully raised funds to build a schoolhouse, modeled after a Greek temple, on one of the city’s main streets. When Hiram Fuller agreed to Margaret’s conditions, she had reason to believe he could deliver. Despite misgivings about leaving Boston’s more stimulating intellectual atmosphere, when the Greene Street School opened in its new quarters in June 1837, Margaret was there for the start of the new term—along with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

9

“Bringing my opinions to the test”

I
F BOSTON WAS OLD MONEY AND NEW IDEAS, PROVIDENCE
was simply money. Or so it seemed to Margaret after her first weeks in the city fifty miles to the south, with one quarter the population. “Here is the hostile element of money getting but with little counterpoise” of cultural or spiritual aspiration, she wrote to Bronson Alcott. Providence seemed “low” on intellectual stimulation compared with even some of the “villages” surrounding Boston—Concord or Cambridge, she must have been thinking. Margaret missed the “liveliness of mind” in the Temple School children, which she attributed not so much to their innate genius, as Alcott had, as to their enlightened parents. Yet the solid prosperity of the Greene Street School families increased her confidence in the school’s success—and in receiving her pay—and their relative lack of intellectual sophistication promised relief from the scrutiny of a cannier Boston elite: “there is an affectionate, if not an intelligent sympathy in this community with Mr. Fuller and his undertaking,” she reported to Alcott.

Margaret had ended her teaching days in Boston pleased with all she had accomplished in her first “public position”—and suffering a raging headache. Yet that too was something to boast about: “all my pursuits and propensities have a tendency to make my head worse,” she wrote to James Clarke, still in Kentucky. “It is but a bad head; as bad as if I were a great man.” Although she still hadn’t accomplished anything worthy of greatness, an ambition evident in all her letters to James, “I flatter myself it is very interesting of me to suffer so much.”
Margaret had retreated to Groton to be coddled by her mother, whose habitual submissiveness was receding along with her grief. Margarett Crane had married at twenty, “too young,” in her older daughter’s view, stunting her own development while “growing to earthly womanhood with your children.”
The forty-eight-year-old widow would soon launch a successful appeal to Uncle Abraham for the funds to keep Ellen in school, and while it still fell to Margaret to lecture her sister on the need to accustom herself to wearing “faded frocks” in company—“Now that every one knows our circumstances it is no disgrace to us not to wear fine clothes, but a credit”
—Margaret could “vegetate” this spring, for perhaps the first time in her life, in her mother’s “sunny kindness.”
Margarett Crane saw to it that her overtired daughter “had a grand reading time at home,” broken only by a week’s visit to Waldo and Lidian Emerson and their new infant son in late April.

Margaret had last seen the Emersons on a brief stopover in October, a few weeks before the birth of the couple’s first child. In advance of that visit, Waldo had urged her to come “as soon as you can,”
writing that Margaret’s company was sure to be more healthful to the ailing Lidian than “poppy & oatmeal,”
referring to the opium that both women sometimes took to ease headaches. But the visit itself proved to be a disappointment for Margaret. Her aim was friendship with Waldo, whom she saw as her intellectual counterpart and potential soul mate, not with Lidian, much as she esteemed her “holiness.”
Once she arrived, Waldo maintained a surprising reserve after the past summer’s volubility, retreating to his study to keep to a regular work schedule and responding coolly to Margaret’s verbal sallies. “We lead a life of glimpses & glances,” he had written to Margaret afterward, in oblique apology—and warning. He might have been referring to himself rather than to his fleeting thoughts: “We see nothing good steadily or long, and though love-sick with Ideas they hide their faces alway.”

Leading up to this third stay in Concord, Margaret had turned the tables, playing Waldo’s game. “I am sure you will purify and strengthen me to enter the Paradise of thought once more,”
she wrote effusively in advance, while privately “schooling” herself—her “heart,” she specified—“not to expect too much.”
Lowering her expectations helped. This time in Concord, evening conversation proved so stimulating that “the excitement . . . prevents my sleeping,” she wrote to one of her Boston language students. The resulting headaches brought good cover too: if Waldo withdrew to his study during the day, Margaret, when feeling unwell, could seal herself up in the first-floor guest room across the hall. Alternatively she could earn her host’s gratitude by playing with the six-month-old “beautiful” baby boy, who “looks like his father, and smiles so sweetly on all hearty, good people.” She was rewarded at the end of the week with a Sunday-morning drive, alone “with the Author of ‘
Nature
’” on his way to Watertown, several villages away, to deliver a guest sermon. All “care and routine” were forgotten as the pair wound through the woods, the tall pines sighing “with their soul-like sounds for June.”
It was to be one of the last sermons the renegade minister preached from a pulpit.

Margaret was eager for June as well. Waldo had agreed to deliver the inaugural address at the opening of the Greene Street School’s new building at the start of the month, filling in for Hiram Fuller’s mentor, the recently disgraced Bronson Alcott. Stopping again in Concord for a night at the end of May on her way to Rhode Island, Margaret left armed with a stack of books loaned by Waldo—Coleridge, Milton, Jonson, Plutarch, Goethe—and the draft of a poem, Waldo’s “Compensation,” which reverberated with Margaret’s own sense of solitary mission:

Why should I keep holiday

When other men have none?

Why but because when these are gay

I sit and mourn alone.

And why, when Mirth unseals all tongues

Must mine alone be dumb?

Ah late I spoke to the silent throngs

And now their turn has come.

Many had predicted it, but few saw just how it would happen: a crash of the fragile new American economy. On May 4, the first bank suspension took place in Natchez, Mississippi, followed within the week by sharp reductions in lending at banks in Alabama, New York, Connecticut, and finally Boston and Providence. By the end of the month, nearly all American banks were conducting business only in specie—gold or silver. Enormous paper fortunes, all based on speculation, were lost. The Panic of 1837, which brought the worst recession in the history of the young nation, not to be matched for another forty years, was under way.

When Waldo Emerson spoke on June 10 at Providence’s Westminster Unitarian Church in honor of the opening of the Greene Street School, he told the overflow crowd that attempting to make sense of such unprecedented calamity felt to him like “learning geology the morning after an earthquake.” The world had split apart, and he would read the “ghastly diagrams” of “cloven mountain and upheaved plain.”
Margaret, who had been thinking of little but “Concord, dear Concord” since arriving in Providence the week before, was in the audience, buoyed already by a letter from Waldo.
“These black times,” he had written, as news of the bank suspensions reached him in the village, “discover by very contrast a light in the mind we had not looked for.”
He would shine that light to good purpose in Providence.