Margaret Fuller (25 page)

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
Western 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.”

But with Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings” at its center, “pleading . . . affinity with the celestial orbs,”
The Dial
proved to be quite “bad” enough.
One reviewer after another targeted Alcott’s list of aphorisms as emblematic of the journal’s all too free spirit—“infidelity in its higher branches,” as a writer for the
Boston Times
charged. Waldo’s plan of granting the “Sayings” a full byline left
The
Dial
vulnerable to attack as the “ravings of Alcott, and his fellow-zanies.” Failing to notice Margaret’s opening essay on criticism or the journal’s distinctive reporting on the arts, reviewers instead focused on and reviled what they’d expected to find in
The Dial:
“its
religion,
” which, “if not all moonshine, is something worse.” A “sickly, fungous literature” was how one reviewer described what the
Boston Times
concluded was an “unintelligible” and “grossly compounded mixture of Swedenborgianism, German mysticism . . . [and] Pantheism.”

Still others charged that the journal prized “imagination” over “cool, substantial deduction of ratiocination” and served as nothing more than a vent for its writers’ “inappeasable longings.” A reviewer for the
Providence Daily Journal
ferreted out the identities of the issue’s unnamed contributors and then lobbed predictable insults: Waldo Emerson had betrayed his calling, and Margaret Fuller was “a woman of extraordinary application and industry,” yet with “no genuine love of knowledge . . . for its own sake, but for the eclat with which it is attended.” This brilliant, willful female had once again overstepped the boundaries of decorum simply to feed her vanity. A lone note of approval came from Horace Greeley’s
New-Yorker:
here, at last, was a “really
new
Magazine.”

But private voices told of a more grateful response.
The
Dial,
Margaret began to hear, “brings meat and drink to sundry famishing men and women at a distance from these tables”—the fractious dinner party of Boston doctrinal dispute. As John Sullivan Dwight later wrote,
The Dial
succeeded in telling “the time of days so far ahead” it could not help but invite scorn. If the journal was, in the eyes of its critics, “one of the most . . . ridiculous productions of the age,”
that meant it had managed to “explode,” as Waldo Emerson had hoped, “all the established rules of Grub Street or Washington Street,” Boston’s own publishers’ row.
“Our community begin to stand in some terror of Transcendentalism,” Waldo was pleased to report to his friend Thomas Carlyle in England.
The
Dial
—“poor little thing”—had been “honoured by attacks from almost every newspaper & magazine.”
Waldo’s chief request of Margaret for the succeeding issue was to alter the typeface on the cover so that “the word
Dial
” would appear in “strong black letters that can be seen in the sunshine . . . Can we not print it a little large & glorious . . . ?”

Margaret postponed a second installment of Alcott’s “Sayings” to a later issue (she refused to scuttle the project), but otherwise the core writers remained the same, and others joined in: Henry Hedge, with the essay “The Art of Life—The Scholar’s Calling,” and Cary Sturgis, with a sheaf of poems that she elected to publish under the initial “Z.” Waldo wrote a flattering introduction to a selection of poetry—“honest, great, but crude”—by another new young friend, Ellery Channing, cousin to William but of an altogether different temperament.
As erratic as William was earnest, Ellery scribbled verses by the ream, but cared little whether they appeared in print, leaving it to Waldo to choose the best and then refusing his editorial advice. Persuaded by Margaret to support her aesthetic agenda, Waldo contributed a substantial essay of his own, “Thoughts on Modern Literature,” and tolerated her editorial nudging on a difficult passage: “I think when you look again you will think you have not said what you meant to say.”
Margaret reviewed the Athenaeum gallery’s latest exhibition, recognizing in particular two landscapes by Sarah Clarke that “deserve greater attention than from their size and position [in the gallery] they are likely to receive.”

As the second
Dial
appeared in October 1840, Margaret took over the lease on the Willow Brook property in Jamaica Plain, to live for the first time in “my own hired house.” The two oldest Fuller brothers, William Henry and Eugene, had recently married and settled in New Orleans, where their mother planned to spend the winter. Ellen left for Louisville to look for work as a schoolteacher; Arthur was at Harvard; and Richard, now sixteen, had taken a job with a dry-goods firm in Boston. Margaret had given up the three boarding students she’d been supervising through the previous year and now had only fourteen-year-old Lloyd to look after, assigning herself “the task of civilizing” the still restive boy “this winter.”
Her newfound independence and near solitude brought a feeling of “peace” and “almost happiness,” Margaret wrote to Waldo Emerson in November.

Expecting soon to be earning a salary for her work on
The Dial
—Waldo predicted that the journal would become “better and perhaps next year bigger”—Margaret also put her faith in a new series of Conversations.
A smaller but “truly interested” group of women began meeting in Elizabeth Peabody’s recently established “Foreign Library,” a bookstore and subscription library specializing in imported books and magazines, which occupied the first floor of a rented brick row house on West Street, a half-block from the Common and around the corner from Washington Street.
The Peabody family lived upstairs, where Mary taught school and Sophia painted and sculpted in her bedroom-studio. The bookroom itself had quickly become a meeting place for Transcendental Club members, who gathered there in new configurations after a contentious last session at West Street in September. At the end of four years of haphazardly scheduled meetings, the group had disbanded to pursue separate aims: Margaret, Waldo, and Bronson Alcott were committed to
The Dial;
others to the reform of the Unitarian Church from within; and still others, in particular George Ripley, who’d dramatically resigned his Boston pulpit the previous spring, to found new freethinking congregations.

Elizabeth Peabody had also begun a publishing business, starting off with the Reverend William Ellery Channing’s anti-slavery tract
Emancipation
and then engaging Nathaniel Hawthorne for a series of historical tales for children. Elizabeth promised Margaret publication too, of a translation Margaret contemplated of Bettine Brentano von Arnim’s fervid correspondence as a teenager with the somewhat older poet Karoline von Günderode,
Die Günderode
—a work that displayed, Margaret thought, “all that is lovely between woman and woman.”

Elizabeth’s offer represented another potential source of income, and the project gave Margaret the excuse to correspond with “Bettine,” as she thought of her already, having read von Arnim’s
Correspondence with a Child
—letters Bettine exchanged with Goethe in girlhood—in hopes of gathering more information for her biography. Margaret would learn that both the teenage letters and the Goethe correspondence had been substantially rewritten or even fabricated, and she ultimately discounted von Arnim as a source on Goethe. But the illumination of two distinct yet complementary souls in
Die Günderode
seemed an authentic representation of the worth of friendship, and the possibility that the letters were embroidered for effect hardly mattered. “Our communion was sweet—it was the epoch in which I first became conscious of myself,” ran its epigraph. The suicide of the older Karoline some years after the correspondence, in a period of melancholy after having been jilted by her married lover, while not treated in the book, lent poignance to the earthly “Woman’s heaven” conjured in the letters.

Some of Margaret’s biographical thoughts on Goethe found their way into the third issue of
The Dial,
published in January 1841. Responding to the recent publication in English of an attack on Goethe by the German literary critic Wolfgang Menzel, Margaret defended her hero as “a prophet of our own age, as well as a representative of his own.” She might as well have been describing her own ambitions as she assessed the accomplishments of this “agent in history” who had inspired her for over a decade. Goethe, she wrote, was “just enough of an idealist, just enough of a realist, for his peculiar task”—that is, to perform the “office of artist-critic to the then chaotic world of thought in his country.” He deserved to be judged apart from the “private gossip” or even the “well-authenticated versions” of his irregular domestic arrangements, which critics like Menzel held against him. Goethe might not meet “the standard of ideal manhood,” Margaret allowed, but it was important to “consider his life as a whole.” His writings alone offered “sufficient evidence of a life of severe labor, steadfast forbearance, and an intellectual growth almost unparalleled.”

Margaret’s commitment to showcasing the “new spirit” in this third and so far strongest issue of
The Dial
showed in her decision to reject an essay by Henry Thoreau, “The Service,” that Waldo urged her to print. Margaret wrote to the twenty-three-year-old Thoreau that she hoped to publish the essay eventually, but while it was “rich in thoughts,” in its present form those thoughts “seem to me so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without
pain.
” Still, she recognized that his “tone” was far superior to the “air of quiet good-breeding” of much of the material submitted to the magazine: “Yours is so rugged that it ought to be commanding.”
She pressed him to revise and accepted, instead, another of Thoreau’s poems and three of Waldo’s, including the enigmatic “Sphinx.”