The Adventures of Allegra Fullerton (24 page)

“She is taxed, yet she is not allowed to vote? Is that not the very abuse for which our Revolution was fought?”

He warned, however (referring to Godwin and Mill, whom he had known once among Bentham's circle) of the long line of distinguished thought arguing that voting alone does not create change.

“A woman in a democracy must, instead, be equal on every footing—social, educational, legal,
and
political,” he said, and thumped the lectern with a clenched fist. “Let us, my fellow men in the audience, consider the matter a little more closely—that is to say perchance more painfully—still: How have we attained our mastery over women? By superior virtue? By superior understanding? Do you, can you—any of you—really believe such a thing?” He laughed; he boldly looked over his audience before continuing.

“No, sirs, it is by the original accident of superior strength
alone
that we have done so, and so have maintained our first advantage. Is it not an advantage unworthy of us, unworthy of true gentlemen?”

There was a mild applause from several women in the audience, and more shifting, harrumphing, and scornful tittering from the men. But I must say that most of the women present appeared either impassive before his plea or in modest agreement with their husbands and brothers. Yet Mr. Neal, far from appearing daunted before this complacent and condescending response, bulled his way forward, as one who gains energy from battle.

“Let me tell you in all frankness, ladies and gentlemen, that I do not believe marriage—an institution I deeply respect and in which I am a happy participant—
marriage
, I say, is not, however, a condition absolutely indispensable for the happiness of woman and the development of a true womanhood. But whether she choose marriage or that single blessedness we sometimes hear of, the woman in America has the protection of every right, natural and constitutional, presumed and granted to men.”

He went on in this forceful vein to the continued discomfort and condescension of most of his audience, for nearly two hours, never referring to prepared notes. His superior address, no less than his outbursts of eloquence, fascinated me. What he was saying of justice and women, as my reader will by now understand, had been long fomenting in my own mind, not only since my acquaintance with Miss Fuller, but through the example and courage of some who once sat for me during those years of my travels.

My interest in Mr. Neal was all the more strengthened by some of the commentary I heard in the aftermath.

“What do you think of this Mr. Neal?” one woman asked of her companion.

“I think him an enthusiast, but a right manly man, and thoroughly the gentleman,” he responded.

“But I mean to ask, what do you think of his opinions?”

“I think,” he said, “that they would take woman from her throne where she is worshipped, to place her in the furrows to be bespattered.”

Miss Fuller and I approached Mr. Neal once the crowd had dispersed, save a few remaining auditors. One in particular, clearly a woman of imposing carriage, was saying, “Would political equality, sir, be preferable to exerting the moral influence of her sex to right her wrongs? Is it not, moreover, a declaration of a woman's rights for her to say, ‘I am a wife and a mother! To be these is my freedom, to be other is slavery?'”

Mr. Neal smiled benevolently upon her. “It may be so for her, madam,” he returned, “but suppose she happened to be neither? According to your definition, she is then a slave. Yet we have thousands of women in this country who are neither wives nor mothers—nor ever will be—just as my twin sister is neither. Would you leave her, would you leave them all, nothing to console them? Why, indeed, if we agree that women are unlike men, can we not agree that they are not for that reason in any way inferior to them?”

Mr. Spooner had followed us as we worked our way closer to John Neal. He knew the speaker from former associations, and once all the others had left us alone with Neal, Mr. Spooner invited him, along with Miss Fuller, to his home for refreshment.

It was in these circumstances that I met this extraordinary man. Neal had himself, I discovered, once been an itinerant artist and schoolmaster; he seemed to know every artist of note here and in England. He was also a lawyer, a novelist, an editor and essayist, a lecturer, and a man of myriad interests. Miss Fuller whispered to me, “He is the most brilliant and original man to come out of Maine, his friend Mr. Longfellow notwithstanding.” And it became clear, the better I began to know him, that his old role as Byronesque Yankee Genius was, in part, a creature of his own manufacture, as much as it was once upheld by the public press.

Late into the evening we all sat in Mr. Spooner's studio, which Mr. Neal first insisted on seeing and then upon using as the site of our conversations. He once or twice referred to his old friend Miss Fuller as the “She-Gladiator” while they bantered one another. If he seemed to best her as to the merits of some artist over another, she tweaked him jauntily: “Mr. Neal does not argue quite fairly, for he uses reason while it lasts, and then helps himself out with wit, sentiment, and assertion.” When she caused us to laugh by such remarks, she would follow with something more friendly: “But his lion-heart and his sense of the ludicrous in human affairs redeem him.”

At one point she furthered her argument for his redemption by toasting him as a man who morally and materially had helped the careers of many women, from actresses to authors, giving particular instances of his generosity regarding Ann Stephens and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. I found I liked him immediately, but I could not then have known how he would help and encourage me as well.

Mr. Neal's Scots ancestry was clear from first glance: his blue eyes sparkled with the intensity of his soul; his hair, light and silky in texture, framed his fine high forehead in soft natural ringlets; his complexion too was fair, his lips full, and all the features of his head proportionate. He was not tall, but his frame, even for a man of about fifty, was robust. His whole body seemed as vigorous as his mind, both in continual motion, as if from some turbulence of energy or activity within. Miss Fuller at times called him by a pseudonym he had once used, “Jehu O' Cataract,” and I cannot think of a better to express the essence of his wild yet learned character.

He was self-educated in literature and law, and he disclosed at one point his own system—which I cannot possibly now remember—for learning foreign languages, by means of which he had taught himself perhaps ten, and with phrases from which he peppered his conversation. “
Svelature, trenta o quarantu
!” (or some such thing) he would cry out suddenly. His conversation revealed a doctrine of novel writing somewhat in the mesmeric line. Which doctrine, Mr. Spooner humorously suggested, “Mr. Neal-O'Cataract” used to insure the unmatched spontaneity and power of his prose, and the entrancement of his readers, but which also caused him to “burst upon the page with all the sins of his early drafts about him, like weeds hanging from a god rising out of the sea.”

“If he takes as his masters the digressive Mr. Fielding and Mr. Sterne,” Miss Fuller put in, “he does so with barely half their discipline!” She tweaked him, if rather pleasantly, for his “little essays on a host of topics and for substantial doses of self-justification” implanted in his “perhaps too-melodramatic fictions.” Indeed, she gave a humorous rendition of “his abundant lectures on fine art” in
Randolph
.

“Mr. Neal has been much criticized for the erratic and roaring audacity of his style,” Miss Fuller then suggested, “but he is also a great exponent of naturalness in the speech of his characters.”

“Yes,” he admitted, “I have striven to reproduce familiar patterns of speech, or talking on paper, as opposed to display or oration, and I think that is one way to insure a distinct quality in our national literature, to distinguish it from that of our British cousins. Otherwise, are not our American authors left eternally struggling to out-English the English themselves?
Anglis ipsis Anglior!
”

“Might not we also distinguish our national literature,” Mr. Spooner suggested—for he and Miss Fuller alone had read Mr. Neal—“by a frankness we find in your own tales?”

“I hope so,” Mr. Neal agreed. “I myself have always tried to write, and to encourage others to write, a daring and naked exposure of what people generally can not avoid thinking, but dare not express.”

“Which may be the main evil in this flood of indistinguishable novels expressly for women,” Mr. Spooner offered, “this absence of honesty, for lack of a better word.” He began to open another bottle of wine.

“Yes, George, I believe that is our problem,
this
side of the Atlantic,” Mr. Neal agreed.

“You mean to say, Mr. Neal,” I asked, “that American authors need no longer apologize for their novels as the products of their leisure hours for the moral improvement of ladies and children of leisure?”

He looked at me sharply. “Indeed, Mrs. Fullerton!” He smiled. “Why can not the novel ascend the same heights as poetry and take within its ample purview all fiction of great merit, whether in drama or verse or prose—wherever, in brief, the novelist finds imaginary creatures, who entertain and terrify us, who are invested with all the attributes of humanity and agitated by all the passions of our nature?” He looked about him with an air of expectancy. His words—“the naked exposure of what people can not avoid thinking, but dare not express” struck me as somehow essential, for painting as well as for writing.

“In short,” he began again, “tell me that storytelling one way or another is not the chief employment of all mankind! Can you? Can anyone truly say it is not? Then storytelling—novels above all—thereby might have the widest appeal and the deepest influence upon our nation!”

“You make an ambitious appeal for poor scribblers, John,” Mr. Spooner said, raising his glass and laughing. “Gibbon, would you run down cellar, please, and fetch us a couple more of these Bordeaux.”

“Well, sir, may we say at least,” Mr. Neal continued, “that in painting as in novel making Mr. Emerson enlightens us once again when he says that ‘mere study as much as mere talent can not make a writer. There must be a
man
'—or a
woman
I daresay—‘behind the book!' Or, let us add, behind the painting.”

As a reader of novels, I was much taken with these comparisons of writers and painters, of making American novels and paintings. Again, I felt as if he were expressing my own secret if unformed thoughts.

Our conversations went on late into the night and thereby once again was the following day spoiled for serious work. I should not have been able to concentrate on my work in any event, for that day Mr. Wellington had brought his deposition for me to sign.

But John Neal also paid us a parting visit in the afternoon, even while all the Spooners and I remained about the dining table reading the newspaper accounts of his lecture. Mr. Spooner was in fact in the middle of a sentence, decrying the obtuseness of these reports which had mistaken Mr. Neal for a destroyer of marriages. Mr. Spooner was saying that Neal was a thoroughly married man and devoted husband who, however, had once known his share of vital women, and that Mr. Neal, far from recommending profligacy or abstinence, did not at all deny our lower, animal passions.

Into his very pronouncement, as I say, walked Mr. Neal. He himself had read and had by heart one passage in particular that amused him, which he recited now in a most amusing voice: “The subject was discussed in a very entertaining and original manner, but we suspect the fair are well satisfied with their present influence.” Everyone laughed.

Mr. Spooner flipped through the newspaper, then read on in the same spirit: “The subject would be too dangerous if it were not too absurd to debate. These are the jokes of a man fond of humor and fantastic notions.”

After some further amusement at the expense of his critics, Mr. Neal stepped over to a painting Julian had been working on. Julian had not come to the studio that afternoon, and the painting was unfinished, but Mr. Neal expressed his approval the more he examined its composition and effects. “Marvelous!” he said. “And this is Mr. Forrester's work, you say?”

“Yes,” Mr. Spooner answered. “His work has changed for the better since Italy.”

“Something of Canaletto, perhaps, is here?” Mr. Neal suggested.

Mr. Spooner nodded. “And his trips home to Gloucester in aid of his aging mother have inspired new subject matter: the sea and land of his home ground.”

“I think his old friend Fitz Lane has had something of a benevolent influence on our dear Julian,” I ventured.

“You may be quite right, Allegra,” Mr. Spooner said. “But whatever the variety of influences, Julian has begun to devote himself to work, and I am the happier for it. This particular marine,” he continued, “is a memory, an instant from childhood when he saw a certain effect of summer air, light, and sea. It struck him deeply at the time, and there you see it called forth upon the canvas.” Even in its unfinished state, Julian's canvas was unlike anything I had seen him paint before.

The sky was broad and heavy-clouded in the upper half of the canvas, creating a sombre tone. From somewhere, however, a shaft of light illumined a distant sail, with the brilliance of sun gleaming on snow. The distant hull, on the other hand, was scarcely visible. Everywhere, the dark sea obscured other modest vessels. Islands were mostly in shadow as well, but for here and there one part of an island was ignited into brilliant green and white out of the encompassing gloom. The surprising effect of such illumination and shadow was one of ever-expanding space, limitless horizon.

Mr. Neal then turned to an easel where I had been working on a canvas of my own. It was a portrait of a woman in a white summer gown, her back to the viewer, paint brush in hand, contemplating her reflection in a mirror. The face reflected back to the viewer was my own—an exercise in self-portraiture that Mr. Spooner hoped to submit on my behalf to the next year's Athenaeum exhibition.