NAWSA SUBJECT FILE Fuller, Margaret New York Herald Tribune Books Section IX Sunday, January 18, 1942 20 Pages Concord, Cambridge and Margaret Fuller A Notable Portrait of a Woman with an Instinct for Greatness The Life of Margaret Fuller By Madeline B. Stern . . . 549 pp . . . New York: E.P. Dutton and Company . . . $3.75. (Picture of Margaret Fuller) Margaret Fuller A painting by Chappel from "The Life of Margaret Fuller" Reviewed by George F. Whicher Between Margaret Fuller's reputation and her literary achievements there is a wide discrepancy. Nothing that she wrote can stand comparison for a moment with even the average level of Emerson's or Thoreau's or Hawthorne's writing, yet her fame remains as lasting as theirs. The sum of her publications, not counting translations from the German, consists of a travel book describing the inrushing settlers and the vanishing Indians of the Illinois and Wisconsin prairies; a feminist tract, one of the most cogent of the mid-nineteenth century; a large group of book reviews, literary essays and topical papers mainly collected from the columns of the New-York Tribune; and a series of travel letters from Europe, also written for The Tribune, which culminate in bulletins from the siege of Rome in the summer of [?- paper torn] This is all, and it is very little to show for the twenty years of her mature life. She considered, and rightly, that she had not by any means realized her powers in these hurried and miscellaneous productions. The one book that called out, as she believed, her utmost efforts was her history of the first abortive episode of the Italian risorgimento, and by a bitter irony it was this book that perished with her in the shipwreck that closed her career. Miss Fuller may be called, next to Poe, the best practising critic of the 1840s, but since after Poe competition was negligible, this attribution does not place her very high in the scale of created things. If we would understand the amount of attention that is still being bestowed upon her—witness two new biographies and a partial reprint of her writings in the last three years—we must turn to her personality as described by those who knew her rather than as embodied in her own work. In comparison with Poe, who was almost her exact contemporary, Margaret Fuller enjoyed a much richer and more various experience of persons and places. Brought up in the shadow of Harvard College while most of the future leaders of Transcendental thought were undergraduates there and "Jimmy" Lowell was merely a small boy about the village, teaching for a short period in Bronson Alcott's Temple School, editing "The Dial," often visiting Emerson in Concord or consorting with advanced spirits at Brook Farm, living in Horace Greeley's household, making memorable acquaintance with Carlyle, George Sand and Mazzini, Margaret went everywhere and knew every one worth knowing---and found few whom she could recognize as her intellectual superiors. She had a sound instinct for greatness which led her unhesitatingly to prefer Goethe, while the more maidenly Longfellow was shying away from what he considered Goethe's "sensualism." She was one of the few who were not overawed by Emerson, but shared with the elder William James a sturdy perception of the sage's limitations. She was a friend of all liberal causes and an active participant in many reforms. At the very end of her crowded years she knew the joy of fulfillment of her craving for love and the dignity of tragic suffering. Unlike Whitman, she did not live to publish her new perceptions. One of her earliest and best friends was well within the bounds of truth when he said of her, "Margaret had so many aspects to her soul that she might furnish material for a hundred biographers, and all could not be said ever then." Miss Stern, who is Margaret Fuller's seventh biographer, quotes this sentence as an epigraph for her book to justify the reopening of a subject that has been treated four times in the last twenty years. But no apologies are needed for work as soundly conceived and as beautifully executed as hers. If the aim of the biography is the evocation of a fascinating personality with all its appurtenances of circumstances, this latest life of Margaret Fuller is a consummate example of the art. LIke all real artists, Miss Stern has taken risks. She has ventured to saturate her mind with the memoirs and letters and journals of the period, an enormous literature which can hardly be listed in thirty closely printed pages of bibliography, and then to recast this material as a novelist might mold the stuff of his direct observation. She has created scenes and conversations, not from imagination but on the basis of authentic documents. Her skill in presenting dubious traditions in the form of reveries, leaving the reader to accept or reject them at his pleasure, is notable. In the general method of her work she is a confessed follower of Van Wyck Brooks; not a mere imitator, however, but a master in her own right. The technique serves her well. Her triumph consists in the complete assimilation of the world of Cambridge and Concord and New York a century ago, not to mention London and Rome, as though she herself had moved through the scenes that she reproduces and noted costume and gesture, the expression of faces and the tones of voice. Like Carlyle in "The French Revolution," she has made her readers contemporary with the past by combining the factual precision of the trained historian with the glowing color of the expert writer of fiction. She has produced a picture of Miss Fuller and her friends that Carlyle would have approved. "Margaret was a great creature," he declared, "but we have no full biography of her yet. We want to know what time she got up in the morning and what sort of shoes and stocking she wore." Miss Stern, who quotes this dictum, has taken it to heart. She keeps fully informed of Margaret's successive acquisitions and adornments of bombazine or purple muslin, displays for us the accessories of her writing desk, the quill pens. the velvet penwiper, the seal with the head of Franklin given her by her father, and sets again for us the community supper tables at Brook Farm with their mugs of milk and bowls of "brewis." Her characters, vivified by their constant touch with tangible things, emerge with astonishing solidity an definiteness. The hazard is that such emphasis on richness of detail might easily degenerate into tedious and trivial archeologizing. With Miss Stern it never does so. She never lets herself forget that her careful stage settings are merely backgrounds for her characters, and that the many minor figures that throng her pages must be kept in subordinate relation to her central subject. Because her sense of values is remarkably firm, she has so managed that everything falls into its proper place and her effects are all the more impressive because of the feeling of the massive weight of fact behind them. In particular, Miss Stern is to be congratulated on her success in conveying an impression of the maturing and deepening Margaret Fuller's nature. Educated by a father somewhat like John Stuart Mill's, Margaret first appears to us as a thoroughly gauche and tactless young bluestocking, with undulant neck, blinking eyes and nasal voice, resolved to be brilliant since she cannot be handsome, and only managing to make herself excessively irritating. As we follow her story we forget, as Emerson also did, her unpleasant mannerisms and become absorbed in the history of an adventurous mind. By the end we are in full sympathy with a woman of great capacity who, in spite of inhibitions and hampering conventions, grasped life with both hands and won from the grudging years a brief fruition. The story of Margaret's heart needs tact in the telling. With all her keenness in recognizing and her pertinacity in cultivating people of genius, she was singularly ill starred in her choice of lovers. Apparently she was at the mercy of an overwhelming necessity to devote herself to a loved object, and since she conspicuously lacked charm she was predestined to disappointment. Miss Stern does not develop, nor indeed even mention, Dr. Canby's supposition that Margaret may at one time have embarrassed Thoreau by an excess of affection. She does, however, picture three successive attachments: a hoping against hope that she might win the regard of a young Boston Apollo who ultimately married for beauty; a later and more serious affair in New York with a particularly suave German Jew, who at long last extricated himself with unctuous dexterity; and finally the happy accident that brought Margaret, at thirty-seven, in contact with another lonely heart in the person of a young and impecunious Italian of good family who reciprocated her devotion with dog-like fidelity. An ideal union in the manner of George Sand was succeeded by a secret marriage and birth of a child. Ossoil was not literary, indeed he was hardly literate, and he was distinctly not the mate that any one would have selected for the American Hypatia. But they got along beautifully. (Continued on page two) 2 IX NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE BOOKS, SUNDAY, JANUARY 18, 1942 Mr. Burt's Philadelphia Story He Doesn't Love His Native City, but He Likes Americans ALONG THESE STREETS. By Struthers Burt.... 608 pp..... New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.... $2.75. Reviewed by FLORENCE HAXTON BULLOCK ONE effective way to give you the savor of Mr. Struthers Burt's novel about Philadelphia, America, Americans and-- monkeys!-- would be to quote him. Therefore hit or miss from the pages of "Along These Streets" come: "He conducted his marriage exactly like an automobile driver who drives with one hand and turns around and talks to the people on the back seat." "Whenever Valerie opened her slightly scornful mouth, a blood-red cupid's bow with the ends turned down, you saw her small sharp teeth." "On the whole, Philadelphians were a pleasant people," thought Mavis Spate, a pretty Kitty Foyle from Harrisburg, "if you permitted them a harmless, and usually polite, sense of superiority." And-- "Man had only one natural enemy, nature, and that he could often subdue into the best of friends. The living were a conspiracy, a secret society, a fraternity against death and that sly thief of all things, time. They were a handful, bounded together by the ticking of a clock. It seemed to Felix that all those alive at a given moment should take an oath amongst themselves of mutual assistance if for no other reason than their common pity because surrounding them was the mystery of themselves, and of nature, and the universe." This last from our [?] the imperturbable Felix, a slightly stupid, invariably amiable, probably brilliant ex-professor of anthropology, aged thirty-five. Quotes one and two give you a quick sampling of Mr. Burt's ready faculty for putting an idea, or a picture plus meanings, into a phrase or a sentence, Quotes three and four are almost adequate statements of the minor and major themes of "Along These Streets." Felix Macalister came of an old Philadelphia family. His mother had been sufficiently the rebel to elope from one marriage bed and jump into another and not quite ready for her, in the days when Reno was not just around the corner from Philadelphia. So Felix, loved child of this "le-lopement," felt the bar sinister in his childhood, grew up away from Philadelphia and gave the extremely class-conscious group from which he sprung almost no thought till the day when a letter from the family lawyer caught him on the point of setting on a monkey-hunt in the Andes, informing him that he had inherited the family mansion on "Cassianut" Street and an income of $50,000 a year. To claim this inheritance he must spend nine months of each year in the old home and (by implication) to take place in the cultural cozy corner of upper-class Philadelphia which his ancestors helped to fabricate. These privileges, to the thoughtful Felix, seem mostly to be duties, and he feels, at the outset anyhow, that he ought not to shrink them. He believes the powerful families in Philadelphia have evaded their obligation to make theirs a decent city and he feels, not too confidently, that he Margaret Fuller The Brick Row Book Shop. Inc. BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES FIFTY-FIVE FIFTH AVENUE NEW YORK CITY Telephone: GRAMERCY 7-0432 Cable Address: BRICKROW May 21, 1943. Mrs. Guy W. Stantial 21 Ashmont Street Melrose Massachusetts Dear Mrs. Stantial: We trust the the copy of Life and Letters of James and Lucretia Mott sent at your request to the Suffrage Memorial Collection of Radcliffe College was received and found satisfactory. The later list of books sent we are working on and hope to make a report shortly. We are on the track of several volumes of The Woman's Journal but as the person offering them neglected to give the dates we shall have to wait on his response to our letter asking for same. We have found among our collection of A.Ls. one from Margaret Fuller to a Mrs. Howitt. We have failed to find any reference to this lady in our reference books but she may well be known to you. This letter is of 40 pages on a 6 x 4 inch sheet. It has been very carefully inserted in a mat measuring 13 x 9 inches. There is also a portrait of Miss Fuller measuring 10 x 8 inches also mounted in a similar manner 13 x 10 inches. Below we give a transcript of the letter. 17 Warwick St. Oct. 8th Dear Mrs Howitt. As Mr. & Mrs. Spring are just just going out for the day they wish me to write you in their name as well as my own. If it is most inconvenient to you to call on us we can be at home on Monday of next week from twelve till four P.M.; ----- days up to that time are engaged. But we do not wish that you should call merely as a matter of etiquette we are aware that your time, as well as that of Mr. Howitt, is much occupied; our wish is to see you, and if you, and if you prefer and will appoint a time, we will come to you rather than you to us, for we, as strangers and sightseerers, are naturally on the move all the time. So please arrange it, as best suits yourself, & so that we may see yourself and Mr. Howitt when you are most at leisure, and and believe us, dear Madam, yours with true respect, though I can only set to it the hand of S. M. Fuller. We sahll remain here two weeks, if not longer. (2). We have priced this at $12.50 and we will be very happy to submit it for inspection if so desired. Very truly yours THE BRICK ROW BOOK SHOP, INC. Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.