Fuller in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Journal Comments on Fuller in 1840

[53] d [Journal Comments on Fuller in 1840] Theodore Parker [3 August 1840] . . . Saw Miss Fuller, but did not get much. I seldom get much from her. Is it my fault? No doubt. This much, she said some good things about the influence of Christianity at this day. Read me some beautiful poetry, which will shine upon the Dial. . . . [7 September 1840] But what shall I say of Miss F.? I grieve to say what I must say. I have latterly seen in her deportment indications of that same violence and unregenerate passion so strongly naked on her face. I did not Theodore Parker (1810–1860), a self-educated farmer’s son, was a Harvard Divinity School graduate and member of the Transcendental Club, whose South Boston Sermon on “The Transient and Permanent in Christianity” (1841) created more controversy than Emerson’s “Divinity School Address” (1838). Parker contributed to the Dial and, as minister in West Roxbury (1837–1846), was a frequent visitor to Brook Farm. In 1846, he organized his own congregation in Boston and preached to large crowds at the Boston Melodeon. Fuller and Parker first met in 1837, but their conversation was interrupted before she “could get to Spinoza” (11 April 1837, Letters, 1:269). Parker admired Fuller’s ability to converse, saying, “she smites and kindles, with all the force, irregularity and matchless beauty of lightning” (Grodzins, Parker, 111). Fuller later reviewed favorably three of Parker’s sermons in the New-York Tribune. According to Caroline Dall (see next entry), Fuller and Parker “alike required a sort of personal submission before new-comers could be admitted to a cordial understanding”; and, it seemed to Dall, that “Parker hates Margaret, and I never can understand why, unless it be that in their faults, they resemble each other.” Unfortunately, like Hawthorne, Parker did not like intellectually aggressive women, complaining of Fuller’s “Macedonian-phalanx march” (Capper, Private Years, 319). Moreover, Parker was interested in theology, not aesthetics, and practical reform, not theorizing about it, and he differed with Fuller in both areas, even though their personal relations were cordial. fuller in her own time [54] think Religion had softened a spirit naturally so austere; nor that charity had tempered a character so selfish and tyrannical by birth. I did not dream those silken cords had joined her so softly to the sky. But I did dream that considerations of Prudence, suggestions of the Understanding, not a little experience of the world, and a very subtle understanding with considerable insight into first principles—had done the work as well as such agents could effect it. Now I see my mistake. Nor that alone but my old Rule—to which in her case I was making a conjectural exception—that Religion alone can regenerate a spirit at first ill-born, holds good. I need not mention particulars to prove these statements. It is enough that I find the worst suggestions of Mr Alcott confirmed, and I am filled with grief at the discovery. After wandering some 30 years in the Saharas and Siberias; the Englands and Egypts of life finding a sad mingling of Earth and Heaven,—to see one of vast gifts of intellect, great and diversified culture in elegant letters and the arts—of deep experience, in the detail of life, one tried by suffering mind and body),—to see a woman giving way to petty jealousies, contemptible lust of power, and falling into freaks of passion, it is ludicrous first, and then it is melancholy. It is not for me to forgive anything. Thank God I have no occasion, but it is for me to pity and to mourn. It is for me to show others the only salvation for themselves. “My Soul come not thou in her secrets: to her assembly mine honour be not thou united.”1 CarolElizabethJohnston,“TheJournalsofTheodoreParker:July–December1840”(Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1980), 33, 60–61; transcribed from the manuscript “Journals of Theodore Parker” at the Andover Theological Library, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University. Note 1. The quotation at the end of Parker’s text is from Genesis 49:6: “O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honor, be not thou united: for in their anger they slew a man, and in their self-will they digged down a wall.” ...