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

Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1846 and 1852

[77] d [Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1846 and 1852] Thomas Carlyle Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Scottish essayist and biographer, maintained a lifelong friendship and correspondence with Emerson, though it grew strained in later years as Carlyle became more critical of what he considered the Transcendentalists’ impractical idealism. Fuller had studied Carlyle’s writings since 1832, especially those on German literature; she also reviewed his works favorably in the Dial and the New-York Tribune. For his part, he enjoyed reading Papers on Literature and Art (“the undeniable utterances . . . of a true heroic mind”). Emerson had sent Fuller’s translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe to Carlyle in 1839, so it was natural Emerson would alert him that Fuller was coming in 1846 to London, where Carlyle and his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866), lived. Fuller’s visit in October was an interesting one. She thoroughly enjoyed meeting one of her idols, though she did complain that “To interrupt him is a physical impossibility” (16 November 1846, Letters, 4:248). Although Fuller also liked Jane (“full of grace, sweetness , and talent” [Letters, 4:248]), she apparently disliked Fuller, and when she wrote to a friend, Geraldine Jewsbury, about the visit, she received this response: “I loathe her heartily from your description.” Jewsbury had “no patience with theoretical profligacy,” believing it “does the heart and soul more harm than a course of blackguardism!” To her, Fuller “must be, and cannot help but be, a hypocrite, if she be tempted to death to live ‘a free and easy life’, and yet keeps herself straitlaced up in practice to keep in with Emerson & Co.! . . . And then those doctrines from an irredeemably ugly, uninteresting woman are really ‘damnable’” (19 October 1846, Letters to Jane Carlyle, 215). Thomas was milder, telling his brother that Fuller was “a strange lilting lean old-maid, not nearly such a bore as I expected” and writing his sister that Fuller was “rather a good woman,” but “I remember I was somewhat hard upon her and certain crotchets of hers” (8 October 1846, Collected Letters, 21:72; 25 March 1847, New Letters, 2:32). fuller in her own time [78] Thomas Carlyle to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 18 December 1846 Miss Fuller came duly as you announced; was welcomed for your sake and her own. A high-soaring, clear, enthusiast soul; in whose speech there is much of all that one wants to find in speech. A sharp subtle intellect too; and less of that shoreless Asiastic dreaminess than I have sometimes met with in her writings. We liked one another very well, I think, and the Springs too were favourites. But, on the whole, it could not be concealed, least of all from the sharp female intellect, that this Carlyle was a dreadfully heterodox, not to say a dreadfully savage fellow, at heart; believing no syllable of all that Gospel of Fraternity, Benevolence, and new Heaven -on-Earth, preached forth by all manner of “advanced” creatures from George Sand to Elihu Burritt, in these days; that in fact the said Carlyle not only disbelieved all that, but treated it as poisonous cant,—sweetness of sugar-of-lead,—a detestable phosphorescence from the dead body of a Christianity , that would not admit itself to be dead, and lie buried with all its unspeakable putrescences, as a venerable dead one ought! Surely detestable enough.—To all which Margaret listened with much good nature; tho’ of course with sad reflexions not a few.—She is coming back to us, she promises . Her dialect is very vernacular,—extremely exotic in the London climate . If she do not gravitate too irresistibly towards that class of New-Era people (which includes whatsoever we have of prurient, esurient, morbid, flimsy, and in fact pitiable and unprofitable, and is at a sad discount among men of sense), she may get into good tracks of inquiry and connexion here, and be very useful to herself and others. . . . Thomas Carlyle to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 7 May 1852 Poor Margaret, that is a strange tragedy that history of hers; and has many traits of the Heroic in it, tho’ it is wild as the prophecy of a sybil. Such a predetermination to eat this big universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul. Her “mountain me” indeed:—but her courage too is high and...