II.
HEREDITARY TRAITS.
“We are never better understood,” says Margaret Fuller in her fragment of autobiographical romance, “than when we speak of ‘a Roman virtue,’ ‘a Roman outline.’” She goes on: “There is somewhat indefinite, somewhat yet unfulfilled in the thought of Greece, of Spain, of modern Italy; but Rome, it stands by itself a clear Word. The power of will, the dignity of a fixed purpose, is what it utters. Every Roman was an emperor.” Tried by this standard, she herself may be said to have had a Roman parentage. An element of strength went through all her ancestry.
And the quality which was their drawback — too much of self-assertion — was essentially Roman also. “It never shocks us,” the autobiography continues, “that the Roman is self-conscious. One wants no universal truth from him, no philosophy, no creation, but only his life, his Roman life, felt in every pulse, realized in every gesture. The universal heaven takes in the Roman only to make us feel his individuality the more. The Will, the Resolve of Man; it has been expressed, fully expressed.”
