In the most important period of her early life she wrote, “As to Goethe … I do not go to him as a guide or friend, but as a great thinker who makes me think.”[1] At this very time she was planning to write Goethe’s biography and preparing to translate Eckermann’s conversations with him. In her correspondence, here and there, she doubtless speaks of him as “the master,” but the light use of a trivial phrase is not to be set against her distinct disclaimer, as just quoted. She was indeed too omnivorous a reader, too ardent and fertile a thinker, to go through the successive bondages by which many fine minds — especially the minds of women — work their way to freedom. Miss Martineau, for instance, with all her native vigor, was always following with implicit confidence some particular guide or model; in early life her brother James, then Malthus, then Garrison, then Comte, then even Atkinson; but in Margaret Fuller’s case, though there were many friendships, there was no personal and controlling ruler. Emerson came the nearest to this, and yet we see by her letters how frankly she could criticise even him. Her danger lay in the direction of originality, not of imitation; of too much divergence, not too much concentration. Coming in contact, as she did, with some of the strongest men of her time; first the Boston Transcendentalists; then Horace Greeley in New York; then Mazzini in Italy: she was still her own mistress, still nul-
- ↑ MS. letter: Providence, R. I., July 3, 1837.
