poor excuse for not living; my so-called culture a collection of shreds and patches to hide the mind’s nakedness. Cannot I begin really to live and think now?”[1]
How many authors, surrounded by a circle of admiring friends, are found to have descended, in their secret diaries, to quite such depths of humility as appear in these extracts?
Another point where I should diverge strongly from the current estimate of Margaret Fuller is in the prevailing assumption that her chief aim at any period of her life was self-culture. The Roman thread in her was too strong, the practical inheritance from her parentage too profound, for her to have ever contented herself with a life of abstraction. The strong training that came from her father, the early influence of Jefferson’s letters, all precluded this. What she needed was not books but life, and if she ever expressed doubts of this need, she always came back to it again. “Is it not nobler and truer,” she wrote in 1842 to W. H. Channing, “to live than to think?”[2] Here it is that she sometimes chafes under the guidance of Emerson; always longs to work as well as meditate, to deal with the many, not the few, to feel herself in action. This made it the best thing in her Providence life to have attended the Whig caucus, and made her think, on board the French war-vessel, that she would like to command it; this made her delight in studying
