Chapter 3
Margaret Fuller’s Prophecy
2I am including here a quotation from my great aunt, Margaret Fuller. This quotation is important today, when considered in the light of C. P. Snow’s book, Two Cultures. His two cultures are those of the scientists and the literary intellectuals, whose respective languages and interests in the last century and a half have pulled so far apart as to have created a chasm. Snow says that this is partially due to the fact that the intellectual writers of the early nineteenth century not only failed to comprehend the significance of industrialization but that its individual literary stars abhorred industrialization’s every symptom. This occurred despite the fact that The Royal Society of Arts was formed in England in the 1750’s by the literary intellectuals and learned scientists for the very purpose of anticipating and forestalling this dichotomy. Snow says that Emerson and Thoreau in America were typical of intellectuals with aversion to industrialization, and their popularity increased the academic divide between the literary and the scientific.
3 Margaret Fuller was co-founder with Emerson of Dial magazine, which she undertook as the first publishing medium to present the work of Emerson. She was also the first publisher of Thoreau’s work and he, Emerson, and other literati of the time were her great friends. She alone seems not only to have been aware of the looming significance of industrialization, but also to have hailed and welcomed it as it came from England to impinge upon America.
4 In reading Margaret’s essay, it should be remembered that two years before it was written she had spent the summer with the Indians outside Fort Dearborn, which had been established seven years earlier. She had reached that present site of Chicago via the sailing ships on the Great Lakes, and stage coaches. The telegraph had been invented a few years earlier, and at the time Margaret wrote her essay in 1842, the only railroads in America were the short twenty-mile line between Schenectady and Albany and the forty-mile track between Baltimore and Washington. There was nothing in the scene of her time that obviously foretold her ‘‘complete linking together of the great continent of America by the telegraph and railroad.’’ Very little of America was as yet within the ‘‘United States.’’ Not only did Margaret envision the coming and the important significance of industrialization, but she stated also the realization that it would bring a great cross-breeding of man. She foresaw the necessity for the public to serve as sole patron of mass production and she predicted the public’s ripening ability to appreciate its responsibility to the regenerative functioning of the individual artists.
5 Some may think it paradoxical that the work of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and Poe has been acclaimed by history (though these writers were antipathetic to the subsequently realized evolution of man), while Margaret Fuller’s name has remained obscure. In fact, her work has remained so obscure that C. P. Snow and his audiences are unaware of the extraordinary vision and cordiality to industrialization in America she had more than a century ago. Margaret Fuller, however, is well known academically in America. Her life and work is one of the leading thesis subjects for graduate school candidates for Master’s degrees in early American literature.
6 When Horace Greeley founded what is now the New York Herald Tribune, in April 1841, he asked Margaret Fuller to be his literary critic. Heywood Broun, one of her many successors as literary critic of the Tribune, said almost a century later, ‘‘This was the first and last time a literary critic was regularly ‘frontpaged.’ ’’ Because Margaret was devastatingly critical of popular American writers and poets who produced what would be today classified as ‘‘saccharine corn’’ imitations of English authors and pursued a far-sighted vision of an as-yet-gestating intellectual conceptioning for America’s role in history, she lost her frontpage battle to establish the primacy of the regenerative individual to industrialization and the fundamental economic responsibilities of an industrially-instrumented society to its individual conceptual pioneers as the prime commonwealth initiators and augmenters.
7 Margaret Fuller’s 1842 Prediction
89Some thinkers may object to this essay that we are about to write of that which has as yet no existence.
10For it does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along its shores….
11That such a genius is to rise and work in this hemisphere we are confident; equally so that scarce the first faint streaks of that day’s dawn are yet visible. It is sad for those that foresee, to know they may not live to share its glories, yet it is sweet, too, to know that every act and word, uttered in the light of that foresight, may tend to hasten or ennoble its fulfillment.
12That day will not rise till the fusion of races among us is more complete. It will not rise till this nation shall attain sufficient moral and intellectual dignity to prize moral and intellectual no less highly than political freedom, nor till the physical resources of the country being explored, all its regions studded with towns, broken by the plow, netted together by railways and telegraph lines, and talent shall be left at leisure to turn its energies upon the higher department of man’s existence. Nor then shall it be seen till from the leisurely and yearning soul of that riper time national ideas shall take birth, ideas craving to be clothed in a thousand fresh and original forms.
13Without such ideas all attempts to construct a national literature must end in abortions like the monster of Frankenstein, things with forms, and the instincts of forms, but soulless, and therefore revolting. We cannot have expression till there is something to be expressed.
14The symptoms of such a birth may be seen in a longing felt here and there for the sustenance of such ideas. At present, it shows itself, where felt, in sympathy with the prevalent tone of society, by attempts at external action, such as are classed under the head of social reform. But it needs to go deeper before we can have poets, needs to penetrate beneath the springs of action, to stir and remake the soil as by the action of fire.
15Another symptom is the need felt by individuals of being even sternly sincere. This is the one great means by which alone progress can be essentially furthered. Truth is the nursing mother of genius. No man can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation, and complaisance, without becoming original, for there is in every creature a fountain of life which, if not choked back by stones and other dead rubbish, will create a fresh atmosphere, and bring to life fresh beauty. And it is the same with the nation as with the individual man.
16The best work we do for the future is by such truth. By use of that, in whatever way we harrow the soil and lay it open to the sun and air. The winds from all quarters of the globe bring seed enough, and there is nothing wanting but preparation of the soil, and freedom in the atmosphere, for ripening of a new and golden harvest.
17We are sad that we cannot be present at the gathering in of this harvest. And yet we are joyous, too, when we think that, though our name may not be writ on the pillar of our country’s fame, we can really do far more toward rearing it than those who come at a later period and to a seemingly fairer task. Now, the humblest effort, made in a noble spirit, and with religious hope, cannot fail to be even infinitely useful. Whether we introduce some noble model from another time and clime, to encourage aspiration in our own, or cheer into blossom the simplest wood-flower that ever rose from the earth, moved by the genuine impulse to grow, independent of the lures of money or celebrity; whether we speak boldly when fear or doubt keep others silent, or refuse to swell the popular cry upon an unworthy occasion, the spirit of truth, purely worshipped, shall turn our acts and forbearances alike to profit, informing them with oracles which the latest time shall bless.
18Under present circumstances the amount of talent and labor given to writing ought to surprise us. Literature is in this dim and struggling state, and its pecuniary results exceedingly pitiful. From many well-known causes it is impossible for ninety-nine out of the hundred, who wish to use the pen, to ransom, by its use, the time they need. This state of things will have to be changed in some way. No man of genius writes for money; but it is essential to the free use of his powers, that he should be able to disembarrass his life from care and perplexity. This is very difficult here; and the state of things gets worse and worse, as less and less is offered in pecuniary need for works demanding great devotion of time and labor (to say nothing of the ether engaged) and the publisher, obliged to regard the transaction as a matter of business, demands of the author to give him only what will find an immediate market, for he cannot afford to take anything else. This will not do! When an immortal poet was secure only of a few copyists to circulate his works, there were princes and nobles to patronize literature and the arts. Here is only the public, and the public must learn how to cherish the nobler and rarer plants, and to plant the aloe, able to wait a hundred years for its bloom, or its garden will contain, presently, nothing but potatoes and potherbs.