Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Vol. 1: The Private Years by Charles Capper

Author:Charles Capper [Charles Capper]
Language: eng
Format: epub

CHAPTER SEVEN

.The Schoolmistress

(1837-1838)

I

Margaret Fuller's first impressions of Providence were not especially happy ones. Feeling both sick and a little homesick, she wrote wistfully to Emerson on June 6, 1837: "Every day I have mentally addressed Concord, dear Concord, haven of repose where headach-vertigo-other sins that flesh is heir to cannot long pursue." But she rejoiced, she said, that he was to come on Saturday. "I look forward to your presence as the weary traveller does to the Diamond of the Desert- Flowers will I trust, spring up, but at the present all is too new for my weak head." The occasion of Emerson's coming was the dedication of the new Greene Street School. Originally Hiram Fuller had invited Alcott to give the principal address, but after the furor over his book, Alcott unhappily but selflessly (and to the relief of his more worldly disciple) bowed out from a fear that any public identification of himself with the new school would harm it. This left Emerson, somewhat reluctantly, he had confessed to Margaret, to be the one "to waft benedictions from Concord." Actually, the address Emerson delivered was neither the conventional benediction nor exactly the "good, genial preachment" Fuller had urged him to bring to cheer her up. Instead, shortly after four in the afternoon on June 10, to the overflow audience jamming the Reverend Frederick A. Farley's Westminster Unitarian Church, with the dual calamities of the persecution of Alcott and the nation's spreading financial panic as barely concealed backdrops, he preached a Transcendental jeremiad. "A desperate conservatism clings with both hands to every dead form in the schools, in the state, in the church. A timid political tithe-paying and churchgoing zeal takes the place of religion. That utter unbelief which is afraid of change, afraid ofthought, supervenes." After conjuring up the current cultural paralysis that that unbelief had produced ("At times the land smells with suicide. Young men have no hope. The educated class stand idle in the streets. No man calleth them to labor"), he went on to urge an antidote: scholars and educators must learn "the capital secret of their profession"; namely, the converting of life into truth by showing "the symbolic character of life." Only by teaching this truth, he said, and its corollary "self-trust," could teachers arouse the interior activity of their students and thereby help overcome the present-day torpor that a society without an inner life inevitably bred.'

Nowhere is it recorded how the Greene Street School's prospective students and their parents, relatives, and friends reacted to this challenging exhortation. Fuller was certainly pleased with it. "I wish you and Cary could have been here last Saturday," she excitedly wrote to Jane Tuckerman on June 16. "Our schoolhouse was dedicated and Mr. Emerson made the address; it was a noble appeal in behalf of the best interests of culture, and seemingly here was fit occasion." The very next day, however, there appeared in the city's leading newspaper, the Providence Daily Journal, a notice of the opening of the school that put Emerson's sermon in a different light.

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