The Arkansaw traveler., 1885-01-31
MARGARET FULLER AND HAW-
 THORNE.

to the New Orleans 7imes-D Democy0t, 1 says: MT. Julian Hawthorne has sown the dragons teeth in his public ton of paragraph regarding Margaret Fuller, fEom the private diary of his father, in the new books entitled Nathaniel Haw- thorne and his wife" The post mortem possibilities of authors manuscripts add a new terror to death, and one would im- agine all literary people might follow the example oi the poet Whittier, who im- mediately burnt all his letters after read jag the revelations of the Carlyle house hold. The impression made by MT. Froude's indiscretion has been a deep and painful one, and it has moved MT. Frederic Harrison to more than usual melodramatic rhetoric in the current number of the North AssyicaH RevifzV, where he discusses " Froude's Life of Carlyle" and in which he says: "The biographies and autobiographies, the un- roofing of his home and the unveiling of his hearth, the letters, journals and re- corded sayings, are intensely interesting. But they have told us things we would rather not have heard. Those who loved him, and those who loved her, have been shocked, amazed, ashamed, in turn"
 The revelations of the Hawthorne home have offered US nothing of this painful character. It was an ideally beautiful marriage, an ideally happy home. If thele was poverty of the purse there was no poverty of the spirit. But Mir. Julian Hawthorne's work presented its vulnerable point in the extract to which l refer from his fathers diary in which the elder Hawthorne had said of Mar garet Taller that she had strong aud coarse nature;' that she |" had not left in the hearts and minds of those who knew her any deep witness of her integrity and purity. She was a great humbug-of course with much talent and much moral reality, or she could never have been so great humbug. She had stuck herself full of borrowed qualities which she chose to provide herself with, but which had no root in her. There appears to have been total col lapse in poor Margaret, morally and in- lectually and, tragic as her catastrophe was, Providence was after all kind in put ting her by her clownish husband and their child cn board that i.i-fated ship. She proved herself a very woman after all, and fell, as the weakes. of her sisters might"
 The books were published and read, and the paragraph from which make and with that shock and sense of spiritual loss with which we receive the first revela- ton that our idols are only clay after all. But 1t wcs not without reference to Mar garet Fuller that this shock came, as 1t was with reference to Hawthorne him. self. The character of Miss Fuller, both personally and in literature, is almost curiously secure, when one realizes how limited in quantity is her literary work. It is, too, work that is revealed only to the reader who is by temperamentality responsive to her richly ideal and inn aginative nature, to her intuition, her in- sight, her sympathetic comprehension of the riddle of life. It might seem that such an audience would be fit, though few, but in reality it is by no means a lim- ited one. Yet it is difficult to tell just why Margaret Fuller is great to one who does not feel and know it himself.
 And you must love him, ere to you
 He will seem worthy of your love-"
 always relates itself in my mind with the appreciation of Miss Fuller. A woman of the literary world, of elegant accom- piishments and fine literary achieve ments, yet who had never come into special sympathy with the transcendental school of thought, remarked to me this week that she thought Margaret Fuller was greatly overrated, and that this fer vent worship of her was almost limited to New England, and did not extend to the west. Dr. Holmes, in his new life of Emerson, refers incidentally to Miss Fuller as a woman who is more likely to be remembered by what has been written about her than by anything she has herself written" But Dr. Holmes, and tbe lady whom quote, do not enter into what was the essential atmosphere of Margaret Fuller. They apprehend her on the purely literary side, and find it meagre to their own broad and cultivated vision. Dr. Holmes shows this precise limitation in his estimate of Emerson. "A terrible heresy-to speak of imita. ton of the brilliant autocrat.) But while he interprets Emerson on the literary side in manner at once 90 subtle and SO pro- found as to make it a marvellous revela- ton, he does not, venture to think, so adequately approach him a the ethical Ss~sS oA01 " kaA 0S ' 0AvG UEGu HU1E tO read, only one person has ever entesed with the perfect weight of sympathy into Emerson's ethics, and that person is Prof Wm. T. Harris. The rranscendental school of thought was something like poverty-in that one only comes to it born, and not made. Yet, like the poet, the transcendentalist must be both born and made, and one who has by nature this temperament turns intuitively to Boston as the home ot idealism. Nay, even now, much of the old transcendentai spirit remains, though called by another
 It seems to me that Hawthosne's in- ability to comprehend Margaret Fuller lay just here in an incompatihiiisy of temperament. She was an ideaIist, and he an analyst. Because he was writer of romAnces that arc immortal in iitsra-