His scholarship
is exhibited in such a work as the Church History of Britain'; his
peculiar faculty for happy description in the Worthies of England.
is exhibited in such a work as the Church History of Britain'; his
peculiar faculty for happy description in the Worthies of England.
Warner - World's Best Literature - v11 - Fro to Gre
.
.
A woman of
tact and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men.
They are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we got our
knowledge; and while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel and fly,
and dart hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the weak points,
like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing when we come to write,
and without suggestion from another mind, to declare the positive amount
of thought that is in us.
Then gentlemen are surprised that I write
MARGARET FULLER
## p. 6120 (#90) ############################################
6120
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
no better, because I talk so well. I have served a long apprenticeship to the
one, none to the other. I shall write better, but never, I think, so well as I
talk;
for then I feel inspired. . . . For all the tides of life that flow within
me, I am dumb and ineffectual when it comes to casting my thought into a
form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it seems to me the pleas-
ure of creation would make it possible for me to write. What shall I do,
dear friend? I want force to be either a genius or a character. One should
be either private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood is
at present too straitly bounded to give me scope. At hours, I live truly as
a woman; at others, I should stifle. "
All these naïve confessions were made, it must be remembered,
either in her journal, or in letters to her nearest friends, and without
fear of misinterpretation.
This complex, self-conscious, but able woman was born in Cam-
bridgeport, Massachusetts, in 1810, in the house of her father, Timothy
Fuller, a lawyer. Her mother, it is reported, was a mild, self-effacing
lover of flower-bulbs and gardens, of a character to supplement, and
never combat, a husband who exercised all the domestic dictation
which Puritan habits and the marital law encouraged.
"He thought to gain time by bringing forward the intellect as early as pos-
sible," wrote Margaret in her autobiographical sketch. "Thus I had tasks
given me, as many and as various as the hours would allow, and on subjects
beyond my age; with the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the
evening after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many inter-
ruptions, I was often kept up till very late, and as he was a severe teacher,
both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept
on the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus, frequently, I was sent to
bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The conse-
qence was a premature development of the brain that made me a 'youthful
prodigy by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and
somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of
my bodily powers and checked my growth, while later they induced continual
headache, weakness, and nervous affections of all kinds. . . I was taught
Latin and English grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at
six years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily.
Of the
Greek language I knew only enough to feel that the sounds told the same
story as the mythology; that the law of life in that land was beauty, as in
Rome it was stern composure.
With these books I passed my days.
The great amount of study exacted of me soon ceased to be a burden, and
reading became a habit and a passion. The force of feeling which under other
circumstances might have ripened thought, was turned to learn the thoughts
of others. "
•
By the time she entered mature womanhood, Margaret had made
herself acquainted with the masterpieces of German, French, and
Italian literatures. It was later that she became familiar with the
## p. 6121 (#91) ############################################
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
6121
great literature of her own tongue. Her father died in 1835, and in
1836 she went to Boston to teach languages.
"I still," wrote Emerson (1851), "remember the first half-hour of Marga-
ret's conversation. She was then twenty-six years old. She had a face and
a frame that would indicate fullness and tenacity of life. She was rather un-
der the middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong, fair hair. She
was then, as always, carefully and becomingly dressed, and of ladylike self-
possession. For the rest, her appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her
extreme plainness,- a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids,—
the nasal tone of her voice, all repelled; and I said to myself, 'We shall
never get far. It is to be said that Margaret made a disagreeable first im-
pression on most persons, including those who became afterwards her best
friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in the same room
with her. This was partly the effect of her manners, which expressed an
overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others, and partly the
prejudice of her fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition
to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too many guns, and
the women did not like one who despised them. »
In 1839 Margaret began her famous "Conversations » in Boston,
continuing these for five winters. "Their theory was not high-flown
but eminently sensible," writes Mr. Higginson, "being based expressly
on the ground stated in her circular; that the chief disadvantage of
women in regard to study was in not being called upon, like men, to
reproduce in some way what they had learned. As a substitute for
this she proposed to try the uses of conversation, to be conducted in
a somewhat systematic way under efficient leadership. " In 1839 she
published her translation of Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,'
and in 1842 of the Correspondence of Fräulein Günerode and Bet-
tine von Arnim. ' The year 1839 had seen the full growth of New
England transcendentalism, which was a reaction against Puritanism
and a declaration in vague phrases of God in man and of the indwell-
ing of the spirit in each soul,-an admixture of Platonism, Oriental
pantheism, and the latest German idealism, with a reminiscence of
the stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus. In 1840 The Dial was founded
to be the expression of these ideas, with Margaret as editor and
Emerson and George Ripley as aids. To this quarterly she gave
two years of hard work and self-sacrifice.
Another outcome of the transcendental movement, the community
of Brook Farm, was to her, says Mr. Higginson, "simply an experi-
ment which had enlisted some of her dearest friends; and later, she
found [there] a sort of cloister for occasional withdrawal from her
classes and her conversations. This was all: she was not a stock-
holder, nor a member, nor an advocate of the enterprise; and even
'Miss Fuller's cow,' which Hawthorne tried so hard to milk, was a
being as wholly imaginary as [Hawthorne's] Zenobia. »
## p. 6122 (#92) ############################################
6122
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
une.
Her 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' (1844) led Horace Greeley
to offer her a place in the literary department of the New York Trib-
It is her praise that she was able to impart a purely literary
interest to a daily journal, and to make its critical judgment author-
itative. The best of her contributions to that journal were published,
with articles from the Dial and other periodicals, under the title of
'Papers on Art and Literature' (1846).
In that year she paid the visit to Europe of which she had dreamed
and written; and her letters to her friends at home are now, perhaps,
the most readable of her remains. Taking up her residence in Italy
in 1847, and sympathizing passionately with Mazzini and his republi-
can ideas, she met and married the Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli.
Her husband was seven years her junior, but his letters written while
he was serving as a soldier at Rome, and she was absent with their
baby in the country, reveal the ardor of his love for her. During the
siege of Rome by the French, Mazzini put in her charge the hos-
pital of the Trinity of the Pilgrims. "At the very moment when
Lowell was satirizing her in his 'Fables for Critics,' says Mr. Hig-
ginson, "she was leading such a life as no American woman had led
in this century before. " Her Southern nature and her longing for
action and love had found expression. In May 1850 she sailed with
her husband and son from Leghorn for America. But the vessel was
wrecked off Fire Island within a day's sail of home and friends, and,
save the body of her child and a trunk of water-soaked papers, the
sea swallowed up all remnants of the happiness of her later life.
> >>
The position which Margaret Fuller held in the small world of
letters about her is not explained by her writings. She seems to
have possessed great personal magnetism. She was strong, she had
intellectual grasp and poise, possibly at times she had the tact she
so much admired, she had unusual knowledge, and above all a keen
self-consciousness. Her nature was too Southern in its passions, just
as it was too large in intellectual vigor, for the environment in which
she was born. She was in fact stifled until she escaped from her
egotism and self-consciousness, and from the pale New England life
and movement, to find a larger existence in her Italian lover and
husband, and their child. And then she died.
The affectionate admiration which she aroused in her friends has
found expression in three notable biographies: Memoirs of Margaret
Fuller Ossoli,' by her brother; Margaret Fuller Ossoli,' by Thomas
Wentworth Higginson (American Men of Letters Series '); and 'Mar-
garet Fuller (Marchesa Ossoli)' by Julia Ward Howe (Eminent
Women Series').
## p. 6123 (#93) ############################################
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
6123
GEORGE SAND
.
TO ELIZABETH HOAR
From Memoirs': Paris,
-, 1847
You
ou wished to hear of George Sand, or as they say in Paris,
"Madame Sand. " I find that all we had heard of her was
true in the outline; I had supposed it might be exagger-
ated.
It is the custom to go and call on those to whom you bring
letters, and push yourself upon their notice; thus you must go
quite ignorant whether they are disposed to be cordial. My name
is always murdered by the foreign servants who announce me.
I speak very bad French; only lately have I had sufficient com-
mand of it to infuse some of my natural spirit in my discourse.
This has been a great trial to me, who am eloquent and free in
my own tongue, to be forced to feel my thoughts struggling in
vain for utterance.
The door-
The servant who admitted me was in the picturesque costume
of a peasant, and as Madame Sand afterwards told me, her
goddaughter, whom she had brought from her province. She
announced me as "Madame Salère," and returned into the ante-
room to tell me, "Madame says she does not know you. " I
began to think I was doomed to rebuff among the crowd who
deserve it. However, to make assurance sure, I said, "Ask if
she has received a letter from me. " As I spoke Madame Sand
opened the door, and stood looking at me an instant.
Our eyes
met. I never shall forget her look at that moment.
way made a frame for her figure; she is large but well formed.
She was dressed in a robe of dark-violet silk, with a black man-
tle on her shoulders, her beautiful hair dressed with the greatest
taste; her whole appearance and attitude, in its simple and lady-
like dignity, presented an almost ludicrous contrast to the vulgar
caricature idea of George Sand. Her face is a very little like the
portraits, but much finer; the upper part of the forehead and
eyes are beautiful, the lower strong and masculine, expressive of
a hardy temperament and strong passions, but not in the least.
coarse; the complexion olive, and the air of the whole head
Spanish (as indeed she was born at Madrid, and is only on one
side of French blood). All these I saw at a glance; but what
fixed my attention was the expression of goodness, nobleness, and
## p. 6124 (#94) ############################################
6124
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
power that pervaded the whole,-the truly human heart and
nature that shone in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, "C'est
vous," and held out her hand. I took it, and went into her little
study; we sat down a moment; then I said, "Il me fait de bien
de vous voir," and I am sure I said it with my whole heart, for
it made me very happy to see such a woman, so large and so
developed in character, and everything that is good in it so
really good. I loved, shall always love her.
She looked away, and said, "Ah! vous m'avez écrit une lettre
charmante. " This was all the preliminary of our talk, which then
went on as if we had always known one another. .
Her
way of talking is just like her writing, lively, picturesque, with
an undertone of deep feeling, and the same happiness in striking.
the nail on the head every now and then with a blow.
I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich, so prolific, so ardent a
genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very much; I never
liked a woman better.
For the rest, she holds her place
in the literary and social world of France like a man, and seems
full of energy and courage in it. I suppose she has suffered
much, but she has also enjoyed and done much.
.
AMERICANS ABROAD IN EUROPE
From At Home and Abroad'
THE
HE American in Europe, if a thinking mind, can only become
more American. In some respects it is a great pleasure to
be here. Although we have an independent political exist-
ence, our position toward Europe as to literature and the arts is
still that of a colony, and one feels the same joy here that is
experienced by the colonist in returning to the parent home.
What was but picture to us becomes reality; remote allusions and
derivations trouble no more; we see the pattern of the stuff, and
understand the whole tapestry. There is a gradual clearing up
on many points, and many baseless notions and crude fancies are
dropped. Even the post-haste passage of the business American
through the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers and igno-
rant valets de place, unable to hold intercourse with the natives
of the country, and passing all his leisure hours with his coun-
trymen, who know no more than himself, clears his mind of some
mistakes, lifts some mists from his horizon.
## p. 6125 (#95) ############################################
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
6125
There are three species: First, the servile American,-a being
utterly shallow, thoughtless, worthless. He comes abroad to spend
his money and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to
have fashionable clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some
titled persons, and furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, by
retailing which among those less traveled and as uninformed as
himself he can win importance at home. I look with unspeakable
contempt on this class, -a class which has all the thoughtlessness
and partiality of the exclusive classes in Europe, without any of
their refinement, or the chivalric feeling which still sparkles
among them here and there. However, though these willing
serfs in a free age do some little hurt, and cause some annoyance
at present, they cannot continue long; our country is fated to a
grand independent existence, and as its laws develop, these para-
sites of a bygone period must wither and drop away.
Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling
and proud of -he knows not what. He does not see, not he!
that the history of humanity, for many centuries, is likely to have
produced results it requires some training, some devotion, to ap-
preciate and profit by. With his great clumsy hands, only fitted
to work on a steam-engine, he seizes the old Cremona violin,
makes it shriek with anguish in his grasp, and then declares he
thought it was all humbug before he came, and now he knows
it; that there is not really any music in these old things; that
the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they are
young and alive. To him the etiquettes of courts and camps, the
ritual of the Church, seem simply silly,- and no wonder, pro-
foundly ignorant as he is of their origin and meaning. Just so
the legends which are the subjects of pictures, the profound myths
which are represented in the antique marbles, amaze and revolt
him; as, indeed, such things need to be judged of by another
standard than that of the Connecticut Blue Laws. He criticizes
severely pictures, feeling quite sure that his natural senses are
better means of judgment than the rules of connoisseurs,-not
feeling that to see such objects mental vision as well as fleshly
eyes are needed, and that something is aimed at in art beyond
the imitation of the commonest forms of nature. This is Jona-
than in the sprawling state, the booby truant, not yet aspiring
enough to be a good schoolboy. Yet in his folly there is a
meaning; add thought and culture to his independence, and he
will be a man of might: he is not a creature without hope, like
the thick-skinned dandy of the class first specified.
## p. 6126 (#96) ############################################
6126
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
1
I
The artists form a class by themselves. Yet among them,
though seeking special aims by special means, may also be found
the lineaments of these two classes, as well as of the third, of
which I am now to speak.
This is that of the thinking American, a man who, recog-
nizing the immense advantage of being born to a new world and
on a virgin soil, yet does not wish one seed from the past to be
lost. He is anxious to gather and carry back with him every
plant that will bear a new climate and new culture. Some will
dwindle; others will attain a bloom and stature unknown before.
He wishes to gather them clean, free from noxious insects, and
to give them a fair trial in his new world. And that he may
know the conditions under which he may best place them in that
new world, he does not neglect to study their history in this.
—
The history of our planet in some moments seems so pain-
fully mean and little,—such terrible bafflings and failures to com-
pensate some brilliant successes; such a crushing of the mass of
men beneath the feet of a few, and these too often the least
worthy; such a small drop of honey to each cup of gall, and in
many cases so mingled that it is never one moment in life
purely tasted; above all, so little achieved for humanity as a
whole, such tides of war and pestilence intervening to blot out
the traces of each triumph,- that no wonder if the strongest
soul sometimes pauses aghast; no wonder if the many indolently
console themselves with gross joys and frivolous prizes. Yes!
those men are worthy of admiration, who can carry this cross
faithfully through fifty years; it is a great while for all the
agonies that beset a lover of good, a lover of men; it makes a
soul worthy of a speedier ascent, a more productive ministry in
the next sphere. Blessed are they who ever keep that portion of
pure, generous love with which they began life! How blessed
those who have deepened the fountains, and have enough to
spare for the thirst of others! Some such there are; and feeling
that, with all the excuses for failure, still only the sight of those
who triumph gives a meaning to life or makes its pangs endura-
ble, we must arise and follow.
## p. 6127 (#97) ############################################
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
6127
A CHARACTER SKETCH OF CARLYLE
LETTER TO R. W. EMERSON
From Memoirs': Paris,
1846
ENJOYED the time extremely [in London]. I find myself much.
in my element in European society. It does not indeed come
up to my ideal, but so many of the incumbrances are cleared
away that used to weary me in America, that I can enjoy a
freer play of faculty, and feel, if not like a bird in the air, at
least as easy as a fish in water.
"
Of the people I saw in London, you will wish me to speak
first of the Carlyles. Mr. Carlyle came to see me at once, and
appointed an evening to be passed at their house. That first
time I was delighted with him. He was in a very sweet
humor,-full of wit and pathos, without being overbearing or
oppressive. I was quite carried away with the rich flow of his
discourse; and the hearty, noble earnestness of his personal being
brought back the charm which once was upon his writing, before
I wearied of it. I admired his Scotch, his way of singing his
great
full sentences, so that each one was like the stanza of a
narrative ballad. He let me talk, now and then, enough to free
my lungs and change my position, so that I did not get tired.
That evening he talked of the present state of things in England,
giving light, witty sketches of the men of the day, fanatics and
others, and some sweet, homely stories he told of things he had
known of the Scotch peasantry. Of you he spoke with hearty
kindness; and he told with beautiful feeling a story of some
poor farmer or artisan in the country, who on Sunday lays aside.
the cark and care of that dirty English world, and sits reading
the Essays and looking upon the sea.
<
of a <
The second time, Mr. Carlyle had a dinner party, at which
was a witty, French, flippant sort of a man, named Lewes, author
History of Philosophy,' and now writing a life of Goethe,
a task for which he must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling
shallowness can make him. But he told stories admirably, and
was allowed sometimes to interrupt Carlyle a little,-of which
was glad, for that night he was in his acrid mood; and
though much more brilliant than on the former evening, grew
wearisome to me, who disclaimed and rejected almost everything
he said.
one
## p. 6128 (#98) ############################################
6128
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his
writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely
to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse, only
harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked men,-
happily not one invariable or inevitable,— that they cannot allow
other minds room to breathe and show themselves in their atmos-
phere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the
greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest.
Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition,
not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharp-
ness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority,—
raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of
sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow free-
dom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a
manly resistance in his thoughts. But it is the impulse of a
mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its
prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase.
Carlyle indeed is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arro-
gance there is no littleness, no self-love. It is the heroic arro-
gance of some old Scandinavian conqueror; it is his nature, and
the untamable impulse that has given him power to crush the
dragons. He sings rather than talks. He
pours upon you a
kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences,
and generally catching up, near the beginning, some singular
epithet which serves as a refrain when his song is full, or with
which, as with a knitting-needle, he catches up the stitches, if he
has chanced now and then to let fall a row. For the higher
kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is
delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a min-
ute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for
all the spirits he is driving before him as Fata Morgana, ugly
masks, in fact, if he can but make them turn about; but he
laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels. His talk,
like his books, is full of pictures; his critical strokes masterly.
Allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable. He is a
large subject. I cannot speak more or wiselier of him now, nor
needs it; his works are true, to blame and praise him,- the
Siegfried of England, great and powerful, if not quite invul-
nerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than legislate for
good.
## p. 6129 (#99) ############################################
6129
THOMAS FULLER
(1608-1661)
HE fragrance which surrounds the writings of Thomas Fuller
seems blended of his wit, his quaint worldliness, his sweet
Ce and happy spirit. The after-glow of the dazzling day of
Shakespeare and his brotherhood rests upon the pages of this divine.
In Fuller the world-spir
the world-spirit of the Elizabethan dramatists becomes
urbanity, the mellow humor of the dweller in the town. Too well
satisfied with the kindly comforts of life to agonize over humanity
and the eternal problems of existence, Fuller, although a Church of
England clergyman, was no less a cavalier
at heart than the most jaunty follower of
King Charles. He had not the intensity
of nature which characterizes the theolo-
gian by the grace of God. His Holy and
Profane State,' his 'Good Thoughts in
Bad Times,' and 'Good Thoughts in Worse
Times,' evidence a comfortable and reason-
able reliance on the Unseen; but they will
not be read for their spiritual insight so
much as for their well-seasoned and de-
lightful English. That quaint and fragrant
style of his lends charm even to those pas-
sages in which his thought is commonplace.
THOMAS FULLER
It is in Thomas Fuller the historian and biographer, that poster-
ity recognizes a man of marked intellectual power.
His scholarship
is exhibited in such a work as the Church History of Britain'; his
peculiar faculty for happy description in the Worthies of England. '
Fuller was fitted by temperament and training to be a recorder of
his own country and countrymen. His life was spent upon his island;
his love was fastened upon its places and its people. Born the same
year as Milton, 1608, the son of a clergyma of the same name as
his own, he was from boyhood both a scholar and an observer of men
and things. His education at Cambridge fostered his love of books.
His subsequent incumbency of various comfortable livings afforded
him opportunities for close acquaintance with the English world of
his day, and especially with its "gentry. " By birth, education, and
inclination, Fuller was an aristocrat. During the civil war he took
the side of King Charles, to whose stately life and mournful death
he has devoted the last volume of his great work, the History of
XI-384
## p. 6130 (#100) ###########################################
6130
THOMAS FULLER
the Church of Britain. '
Under the Protectorate, the genial priest
and man of the world found himself in an alien atmosphere. Like
many others in Anglican orders, he was "silenced" by the sour Puri-
tan authorities, but was permitted to preach again in London by the
grace of Cromwell. He was subsequently appointed chaplain to
Charles II. , but did not live long after the Restoration, dying of a
fever in 1661.
An early instance of modern scholarship is found in the histories
written by Thomas Fuller. Being by nature an antiquarian, he was
not inclined to find his material at second hand. He went back
always to the earliest sources for his historical data. It is this fact
which gives their permanent value to the History of the Church of
Britain' and to the History of the Holy War. ' These works bear
witness to wide and patient research, to a thorough sifting of mate-
rial. The antiquarian spirit displayed in them loses some of its
scholarly dignity, and takes on the social humor of the gossip, in the
'Worthies of England. ' Fuller's other writings may be of more
intrinsic value, but it is through the Worthies' that he is remem-
bered and loved. The book is rich in charm. It is as quaint as an
ancient flower garden, where blooms of every sort grow in lavish
tangle. He considers the counties of England, one by one, telling of
their physical characteristics, of their legends, of their proverbs, of
the princely children born in them, of the other "Worthies" - schol-
ars, soldiers, and saints who have shed lustre upon them. Fuller
gathered his material for this variegated record from every quarter
of his beloved little island. As a chaplain in the Cavalier army, he
had many opportunities of visiting places and studying their people.
As an incumbent of country parishes, he would listen to the ram-
blings of the old women of the hamlets, for the sake of discovering
in their talk some tradition of the country-side, or some quaint bit
of folk-lore. He writes of the strange, gay, sad lives of princely
families as familiarly as he writes of the villagers and townsfolk.
Sometimes an exquisite tenderness lies like light upon his record, as
in this, of the little Princess Anne, daughter to Charles I. :—
-
SHE was a very pregnant lady above her years, and died in her infancy,
when not fully four years old. Being minded by those about her to call upon
God even when the pangs of death were upon her, "I am not able," saith she,
"to say my long prayer" (meaning the Lord's Prayer), "but I will say my
short one, Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, lest I sleep the sleep of death. >>>
This done, the little lamb gave up the ghost.
Because of passages like these, Thomas Fuller will always be
numbered among those writers who, irrespective of their rank in the
world of letters, awaken a deep and lasting affection in the hearts of
their readers.
## p. 6131 (#101) ###########################################
THOMAS FULLER
6131
THE KING'S CHILDREN
From The Worthies of England'
K
ATHERINE, fourth daughter to Charles the First and Queen
Mary, was born at Whitehall (the Queen mother then being
at St. James), and survived not above half an hour after
her baptizing; so that it is charity to mention her, whose memory
is likely to be lost, so short her continuance in this life,- the
rather because her name is not entered, as it ought, into the
register of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields; as indeed none of the King's
children, save Prince Charles, though they were born in that
parish. And hereupon a story depends.
I am credibly informed that at the birth of every child of
kings born at Whitehall or St. James's, full five pounds were
ever faithfully paid to some unfaithful receivers thereof, to record
the names of such children in the register of St. Martin's. But
the money being embezzled (we know by some, God knows by
whom), no memorial is entered of them. Sad that bounty should
betray any to baseness, and that which was intended to make
them the more solemnly remembered should occasion that they
should be more silently forgotten! Say not, "Let the children.
of mean persons be written down in registers: kings' children
are registers to themselves;" or, "All England is a register to
them; » for sure I am, this common confidence hath been the
cause that we have been so often at a loss about the nativities
and other properties of those of royal extraction.
A LEARNED LADY
From The Worthies of England'
M
ARGARET MORE. -Excuse me, reader, for placing a lady among
men and learned statesmen. The reason is because of
her unfeigned affection to her father, from whom she
would not willingly be parted (and from me shall not be), either
living or dead.
She was born in Bucklersburie in London at her father's
house therein, and attained to that skill in all learning and lan-
guages that she became the miracle of her age. Foreigners
## p. 6132 (#102) ###########################################
6132
THOMAS FULLER
took such notice thereof that Erasmus hath dedicated some epis-
tles unto her. No woman that could speak so well did speak so
little; whose secrecy was such, that her father intrusted her with
his most important affairs.
Such was her skill in the Fathers that she corrected a de-
praved place in Cyprian; for where it was corruptly written
"Nisi vos sinceritas" she amended it "Nervos sinceritas. " Yea,
she translated Eusebius out of Greek; but it was never printed,
because J. Christopherson had done it so exactly before.
She was married to William Roper of Eltham in Kent, Esquire,
one of a bountiful heart and plentiful estate. When her father's
head was set up on London Bridge, it being suspected it would
be cast into the Thames to make room for divers others (then
suffering for denying the King's supremacy), she bought the head
and kept it for a relic (which some called affection, others reli-
gion, others superstition in her), for which she was questioned
before the Council, and for some short time imprisoned until she
had buried it; and how long she herself survived afterwards is to
me unknown.
HENRY DE ESSEX, STANDARD-BEARER TO HENRY II.
From The Worthies of England'
I
T HAPPENED in the reign of this King, there was a fierce battle
fought in Flintshire in Coleshall, between the English and
Welsh, wherein this Henry de Essex, animum et signum simul
abjecit,-betwixt traitor and coward,-cast away both his courage
and banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of English.
But he that had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny,
the doing of so foul a fact, until he was challenged in combat
by Robert de Momford, a knight, eye-witness thereof, and by
him overcome in a duel. Whereupon his large inheritance was
confiscated to the King, and he himself, partly thrust, partly
going, into a convent, hid his head in a cowl, under which,
between shame and sanctity, he blushed out the remainder of
his life.
## p. 6133 (#103) ###########################################
THOMAS FULLER
6133
TH
THE GOOD SCHOOLMASTER
From The Holy and Profane State>
ERE is scarcely any profession in the commonwealth more
necessary, which is so slightly performed. The reasons
any
whereof I conceive to be these: First, young scholars make
this calling their refuge; yea, perchance before they have taken
degree in the university, commence schoolmasters in the
country, as if nothing else were required to set up this profes-
sion but only a rod and a ferula. Secondly, others who are able
use it only as a passage to better preferment, to patch the rents
in their present fortune, till they can provide a new one and
betake themselves to some more gainful calling. Thirdly, they
are disheartened from doing their best with the miserable reward
which
in some places they receive, being masters to their child-
ren and slaves to their parents. Fourthly, being grown rich,
they grow negligent, and scorn to touch the school but by the
proxy of the usher. But see how well our schoolmaster behaves
himself.
He
studieth his scholars' natures as carefully as they were
books,
and ranks their dispositions into several forms. And
though it may seem difficult for him in a great school to descend
to all
make
particulars, yet experienced schoolmasters may quickly
a grammar of boys' natures, and reduce them all-saving
some few exceptions—to these general rules:—
I.
Those that are ingenious and industrious.
The conjunc-
tion of two such planets in a youth presages much good unto
him.
To such a lad a frown may be a whipping, and a whip-
ping a
death; yea, where their master whips them once, shame
whips them all the week after. Such natures he useth with all
gentleness.
2.
Those that are ingenious and idle. These think, with the
hare in the fable, that running with snails-so they count the rest
of their schoolfellows-they shall come soon enough to the post,
though sleeping a good while before their starting.
Oh! a good
rod would finely take them napping!
3.
Those that are dull and diligent. Wines, the stronger
they be, the more lees they have when they are new. Many
boys are muddy-headed till they be clarified with age, and such
## p. 6134 (#104) ###########################################
6134
THOMAS FULLER
afterwards prove the best. Bristol diamonds are both bright, and
squared, and pointed by nature, and yet are soft and worthless;
whereas Orient ones in India are rough and rugged naturally.
Hard, rugged, and dull natures of youth acquit themselves after-
wards the jewels of the country, and therefore their dullness at
first is to be borne with if they be diligent. The schoolmaster
deserves to be beaten himself, who beats Nature in a boy for a
fault. And I question whether all the whipping in the world
can make their parts, which are naturally sluggish, rise one
minute before the hour Nature hath appointed.
4. Those that are invincibly dull, and negligent also. Correc-
tion may reform the latter, not amend the former. All the
whetting in the world can never set a razor's edge on that which
hath no steel in it. Such boys he consigneth over to other pro-
fessions. Shipwrights and boat-makers will choose those crooked
pieces of timber which other carpenters refuse. Those may make
excellent merchants and mechanics who will not serve for
scholars.
He is able, diligent, and methodical in his teaching; not lead-
ing them rather in a circle than forwards. He minces his pre-
cepts for children to swallow, hanging clogs on the nimbleness
of his own soul, that his scholars may go along with him.
ON BOOKS
From The Holy and Profane State ›
IT
T IS a vanity to persuade the world one hath much learning by
getting a great library. As soon shall I believe every one
is valiant that hath a well-furnished armory. I guess good
housekeeping by the smoking, not the number of the tunnels, as
knowing that many of them-built merely for uniformity—are
without chimneys, and more without fires.
Some books are only cursorily to be tasted of: namely, first,
voluminous books, the task of a man's life to read them over;
secondly, auxiliary books, only to be repaired to on occasions;
thirdly, such as are mere pieces of formality, so that if you look
on them you look through them, and he that peeps through the
casement of the index sees as much as if he were in the house.
But the laziness of those cannot be excused who perfunctorily
pass over authors of cons
onsequence, and only trade in their tables
## p. 6135 (#105) ###########################################
THOMAS FULLER
6135
and contents.
These, like city cheaters, having gotten the names
of all country gentlemen, make silly people believe they have
long lived in those places where they never were, and flourish
with skill in those authors they never seriously studied.
LONDON
From The Worthies of England'
IT
Tis the second city in Christendom for greatness, and the first
for good government. There is no civilized part of the
world but it has heard thereof, though many with this mis-
take: that they conceive London to be the country and England
but the city therein.
Some have suspected the declining of the lustre thereof, be-
cause of late it vergeth so much westward, increasing in build-
ings, Covent Garden, etc. But by their favor (to disprove their
fear) it will be found to burnish round about with new struct-
ures daily added thereunto.
It oweth its greatness under God's divine providence to the
well-conditioned river of Thames, which doth not (as some tyrant
rivers of Europe) abuse its strength in a destructive way, but
employeth its greatness in goodness, to be beneficial to com-
merce, by the reciprocation of the tide therein. Hence it was
that when King James, offended with the city, threatened to re-
move his court to another place, the Lord Mayor (boldly enough)
returned that "he might remove his court at his pleasure, but
could not remove the river Thames. "
Erasmus will have London so called from Lindus, a city of
Rhodes; averring a great resemblance betwixt the languages and
customs of the Britons and Grecians. But Mr. Camden (who no
doubt knew of it) honoreth not this his etymology with the least
mention thereof. As improbable in my apprehension is the
deduction from Lud's-Town,-town being a Saxon, not British
termination; and that it was so termed from Lan Dian, a temple
of Diana (standing where now St. Paul's doth), is most likely in
my opinion.
## p. 6136 (#106) ###########################################
6136
THOMAS FULLER
MISCELLANEOUS SAYINGS
I'
T IS dangerous to gather flowers that grow on the banks of the
pit of hell, for fear of falling in; yea, they which play with
the Devil's rattles will be brought by degrees to wield his
sword; and from making of sport they come to doing of mis-
chief.
A public office is a guest which receives the best usage from
them who never invited it.
Scoff not at the natural defects of any, which are not in their
power to amend. Oh! 'tis cruel to beat a cripple with his own
crutches.
Learning has gained most by those books by which the print-
ers have lost.
Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl
chain of all virtues.
To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body;
no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.
The lion is not so fierce as painted.
Their heads sometimes so little that there is no room
for wit; sometimes so long that there is no wit for so much
room.
·
Often the cock-loft is empty in those whom nature hath built
many stories high.
The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the
names of their founders.
One that will not plead that cause wherein his tongue
must be confuted by his conscience.
But our captain counts the image of God nevertheless his
image-cut in ebony as if done in ivory; and in the blackest
Moors he sees the representation of the King of Heaven.
_
## p. 6137 (#107) ###########################################
6137
ÉMILE GABORIAU
(1835-1873)
O SPEAK of the detective novel is to speak of Gaboriau. He
cannot be called the father of it; but the French novelist
made his field so peculiarly his own, developed its type of
human nature so painstakingly, created so distinctive a reputation
associated with it, that it is doubtful whether any one can be said to
have outrivaled him.
Born at Saujon, in the Department of the Charente-Inférieure, in
1835, Gaboriau drifted from school into the cavalry service; then into
three or four less picturesque methods of keeping body and soul to-
gether; and finally, by a kind of literary accident, he became the
private secretary of the Parisian novelist Paul Féval. His first suc-
cessful story ran as a continued one in a journal called Le Pays. It
was 'The Lerouge Affair,' but it did not even under newspaper cir-
cumstances find any considerable favor until it caught the eye of the
astute Millaud, the founder of the Petit Journal. Millaud recognized
in the fiction a new note in detective-novel making. He transferred
it to another journal, Le Soleil. There it made an instant and tre-
mendous success.
From that moment Gaboriau's career was determined and fortu-
nate. In rapid succession followed The Crime of Orcival' (1867);
'File No. 113' (1867); the elaborate Slaves of Paris' (1869); M. Le-
coq' (1869),—in which title appears the name of the moving spirit
of almost all the other stories; The Infernal Life' (1870); and four
or five others. All these stories have been translated into almost
every modern language that has a reading public. They brought
Gaboriau a large income during his lifetime, and they are still valu-
able literary properties. Their author died in Paris, his health broken
in consequence of incessant overwork, in September 1873.
Gaboriau elevated the detective story to something like a superior
plane in popular fiction. It is a question whether he did not say in
a large measure the strongest word in it, and to all intents and pur-
poses the last word. His books all have a certain resemblance, in
that we start into a complex drama with a riddle of crime. The un-
folding always brings us sooner or later to a dramatic family secret,
of which the original crime has only been an outside detail.
The
## p. 6138 (#108) ###########################################
6138
ÉMILE GABORIAU
-
secret is the mainspring of the book, and about the middle of it the
reader finds himself chiefly absorbed by it. Indeed, Gaboriau's novels
have often been spoken of as "told backward. " Most of the novels
too gain their movement from one source - the wonderful shrewdness
and audacity of a certain M. Lecoq of the Paris detective service.
M. Lecoq was really an exaggeration of the well-known and wonder-
fully able Paris detective, M. Vidocq; and there are dozens of epi-
sodes in the course of Vidocq's brilliant professional career which
Gaboriau did not dress up so very much in introducing them into his
stories. There is an individuality to each novel, in spite of the fam-
ily likeness. Occasionally, like Dickens, the author attacked abuses
with effect; as in 'The Infernal Life' and 'The Slaves of Paris,' and
other books where he has set forth the merciless system of private
blackmailing in Paris with little exaggeration.
As to literary manner, Gaboriau was not a writer of the first
order, even as a French popular novelist. But he knew how to write;
and there is a correctness of diction and a nervous vivacity that is
much to his credit, considering the rapidity with which he produced
his work, and the fact that he had no sufficient early training for his
profession. He is seldom slipshod, and he is never really negligent.
He has been criticized for making his dénouements too simple, if one
regards them as a whole process; but his details are full of variety,
and the reader of Gaboriau never is troubled to keep his attention on
the author's pages, even in the case of those stories that are not of
the first class among his works. Perhaps the best of all the novels
is one of the shorter ones, 'File No. 113. '
THE IMPOSTOR AND THE BANKER'S WIFE: THE ROBBERY
From File No. 113'
R
AOUL SPENCER, supposed to be Raoul de Clameran, began to
triumph over his instincts of revolt. He ran to the door
and rang the bell. It opened.
"Is my aunt at home? " he asked the footman.
"Madame is alone in the boudoir next her room," replied the
servant.
Raoul ascended.
Clameran had said to Raoul, "Above all, be careful about your
entrance; your appearance must express everything, and thus you
will avoid impossible explanations. "
The suggestion was useless.
## p. 6139 (#109) ###########################################
EMILE GABORIAU
6139
When Raoul entered the little reception-room, his pale face
and wild eyes frightened Madame Fauvel, who cried:-
"Raoul! What has happened to you? "
The sound of her gentle voice produced upon the young va-
grant the effect of an electric shock. He trembled from head to
foot: yet his mind was clear; Louis had not been mistaken in
him. Raoul continued his rôle as if on the stage, and as assur-
ance came to him his knavery crushed his better nature.
"Mother, the misfortune which has come to me," he replied,
"is the last one. "
―
Madame Fauvel had never seen him like this. Trembling
with emotion, she rose and stood before him, with her tender face
near his.
She fixed in a steady gaze the power of her will, as if
she meant to read the depths of his soul.
"What is it? " she insisted. "Raoul, my son, tell me. "
He pushed her gently away.
"What has happened," he replied in a choked voice which
pierced the heart of Madame Fauvel, "proves that I am un-
worthy of you, unworthy of my noble and generous father. ”
She moved her head in protestation.
"Ah! " he continued, "I know and judge myself. No one
could reproach my own infamous conduct so cruelly as my own
conscience. I was not born wicked, but I am a miserable fool.
I have hours when, as if in a vertigo, I do not know what I am
doing. Ah! I should not have been like this, mother, if you had
been with me in my childhood. But brought up among strangers,
and left to myself without any guides but my own instincts, I
am at the mercy of my own passions. Possessing nothing, not
even my stolen name, I am vain and devoured by ambition.
Poor and without resources but your help, I have the tastes and
vices of a millionaire's son.
tact and brilliancy, like me, has an undue advantage in conversation with men.
They are astonished at our instincts. They do not see where we got our
knowledge; and while they tramp on in their clumsy way, we wheel and fly,
and dart hither and thither, and seize with ready eye all the weak points,
like Saladin in the desert. It is quite another thing when we come to write,
and without suggestion from another mind, to declare the positive amount
of thought that is in us.
Then gentlemen are surprised that I write
MARGARET FULLER
## p. 6120 (#90) ############################################
6120
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
no better, because I talk so well. I have served a long apprenticeship to the
one, none to the other. I shall write better, but never, I think, so well as I
talk;
for then I feel inspired. . . . For all the tides of life that flow within
me, I am dumb and ineffectual when it comes to casting my thought into a
form. No old one suits me. If I could invent one, it seems to me the pleas-
ure of creation would make it possible for me to write. What shall I do,
dear friend? I want force to be either a genius or a character. One should
be either private or public. I love best to be a woman; but womanhood is
at present too straitly bounded to give me scope. At hours, I live truly as
a woman; at others, I should stifle. "
All these naïve confessions were made, it must be remembered,
either in her journal, or in letters to her nearest friends, and without
fear of misinterpretation.
This complex, self-conscious, but able woman was born in Cam-
bridgeport, Massachusetts, in 1810, in the house of her father, Timothy
Fuller, a lawyer. Her mother, it is reported, was a mild, self-effacing
lover of flower-bulbs and gardens, of a character to supplement, and
never combat, a husband who exercised all the domestic dictation
which Puritan habits and the marital law encouraged.
"He thought to gain time by bringing forward the intellect as early as pos-
sible," wrote Margaret in her autobiographical sketch. "Thus I had tasks
given me, as many and as various as the hours would allow, and on subjects
beyond my age; with the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the
evening after he returned from his office. As he was subject to many inter-
ruptions, I was often kept up till very late, and as he was a severe teacher,
both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept
on the stretch till the recitations were over. Thus, frequently, I was sent to
bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated. The conse-
qence was a premature development of the brain that made me a 'youthful
prodigy by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and
somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of
my bodily powers and checked my growth, while later they induced continual
headache, weakness, and nervous affections of all kinds. . . I was taught
Latin and English grammar at the same time, and began to read Latin at
six years old, after which, for some years, I read it daily.
Of the
Greek language I knew only enough to feel that the sounds told the same
story as the mythology; that the law of life in that land was beauty, as in
Rome it was stern composure.
With these books I passed my days.
The great amount of study exacted of me soon ceased to be a burden, and
reading became a habit and a passion. The force of feeling which under other
circumstances might have ripened thought, was turned to learn the thoughts
of others. "
•
By the time she entered mature womanhood, Margaret had made
herself acquainted with the masterpieces of German, French, and
Italian literatures. It was later that she became familiar with the
## p. 6121 (#91) ############################################
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
6121
great literature of her own tongue. Her father died in 1835, and in
1836 she went to Boston to teach languages.
"I still," wrote Emerson (1851), "remember the first half-hour of Marga-
ret's conversation. She was then twenty-six years old. She had a face and
a frame that would indicate fullness and tenacity of life. She was rather un-
der the middle height; her complexion was fair, with strong, fair hair. She
was then, as always, carefully and becomingly dressed, and of ladylike self-
possession. For the rest, her appearance had nothing prepossessing. Her
extreme plainness,- a trick of incessantly opening and shutting her eyelids,—
the nasal tone of her voice, all repelled; and I said to myself, 'We shall
never get far. It is to be said that Margaret made a disagreeable first im-
pression on most persons, including those who became afterwards her best
friends, to such an extreme that they did not wish to be in the same room
with her. This was partly the effect of her manners, which expressed an
overweening sense of power, and slight esteem of others, and partly the
prejudice of her fame. She had a dangerous reputation for satire, in addition
to her great scholarship. The men thought she carried too many guns, and
the women did not like one who despised them. »
In 1839 Margaret began her famous "Conversations » in Boston,
continuing these for five winters. "Their theory was not high-flown
but eminently sensible," writes Mr. Higginson, "being based expressly
on the ground stated in her circular; that the chief disadvantage of
women in regard to study was in not being called upon, like men, to
reproduce in some way what they had learned. As a substitute for
this she proposed to try the uses of conversation, to be conducted in
a somewhat systematic way under efficient leadership. " In 1839 she
published her translation of Eckermann's 'Conversations with Goethe,'
and in 1842 of the Correspondence of Fräulein Günerode and Bet-
tine von Arnim. ' The year 1839 had seen the full growth of New
England transcendentalism, which was a reaction against Puritanism
and a declaration in vague phrases of God in man and of the indwell-
ing of the spirit in each soul,-an admixture of Platonism, Oriental
pantheism, and the latest German idealism, with a reminiscence of
the stoicism of Seneca and Epictetus. In 1840 The Dial was founded
to be the expression of these ideas, with Margaret as editor and
Emerson and George Ripley as aids. To this quarterly she gave
two years of hard work and self-sacrifice.
Another outcome of the transcendental movement, the community
of Brook Farm, was to her, says Mr. Higginson, "simply an experi-
ment which had enlisted some of her dearest friends; and later, she
found [there] a sort of cloister for occasional withdrawal from her
classes and her conversations. This was all: she was not a stock-
holder, nor a member, nor an advocate of the enterprise; and even
'Miss Fuller's cow,' which Hawthorne tried so hard to milk, was a
being as wholly imaginary as [Hawthorne's] Zenobia. »
## p. 6122 (#92) ############################################
6122
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
une.
Her 'Woman in the Nineteenth Century' (1844) led Horace Greeley
to offer her a place in the literary department of the New York Trib-
It is her praise that she was able to impart a purely literary
interest to a daily journal, and to make its critical judgment author-
itative. The best of her contributions to that journal were published,
with articles from the Dial and other periodicals, under the title of
'Papers on Art and Literature' (1846).
In that year she paid the visit to Europe of which she had dreamed
and written; and her letters to her friends at home are now, perhaps,
the most readable of her remains. Taking up her residence in Italy
in 1847, and sympathizing passionately with Mazzini and his republi-
can ideas, she met and married the Marquis Giovanni Angelo Ossoli.
Her husband was seven years her junior, but his letters written while
he was serving as a soldier at Rome, and she was absent with their
baby in the country, reveal the ardor of his love for her. During the
siege of Rome by the French, Mazzini put in her charge the hos-
pital of the Trinity of the Pilgrims. "At the very moment when
Lowell was satirizing her in his 'Fables for Critics,' says Mr. Hig-
ginson, "she was leading such a life as no American woman had led
in this century before. " Her Southern nature and her longing for
action and love had found expression. In May 1850 she sailed with
her husband and son from Leghorn for America. But the vessel was
wrecked off Fire Island within a day's sail of home and friends, and,
save the body of her child and a trunk of water-soaked papers, the
sea swallowed up all remnants of the happiness of her later life.
> >>
The position which Margaret Fuller held in the small world of
letters about her is not explained by her writings. She seems to
have possessed great personal magnetism. She was strong, she had
intellectual grasp and poise, possibly at times she had the tact she
so much admired, she had unusual knowledge, and above all a keen
self-consciousness. Her nature was too Southern in its passions, just
as it was too large in intellectual vigor, for the environment in which
she was born. She was in fact stifled until she escaped from her
egotism and self-consciousness, and from the pale New England life
and movement, to find a larger existence in her Italian lover and
husband, and their child. And then she died.
The affectionate admiration which she aroused in her friends has
found expression in three notable biographies: Memoirs of Margaret
Fuller Ossoli,' by her brother; Margaret Fuller Ossoli,' by Thomas
Wentworth Higginson (American Men of Letters Series '); and 'Mar-
garet Fuller (Marchesa Ossoli)' by Julia Ward Howe (Eminent
Women Series').
## p. 6123 (#93) ############################################
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
6123
GEORGE SAND
.
TO ELIZABETH HOAR
From Memoirs': Paris,
-, 1847
You
ou wished to hear of George Sand, or as they say in Paris,
"Madame Sand. " I find that all we had heard of her was
true in the outline; I had supposed it might be exagger-
ated.
It is the custom to go and call on those to whom you bring
letters, and push yourself upon their notice; thus you must go
quite ignorant whether they are disposed to be cordial. My name
is always murdered by the foreign servants who announce me.
I speak very bad French; only lately have I had sufficient com-
mand of it to infuse some of my natural spirit in my discourse.
This has been a great trial to me, who am eloquent and free in
my own tongue, to be forced to feel my thoughts struggling in
vain for utterance.
The door-
The servant who admitted me was in the picturesque costume
of a peasant, and as Madame Sand afterwards told me, her
goddaughter, whom she had brought from her province. She
announced me as "Madame Salère," and returned into the ante-
room to tell me, "Madame says she does not know you. " I
began to think I was doomed to rebuff among the crowd who
deserve it. However, to make assurance sure, I said, "Ask if
she has received a letter from me. " As I spoke Madame Sand
opened the door, and stood looking at me an instant.
Our eyes
met. I never shall forget her look at that moment.
way made a frame for her figure; she is large but well formed.
She was dressed in a robe of dark-violet silk, with a black man-
tle on her shoulders, her beautiful hair dressed with the greatest
taste; her whole appearance and attitude, in its simple and lady-
like dignity, presented an almost ludicrous contrast to the vulgar
caricature idea of George Sand. Her face is a very little like the
portraits, but much finer; the upper part of the forehead and
eyes are beautiful, the lower strong and masculine, expressive of
a hardy temperament and strong passions, but not in the least.
coarse; the complexion olive, and the air of the whole head
Spanish (as indeed she was born at Madrid, and is only on one
side of French blood). All these I saw at a glance; but what
fixed my attention was the expression of goodness, nobleness, and
## p. 6124 (#94) ############################################
6124
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
power that pervaded the whole,-the truly human heart and
nature that shone in the eyes. As our eyes met, she said, "C'est
vous," and held out her hand. I took it, and went into her little
study; we sat down a moment; then I said, "Il me fait de bien
de vous voir," and I am sure I said it with my whole heart, for
it made me very happy to see such a woman, so large and so
developed in character, and everything that is good in it so
really good. I loved, shall always love her.
She looked away, and said, "Ah! vous m'avez écrit une lettre
charmante. " This was all the preliminary of our talk, which then
went on as if we had always known one another. .
Her
way of talking is just like her writing, lively, picturesque, with
an undertone of deep feeling, and the same happiness in striking.
the nail on the head every now and then with a blow.
I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich, so prolific, so ardent a
genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very much; I never
liked a woman better.
For the rest, she holds her place
in the literary and social world of France like a man, and seems
full of energy and courage in it. I suppose she has suffered
much, but she has also enjoyed and done much.
.
AMERICANS ABROAD IN EUROPE
From At Home and Abroad'
THE
HE American in Europe, if a thinking mind, can only become
more American. In some respects it is a great pleasure to
be here. Although we have an independent political exist-
ence, our position toward Europe as to literature and the arts is
still that of a colony, and one feels the same joy here that is
experienced by the colonist in returning to the parent home.
What was but picture to us becomes reality; remote allusions and
derivations trouble no more; we see the pattern of the stuff, and
understand the whole tapestry. There is a gradual clearing up
on many points, and many baseless notions and crude fancies are
dropped. Even the post-haste passage of the business American
through the great cities, escorted by cheating couriers and igno-
rant valets de place, unable to hold intercourse with the natives
of the country, and passing all his leisure hours with his coun-
trymen, who know no more than himself, clears his mind of some
mistakes, lifts some mists from his horizon.
## p. 6125 (#95) ############################################
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
6125
There are three species: First, the servile American,-a being
utterly shallow, thoughtless, worthless. He comes abroad to spend
his money and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to
have fashionable clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some
titled persons, and furnish himself with coffee-house gossip, by
retailing which among those less traveled and as uninformed as
himself he can win importance at home. I look with unspeakable
contempt on this class, -a class which has all the thoughtlessness
and partiality of the exclusive classes in Europe, without any of
their refinement, or the chivalric feeling which still sparkles
among them here and there. However, though these willing
serfs in a free age do some little hurt, and cause some annoyance
at present, they cannot continue long; our country is fated to a
grand independent existence, and as its laws develop, these para-
sites of a bygone period must wither and drop away.
Then there is the conceited American, instinctively bristling
and proud of -he knows not what. He does not see, not he!
that the history of humanity, for many centuries, is likely to have
produced results it requires some training, some devotion, to ap-
preciate and profit by. With his great clumsy hands, only fitted
to work on a steam-engine, he seizes the old Cremona violin,
makes it shriek with anguish in his grasp, and then declares he
thought it was all humbug before he came, and now he knows
it; that there is not really any music in these old things; that
the frogs in one of our swamps make much finer, for they are
young and alive. To him the etiquettes of courts and camps, the
ritual of the Church, seem simply silly,- and no wonder, pro-
foundly ignorant as he is of their origin and meaning. Just so
the legends which are the subjects of pictures, the profound myths
which are represented in the antique marbles, amaze and revolt
him; as, indeed, such things need to be judged of by another
standard than that of the Connecticut Blue Laws. He criticizes
severely pictures, feeling quite sure that his natural senses are
better means of judgment than the rules of connoisseurs,-not
feeling that to see such objects mental vision as well as fleshly
eyes are needed, and that something is aimed at in art beyond
the imitation of the commonest forms of nature. This is Jona-
than in the sprawling state, the booby truant, not yet aspiring
enough to be a good schoolboy. Yet in his folly there is a
meaning; add thought and culture to his independence, and he
will be a man of might: he is not a creature without hope, like
the thick-skinned dandy of the class first specified.
## p. 6126 (#96) ############################################
6126
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
1
I
The artists form a class by themselves. Yet among them,
though seeking special aims by special means, may also be found
the lineaments of these two classes, as well as of the third, of
which I am now to speak.
This is that of the thinking American, a man who, recog-
nizing the immense advantage of being born to a new world and
on a virgin soil, yet does not wish one seed from the past to be
lost. He is anxious to gather and carry back with him every
plant that will bear a new climate and new culture. Some will
dwindle; others will attain a bloom and stature unknown before.
He wishes to gather them clean, free from noxious insects, and
to give them a fair trial in his new world. And that he may
know the conditions under which he may best place them in that
new world, he does not neglect to study their history in this.
—
The history of our planet in some moments seems so pain-
fully mean and little,—such terrible bafflings and failures to com-
pensate some brilliant successes; such a crushing of the mass of
men beneath the feet of a few, and these too often the least
worthy; such a small drop of honey to each cup of gall, and in
many cases so mingled that it is never one moment in life
purely tasted; above all, so little achieved for humanity as a
whole, such tides of war and pestilence intervening to blot out
the traces of each triumph,- that no wonder if the strongest
soul sometimes pauses aghast; no wonder if the many indolently
console themselves with gross joys and frivolous prizes. Yes!
those men are worthy of admiration, who can carry this cross
faithfully through fifty years; it is a great while for all the
agonies that beset a lover of good, a lover of men; it makes a
soul worthy of a speedier ascent, a more productive ministry in
the next sphere. Blessed are they who ever keep that portion of
pure, generous love with which they began life! How blessed
those who have deepened the fountains, and have enough to
spare for the thirst of others! Some such there are; and feeling
that, with all the excuses for failure, still only the sight of those
who triumph gives a meaning to life or makes its pangs endura-
ble, we must arise and follow.
## p. 6127 (#97) ############################################
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
6127
A CHARACTER SKETCH OF CARLYLE
LETTER TO R. W. EMERSON
From Memoirs': Paris,
1846
ENJOYED the time extremely [in London]. I find myself much.
in my element in European society. It does not indeed come
up to my ideal, but so many of the incumbrances are cleared
away that used to weary me in America, that I can enjoy a
freer play of faculty, and feel, if not like a bird in the air, at
least as easy as a fish in water.
"
Of the people I saw in London, you will wish me to speak
first of the Carlyles. Mr. Carlyle came to see me at once, and
appointed an evening to be passed at their house. That first
time I was delighted with him. He was in a very sweet
humor,-full of wit and pathos, without being overbearing or
oppressive. I was quite carried away with the rich flow of his
discourse; and the hearty, noble earnestness of his personal being
brought back the charm which once was upon his writing, before
I wearied of it. I admired his Scotch, his way of singing his
great
full sentences, so that each one was like the stanza of a
narrative ballad. He let me talk, now and then, enough to free
my lungs and change my position, so that I did not get tired.
That evening he talked of the present state of things in England,
giving light, witty sketches of the men of the day, fanatics and
others, and some sweet, homely stories he told of things he had
known of the Scotch peasantry. Of you he spoke with hearty
kindness; and he told with beautiful feeling a story of some
poor farmer or artisan in the country, who on Sunday lays aside.
the cark and care of that dirty English world, and sits reading
the Essays and looking upon the sea.
<
of a <
The second time, Mr. Carlyle had a dinner party, at which
was a witty, French, flippant sort of a man, named Lewes, author
History of Philosophy,' and now writing a life of Goethe,
a task for which he must be as unfit as irreligion and sparkling
shallowness can make him. But he told stories admirably, and
was allowed sometimes to interrupt Carlyle a little,-of which
was glad, for that night he was in his acrid mood; and
though much more brilliant than on the former evening, grew
wearisome to me, who disclaimed and rejected almost everything
he said.
one
## p. 6128 (#98) ############################################
6128
SARAH MARGARET FULLER
Accustomed to the infinite wit and exuberant richness of his
writings, his talk is still an amazement and a splendor scarcely
to be faced with steady eyes. He does not converse, only
harangues. It is the usual misfortune of such marked men,-
happily not one invariable or inevitable,— that they cannot allow
other minds room to breathe and show themselves in their atmos-
phere, and thus miss the refreshment and instruction which the
greatest never cease to need from the experience of the humblest.
Carlyle allows no one a chance, but bears down all opposition,
not only by his wit and onset of words, resistless in their sharp-
ness as so many bayonets, but by actual physical superiority,—
raising his voice and rushing on his opponent with a torrent of
sound. This is not in the least from unwillingness to allow free-
dom to others. On the contrary, no man would more enjoy a
manly resistance in his thoughts. But it is the impulse of a
mind accustomed to follow out its own impulse, as the hawk its
prey, and which knows not how to stop in the chase.
Carlyle indeed is arrogant and overbearing; but in his arro-
gance there is no littleness, no self-love. It is the heroic arro-
gance of some old Scandinavian conqueror; it is his nature, and
the untamable impulse that has given him power to crush the
dragons. He sings rather than talks. He
pours upon you a
kind of satirical, heroical, critical poem, with regular cadences,
and generally catching up, near the beginning, some singular
epithet which serves as a refrain when his song is full, or with
which, as with a knitting-needle, he catches up the stitches, if he
has chanced now and then to let fall a row. For the higher
kinds of poetry he has no sense, and his talk on that subject is
delightfully and gorgeously absurd. He sometimes stops a min-
ute to laugh at it himself, then begins anew with fresh vigor; for
all the spirits he is driving before him as Fata Morgana, ugly
masks, in fact, if he can but make them turn about; but he
laughs that they seem to others such dainty Ariels. His talk,
like his books, is full of pictures; his critical strokes masterly.
Allow for his point of view, and his survey is admirable. He is a
large subject. I cannot speak more or wiselier of him now, nor
needs it; his works are true, to blame and praise him,- the
Siegfried of England, great and powerful, if not quite invul-
nerable, and of a might rather to destroy evil than legislate for
good.
## p. 6129 (#99) ############################################
6129
THOMAS FULLER
(1608-1661)
HE fragrance which surrounds the writings of Thomas Fuller
seems blended of his wit, his quaint worldliness, his sweet
Ce and happy spirit. The after-glow of the dazzling day of
Shakespeare and his brotherhood rests upon the pages of this divine.
In Fuller the world-spir
the world-spirit of the Elizabethan dramatists becomes
urbanity, the mellow humor of the dweller in the town. Too well
satisfied with the kindly comforts of life to agonize over humanity
and the eternal problems of existence, Fuller, although a Church of
England clergyman, was no less a cavalier
at heart than the most jaunty follower of
King Charles. He had not the intensity
of nature which characterizes the theolo-
gian by the grace of God. His Holy and
Profane State,' his 'Good Thoughts in
Bad Times,' and 'Good Thoughts in Worse
Times,' evidence a comfortable and reason-
able reliance on the Unseen; but they will
not be read for their spiritual insight so
much as for their well-seasoned and de-
lightful English. That quaint and fragrant
style of his lends charm even to those pas-
sages in which his thought is commonplace.
THOMAS FULLER
It is in Thomas Fuller the historian and biographer, that poster-
ity recognizes a man of marked intellectual power.
His scholarship
is exhibited in such a work as the Church History of Britain'; his
peculiar faculty for happy description in the Worthies of England. '
Fuller was fitted by temperament and training to be a recorder of
his own country and countrymen. His life was spent upon his island;
his love was fastened upon its places and its people. Born the same
year as Milton, 1608, the son of a clergyma of the same name as
his own, he was from boyhood both a scholar and an observer of men
and things. His education at Cambridge fostered his love of books.
His subsequent incumbency of various comfortable livings afforded
him opportunities for close acquaintance with the English world of
his day, and especially with its "gentry. " By birth, education, and
inclination, Fuller was an aristocrat. During the civil war he took
the side of King Charles, to whose stately life and mournful death
he has devoted the last volume of his great work, the History of
XI-384
## p. 6130 (#100) ###########################################
6130
THOMAS FULLER
the Church of Britain. '
Under the Protectorate, the genial priest
and man of the world found himself in an alien atmosphere. Like
many others in Anglican orders, he was "silenced" by the sour Puri-
tan authorities, but was permitted to preach again in London by the
grace of Cromwell. He was subsequently appointed chaplain to
Charles II. , but did not live long after the Restoration, dying of a
fever in 1661.
An early instance of modern scholarship is found in the histories
written by Thomas Fuller. Being by nature an antiquarian, he was
not inclined to find his material at second hand. He went back
always to the earliest sources for his historical data. It is this fact
which gives their permanent value to the History of the Church of
Britain' and to the History of the Holy War. ' These works bear
witness to wide and patient research, to a thorough sifting of mate-
rial. The antiquarian spirit displayed in them loses some of its
scholarly dignity, and takes on the social humor of the gossip, in the
'Worthies of England. ' Fuller's other writings may be of more
intrinsic value, but it is through the Worthies' that he is remem-
bered and loved. The book is rich in charm. It is as quaint as an
ancient flower garden, where blooms of every sort grow in lavish
tangle. He considers the counties of England, one by one, telling of
their physical characteristics, of their legends, of their proverbs, of
the princely children born in them, of the other "Worthies" - schol-
ars, soldiers, and saints who have shed lustre upon them. Fuller
gathered his material for this variegated record from every quarter
of his beloved little island. As a chaplain in the Cavalier army, he
had many opportunities of visiting places and studying their people.
As an incumbent of country parishes, he would listen to the ram-
blings of the old women of the hamlets, for the sake of discovering
in their talk some tradition of the country-side, or some quaint bit
of folk-lore. He writes of the strange, gay, sad lives of princely
families as familiarly as he writes of the villagers and townsfolk.
Sometimes an exquisite tenderness lies like light upon his record, as
in this, of the little Princess Anne, daughter to Charles I. :—
-
SHE was a very pregnant lady above her years, and died in her infancy,
when not fully four years old. Being minded by those about her to call upon
God even when the pangs of death were upon her, "I am not able," saith she,
"to say my long prayer" (meaning the Lord's Prayer), "but I will say my
short one, Lighten mine eyes, O Lord, lest I sleep the sleep of death. >>>
This done, the little lamb gave up the ghost.
Because of passages like these, Thomas Fuller will always be
numbered among those writers who, irrespective of their rank in the
world of letters, awaken a deep and lasting affection in the hearts of
their readers.
## p. 6131 (#101) ###########################################
THOMAS FULLER
6131
THE KING'S CHILDREN
From The Worthies of England'
K
ATHERINE, fourth daughter to Charles the First and Queen
Mary, was born at Whitehall (the Queen mother then being
at St. James), and survived not above half an hour after
her baptizing; so that it is charity to mention her, whose memory
is likely to be lost, so short her continuance in this life,- the
rather because her name is not entered, as it ought, into the
register of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields; as indeed none of the King's
children, save Prince Charles, though they were born in that
parish. And hereupon a story depends.
I am credibly informed that at the birth of every child of
kings born at Whitehall or St. James's, full five pounds were
ever faithfully paid to some unfaithful receivers thereof, to record
the names of such children in the register of St. Martin's. But
the money being embezzled (we know by some, God knows by
whom), no memorial is entered of them. Sad that bounty should
betray any to baseness, and that which was intended to make
them the more solemnly remembered should occasion that they
should be more silently forgotten! Say not, "Let the children.
of mean persons be written down in registers: kings' children
are registers to themselves;" or, "All England is a register to
them; » for sure I am, this common confidence hath been the
cause that we have been so often at a loss about the nativities
and other properties of those of royal extraction.
A LEARNED LADY
From The Worthies of England'
M
ARGARET MORE. -Excuse me, reader, for placing a lady among
men and learned statesmen. The reason is because of
her unfeigned affection to her father, from whom she
would not willingly be parted (and from me shall not be), either
living or dead.
She was born in Bucklersburie in London at her father's
house therein, and attained to that skill in all learning and lan-
guages that she became the miracle of her age. Foreigners
## p. 6132 (#102) ###########################################
6132
THOMAS FULLER
took such notice thereof that Erasmus hath dedicated some epis-
tles unto her. No woman that could speak so well did speak so
little; whose secrecy was such, that her father intrusted her with
his most important affairs.
Such was her skill in the Fathers that she corrected a de-
praved place in Cyprian; for where it was corruptly written
"Nisi vos sinceritas" she amended it "Nervos sinceritas. " Yea,
she translated Eusebius out of Greek; but it was never printed,
because J. Christopherson had done it so exactly before.
She was married to William Roper of Eltham in Kent, Esquire,
one of a bountiful heart and plentiful estate. When her father's
head was set up on London Bridge, it being suspected it would
be cast into the Thames to make room for divers others (then
suffering for denying the King's supremacy), she bought the head
and kept it for a relic (which some called affection, others reli-
gion, others superstition in her), for which she was questioned
before the Council, and for some short time imprisoned until she
had buried it; and how long she herself survived afterwards is to
me unknown.
HENRY DE ESSEX, STANDARD-BEARER TO HENRY II.
From The Worthies of England'
I
T HAPPENED in the reign of this King, there was a fierce battle
fought in Flintshire in Coleshall, between the English and
Welsh, wherein this Henry de Essex, animum et signum simul
abjecit,-betwixt traitor and coward,-cast away both his courage
and banner together, occasioning a great overthrow of English.
But he that had the baseness to do, had the boldness to deny,
the doing of so foul a fact, until he was challenged in combat
by Robert de Momford, a knight, eye-witness thereof, and by
him overcome in a duel. Whereupon his large inheritance was
confiscated to the King, and he himself, partly thrust, partly
going, into a convent, hid his head in a cowl, under which,
between shame and sanctity, he blushed out the remainder of
his life.
## p. 6133 (#103) ###########################################
THOMAS FULLER
6133
TH
THE GOOD SCHOOLMASTER
From The Holy and Profane State>
ERE is scarcely any profession in the commonwealth more
necessary, which is so slightly performed. The reasons
any
whereof I conceive to be these: First, young scholars make
this calling their refuge; yea, perchance before they have taken
degree in the university, commence schoolmasters in the
country, as if nothing else were required to set up this profes-
sion but only a rod and a ferula. Secondly, others who are able
use it only as a passage to better preferment, to patch the rents
in their present fortune, till they can provide a new one and
betake themselves to some more gainful calling. Thirdly, they
are disheartened from doing their best with the miserable reward
which
in some places they receive, being masters to their child-
ren and slaves to their parents. Fourthly, being grown rich,
they grow negligent, and scorn to touch the school but by the
proxy of the usher. But see how well our schoolmaster behaves
himself.
He
studieth his scholars' natures as carefully as they were
books,
and ranks their dispositions into several forms. And
though it may seem difficult for him in a great school to descend
to all
make
particulars, yet experienced schoolmasters may quickly
a grammar of boys' natures, and reduce them all-saving
some few exceptions—to these general rules:—
I.
Those that are ingenious and industrious.
The conjunc-
tion of two such planets in a youth presages much good unto
him.
To such a lad a frown may be a whipping, and a whip-
ping a
death; yea, where their master whips them once, shame
whips them all the week after. Such natures he useth with all
gentleness.
2.
Those that are ingenious and idle. These think, with the
hare in the fable, that running with snails-so they count the rest
of their schoolfellows-they shall come soon enough to the post,
though sleeping a good while before their starting.
Oh! a good
rod would finely take them napping!
3.
Those that are dull and diligent. Wines, the stronger
they be, the more lees they have when they are new. Many
boys are muddy-headed till they be clarified with age, and such
## p. 6134 (#104) ###########################################
6134
THOMAS FULLER
afterwards prove the best. Bristol diamonds are both bright, and
squared, and pointed by nature, and yet are soft and worthless;
whereas Orient ones in India are rough and rugged naturally.
Hard, rugged, and dull natures of youth acquit themselves after-
wards the jewels of the country, and therefore their dullness at
first is to be borne with if they be diligent. The schoolmaster
deserves to be beaten himself, who beats Nature in a boy for a
fault. And I question whether all the whipping in the world
can make their parts, which are naturally sluggish, rise one
minute before the hour Nature hath appointed.
4. Those that are invincibly dull, and negligent also. Correc-
tion may reform the latter, not amend the former. All the
whetting in the world can never set a razor's edge on that which
hath no steel in it. Such boys he consigneth over to other pro-
fessions. Shipwrights and boat-makers will choose those crooked
pieces of timber which other carpenters refuse. Those may make
excellent merchants and mechanics who will not serve for
scholars.
He is able, diligent, and methodical in his teaching; not lead-
ing them rather in a circle than forwards. He minces his pre-
cepts for children to swallow, hanging clogs on the nimbleness
of his own soul, that his scholars may go along with him.
ON BOOKS
From The Holy and Profane State ›
IT
T IS a vanity to persuade the world one hath much learning by
getting a great library. As soon shall I believe every one
is valiant that hath a well-furnished armory. I guess good
housekeeping by the smoking, not the number of the tunnels, as
knowing that many of them-built merely for uniformity—are
without chimneys, and more without fires.
Some books are only cursorily to be tasted of: namely, first,
voluminous books, the task of a man's life to read them over;
secondly, auxiliary books, only to be repaired to on occasions;
thirdly, such as are mere pieces of formality, so that if you look
on them you look through them, and he that peeps through the
casement of the index sees as much as if he were in the house.
But the laziness of those cannot be excused who perfunctorily
pass over authors of cons
onsequence, and only trade in their tables
## p. 6135 (#105) ###########################################
THOMAS FULLER
6135
and contents.
These, like city cheaters, having gotten the names
of all country gentlemen, make silly people believe they have
long lived in those places where they never were, and flourish
with skill in those authors they never seriously studied.
LONDON
From The Worthies of England'
IT
Tis the second city in Christendom for greatness, and the first
for good government. There is no civilized part of the
world but it has heard thereof, though many with this mis-
take: that they conceive London to be the country and England
but the city therein.
Some have suspected the declining of the lustre thereof, be-
cause of late it vergeth so much westward, increasing in build-
ings, Covent Garden, etc. But by their favor (to disprove their
fear) it will be found to burnish round about with new struct-
ures daily added thereunto.
It oweth its greatness under God's divine providence to the
well-conditioned river of Thames, which doth not (as some tyrant
rivers of Europe) abuse its strength in a destructive way, but
employeth its greatness in goodness, to be beneficial to com-
merce, by the reciprocation of the tide therein. Hence it was
that when King James, offended with the city, threatened to re-
move his court to another place, the Lord Mayor (boldly enough)
returned that "he might remove his court at his pleasure, but
could not remove the river Thames. "
Erasmus will have London so called from Lindus, a city of
Rhodes; averring a great resemblance betwixt the languages and
customs of the Britons and Grecians. But Mr. Camden (who no
doubt knew of it) honoreth not this his etymology with the least
mention thereof. As improbable in my apprehension is the
deduction from Lud's-Town,-town being a Saxon, not British
termination; and that it was so termed from Lan Dian, a temple
of Diana (standing where now St. Paul's doth), is most likely in
my opinion.
## p. 6136 (#106) ###########################################
6136
THOMAS FULLER
MISCELLANEOUS SAYINGS
I'
T IS dangerous to gather flowers that grow on the banks of the
pit of hell, for fear of falling in; yea, they which play with
the Devil's rattles will be brought by degrees to wield his
sword; and from making of sport they come to doing of mis-
chief.
A public office is a guest which receives the best usage from
them who never invited it.
Scoff not at the natural defects of any, which are not in their
power to amend. Oh! 'tis cruel to beat a cripple with his own
crutches.
Learning has gained most by those books by which the print-
ers have lost.
Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl
chain of all virtues.
To smell to a turf of fresh earth is wholesome for the body;
no less are thoughts of mortality cordial to the soul.
The lion is not so fierce as painted.
Their heads sometimes so little that there is no room
for wit; sometimes so long that there is no wit for so much
room.
·
Often the cock-loft is empty in those whom nature hath built
many stories high.
The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the
names of their founders.
One that will not plead that cause wherein his tongue
must be confuted by his conscience.
But our captain counts the image of God nevertheless his
image-cut in ebony as if done in ivory; and in the blackest
Moors he sees the representation of the King of Heaven.
_
## p. 6137 (#107) ###########################################
6137
ÉMILE GABORIAU
(1835-1873)
O SPEAK of the detective novel is to speak of Gaboriau. He
cannot be called the father of it; but the French novelist
made his field so peculiarly his own, developed its type of
human nature so painstakingly, created so distinctive a reputation
associated with it, that it is doubtful whether any one can be said to
have outrivaled him.
Born at Saujon, in the Department of the Charente-Inférieure, in
1835, Gaboriau drifted from school into the cavalry service; then into
three or four less picturesque methods of keeping body and soul to-
gether; and finally, by a kind of literary accident, he became the
private secretary of the Parisian novelist Paul Féval. His first suc-
cessful story ran as a continued one in a journal called Le Pays. It
was 'The Lerouge Affair,' but it did not even under newspaper cir-
cumstances find any considerable favor until it caught the eye of the
astute Millaud, the founder of the Petit Journal. Millaud recognized
in the fiction a new note in detective-novel making. He transferred
it to another journal, Le Soleil. There it made an instant and tre-
mendous success.
From that moment Gaboriau's career was determined and fortu-
nate. In rapid succession followed The Crime of Orcival' (1867);
'File No. 113' (1867); the elaborate Slaves of Paris' (1869); M. Le-
coq' (1869),—in which title appears the name of the moving spirit
of almost all the other stories; The Infernal Life' (1870); and four
or five others. All these stories have been translated into almost
every modern language that has a reading public. They brought
Gaboriau a large income during his lifetime, and they are still valu-
able literary properties. Their author died in Paris, his health broken
in consequence of incessant overwork, in September 1873.
Gaboriau elevated the detective story to something like a superior
plane in popular fiction. It is a question whether he did not say in
a large measure the strongest word in it, and to all intents and pur-
poses the last word. His books all have a certain resemblance, in
that we start into a complex drama with a riddle of crime. The un-
folding always brings us sooner or later to a dramatic family secret,
of which the original crime has only been an outside detail.
The
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6138
ÉMILE GABORIAU
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secret is the mainspring of the book, and about the middle of it the
reader finds himself chiefly absorbed by it. Indeed, Gaboriau's novels
have often been spoken of as "told backward. " Most of the novels
too gain their movement from one source - the wonderful shrewdness
and audacity of a certain M. Lecoq of the Paris detective service.
M. Lecoq was really an exaggeration of the well-known and wonder-
fully able Paris detective, M. Vidocq; and there are dozens of epi-
sodes in the course of Vidocq's brilliant professional career which
Gaboriau did not dress up so very much in introducing them into his
stories. There is an individuality to each novel, in spite of the fam-
ily likeness. Occasionally, like Dickens, the author attacked abuses
with effect; as in 'The Infernal Life' and 'The Slaves of Paris,' and
other books where he has set forth the merciless system of private
blackmailing in Paris with little exaggeration.
As to literary manner, Gaboriau was not a writer of the first
order, even as a French popular novelist. But he knew how to write;
and there is a correctness of diction and a nervous vivacity that is
much to his credit, considering the rapidity with which he produced
his work, and the fact that he had no sufficient early training for his
profession. He is seldom slipshod, and he is never really negligent.
He has been criticized for making his dénouements too simple, if one
regards them as a whole process; but his details are full of variety,
and the reader of Gaboriau never is troubled to keep his attention on
the author's pages, even in the case of those stories that are not of
the first class among his works. Perhaps the best of all the novels
is one of the shorter ones, 'File No. 113. '
THE IMPOSTOR AND THE BANKER'S WIFE: THE ROBBERY
From File No. 113'
R
AOUL SPENCER, supposed to be Raoul de Clameran, began to
triumph over his instincts of revolt. He ran to the door
and rang the bell. It opened.
"Is my aunt at home? " he asked the footman.
"Madame is alone in the boudoir next her room," replied the
servant.
Raoul ascended.
Clameran had said to Raoul, "Above all, be careful about your
entrance; your appearance must express everything, and thus you
will avoid impossible explanations. "
The suggestion was useless.
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EMILE GABORIAU
6139
When Raoul entered the little reception-room, his pale face
and wild eyes frightened Madame Fauvel, who cried:-
"Raoul! What has happened to you? "
The sound of her gentle voice produced upon the young va-
grant the effect of an electric shock. He trembled from head to
foot: yet his mind was clear; Louis had not been mistaken in
him. Raoul continued his rôle as if on the stage, and as assur-
ance came to him his knavery crushed his better nature.
"Mother, the misfortune which has come to me," he replied,
"is the last one. "
―
Madame Fauvel had never seen him like this. Trembling
with emotion, she rose and stood before him, with her tender face
near his.
She fixed in a steady gaze the power of her will, as if
she meant to read the depths of his soul.
"What is it? " she insisted. "Raoul, my son, tell me. "
He pushed her gently away.
"What has happened," he replied in a choked voice which
pierced the heart of Madame Fauvel, "proves that I am un-
worthy of you, unworthy of my noble and generous father. ”
She moved her head in protestation.
"Ah! " he continued, "I know and judge myself. No one
could reproach my own infamous conduct so cruelly as my own
conscience. I was not born wicked, but I am a miserable fool.
I have hours when, as if in a vertigo, I do not know what I am
doing. Ah! I should not have been like this, mother, if you had
been with me in my childhood. But brought up among strangers,
and left to myself without any guides but my own instincts, I
am at the mercy of my own passions. Possessing nothing, not
even my stolen name, I am vain and devoured by ambition.
Poor and without resources but your help, I have the tastes and
vices of a millionaire's son.
