Margaret Fuller

Fuller, Sarah Margaret Ossoli.
The blow-by-blow for the Papers on Art ----

A Dialogue. Poet. Critic. --

Poet vs critic in socratic dialog, each insist on the value of his own. The critic tenatively manages to justify herself, denying the poet's accusation of lack of emotion on the basis that part is better than nothing, that reason explores things that would be left unexamined.

The Two Herberts --

Lord Herbert and George Herbert is "intended chiefly as a setting to the Latin poems of George Herbert," and prefers George's more ethereal observations to his brother's richer stylel (15).

The Prose Works of Milton --

Reads like dust-jacket material for a Works of Milton, and reminds one that into the 20th Century, Milton enjoyed a prominence very near that of Shakespeare. Herein find Fuller's amended Romantic and Transcendental eidos in praise of M's spirituality and the grander span and grasp of his insight. Sublime does not come up, it it's very near the point.

The Life of SIr James Mackintosh: By his son; Robert James Mackintosh --

Clearly, clearly written as a book review, given that it discusses things like the binding, and goes through the pleasantness of owning a thing to which Fuller doth not grant genius. The drift seems to be how the elder Mack did not altogether reach fame and genius for human qualities that may be more admirable. One really wonders whether the younger were not a personal friend or patron.

Modern British Poets --

Campbell -- "... a poet; simply a poet-no philosopher. His forte is strong conception, a style free and bold . . ." (58).
. . . Anacreon Moore, sweet warbler of Erin! What ecstasy of sensation must thy poetic life have been!

The poetry of Walter Scott has been superseded by his prose, yet it fills no unimportant niche . . . . These poems are chiefly remarkable for presenting pictures of particulare epochs . . . " (63).

"Crabbe has the true spirit fo the man of science; he seeks truth alone . . . . The poor and humble owe him much, for he has made them known to the upper classes, not as they ought to be, but as they really are; and in so doing, in distinctly portraying the evils of their condition, he has opened the way to amelioration" (67).

"The youth of Shelley was unfortunate. He commited many errors" (68). But we don't hear which in any specific way. He is "most lyrical," yet "the struggles of Shelley's mind destroyed that serenity of tone which is essential to thei finest poetry, and his tenderness has not always that elevation of hope" (69), which I'd reather call a compliment than a criticism. She only faults him for lacking "unity of purpose and regulation of parts," for which I can only imagine that she's referring to the longer poems rather than substantial jewels like "Mont Blanc" and "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty."

". . . a sorrowful indignation curls too strongly the lip, lightens too fiercely the eye, of Byron" (74). On the other hand ". . . Byron's moral perversion never paralyzed or obscured his intellectual powers, though it might lower their aims" (76) -- an odd separation of moral and intellectual, but I think we're hearing that Byron's often clever without being profound.

She does go on to Southey, Cage, Wordsworth and eventually Coleridge. The comments are more evaluative than analytical.

All in all we have here a catalog for potential readers, and the long quotes that she includes are display rather than meat for close reading.

The Modern Drama -- Shakespeare's "children should not hope to walk in his steps" (103), though british drama far exceeds the american.

". . . if you burn or cut down an ancient wood, the next offering of the soil will not be the same kind, but raspberries and purple flowers will succed the oak, poplars the pine. Thus, beneath the roots of the drama, lay seeds of the historic novel, the romantic epic, which were to take its place to the reader, and for the scene, the oratorios, the opera, and ballet.
"Music is the great art of the time" (104).

She argues further that more respect be shown the actor and what Artaud call the mise en scene. But she trails off in sundry observations of minor work -- accurate enough, but leaving little to report.

Dialogue -- Old friends discourse about not seeing each other so often, the one feeling neglected. They have recourse to various Romantic poets to augment their discussion -- and of course, to Shakespeare.

Poets of the People: Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-Loom Weaver by WIlliam Thom, of Iverrury.

"in this book, the recollections are introduced for the sake of the 'Rhymes,' (2).

Here, finally, is an aesthetic statement:

"There are two ways of considering :oems, or the pruducts of literature in general. We may tolerate only what is excellent, and demand that whatever is consigned to prin fo r the benefit of the human race should exhibit fruits perfect in shape, color, and flavor, enclusing kernels of permanent value.
"Those who demand this will be content only with the Iliads and Odysseys of the minds' endeavor. -- They can feed no where but at rich men's tables; in teh wildest recess of nature roots and berries will not content them. . . . .
"But, on the othe rhand, literature may be regarded as the great mutual system of interpretation betweeen all kinds and classes of men. it is an epistolary correspondence between brethren of one family, subject to many and wide separations, and anxious to remain in spiritual presence of one another" (2).

This is a pretty fair statent of the credo of the departments that would bring the academic study called "Literature" to "Cultural Studies," the contextualists. It's a more self-aware statement than I've read otherwise. This is worth quoting at more length as she extends the principle to criticism:

"In like manner are there two modes of criticism. On which tries, by the highest standard fo literary prefection the critic is capable of conceiving, each work which comes in his way; rejecting all that it is possible to reject, and reserving for toleration only what is capable of standing the severest test . . . .
"There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain . . . " (3).

It's easy to see where Fuller's sympathies lie. She mistakes better work of the formal critic, who should be not so much evaluating, or not evaluating as an end, but should determine and describe the workings of text.

Fuller's tone throughout seems that of a social reformer rather than an artist, clear and sharp rather than subject to transports in the Romantic mode she describes. One can picture Thoreau or Whitman engaged with Emerson's transparent eyeball, but Fuller will be there to remind the boys what work remains to do when they stumble down from that hill.

The rest trails into discussions of poverty, and of Victoria -- which are perhaps in part the same topic.

Miss Barrett's Poems -- F considers BB as free from "morbid sentimentalism" (23). F greets warmly the lush lyricism by which BB remains popular, without playing much with its excesses, as might be imagined from the above.

Browning's Poems -- Interesting that Browning must be Robert and not Elizabeth, even for Margaret Fuller, whom one suspects of other sympathies. Actually, her response to him seems more perceptive than most of what's gone before:

"['Paracelsus'] is one of those attempts, that illustrate the self-consciosness of this age, to represent the fever of the soul pininig to embrace the secret of the universe in a single trance. Men who are once seized with this fever, carry thought upon th eheart as a cross, instead of finding thesmselves dailly warmed and enlightened to more life and joy by the sacred fire to which their lieves daily bring fresh fuel" (31).

Fine notion, and apparopriate to RB, hang it all. Also, this is pretty revealing of Fuller, and who she is and who she is not. Let's note first that insofar as one does not "embrace the secret of the universe in a single trance," one does not embrace it, but stands aside and recognizes and perhaps describes. Fuller's in the latter house, clear where Emerson's not, but, having never seen from that transparent eyeball, she does not fully appreciate the value of getting it all at once.

"Byron could only paint women as they were to him. Browning can show what they are in themselves" (41).

Lives of the Great Composers; Hayden, Mozart, Handel, Bach, Beethoven.

"It is easier to us to get the scope of the artist's design and its grown as the area where we see it does not stretch vision beyond its power" (47).

Left politic and rightis aesthetics -- not an unusual combination.

An interesting comparison between the apparent processes of Emerson and Fuller occurs. Harkening back to the explanation of logic with non-discrete words, one might say that Emerson feels forcibly the instability of his discrete pronunciations and repeatedly weaves back to respond to the unspoken. He has some faith that at some level Kosmos unifies and organizes and so forth -- his transcendent level, of course. For Fuller, the associations of discourse resolve adequately within the sentence, and the recursions of paragraphs and larger units revisit only what has been made relatively explicit in the prior text; where they extend it, they do so relatively straightforwardly.

This difference is quantitive, and anything but absolute. Emerson's trying for clarity, too, and Fuller for profundity. And both achieve some of each. But Emerson spills over regularly, whereas Fuller falls back into abstraction.

This is much of what the business of jumping around consists of in freshman compositions, too. Only they haven't the experience or desire to police it, so they allow it where they have little call to do so.

This has something to do with the difference between linguistic and mathematic analysis. In mathematical analysis, the terms are quantities, their natures fixed or presumed to be fixed. In language one tries for similar strictures, or approximations of them, but the language is presumed referent, therefore it continues always subject to the dissonance of reference. Also, it remains subject to the dissonance involved in categorization, in the parting of externals by the separate samplings of sense and the fictions of its subsequent reassembly.

Mathematics further tends to presume the referent as expressible in quantities, or in a quantity of quantities. Language, conversely, favors the subjectively irreducible goache-fluxus of sense. Mathmind takes the world to be asensual, to hold Meaning or Nature unavailable to the senses or to vision -- possible available to sound or movement, in kinesis.

Here we bend back to a surprising unity -- Fuller is the master of the kinesis in her sentences and paragraphs; Emerson is not. She owns or spans the effective sentence, the long moment of meaning. She has the measure. THE PROCESS OF MEASURE, OF MEASURING, IS TEMPORAL. One measures from __ to __, :. movement.

Now, here's also the problem with the stylistic alterations often requisite of simpler prose. They don't strive like Robert Browning to embrace their topic-wisdom at once. They treat a whole as assembled of parts. Therefore, they tend to lose the specific relationship of those parts. The logical phrase, then, loses the possibility of feeding those aspects into the general pattern, then determining whether other constructs can or cannot be staged mutually with the first construct.

Ooh.

Well, back to Fuller-Ossoli-- She's on to A Record of Impressions of Mr. Allson's Pictures in the Summer of 1839.

"I seemed to recognise in painting that self-possessedelegance, that transparent depth, which I most admire in liaturere; I thought with delight that such a man as this had been able to grow up in our bustling, reasonable community, that he had kept hsi foot upon the ground, yet never lost sight of the rose-clouds of beauty floating above him" (109-110).

The operative concept here seems to be transparence. The relations to Emerson's images of transcendance and transparency describe something of the aesthetic to which Fuller refers. Transparency may involve an alignment of molecules or surfaces. Thus glass is transparent while it lays as melted or poured. Light passes through the aligned surface with little reflection. We see ground glass as white because light of various frequences bounces from the various surfaces. Likewise one considers the moment of recognition as one of clarity or transparency because factors under consideration align; one can also thereby ignore certain aspects of them, because these can be assumed to be in alignment. One can consider other aspects that would normally have to be bracked away from consideration. On has the impression of great or universal perception.

American Literature --

She bops through a few near-contemporaries, admitting a general lack in amlit, but noting Dr. Channing, a Unitarian preacher near to the transcendentalist movement; and JF Cooper, more noted for his faults than blessings, though we're still awaiting Twain on this one. I guess the Sage of Concord must be Emerson, though she ought to say. She disses Longfellow as elegant but "artificial and imitative," Lowell as less. Emerson's mentioned differently, so the Sage above is probably Channing, or the elder Channing. There is also William Ellery Channing "nephew and namesake of Dr. C."

As to the stage of development, she mentions "those who find the theatres of this city well filled all the year round by an audience willing to sit out the heroisms of Rolla" (134). The city is probably New York. She goes on to complain of the play, but the people are there.

". . . the most important part of our literature, wile the work of diffusion is still going on, likes in teh journals, which monthly, weekly, daily, send their messages to every corner of this great land, and form, at present, the only efficient for the general education of the people.
Among these, the Magazines take the lowest rank. Their object is principally to cater for the amusement of vacant hours, and as there is not a great deal of wit and light talkent in this country, they do not even this to much advantage. More wit, grace, and elegant trifling, embellish the annals of literatuer in one day of France than in a year of America.
"The Reviews are more able. If they cannot compare, on equal terms, with those of France, England, and Germany, where, if genius be rare, at least a vast amount of talent and culture arebrought to bear upon all the department so fknowlege, there are yet very creditable to a new country . . . " (137-138).

Swedenborgism ---

"The claim to be the New Church, or peculiarly the founders of a New Jerusalem, is like exclusive claims to the title of Orthodox. We have no sympathy with it" (160).

Kant

The universe that Emerson & Co. and a lot of others seem to imagine themselves reeks of Kant, whom I haven't read in years. So I glanced at Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful. But this doesn't seem to be the best sampling of Kant's work. Critique of Pure Reason does, of course, and anything that goes so far into epistemology must have ramifications for aesthetics and literature, but that's a chunk that I suspect I won't get to reread it this year. So I've started into a section of the Critique of Pure Judgment from Adams, Hazard. Ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. Revised. NYC: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. That's been just right. Here are a couple slices, with comments.

"Taste is the faculty of judging of an object or a method of representing it by an entirely disinterested satisfaction is called beautiful" (378).

In coming to this conclusion, Kant distinguishes beauty from good by saying beauty is intuitable or sensible, whereas good is intellectual or analytical -- so here's a basis for subjective intuition as the base of aesthetic judgment. But he distinguishes that from more relativistic explanations such as have become popular later:

"That which gratifies a man is called pleasant; that which merely pleases is beautiful; that which is esteemed or approved by him, i.e. that to which he accords an objective worth, is good" Pleasantness concerns irrational animals also, but beaut only concerns men, i.e. animal, but still rational beings -- nto merely qua rational (e.g. spirits) , but qua animal also -- and the good concerns every rational being in general. This is a proposition which can only be completely established and explained in the sequel. We may say that, of all these three kinds of satisfaction, that of taste in the beautiful is alone a disniterested and free satisfaction; for no interest, either of sense or of reason here forces our assent" (377).

So pleasure must be felt directly by the subject for the subject's own sake; the subject must receive attain or confront something that's pleasant. The good may be rationally observed and enjoyed in its way without being subjectively felt at all. But Beauty must be felt and may be independent of any subjective or personal self-interest. So while the artist's judgment is subjective, it remains judgment of something universal -- again a foundation of Romanticism and Transcendentalism.

This also relates to the judgment being subjective in the sense that it is made by the perceiving subject, not the perceived object in itself. Kant allows for considerable interaction and complexity in such relationships. That is, intellect uses aesthetic judgments, and multiple aspects of judging may be used in a single judgment:

"Given representations in a judgment can be empirical (consequently, aesthetical); but the judgment which is formed by means of them is logical, provided they are referred in the judgment to the object. Conversely, if the given representations are rational, but are referred in a judgment simply to the subject (to its feeling), the judgment is so far always aesthetical" (376).

Thus, we can get Kant's conclusion, in which beauty constitutes the intuitive, aesthetic, subjective, personal judgment that an object or condition is beautiful, that is, pleasing in a universal way, not just to oneself.

He goes on to state that "The beautiful is that which pleases universally without requiring a concept" (380). Although Kant himself qualifies this quite sharply later on, one can see the relation to Rousseauvian ideas in the importance given to untrained intuition and native insight.

"To seek for a principle of taste which shall furnish, by means of definite concepts, a universal criterion of the beautiful is fruitless trouble, because what is sought is impossible and self-contradictory" (384).

That is, you can't do beauty by the numbers or by category; it has to be specifically instantiated with reference to context and surroundings. Yet on the other hand it involves universal benefit and universal purposiveness. It's worth comparing this and Kant's description of the sublime with Emerson's passage about the transparent eyeball early in Nature, and also with the nature of Whitman's 1st person narrator who is nominally "I" but palpably everyone and all the universe as well and at the same time.

To my knowledge, Kant supplies the most precise and explicit articulation of a theory of personal direct sensation of something like the infinite, the universe, or spirit. Emerson's Nature -- which requires an individual, personal relationship to the universal -- seems to conflate (rightly or wrongly) the good and the beautiful, whereas Kant distinguishes them. In many ways, though, the logical distinctions are impressively similar.

Kant's interpenitration of universal and instantiation constitutes the center of Kant's doctrines of transcendance. It was interesting to nose into A Critique of Pure Reason after so many years and shortly after reading Emerson to see the word transcendental or some form thereof wedged into nearly every chapter title. I doubt Emerson's use of the term a generation afterward could hardly be coincidental. That moment with the transparent eyeball reads like a classic moment of beauty or even of the sublime. This fractal harmonies described by these men seems to be the basis of Romantic and Transcendental aesthetics in general.

The Romantic writer typically assumes that his or her innermost feelings are those of the readers. Therefore the most universal, most sublime material comes from the expulsion of the artist's innermost angst or desire. For the Romantics, the person who so dips into his or her deepest soul, most unmediated passions is the person who most grasps the Truth, not only of his or her innermost being, but of the principle of movement of the universe.

One might go back to Whitman for the example, and not just Whitman's expansiveness, but the particular and peculiar relation of the speaking subject to the reader and to the text. Whitman most directly assumes that he may speak directly for the reader without the reader's permission and with complete assumption of confidence. We have in this way an assumption of similarity of perceptive mechanisms in all readers, similar possession of a mutual reality, subjective appreciation of the tick-tock movements of the universe. This would seem to operate Kant -> Schiller -> Coleridge and Wordsworth -> Emerson -> Whitman -- with various other branches, mostly across Europe.

Kant's sublime only reinforces this impression:

"The beautiful in nature is connected with the form of the object, which consists in having definite boundaries. The sublime, on the other hand, is to be found in a formless object, so far as it it or by occasion of it boundlessness represented, and yet its totality is also present to thought" (386).

The sublime is still something to be experienced directly, as per Emerson or theologial Karl Barth. Talking of the absolute grandeur of the sublime, Kant insists that "It is not a pure concept of understanding that is thus signified; still less is it an intuition of sense; and just as little is it a concept of reason, because it brings with it no principleof cognition. It must therefore be a concept of judgement or derived from one, and a subjective purposiveness of the representation in referene tothe judgement must lie at its basis" (387).

So it is subjectively perceived. It's not, however, sensed per se, because it has no identifiable limits, no specific extension. It's greatness, however many times he says absolute, seems to have some kind of relativism. He will eventually get to saying that it involves the relation between things. The first clue seems to be the relativism of said greatness -- it appears to be not a size (how could it be?) but a hierarchy and the characteristic of being at the perceptible outer reach of a system of hierarchies:

"In a judgment by which anything is designated simply as great, it is not merely meant that the object has a magnitude, but hat this magnitude is superior to that of many other objects of the same kind, without, owever, any exact determination of this superiority" (388).

The sublime is the greater thing which contains and subsumes the lesser -- the greater plan of God, the syntax of the sentence, the syntagma of the larger work. Kant makes an interesting further gesture towards the individual perception, concluding this section so:

" . . . the sublime is that, the mere ability to think which sews a faculty of the mind surpassing every standard of sense (387).

In passing, I should note that this coincides very nearly to Jacques Derrida's conception of God as expressed in The Gift of Death (page 109, if I recall).

A couple of paragraphs of Kant seem worth typing out:

"The feeling of the sublime is therefore a feeling of pain arising from the want of accordance between the aesthetical estimation of magnitude formed by the imagination and the estimation of the same formed by reason. There is at the same time a pleasure thus excited, arising from the correspondence with rational ideas of this very judgment of the inadequacy of our greatest facultyfo sense, insofar as it is a law fo us to strive afte rthese ideas. In fact it is for us a law (of reason) and belongs to our destination to estimate as small, in comparison with ideas of reason, everthing which nature, regarded as an object of sense, contains that is great for us; and that which arouses in us the feeling of this supersensible destination agrees with that law" (389).

"Sublimity . . . does not reside in anything of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious that we are superior to nature within, and therefore also to nature witout us (so far as it influences us). Everything that excites this feeling in us, e.g. the mightof nature which calls forth our forces, is called them (although improperly) sublime. Only by supposing this idea in ourselves and in reference to it are we capable of attaining to the idea of the sublimity of that Being which produces respect in us, not merely by the might that it displayes in nature, but rather by means of the faculty which resides in ous of judging it fearlessly and of regarding our destination as sublime in respect of it" (391).

"Spirit, in an aesthetical sense, is the name given to the animating principle of the mind' (391).

There at the end we have the pure Romanticism:

"In a word, the aesthetical idea is a representation of the imagination associated with a given concept, which is bound up with such a multiplicity of partial representaitons in its free employment that for it no expression marking a definite can be found; and such a representaiton, therefore, adds to a concept much ineffable thought, the feeling of which quickens the cognitive faculties, and with langauge, which is the mere letter, minds up spirit also" (392).

And and this point, one feels that the individual has slipped quite solidly into aesthetics and spirit, and may use his own personal judgment as an indicator without reference to prior judgment, social judgment, religion or government.

The bizarre thing is that this straightlaced man who seems to have never confronted anyone has been instrumental in the great revolutions, and perhaps more than anyone who carried a gun or sword. I don't know that I find a "pen is mightier" here, but at least a "to thine own self be true."