Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/80

Rh From this paper our thoughts naturally revert to what Washington Emerson has said of Margaret as an art critic:—

"Margaret's love of art, like that of most cultivated persons in this country, was not at all technical, but truly a sympathy with the artist in the protest which his work pronounced on the deformity of our daily manners; her co-perception with 'him of the eloquence of form; her aspiration with him to a fairer life. As soon as her conversation ran into the mysteries of manipulation and artistic effect, it was less trustworthy. I remember that in the first times when I chanced to see pictures with her, I listener reverently to her opinions, and endeavoured to see what she saw. But on several occasions, finding myself unable to reach it, I came to suspect my guide and to believe at last that her taste in works of art, though honest, was not on universal, but on idiosyncratic grounds."