BOOKS.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT'S LETTERS.*
THAT Mary Wollstonecraft's public writings are now fresh and instructive, while Godwin's offer to our wearied minds a curious combination of truisms and mares'-nests, is, in part, due to this fact,—that in social ethics, which were her province, the world has made so little change of mind, that in all things in which she was in advance of her own day she is in advance of ours ; but in political science, which was her husband's field, general thought in England has developed apace. Another striling difference between the two is that Godwin had a man's power and privilege of impersonal generalisation ;—professional at thinking, he was an amateur at living; but all that Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, however large and general in its sym- pathies and speculations, is quick with the feelings of the per- sonal and intense woman, who took her life so greatly td heart. If this be so in her public works, how vital are the writings in which she shows herself, making a disclosure too intimate for good-taste, perhaps too intimate for good-feeling, to accept. These letters to Imlay were written under circumstances which are stated in a short memoir by Mr. Kegan Paul in the volume under review, and at greater length in the same author's Godwin and his Contemporaries. It may be well briefly to recapitulate them here.
Mary, Eliza, and Everina Wollstonecraft were three girls whose home was laid waste by the ill-conduct of a father, and who were thrown on the world without means of livelihood, except their own labours ; one brother was selfish and grudging, the other was a ne'er-do-weel and a burden; one of the girls had the additional misfortune of being married to a violent and brutal savage, who ill-treated her to the verge of madness. From his clutches her sister Mary rescued her, harbouring her and working for her afterwards; this was the first revolt against society attempted by the future author of A Vindication of the Bights. of Woman. With the three sisters was associated a fourth girl, a poor little artist who lived by her brush, and whom the large-hearted Mary tenderly loved,—Fanny Blood, the daughter of a drunken spendthrift. Mark how it chanced that in Mary Wollstonecraft's experience and observation of life, virtuous and industrious women suffered by the idleness of dis- solute men ; for the claim which she afterwards made on behalf of her sex for equal intellectual and political rights is thus the more • Lary Wollstoneeraii: Leiters to Imlay. London; O. Kogan Paul and Co.
easily accounted for. During this time of early struggles with poverty, we find her an independent and energetic, a most self- sacrificing and loving, and distinctively a pious woman. If her piety be less observable as her life advances, we yet see no rea- son for believing that it suffered any great diminution, and Mr. Kegan Paul tells us that her mind was never even overclouded by a doubt as to the existence of a God. After her rescue of her sister, the most marked incident of her laborious youth is a very characteristic one. Her friend, Fanny Blood, had mar- ried, and gone to live in Portugal with her husband. Her con- finement approaching, she begged Mary to go over and nurse her ; and Mary immediately set sail, leaving the school which the sisters were toiling to keep up, and which fell to pieces in her absence. Fanny Blood died in childbirth, and when Mary returned to England the Wollstonecrafts' sorrowful little home was divided, and she took a governess's place, working the while for the first time with her pen, and doing all in the hope of providing for her two sisters, whose sor- rows and necessities caused her a constant, keen, and almost morbid agony of mind. Then for five years she lived alone in lodgings in London, writing for a publisher, helping her sisters to governesses' places, and sheltering them when unemployed.
During this period, her Vindication of the Bights of Woman was written and published. It brought her immediate fame, —an admiration which was almost worship from one section of society, suspicion and dislike from another. Her sisters being
at the moment in comfort, she for the first time indulged her- self, gratifying her desire for culture and accomplishments, and at the same time her large and generous interest in the destinies of the world, by a residence in Paris in time of revolution. Here, at the age of thirty-four, when her mind, ripening late like her beautiful person, was, in spite of past sorrows, fresh and keen, and deep in its capacity for happiness, she met Gilbert Imlay, an American of talent, and in course of time contracted with him what she intended to be a life-long union. Love had never before entered into her tender and maidenly heart. Her life had been as clean of thought as a nun's life ; and now her offence, though a great and grave one, was, in part at least, an intellectual offence ; she set aside the Divine institution of marriage, presuming to think it unnecessary to
a real and permanent tie. We must not be misunderstood when we say that her offence was not against purity. The
honest woman who outlives two husbands, and marries a third, is more easily criticised on this head than she ; and the ordinary woman of the world, who, though blameless in her own conduct, is apathetic as to the profligacy of brother and son, is, to our mind, somewhat too indulgently credited by public opinion with a love of virtue. No such arbitrary distinctions found a place in Mary Wollstonecraft's code of morals. As she expresses herself, " The obligation [to check the passions] is the duty of mankind, not a sexual duty." Taking the following sentences, gathered almost at random from her book, it is difficult to think that the hand which wrote them was yielded, except in dignity and honour, and faith in the cleanness of its bond :-
" A Christian has still nobler motives to incite her to preserve
chastity for her body has been called the Temple of the living God; of that God who requires more than modesty of mien. His eye searcheth the heart ; and let her remember that if she hope to find favour in the sight of purity itself, her chastity must be founded on modesty, and not on worldly prudence ; or verily, a good reputation will be her only reward."
" My sisters when love, even innocent love, is the whole employ of your lives, your hearts will be too soft to afford modesty that tranquil retreat where she delights to dwell, in close union with humanity."
Still more strikingly she says, in one of the letters to Imlay, that she prefers the word " affection " to " because the former implies temperance and habit. The man whose wife Mary Wollstonecraft considered herself (and any Scotchwoman would be virtuously married with less form than passed between them) seems, from glimpses in her letters, to have been a free-thinker, who had reduced immorality to a principle of conduct. Although she knew his love of change, Mary watched the calming of his passion for her with a noble equanimity, trusting to her own worth to attach her lover for ever to her. " You must esteem me ! " she exclaims, with dignity. The story of her desertion need scarcely be told here; it is told with pathos and power in this little volume. Her scorn of wealth (" Nothing worth having is to be purchased," she says), her sweet playfulness, her serene and womanly affectionateness, her anguish in the betrayal, combine in a self-painted, unconscious.
portrait, almost unequalled in beauty. There is a rising tone of pain throughout the book :—" My friend, my friend, I am not well ! a deadly weight of sorrow lies heavily on my heart. I am again tossed on the billows of life I long every night to go to bed, to hide my melancholy face in my pillow ; but there is a canker-worm in my bosom that never sleeps." " Writing to you, whenever an affectionate epithet occurs, my eyes fill with tears, and my trembling hand. stops If I am doomed to be unhappy, I will confine my anguish to my own bosom God bless you!" It needs only to be added that the man who had won the constant love of this woman of genius, seems to have been detected by her in the grotesque wickedness of an intrigue with her cook. Upon this discovery, Mary Woll- stonecraft's courage gave way, and she attempted to drown her- self, with so much resolution that she was insensible when some passing watermen saw and rescued her. She was reconciled to life only by the duty of working for the little girl Imlay had left her,—the little girl who was afterwards that " Fanny God- win " whose tragical death by her own hand has never been explained.
Clinging to her theories with a culpable infatuation, Mary formed a second unlawful connection, for her marriage with Godwin did not take place until five months before the birth of her daughter Mary, afterwards Mary Shelley. She seems to have loved Godwin tenderly, though not with the fervour of her first union ; but these few months of peace were cut short by her death in childbirth, at the age of thirty-eight. It is diffi- cult to believe that she was more than negatively happy as Godwin's wife ; there was little in common between her genius and his "large head full of cold brains," to use Ticknor's word. Mr. Paul relates a characteristic incident of her last hours. At the sudden cessation of great pain, she cried to her husband, " Oh, Godwin, I am in heaven!" and the grotesque little infidel replied, " You mean, my dear, that your physical sensations are somewhat easier." Her remains were interred in St. Pan- cras' churchyard, and subsequently removed by her grandson, Sir Percy Shelley, to the pretty but somewhat incongruous neighbourhood of a modern Ritualistic church at Bournemouth.
Her style, in the letters to Tmlay, as in her public works, is peculiarly direct, sincere, and strong ; we are always con- scious of a certain reserve of power. The few living persons who have read her Rights of Woman must have been struck with the force of reasoning exerted and husbanded throughout a long argumentative work. Her originality of mind is so great, that she dispenses with all such eccentricities of style as simulate originality. The orderliness of her thoughts is indeed mascu- line. Every action of her reason is quick with philanthropy towards the race, with charity towards the individual, with religious love. Her mission, as she received it, was to teach the equality of the sexes in intellect, in responsibility, in duty ; her life, by one sin of presumptuous revolt—not merely against society, as Mr. Kegan Paul puts it, but against divine law—has raised public opinion against her, marred her mission, and made her teaching futile.
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