Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  Mary was now arrived at the situation, which, for two or three preceding years, her reason had pointed out to her as affording the most substantial prospect of happiness. She had been tossed and agitated by the waves of misfortune. Her childhood, as she often said, had known few of the endearments, which constitute the principal happiness of childhood. The temper of her father had early given to her mind a severe cast of thought, and substituted the inflexibility of resistance for the confidence of affection. The cheerfulness of her entrance upon womanhood, had been darkened, by an attendance upon the death-bed of her mother, and the still more afflicting calamity of her eldest sister. Her exertions to create a joint independence for her sisters and herself, had been attended, neither with the success, nor the pleasure, she had hoped for them. Her first youthful passion, her friendship with Fanny, had encountered many disappointments, and, in fine, a melancholy and premature catastrophe. Soon after these accumulated mortifications, she was engaged in a contest with a near relation, whom she regarded as unprincipled, respecting the wreck of her father’s fortune. In this affair she suffered the double pain, which arises from moral indignation, and disappointed benevolence. Her exertions to assist almost every member of her family, were great and unremitted. Finally, when she indulged a romantic affection for Mr Fuseli, and fondly imagined that she should find in it the solace of her cares, she perceived too late, that, by continually impressing on her mind fruitless images of unreserved affection and domestic felicity, it only served to give new pungency to the sensibility that was destroying her.

  Some persons may be inclined to observe, that the evils here enumerated, are not among the heaviest in the catalogue of human calamities. But evils take their rank more from the temper of the mind that suffers them, than from their abstract nature. Upon a man of a hard and insensible disposition, the shafts of misfortune often fall pointless and impotent. There are persons, by no means hard and insensible, who, from an elastic and sanguine turn of mind, are continually prompted to look on the fair side of things, and, having suffered one fall, immediately rise again, to pursue their course, with the same eagerness, the same hope, and the same gaiety, as before. On the other hand, we not unfrequently meet with persons, endowed with the most exquisite and delicate sensibility, whose minds seem almost of too fine a texture to encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to whom pleasure is transport, and disappointment is agony indescribable. This character is finely portrayed by the author of The Sorrows of Werther. Mary was in this respect a female Werther.

  She brought then, in the present instance, a wounded and sick heart, to take refuge in the bosom of a chosen friend. Let it not however be imagined, that she brought a heart, querulous, and ruined in its taste for pleasure. No; her whole character seemed to change with a change of fortune. Her sorrows, the depression of her spirits, were forgotten, and she assumed all the simplicity and the vivacity of a youthful mind. She was like a serpent on a rock, that casts its slough, and appears again with brilliancy, the sleekness, and the elastic activity of its happiest age. She was playful, full of confidence, kindness and sympathy. Her eyes assumed new lustre, and her cheeks new colour and smoothness. Her voice became cheerful, her temper overflowing with universal kindness, and that smile of bewitching tenderness from day to day illuminated her countenance, which all who knew her will so well recollect, and which won, both heart and soul, the affection of almost every one that beheld it.

  Many things could be said of this passage, not least Godwin’s generosity as the biographer-husband in writing it. But it is perhaps enough to note that its snake imagery was taken up almost word for word, in Shelley’s triumphant chorus from Hellas, which carries forward Mary Wollstonecraft’s hopes for happiness in a better world, like a flame passed from hand to hand:

  The world’s great age begins anew,

  The golden years return,

  The earth does like a snake renew

  Her winter’s weeds outworn …

  Godwin’s powers of moral analysis as a biographer are matched – particularly in the second half of the Memoirs – by a considerable narrative gift. This is in a sense unexpected, until we recall that the philosopher was also a novelist. He recounts with great effect the rapid and fatal development of the love affair with Imlay in Paris (Chapter 7), the suicide attempt from Putney Bridge (Chapter 8), and above all the agonizingly detailed account of Wollstonecraft’s death which occupies almost an entire chapter (Chapter 10).

  This last scene is itself a revolution in the biographer’s art, depleted of all the traditional religious and literary comforts, but harrowing in its medical details and Godwin’s supreme use of understatement to express unspoken emotion. It was perhaps this chapter which most shocked his intimate friends, and the modern reader may still find it strangely disturbing. He was much criticized for making no formal reference to Wollstonecraft’s religious feelings at this time (though they are fully discussed in Chapter 3) – ‘her religion was almost entirely of her own creating’. Yet Godwin’s overwhelming grief – which we know from his later letters – seems to gain tremendous force from his effort to contain it. The precise, laconic sentences observe terminal illness as a domestic event, surrounded by mundane bustle and the grotesque details of medical treatment. But they also carry a world of metaphysical pain:

  In the evening she had a second shivering fit, the symptoms of which were in the highest degree alarming. Every muscle of the body trembled, the teeth chattered, and the bed shook under her. This continued probably for five minutes. She told me, after it was over, that it had been a struggle between life and death, and that she had been more than once, in the course of it, at the point of expiring. I now apprehend these to have been the symptoms of a decided mortification, occasioned by the part of the placenta that remained in the womb. At the time however I was far from considering it in that light. When I went for Dr Poignand, between two and three o’clock on the morning of Thursday, despair was in my heart. The fact of the adhesion of the placenta was stated to me, and, ignorant as I was of obstetrical science, I felt as if the death of Mary was in a manner decided. But hope had revisited my bosom, and her cheerings were so delightful, that I hugged her obstinately to my heart. I was only mortified at what appeared to me a new delay in the recovery I so earnestly longed for. I immediately sent for Dr Fordyce, who had been with her in the morning, as well as on the three preceding days. Dr Poignand had also called this morning, but declined paying any further visits, as we had thought proper to call in Dr Fordyce.

  The progress of the disease was not uninterrupted. On Tuesday I found it necessary again to call in Dr Fordyce in the afternoon, who brought with him Dr Clarke of New Burlington-street, under the idea that some operation might be necessary. I have already said, that I pertinaciously persisted in viewing the fair side of things, and therefore the interval between Sunday and Tuesday evening, did not pass without some mixture of cheerfulness. On Monday, Dr Fordyce forbad the child’s having the breast and we therefore procured puppies to draw off the milk. This occasioned some pleasantry of Mary with me and the other attendants.

  Nothing could exceed the equanimity, the patience and affectionateness of the poor sufferer. I intreated her to recover, and I dwelt with trembling fondness on every favourable circumstance, and, as far as it was possible in so dreadful a situation, she, by her smiles and kind speeches, rewarded my affection.

  Wednesday was to me the day of greatest torture in the melancholy series. It was now decided that the only chance of supporting her through what she had to suffer, was by supplying her freely with wine. This task was devolved upon me. I began about four o’clock in the afternoon. But for me, totally ignorant of the nature of diseases and of the human frame, thus to play with a life that now seemed all that was dear to me in the universe, was too dreadful a task. I knew neither what was too much, nor what was too little. Having begun, I felt compelled, under every disadvantage, to go on. This lasted for three hours. Towards the end of that time, I happened f
oolishly to ask the servant who came out of the room, ‘What she thought of her mistress?’ She replied, ‘that, in her judgement, she was going as fast as possible.’

  Such a passage lets us into entirely new areas of personal intimacy and grief, in a way that is without precedent in eighteenth-century life-writing. There is nothing quite like this, even in Boswell. It acknowledges human vulnerability, and draws strength and solidarity from it, in a recognizably modern way.

  Yet for all this, Godwin does have certain important limitations as a biographer which must be briefly acknowledged. First, he lacked several sources. He had full access to Wollstonecraft’s professional papers, and had private information from many of her closest friends: Joseph Johnson, Hugh Skeys, Mary Hays, Mrs Christie, and several others. But Wollstonecraft’s family refused to cooperate with him, and her sister Everina Wollstonecraft withheld all correspondence. Equally, Henry Fuseli angrily refused to let Godwin even glance over Wollstonecraft’s letters of 1791. Most significant of all, perhaps, Gilbert Imlay’s side of the correspondence with Wollstonecraft in Paris, London and Scandinavia was never recovered. This is a lacuna which has probably affected all subsequent accounts of their affair. In general it meant that Godwin was always interpreting these emotional events through Mary Wollstonecraft’s own account of them (in her own letters, and in her private talks with Godwin when they first fell in love). If there is any ‘romanticizing’ its cause lies here – in the kind of literary projection that we shall see in A Short Residence – rather than in Godwin’s deliberate attempt to present an acceptable heroine to the age.

  In the second place, Godwin’s literary style as a biographer lacks a strong visual sense. (This was something first noted by Hazlitt, the painter turned critic, in his fine essay on Godwin in The Spirit of the Age.) This means that we are given very little awareness of Mary Wollstonecraft’s physical presence, which must have been so striking: how she looked, the famous auburn hair, how she dressed, how she moved and talked in company. But more than that, and so crucial for a traveller like her, we have no impression of all those formative places that she visited – Lisbon, Dublin, Paris, Gothenburg, Christiania, Hamburg. In Godwin’s mind, she always moves and lives in something of an abstract void. We cannot even easily imagine her little apartment in Store Street, with that cat, or her parlour in the Polygon with little Fanny. As I shall show, her own manner in A Short Residence is so much the opposite of this abstraction, that the stylistic contrast between the two works – the biographic and the autobiographic vision – itself says more than anything else about the contrasting temperaments of their authors.

  Finally, for all his astonishing detachment and sense of objective judgement, Godwin was far more influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft’s intellect than he then realized. One has the sense that he could see round her character far better than he could see round her mind. In an unphilosophical moment he admitted that her personality had ‘a kind of witchcraft’. When he wrote the Memoirs he was still trying to digest the full implication of her ideas, and even his professional philosophic work was never to be the same again. This becomes most evident in his unavailing attempts to write a summary of ‘the leading intellectual traits of her character’ at the end of his book. He tried it twice, in the first and the second edition, and both are deeply unsatisfactory. In fact they tell us much less than he had already managed to show in the body of his narrative. His biographic explorations are far more convincing than his philosophic ones.

  What he tries to do is enforce an arbitrary distinction between their two ‘kinds’ of intellect. In the first edition, he puts it like this: ‘We had cultivated our powers (if I may venture to use this sort of language) in different directions; I chiefly an attempt at logical and metaphysical distinction, she a taste for the picturesque’ (Chapter 10).

  This strikes one as so ludicrously inadequate – and so far below what he had already brilliantly shown of her developing ‘powers’ – that one loses confidence in a way that happens nowhere else in the book. Godwin himself seems to have been vaguely aware of something going wrong when he makes the apologetic parenthesis about using ‘this sort of language’. One is hardly surprised to find a little later the absurd statement that ‘in the strict sense of the term, she reasoned little’. We seem to have collapsed into an inferior mode of discourse.

  In the second edition, he explores the distinction again, but now attempting to see their intellectual companionship on a grand scale. It becomes an archetype of the universal reconciliation between the two sexes. Each supplies what the other most lacks, in a prophetic partnership between the powers of Reason (male) and Imagination (female).

  Mary and myself perhaps each carried farther than to its common extent the characteristic of the sexes to which we belonged. I have been stimulated, as long as I can remember, by the love of intellectual distinction; but, as long as I can remember, I have been discouraged, when casting the sum of my intellectual value, by finding that I did not possess, in the degree of some other persons, an intuitive sense of the pleasures of the imagination. Perhaps I feel them as vividly as most men; but it is often rather by an attentive consideration, than an instantaneous survey. They have been liable to fail of their effect in the first experiment, and my scepticism has often led me anxiously to call in the approved decisions of taste, as a guide to my judgement, or a countenance to my enthusiasm. One of the leading passions of my mind has been an anxious desire not to be deceived. This has led me to view the topics of my reflection on all sides, and to examine and re-examine without end the questions that interest me. Endless disquisition however is not always the parent of certainty.

  What I wanted in this respect, Mary possessed in a degree superior to any other person I ever knew. Her feelings had a character of peculiar strength and decision, and the discovery of them, whether in matters of taste or of moral virtue, she found herself unable to control. She had viewed the objects of nature with a lively sense and an ardent admiration, and had developed their beauties. Her education had been fortunately free from the prejudices of system and bigotry, and her sensitive and generous spirit was left to the spontaneous exercise of its own decisions. The warmth of her heart defended her from artificial rules of judgement, and it is therefore surprising what a degree of soundness pervaded her sentiments. In the strict sense of the term, she had reasoned comparatively little, and she was therefore little subject to diffidence and scepticism. Yet a mind more candid in perceiving and retracting error, when it was pointed out to her, perhaps never existed. This arose naturally out of the directness of her sentiments, and her fearless and unstudied veracity.

  A companion like this, excites and animates the mind. From such a one we imbibe, what perhaps I principally wanted, the habit of minutely attending to first impressions, and justly appreciating them. Her taste awakened mine, her sensibility determined me to a careful development of my feelings. She delighted to open her heart to the beauties of nature, and her propensity in this respect led me to a more intimate contemplation of them. My scepticism in judging, yielded to the coincidence of another’s judgement, and especially when the judgement of that other was such, that the more I made experiment of it, the more was I convinced of its rectitude.

  The improvement I had reason to promise myself, was however yet in its commencement, when a fatal event, hostile to the moral interests of mankind, ravished from me the light of my steps, and left to me nothing but the consciousness of what I had possessed, and must now possess no more! (Chapter 10)

  This is a shrewd, and in places intensely moving, analysis of the relationship. It clearly contains much truth, and must have required considerable humility for Godwin to write, at a time when he was considered one of the leading philosophers of the age. Yet it is based, inescapably, on a prejudiced assumption about the nature of the sexes (and one which Wollstonecraft would never for a moment have accepted). It is that the Man reasons, while the Woman merely feels. Godwin has here so far declined into the conventions of
eighteenth-century thinking (and even modern cliché), that one cannot take him entirely seriously.

  Yet it is his only major lapse as a biographer, and on reflection it is an instructive and even a touching one. Reading through both versions, I think one can see what has happened. In the first place he was really trying to describe the way in which Wollstonecraft had ‘improved’ the inadequacies of his own intellectual make-up, as he was now beginning to see them. It was her feeling, her imagination, her intuition, that he most valued. It was not that she merely felt, but that he merely reasoned – until he met her. ‘What I wanted in this respect, Mary possessed in a degree superior to any other person I ever knew … my oscillation and scepticism were fixed by her boldness.’ For once, and only once, he was speaking with overwhelming subjectivity.

  In the second place, Godwin was indeed reverting to another, and more conventional mode of literary discourse. For one crucial and revealing moment he was turning his back on the revolutionary vision and style he had forged as a biographer. He was reverting to the grand, dusty philosophic commonplaces of the previous age: the age which they had both so courageously stormed and subverted. He was attempting to generalize like a philosopher of the Enlightenment, on an experience they had lived out together with the passionate particularity of the Romantic poets and lovers.

  IV

  ‘Love in a Cold Climate’

  GODWIN’S BIOGRAPHY leaves us finally with a sense of the mystery of Mary Wollstonecraft’s character. I do not think this is a weakness. On the contrary, by acknowledging a whole new world of Romantic impetuosity and idealism which could not be defined in conventional terms, it draws us on to explore and investigate further for ourselves. This is a new achievement in life-writing. It is not lapidary in the old sense; it does not lay a formal tombstone on her life. But rather, it opens a window back into the extraordinary way she lived and wrote. It compels us to try and get closer to her, and to look further into the experiences which finally brought her and Godwin together. We must go back over the story again from her own viewpoint. I am convinced that no single piece of literary evidence shows this so well as her remarkable account of the journey she made to Scandinavia, and the impact it made on her contemporaries. It is this work, even more than The Rights of Woman, which reveals her originality, and her adventurous qualities of mind and spirit. As Godwin himself said, it was the book calculated to make any reader fall in love with its author.