Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle Part 5

With the cares of this family on his shoulders G.o.dwin began to form the habit of applying to his wealthy friends for aid. In judging this part of his conduct, one must bear in mind both his own doctrine about property, and the practice of the age. G.o.dwin was a communist, and so, in some degree, were most of his friends. When he applied to Wedgwood, the philosophic potter of Etruria, or to Ritson, the vegetarian, or in later years to Sh.e.l.ley for money, he was simply giving virtue its occasion, and a.s.sisting property to find its level. He practised what he preached, and he would himself give with a generosity which seemed prodigal, to his own relatives, to promising young men, and even to total strangers. He supported one disciple at Cambridge, as he had educated Cooper in his younger days. It was the prevailing theory of the age that men of genius have the right to call on society in the persons of its wealthier members for support. Helvetius, himself a rich man, had maintained this view. Southey and Coleridge acted on it. Dr.

Priestley, universally respected both for his character and his talents, received large gifts from friends, admirers, members of his congregation and aristocratic patrons. To G.o.dwin, profoundly individualistic as he was, a post in the civil service, or even a professorship, would have seemed a more degrading form of charity than this private benevolence.

Partly to mend his fortunes, partly to furnish himself with an occupation when his mind refused original work, G.o.dwin in 1805 turned publisher. It was a disastrous inspiration, due apparently to his wife, who believed herself to possess a talent for business. The firm was established in Skinner Street, Holborn, and specialised in school books and children's tales. They were well-printed, and well-ill.u.s.trated, and G.o.dwin, writing under the pseudonym of Edward Baldwin, to avoid the odium which had now overtaken his own name, compiled a series of histories with his usual industry and conscientious finish. Through years darkened with misfortune and clouded by failing health, he worked hard at the business of publishing. His capital was never adequate, though his friends and admirers twice came to his aid with public subscriptions. In 1822 he was evicted for arrears of rent, and in 1825 the unlucky venture came to an end.

These years were crowded with literary work, for neither "Baldwin" nor G.o.dwin allowed their common pen to idle. Two elaborate historical works enjoyed and deserved a great reputation in their day, though subsequent research has rendered them obsolete--a _Life of Geoffrey Chaucer_ (1803) and a _History of the Commonwealth of England from its Commencement to the Restoration of Charles II._ (1824-8). It is not easy for modern taste to do justice to G.o.dwin's novels; but on them his contemporary fame chiefly rested, and publishers paid for them high though diminishing prices. They all belong to the romantic movement; some have a supernatural basis, and most of them discover a too obvious didactic purpose. _St. Leon_ (1799), almost as popular in its day as _Caleb Williams_, mingles a romance of the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone with an ardent recommendation of those family affections which _Political Justice_ had depreciated. _Fleetwood_ (1805) makes war on debauchery with sincere and impressive dulness. _Mandeville_ (1817), _Cloudesley_ (1830) and _Deloraine_ (1833) are dead beyond the reach of curiosity, yet the Radical critics of his day, including Hazlitt, tried hard to convince themselves that G.o.dwin was a greater novelist than the Tory, Scott. It remains to mention G.o.dwin's two attempts to conquer the theatre with _Antonio_ (1800) and _Faulkener_ (1807). Neither play lived, and _Antonio_, written in a sort of journalese, cut up into blank verse lines, was too frigid to survive the first night. G.o.dwin's disappointment would be comical if it were not painful. He regarded these deplorable tragedies as the flower of his genius.

Through these years of misfortune and eclipse, the friendships which G.o.dwin could still retain were his chief consolation. The published letters of Coleridge and Lamb make a charming record of their intimacy.

Whimsical and affectionate in their tone, they are an unconscious tribute as much to the man who received them as to the men who wrote them. Conservative critics have talked of G.o.dwin's "coldness" because he could reason. But the abiding and generous regard of such a nature as Charles Lamb's is answer enough to these summary valuations. But G.o.dwin's most characteristic relationship was with the young men who sought him out as an inspiration. He would write them long letters of advice, encouragement, and criticism, and despite his own poverty, would often relieve their distresses. The most interesting of them was an adventurous young Scot named Arnot who travelled on foot through the greater part of Europe during the Napoleonic wars. The tragedy which seemed always to pursue G.o.dwin's intimates drove another of them, Patrickson, to suicide while an undergraduate at Cambridge. Bulwer Lytton, the last of these admiring young men, left a note on G.o.dwin's conversational powers in his extreme old age, which a.s.sures us that he was "well worth hearing," even amid the brilliance of Lamb, Hunt, and Hazlitt, and could display "a grim jocularity of sarcasm."

One of these relationships has become historical, and has coloured the whole modern judgment of G.o.dwin. It would be no exaggeration to say that G.o.dwin formed Sh.e.l.ley's mind, and that _Prometheus Unbound_ and _h.e.l.las_ were the greatest of G.o.dwin's works. That debt is too often forgotten, while literary gossip loves to remind us that it was repaid in cheques and _post-obits_. The intellectual relationship will be discussed in a later chapter; the bare facts of the personal connection must be told here. _Political Justice_ took Sh.e.l.ley's mind captive while he was still at Eton, much as it had obsessed Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. The influence with him was permanent; and _Queen Mab_ is nothing but G.o.dwin in verse, with prose notes which quote or summarise him. A correspondence began in 1811, and the pupil met the master late in 1812, and again in 1813. They talked as usual of virtue and human perfectibility; and as the intimacy grew, Sh.e.l.ley, whose chief employment at this time was to discover and relieve genius in distress, began to place his present resources and future prospects at G.o.dwin's disposal. It was not an unnatural relationship to arise between a grateful disciple, heir to a great fortune, and a philosopher, aged, neglected, and sinking under the burden of debt.

Sh.e.l.ley's romantic runaway match with Harriet Westbrook had meanwhile entered on the period of misery and disillusion. She had lost her early love of books and ideas, had taken to hats and ostentation, and had become so harsh to him that he welcomed absence. It is certain that he believed her to be also in the vulgar sense of the word unfaithful. At this crisis, when the separation seemed already morally complete, he met Mary G.o.dwin, who had been absent from home during most of his earlier visits. She was a young girl of seventeen, eager for knowledge and experience, and as her father described her, "singularly bold, somewhat imperious and active of mind," and "very pretty." They rapidly fell in love. G.o.dwin's conduct was all that the most conventional morality could have required of him. His theoretical views of marriage were still unorthodox; he held at least that "the inst.i.tution might with advantage admit of certain modifications." But nine years before in the preface to _Fleetwood_ he had protested that he was "the last man to recommend a pitiful attempt by scattered examples to renovate the face of society."

He seems, indeed, to have forgotten his own happy experiment with Mary Wollstonecraft, and protests with a vigour hardly to be expected from so stout an individualist against the idea, that "each man for himself should supersede and trample upon the inst.i.tutions of the country in which he lives. A thousand things might be found excellent and salutary if brought into general practice, which would in some cases appear ridiculous and in others attended with tragical consequences if prematurely acted upon by a solitary individual."

On this view he acted. He forbade Sh.e.l.ley his house, and tried to make a reconciliation between him and Harriet. On July 28, 1814, Mary secretly left her father's house, joined her lover, and began with him her life of ideal intimacy and devotion. G.o.dwin felt and expressed the utmost disapproval, and for two years refused to meet Sh.e.l.ley, until at the close of 1816, after the suicide of the unhappy Harriet, he stood at his daughter's side as a witness to her marriage. His public conduct was correct. In private he continued to accept money from the erring disciple whom he refused to meet, and salved his elderly conscience by insisting that the cheques should be drawn in another name. There G.o.dwin touched the lowest depths of his moral degeneration. Let us remember, however, that even Sh.e.l.ley, who saw the worst of G.o.dwin, would never speak of him with total condemnation. "Added years," he wrote near the end of his life, "only add to my admiration of his intellectual powers, and even the moral resources of his character." In the poetical epistle to Maria Gisborne, he wrote of

"That which was G.o.dwin--greater none than he Though fallen, and fallen on evil times, to stand Among the spirits of our age and land Before the dread tribunal of To-come The foremost, while Rebuke cowers pale and dumb."

The end came to the old man amid comparative peace and serenity. He accepted a sinecure from the Whigs, and became a Yeoman Usher of the Exchequer, with a small stipend and chambers in New Palace Yard. It was a tribute as much to his harmlessness as to his merit. The work of his last years shows little decay in his intellectual powers. _His Thoughts on Man_ (1831) collects his fugitive essays. They are varied in subject, suave, easy and conversational in manner, more polished in style than those of the _Enquirer_, if a good deal thinner in matter. They avoid political themes, but the idea of human perfectibility none the less pervades the book with an unaggressive presence, a cold and wintry sun.

One curious trait of his more cautious and conservative later mind is worth noting. When he wrote _Political Justice_, the horizons of science were unlimited, the vistas of discovery endless. Now he questions even the mathematical data of astronomy, talks of the limitations of our faculties, and applauds a positive att.i.tude that refrains from conjecture. His last years were spent in writing a book in which he ventured at length to state his views upon religion. Like Helvetius he perceived the advantages which an unpopular philosopher may derive from posthumous publication. Freed at last from the vulgar worries of debt and the tragical burden of personal ties, the fighting ended which had never brought him the joy of combat, the material struggle over which had issued in defeat, he became again the thing that was himself, a luminous intelligence, a humane thinker.

With eighty years of life behind him, and doubting whether the curtain of death concealed a secret, G.o.dwin tranquilly faced extinction in April, 1836.

"To do my part to free the human mind from slavery," that in his own words was the main object of G.o.dwin's life. The task was not fully discharged with the writing of _Political Justice_. He could never forget the terror and gloom of his own early years, and, like all the thinkers of the revolution, he coupled superst.i.tion with despotism and priests with kings as the arch-enemies of human liberty. The terrors of eternal punishment, the firmly riveted chains of Calvinistic logic, had fettered his own growing mind in youth; and to the end he thought of traditional religion as the chief of those fact.i.tious things which prevent mankind from reaching the full stature to which nature destined it. Paine had attempted this work from a similar standpoint, but G.o.dwin, with his trained speculative mind, and his ideal of courtesy and persuasiveness in argument, thought meanly (as a private letter shows) of his friend's polemics. It was an unlucky timidity which caused Mrs.

Sh.e.l.ley to suppress her father's religious essays when the ma.n.u.script was bequeathed to her for publication on his death. When, at length, they appeared in 1873 (_Essays never before Published_), the work which they sought to accomplish had been done by other pens. They possess none the less an historical interest; some fine pages will always be worth reading for their humane impulse and their manly eloquence; they help us to understand the influence which G.o.dwin's ideas, conveyed in personal intercourse, exerted on the author of _Prometheus Unbound_. There is little in them which a candid believer would resent to-day. Most of the dogmas which G.o.dwin a.s.sailed have long since crumbled away through the sapping of a humaner morality and a more historical interpretation of the Bible.

The book opens with a protest against the theory and practice of salutary delusions; and G.o.dwin once more pours his scorn upon those who would cherish their own private freedom, while preserving popular superst.i.tions, "that the lower ranks may be kept in order." The foundation of all improvement is that "the whole community should run the generous race for intellectual and moral superiority." G.o.dwin would preserve some portion of the religious sense, for we can reach sobriety and humility only by realising "how frail and insignificant a part we const.i.tute of the great whole." But the fundamental tenets of dogmatic Christianity are far, he argues, from being salutary delusions. At the basis alike of Protestantism and Catholicism, he sees the doctrine of eternal punishment; and with an iteration that was not superfluous in his own day, he denounces its cruel and demoralising effects. It saps the character where it is really believed, and renders the mind which receives it servile and pusillanimous. The case is no better when it is neither sincerely believed nor boldly rejected. Such an att.i.tude, which is, he thinks, that of most professing believers, makes for insincerity, and for an indifference to all honest thought and speculation. The man who dare neither believe nor disbelieve is debarred from thinking at all.

Worst of all, this doctrine of endless torment and arbitrary election involves a blasphemous denial of the goodness of G.o.d. "To say all, then, in a word, since it must finally be told, the G.o.d of the Christians is a tyrant." He quotes the delightfully nave reflection of Plutarch, who held that it was better to deny G.o.d than to calumniate Him, "for I had rather it should be said of me, that there was never such a man as Plutarch, than that it should be said that Plutarch was ill-natured, arbitrary, capricious, cruel, and inexorable." A survey of Church History brings out what G.o.dwin calls "the mixed character of Christianity, its horrors and its graces." In much of what has come down to us from the Old Testament he sees the inevitable effects of anthropomorphism, when the religion of a barbarous age is reduced to writing, and handed down as the effect of inspiration. He cannot sufficiently admire the beauty of Christ's teaching of a perfect disinterestedness and self-denial--a doctrine in his own terminology of "universal benevolence." But the disciples lived in a preternatural atmosphere, continually busied with the four Last Things, death, judgment, heaven, and h.e.l.l; and they distorted the beauty of the Christian morality by introducing an other-worldliness, to which the ancients had been strangers. From this came the despotism of the Church based on the everlasting burnings and the keys, and something of the spirit of St. Dominic and the Inquisition can be traced, he thinks, even to the earliest period of Christianity. The Gospel sermons do not always realise the G.o.dwinian ideal of rational persuasion.

G.o.dwin's own view is in the main what we should call agnostic: "I do not consider my faculties adequate to p.r.o.nouncing upon the cause of all things. I am contented to take the phenomena as I behold them, without pretending to erect an hypothesis under the idea of making all things easy. I do not rest my globe of earth upon an elephant [a reference to the Indian myth], and the elephant upon a tortoise. I am content to take my globe of earth simply, in other words to observe the objects which present themselves to my senses, without undertaking to find out a cause why they are what they are."

With cautious steps, he will, however, go a little further than this.

He regards with reverence and awe "that principle, whatever it is, which acts everywhere around me." But he will not slide into anthropomorphism, nor give to this Supreme Thing, which recalls Sh.e.l.ley's Demogorgon, the shape of a man. "The principle is not intellect; its ways are not our ways." If there is no particular Providence, there is none the less a tendency in nature which seconds our strivings, guarantees the work of reason, and "in the vast sum of instances, works for good, and operates beneficially for us." The position reminds us of Matthew Arnold's definition of G.o.d as "the stream of tendency by which all things strive to fulfil the law of their being." "We have here," writes G.o.dwin, "a secure alliance, a friend that so far as the system of things extends will never desert us, unhearing, inaccessible to importunity, uncapricious, without pa.s.sions, without favour, affection, or partiality, that maketh its sun to rise on the evil and the good, and its rain to descend on the just and the unjust."

Amid the dim but rosy mist of this vague faith the old man went out to explore the unknown. A bolder and more rebellious thought was his real legacy to his age. It is the central impulse of the whole revolutionary school: "We know what we are: we know not what we might have been. But surely we should have been greater than we are but for this disadvantage [dogmatic religion, and particularly the doctrine of eternal punishment]. It is as if we took some minute poison with everything that was intended to nourish us. It is, we will suppose, of so mitigated a quality as never to have had the power to kill. But it may nevertheless stunt our growth, infuse a palsy into every one of our articulations, and insensibly change us from giants of mind which we might have been into a people of dwarfs."

Let us write G.o.dwin's epitaph in his own Roman language. He stood erect and independent. He spoke what he deemed to be truth. He did his part to purge the veins of men of the subtle poisons which dwarf them.

CHAPTER VII

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

When women, standing at length beyond the last of the gates and walls that have barred their road to freedom, measure their debt to history, there will be little to claim their grat.i.tude before the close of the eighteenth century. The Protestant Reformation on the whole depressed their status, and even among its more speculative sects the Quakers stood alone in preaching the equality of the s.e.xes. The English Whigs ignored the existence of women. It was left for the French thinkers who laid the foundations of the Revolution to formulate a view of society and human nature which, as it were, insisted on its own application to women. The idea of women's emanc.i.p.ation was alive among their principles. One can name its parents, and one marvels not at all that it seized this mind and the other, but that any mind among the professors of the "new philosophy" contrived to escape it. The central thought, which inspired the gospel of perfectibility has a meaning for men which an enlightened mind can grasp, but it tells the plain obvious fact about women.

When Holcroft compares the influence of laws and inst.i.tutions upon men to the action of beggars who mutilate their children, when G.o.dwin talks of the subtle poisons of dogma and custom, which cause mankind to grow up a race of dwarfs when they should be giants, they seem to be using metaphors which describe nothing so well as the effect of an artificial education and a tradition of subjection upon women. One by one the thinkers of this generation were unconsciously laying down the premises which the women's movement needed. At the end of all their arguments for liberty and perfectibility, we seem to hear to-day a chorus of women's voices which points the application to themselves. There was little hope for women while the opinion prevailed that minds come into the world with their qualities innate and their limitations fixed by nature. If that were the case, then the undeniable fact that women were intellectually and morally dependent and inferior must be accepted as their inevitable destiny. Helvetius, all unconscious of what he did, was the hope-bringer, when he insisted that mind is the creation of education and experience. When he urged that the very inequality of men's talents is itself fact.i.tious and the result of more or less good fortune in the occasions which provoke a mind to activity, who could fail to enquire whether the accepted inferiority of women were so natural and so necessary as the whole world a.s.sumed?

This school of thought revelled in social psychology. It studied in turn the soldier, the priest and the courtier, and shewed how each of these has a secondary character, a professional mind, a cla.s.s morality impressed and imposed upon him by his education and employment. Looking down from the vantage ground of their philosophic salon upon their contemporaries in French society who owed their fortunes and reputations to the favour of an absolute court, Helvetius and his friends framed their general theory of the demoralisation which despotism brings about in the human character. They studied the natural history of the human parasite who flourished under the Bourbons. They need not have travelled to Versailles to find him. The domestic subjection of wives to husbands, the education of girls in a specialised morality, the fetters of custom and fashion, the experience of economic dependence, the denial of every n.o.ble stimulus to thought and action--these causes, more potent and more universal than any which work at Court, were making a s.e.x condemned to an artificial inferiority, an induced parasitism. Thinkers who had discarded the notion that human minds come into the world with an innate character and with their limitations already predestined, were ripe to draw the conclusion. The Revolution believed that men by taking thought might add many cubits to their mental stature. To think in these terms was to prepare oneself to see that the "lovely follies" the "amiable weaknesses" of the "fair s.e.x" were in their turn nothing innate, but the fostered characteristics of a cla.s.s bred in subjection, the trading habits of a profession which had bent all its faculties to the art of pleasing. Reformers who sought to raise the peasant, the negro, and even the courtier to his full stature as a man, were inevitably led to consider the case of their own wives and daughters. They were not the men to be arrested by the distinction which has been recently invented.

Democracy, we are told, is concerned with the removal not of natural, but of artificial inequalities. Their bias was to regard all inequalities as artificial. Looking forward to the goal of human perfection, they were prompt to realise that every advance would be insecure, and the final hope a delusion, if on their road they should leave half mankind behind them.

It requires a vigorous exercise of the historical imagination to realise the conditions which society imposed upon women in the eighteenth century. If G.o.dwin and Paine had reflected closely on the position of women, they might have been led to modify their exaggerated ant.i.thesis between society and government. Government, indeed, imposed a barbarous code of laws upon women. It was a trifle that they were excluded from political power. The law treated a wife as the chattel of her husband, denied her the disposal of her own property, even when it was the produce of her own labour, sanctioned his use of violence to her person, and refused (as indeed it still in part does) to recognise her rights as a parent. But the state of the law reflected only too faithfully the opinions of society, and these opinions in their turn formed the minds of women. Civilised people amuse themselves to-day by detecting how much of the old prejudices still lurk in a shamefaced half-consciousness in the minds of modern men. There was no need in the eighteenth century for any fine a.n.a.lysis to detect the nave belief that women exist only as auxiliary beings to contribute to the comfort and to flatter the self-esteem of men. The belief was avowed and accepted as the unquestioned basis of human society. Good men proclaimed it, and the cleverest women dared not question it.

For the crudest statement of it we need not go to men who defended despotism and convention in other departments of life. The most repulsive of all definitions of the principle of s.e.x-subjection is to be found in Rousseau:--"The education of women should always be relative to that of men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable; these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy." When the men of the eighteenth century said this, they meant it, and they accepted not only its plain meaning, but its remotest logical consequences. It was a denial of the humanity and personality of women. A slave is a human being, whom the law deprives of his right to sell his labour. A woman had to learn that her subjection affected not only her relations to men, but her att.i.tude to nature and to G.o.d. The subtle poison ran in her veins when she prayed and when she studied.

Subject in her body, she was enslaved in mind and soul as well. Milton saw the husband as a priest intervening between a woman and her G.o.d:--

He for G.o.d only, she for G.o.d in him.

Even on her knees a woman did not escape the consciousness of s.e.x, and a manual of morality written by a learned divine (Dr. Fordyce) a.s.sured her that a "fine woman" never "strikes so deeply" as when a man sees her bent in prayer. She was encouraged to pray that she might be seen of men--men who scrutinised her with the eyes of desire. It is a woman, herself something of a "blue-stocking," who has left us the most pathetic statement of the intellectual fetters which her s.e.x accepted.

Women, says Mrs. Barbauld, "must often be content to know that a thing is so, without understanding the proof." They "cannot investigate; they may remember." She warns the girls whom she is addressing that if they will steal knowledge, they must learn, like the Spartan youths, to hide their furtive gains. "The thefts of knowledge in our s.e.x are only connived at while carefully concealed, and if displayed punished with disgrace."

Religion was sullied; knowledge was closed; but above all the sentiment of the day perverted morals. Here, too, everything was relative to men, and men demanded a sensitive weakness, a shrinking timidity. Courage, honour, truth, sincerity, independence--these were items in a male ideal. They were to a woman as unnecessary, nay, as harmful in the marriage market as a st.u.r.dy frame and well-knit muscles. Dean Swift, a sharp satirist, but a good friend of women, comments on the prevailing view. "There is one infirmity," he writes in his illuminating _Letter to a very young lady on her marriage_, "which is generally allowed you, I mean that of cowardice," and he goes on to express what was in his day the wholly unorthodox view that "the same virtues equally become both s.e.xes." There he was singular. The business of a woman was to cultivate those virtues most conducive to her prosperity in the one avocation open to her. That avocation was marriage, and the virtues were those which her prospective employer, the average over-s.e.xed male, anxious at all points to feel his superiority, would desire in a subject wife.

Submission was the first of them, and submission became the foundation of female virtue. Lord Kames, a forgotten but once popular Scottish philosopher, put the point quite fairly (the quotation, together with that from Mrs. Barbauld, is to be found in Mr. Lyon Blease's valuable book on _The Emanc.i.p.ation of Englishwomen_): "Women, destined by nature to be obedient, ought to be disciplined early to bear wrongs without murmuring.... This is essential to the female s.e.x, for ever subjected to the authority of a single person."

The rest of morality was summed up in the precepts of the art of pleasing. Chast.i.ty had, of course, its incidental place; it enhances the pride of possession. The art of pleasing was in practice a kind of furtive conquest by stratagems and wiles, by tears and blushes, in which the woman, by an a.s.sumed pa.s.sivity, learned to excite the pa.s.sions of the male. Rousseau owed much of his popularity to his artistic statement of this position:--"If woman be formed to please and to be subjected to man, it is her place, doubtless, to render herself agreeable to him....

The violence of his desires depends on her charms; it is by means of these that she should urge him to the exertion of those powers which nature hath given him. The most successful method of exciting them is to render such exertion necessary by resistance; as in that case self-love is added to desire, and the one triumphs in the victory which the other is obliged to acquire. Hence arise the various modes of attack and defence between the s.e.xes; the boldness of one s.e.x and the timidity of the other; and in a word, that bashfulness and modesty, with which nature hath armed the weak in order to subdue the strong."

The "soft," the "fair," the "gentle s.e.x" learned its lesson with only too much docility. It grew up stunted to meet the prevailing demand. It acquired weakness, feigned ignorance, and emulated folly as sedulously as men will labour to make at least a show of strength, good sense, and knowledge. It adapted itself only too successfully to the economic conditions in which it found itself. Men accepted its flatteries and returned them with contempt. "Women," wrote that dictator of morals and manners, Lord Chesterfield, "are only children of a larger growth.... A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does a sprightly, forward child." The men of that century valued women only as playthings. They forgot that he is the child who wants the toy.

The first protests against this morality of degradation came, as one would expect, from men. Demoralising as it was for men, it did at least leave them the free use of their minds. Enquiry, reflection, scepticism, unsuitable if not immodest in a woman, were the rights of a manly intellect. Defoe and Swift uttered an unheeded protest in England, but neither of them carried the subject far. There are some good critical remarks in Helvetius about women's education; but the first man in that century who seemed to realise the importance and scope of what several dimly felt, was Baron Holbach, whose materialism was so peculiarly shocking to our forefathers. A chapter "On Women" in his _Systeme Social_ (1774) opens thus: "In all the countries of the world the lot of women is to submit to tyranny. The savage makes a slave of his mate, and carries his contempt for her to the point of cruelty. For the jealous and voluptuous Asiatic, women are but the sensual instruments of his secret pleasures.... Does the European, in spite of the apparent deference which he affects towards women, really treat them with more respect? While we refuse them a sensible education, while we feed their minds with tedium and trifles, while we allow them to busy themselves only with playthings and fashions and adornments, while we seek to inspire them only with the taste for frivolous accomplishments, do we not show our real contempt, while we mask it with a show of deference and respect?"

Holbach was a rash and rather superficial metaphysician, but the warm-hearted and honest pages which follow this opening inspire a deep respect for the man. He talks of the absurdities of women's education; draws a bitter picture of a woman's fate in a loveless marriage of convenience; remarks that esteem is necessary for a happy marriage, but asks sadly how one is to esteem a mind which has emerged from a schooling in folly; a.s.sails the practice of gallantry, and the fashionable conjugal infidelities of his day; writes with real indignation of the dangers to which working-cla.s.s girls are exposed; proposes to punish seduction as a crime no less cruel than murder, and concludes by confessing that he would like to adopt Plato's opinion that women should share with men in the tasks of government, but dreads the effects which would flow from the admission of the corrupt ladies of his day to power.

Twenty years later this promising beginning bore fruit in the mature and reasoned pleading of Condorcet for the reform of women's education.

There was no subject on which this n.o.ble constructive mind insisted with such continual emphasis. His feminism (to use an ugly modern word), was an integral part of his thinking. He remembered women when he wrote of public affairs as naturally as most men forget them. He deserves in the grat.i.tude of women a place at least as distinguished as John Stuart Mill's. The best and fullest statement of his position is to be found in the report and draft Bill on national education (Sur l'Instruction Publique), which he prepared for the Revolutionary Convention in 1792 (see also p. 109). He maintains boldly that the system of national education should be the same for women as for men. He specially insists that they should be admitted to the study of the natural sciences (these were days when it was held that a woman would lose her modesty if she studied botany), and thinks that they would render useful services to science, even if they did not attain the first rank. They ought to be educated for many reasons. They must be able to teach their children. If they remain ignorant, the curse of inequality will be introduced into the family, and mothers will be regarded by their sons with contempt.

Nor will men retain their intellectual interests, unless they can share them with women. Lastly, women have the same natural right to knowledge and enlightenment as men. The education should be given in common, and this will powerfully further the interests of morality. The separation of the s.e.xes in youth really proceeds from the fear of unequal marriages, in other words, from avarice and pride. It would be dangerous for a democratic community to allow the spirit of social inequality to survive among women, with the consequence that it could never be extirpated among men. Condorcet was not a brilliant writer, but the humanity and generosity of his thought finds a powerful and reasoned expression in his sober and somewhat laboured sentences.

So far a good and enlightened man might go. The substance of all that need be said against the harem with the door ajar, in which the eighteenth century had confined the mind if not the body, of women, is to be found in Holbach and Condorcet. But they wrote from outside. They were the wise spectators who saw the consequences of the degradation of women, but did not intimately know its cause. Mary Wollstonecraft's _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ (1792) is perhaps the most original book of its century, not because its daring ideas were altogether new, but because in its pages for the first time a woman was attempting to use her own mind. Her ideas, as we have seen, were not absolutely new.

They were latent in all the thinking of the revolutionary period. They had been foreshadowed by Holbach (whom she may have read), by Paine (whom she had occasionally met), and by Condorcet (whose chief contribution to the question, written in the same year as her _Vindication_, she obviously had not read). What was absolutely new in the world's history was that for the first time a woman dared to sit down to write a book which was not an echo of men's thinking, nor an attempt to do rather well what some man had done a little better, but a first exploration of the problems of society and morals from a standpoint which recognised humanity without ignoring s.e.x. She showed her genius not so much in writing the book, which is, indeed, a faulty though an intensely vital performance, as in thinking out its position for herself.

She had her predecessors, but she owed to them little, if anything.

There was not enough in them to have formed her mind, if she had come to their pages unemanc.i.p.ated. She freed herself from mental slavery, and the utmost which she can have derived from the two or three men who professed the same generous opinions, was the satisfaction of encouragement or confirmation. She owed to others only the powerful stimulus which the Revolution gave to all bold and progressive thought.

The vitality of her ideas sprang from her own experience. She had received rather less than was customary of the slipshod superficial education permitted to girls of the middle cla.s.ses in her day. With this nearly useless equipment, she had found herself compelled to struggle with the world not merely to gain a living, but to rescue a luckless family from a load of embarra.s.sments and misfortunes. Her father was a drunkard, idle, improvident, moody and brutal, and as a girl she had often protected her mother from his violence. A sister had married a profligate husband, and Mary rescued her from a miserable home, in which she had been driven to temporary insanity. The sisters had attempted to live by conducting a suburban school for girls; a brief experience as a governess in a fashionable family had been even more formative.

When at length she took to writing and translating educational books, with the encouragement of a kindly publisher, she was practising under the stimulus of necessity the doctrine of economic independence, which became one of the foundations of her teaching. It is the pressure of economic necessity which in this generation and the last has forced women into a campaign for freedom and opportunity. What the growth of the industrial system has done for women in the ma.s.s, a hard experience did for Mary Wollstonecraft. In her own person or through her sisters she had felt in an aggravated form most of the wrongs to which women were peculiarly exposed. She had seen the reverse of the shield of chivalry, and known the domestic tyrannies of a sheltered home.

The miracle was that Mary Wollstonecraft's mind was never distorted by bitterness, nor her faith in mankind destroyed by cynicism. Her personality lives for us still in her own books and in the records of her friends. Opie's vivid painting hangs in the National Portrait Gallery to confirm what G.o.dwin tells us of her beauty in his pathetic _Memoir_ and to remind us of Southey's admiration for her eyes. G.o.dwin writes of "that smile of bewitching tenderness ... which won, both heart and soul, the affection of almost every one that beheld it." She was, he tells us, "in the best and most engaging sense, feminine in her manners"; and indeed her letters and her books present her to us as a woman who had courage and independence precisely because she was so normal, so healthy in mind and body, so richly endowed with a generous vitality. If she won the hearts of all who knew her, it was because her own affections were warm and true. She was a good sister, a good daughter, a pa.s.sionate lover, an affectionate friend, a devoted and tender mother.

She was too real a human being to be misled by the impartialities of universal benevolence. "Few," she wrote, "have had much affection for mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes whom they first played with." That eloquent trait, her love of animals and her hatred of cruelty, helps to define her character. She was, says G.o.dwin, "a worshipper of domestic life,"

and, for all her proud independence, in love with love. In G.o.dwin's prim phraseology, she "set a great value on a mutual affection between persons of an opposite s.e.x, and regarded it as the princ.i.p.al solace of human life." Indeed, in the _Letters to Imlay_, which appeared after her death, it is not so much the strength and independence of her final att.i.tude which impresses us, as her readiness to forgive, her reluctance to resent his neglect, her affection which could survive so many proofs of the man's unworthiness. The strongest pa.s.sion in her generous nature was maternal tenderness. It won her the enduring love of the children whom she taught as a governess. It caused her mind to be busied with the problem of education as its chief preoccupation. It informs her whole view of the rights and duties of women in her _Vindication_. It inspired the charming fragment ent.i.tled _Lessons for Little f.a.n.n.y_, which is one of the most graceful expressions in English prose of the physical tenderness of a mother's love. If she despised the artificial sensibility which in her day was admired and cultivated by women, it was because her own emotions were natural and strong. Her intellect, which no regular discipline had formed, impressed the laborious and studious G.o.dwin by its quickness and its flashes of sudden insight--its "intuitive perception of intellectual beauty."

The _Vindication_ is certainly among the most remarkable books that have come down to us from that opulent age. It has in abundance most of the faults that a book can have. It was hastily written in six weeks. It is ill-arranged, full of repet.i.tions, full of digressions, and almost without a regular plan. Its style is unformed, sometimes rhetorical, sometimes familiar. But with all these faults, it teems with apt phrases, telling pa.s.sages, vigorous sentences which sum up in a few convincing lines the substance of its message. It lacks the neatness, the athletic movement of Paine's English. It has nothing of the learning, the formidable argumentative compulsion of G.o.dwin's writing.

But it is sold to-day in cheap editions, while G.o.dwin survives only on the dustier shelves of old libraries. Its pa.s.sion and sincerity have kept it alive. It is the cry of an experience too real, too authentic, to allow of any meandering down the by-ways of fanciful speculation. It said with its solitary voice the thing which the main army of thinking women is saying to-day. There is scarcely a pa.s.sage of its central doctrine which the modern leaders of the women's movement would repudiate or qualify; and there is little if anything which they would wish to add to it. Writers like Olive Schreiner, Miss Cicely Hamilton, and Mrs. Gilman have, indeed, a background of historical knowledge, an evolutionary view of society, a sense of the working of economic causes which Mary Wollstonecraft did not possess and could not in her age have acquired, even if she had been what she was not, a woman of learning.