Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Pennell, 1885)/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
LIFE WITH IMLAY.
1793–1794.
While Mary was living at Neuilly, the terrors of the French Revolution growing daily greater, she took a step to which she was prompted by pure motives, but which has left a blot upon her fair fame. The outcry raised by her Vindication of the Rights of Women has ceased, since its theories have found so many champions; but that which followed her assertion of her individual rights has never yet been hushed. Mr. Kegan Paul speaks the truth when he says, "The name of Mary Wollstonecraft has long been a mark for obloquy and scorn"; and the least that can be done to clear her memory of stains is to state impartially the facts of her case.
As has been said in the previous chapter, Mary often spent her free hours with Mrs. Christie, and at her house she met Captain Gilbert Imlay. He was one of the many Americans then living in Paris; was an attractive man personally, and by his position and abilities entitled to respect. He had taken an active part in the American rebellion, having then risen to the rank of captain, and, after the war, had been sent as commissioner to survey still unsettled districts of the western States. On his return from this work he wrote A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, which is remarkable for its thoroughness and its clear, condensed style. It passed through several editions and increased his reputation. His business in France is not very explicitly explained. His head-quarters seem to have been at Havre, while he had certain commercial relations with Norway and Sweden. He was most probably in the timber trade, and was, at least at this period, successful. Godwin says that he had no property whatever, but his speculations apparently brought him plenty of ready money.
Foreigners in Paris, especially Americans and English, were naturally drawn together. Mary and Imlay had mutual acquaintances, and they saw much of each other. His republican sentiments alone would have appealed to her. But the better she learned to know him, the more she liked him personally. He, on his side, was equally attracted, and his kindness and consideration for her were greatly in his favour. Their affection in the end developed into a feeling stronger than mere friendship. Its consequence, since both were free, would, under ordinary circumstances, have been marriage.
But her circumstances just then were extraordinary. Godwin says that she objected to a marriage with Imlay because she did not wish to "involve him in certain family embarrassments to which she conceived herself exposed, or make him answerable for the pecuniary demands that existed against her." There were, however, more formidable objections, not of her own making. The English who remained in Paris ran the chance from day to day of being arrested with the priests and aristocrats, and even of being carried to the guillotine. Their only safeguard lay in obscurity. They had, above all else, to evade the notice of Government officers. Mary, if she married Imlay, would be obliged to proclaim herself a British subject, and would thus be risking imprisonment, and perhaps death. Besides, it was very doubtful whether a marriage ceremony performed by the French authorities would be recognized in England as valid.
To Mary, however, this did not seem an insurmountable obstacle to their union. "Her view had now become," Mr. Kegan Paul says, "that mutual affection was marriage, and that the marriage tie should not bind after the death of love, if love should die." In her Vindication she had upheld the sanctity of marriage because she believed that the welfare of society depends upon the order maintained in family relations; but her belief also was that the form the law demands is nothing, the feeling which leads those concerned to desire it, everything. What she had hitherto seen of married life, as at present instituted, was not calculated to make her think highly of it. Her mother and her friend's mother had led the veriest dogs' lives because the law would not permit them to leave brutal and sensual husbands, whom they had ceased to honour or love. Her sister had been driven mad by the ill-treatment of a man to whom she was bound by legal, but not by natural ties. Probably in London other cases had come within her notice. Love was the one unimportant element in the marriage compact. The artificial tone of society had disgusted all the more earnest thinkers of the day. The one extreme to which existing evils were carried drove reformers to the other. Mary reasoned in the same spirit as they did, and from no desire to uphold the doctrine of free love. Fearless in her practice as in her theories, she did not hesitate in this emergency to act in a way that seemed to her conscience right. She loved Imlay honestly and sincerely; but because she loved him she could not think evil of him, nor suppose for a moment that his passion was not as pure and true as hers. Therefore she consented to live with him as his wife, though no religious nor civil ceremony could sanction their union.
That this, according to the world's standard, was wrong, is a fact beyond dispute. But before the first stones are thrown, the pros as well as the cons must be remembered. If Mary had held the conventional beliefs as to the relations of the sexes, she would be judged by them. Had she thought her connection with Imlay criminal, then she would be condemned by her own conviction. But she did not think so. Moreover, her opinions to the contrary were very decided. When she gave herself to Imlay without waiting for a minister's blessing or a legal permit, she acted in strict adherence to her moral ideals; and this at once places her in a far different rank from that of the Mrs. Robinsons and Mrs. Jordans, with whom men have been too ready to class her. To Mary love was literally her whole existence, and fidelity a virtue to be cultivated above all others. Mary Wollstonecraft might rely upon her friends and acquaintances for recognition of her virtue, but she should have remembered that to the world at large her conduct would appear immoral; that by it she would become a pariah in society, and her work lose much of its efficacy; while she would be giving to her children, if she had any, an inheritance of shame that would cling to them for ever.
She may probably have realized this drawback and determined to avoid the evil consequences of her defiance to social usages. For the first few months it seems that she kept her intimacy with Imlay secret, and she may have intended concealing it until such time as she could make it legal in the eyes of the world. Godwin dates its beginning in April, 1793. The only information in this respect is to be had from her published letters to Imlay, the first of which was written in June of the same year, though, it must be added, Mr. Kegan Paul queries the date. This and the following note, dated August, prove the secrecy she had for a time maintained. The latter seems to have been written after she had determined to live openly with Imlay in Paris, but just before she carried her determination into practice:—
I obey an emotion of my heart which made me think of wishing thee, my love, good-night! before I go to rest, with more tenderness than I can to-morrow, when writing a hasty line or two under Colonel 's eye. You can scarcely imagine with what pleasure I anticipate the day when we are to begin almost to live together; and you would smile to hear how many plans of employment I have in my head, now that I am confident my heart has found peace in your bosom. Cherish me with that dignified tenderness which I have only found in you, and your own dear girl will try to keep under a quickness of feeling that has sometimes given you pain. Yes, I will be good, that I may deserve to be happy; and whilst you love me, I cannot again fall into the miserable state which rendered life a burden almost too heavy to be borne.
But good-night! God bless you! . . . I will be at the barrier a little after ten o'clock to-morrow.
The reason for this step was probably the fact that it was not safe to her to continue in Paris alone and unprotected. The robbers in the woods at Neuilly might be laughed at; but the red-capped citoyens and citoyennes, drunk from the first drop of aristocratic blood, were no old man's dangers. The peril of the English in the city increased with every new development of the struggle; but Americans were looked upon as staunch brother citizens, and a man who had fought for the American Republic was esteemed as the friend and honoured guest of the French Republic. As Imlay's wife, Mary's safety would therefore be assured. The murderous greed of the people, to break out in September in the Law of the Suspect, was already felt in August, and at the end of that month she sought protection under Imlay's roof, and shielded herself by his name.
She could not at once judge of the manner in which this expedient would be received. It was impossible to hold any communication with England. For eighteen months after her letter to Mr. Johnson not a word from her reached her friends at home. As for those in Paris, so intense was the great human tragedy of which they were the witnesses, that they probably forgot to gossip about each other. The crimes and horrors that stared them in the face were so appalling that desire to seek out imaginary ones in their neighbours was lost. As far as can be known from Mary's letters, her connection with Imlay did not take from her the position she had held in the English colony. No door was closed against her; no scandal was spread about her. The truth is, these people must have understood her difficulties as well as she did. They knew the impossibility of a legal ceremony and the importance in her case of an immediate union; and, understanding this, they seem to have considered her Imlay's wife. At least the rumours which months afterwards came to her sisters treated her marriage as a certainty. Charles Wollstonecraft, now settled in Philadelphia, wrote on June 16, 1794, to Eliza, a year after Mary and Imlay had begun their joint life: "I heard from Mary six months ago by a gentleman who knew her at Paris, and since that have been informed she is married to Captain Imlay of this country." The same report had found its way to Mr. Johnson, and through him again to Mrs. Bishop. It was hard to doubt its truth, and yet Mrs. Bishop knew as well if not better than any one Mary's views about marriage. She had, happily for herself, reaped the benefit of them. In her surprise she sent Charles's letter to Everina, accompanied by her own reflections upon the startling news.
The only record of Mary's connection with Imlay, which lasted for about two years, are the letters which she wrote to him while he was away from her, his absences being frequent and long. Fortunately, these letters have been preserved. They were published by Godwin almost immediately after her death, and were republished in 1879 by Mr. Kegan Paul. "They are," says Godwin, "the offspring of a glowing imagination, and a heart penetrated with the passion it essays to describe." She was thirty-five when she met Imlay. Her passion for him was strong with the strength of full womanhood, nor had it been weakened by the flirtations in which so many women fritter away what ever deep feeling they may have originally possessed. Her letters contain the unreserved expression of her feelings. Those written before she had cause to doubt her lover are full of wifely devotion and tenderness; those written from the time she was forced to question his sincerity, through the gradual realization of his faithlessness, until the bitter end, are the most pathetic and heart-rending that have ever been given to the world. They are the cry of a human soul in its death-agony, and are the more tragic because they belong to real life and not to fiction.
Imlay's love was to Mary what the kiss of the Prince was to the Sleeping Beauty in the fairy tale. It awakened her heart to happiness, leading her into that new world which is the old. Hitherto the love which had been her portion was that which she had sought
. . . In the pity of other's woe,
In the gentle relief of another's care.
And yet she had always believed that the pure passion which a man gives to a woman is the greatest good in life. That she was without it had been to her a heavier trial than an unhappy home and overwhelming debts. Now, when she least expected it, it had come to her. While women in Paris were either trembling with fear for what the morrow might bring forth, or else caught in the feverish whirl of rebellion, one at least had found rest. But human happiness can never be quite perfect. Sensitiveness was a family fault with the Wollstonecrafts. It had been developed rather than suppressed in Mary by her circumstances. She was therefore keenly susceptible not only to Imlay's love, but to his failings. Of these he had not a few. He does not seem to have been a refined man. From some remarks in Mary's letters it may be concluded that he had at one time been very dissipated, and that the society of coarse men and women had blunted his finer instincts. His faults were peculiarly calculated to offend her. His passion had to be stimulated. His business called him away often, and his absences were unmistakably necessary to the maintenance of his devotion. The sunshine of her new life was therefore not entirely unclouded. She was by degrees obliged to lower the high pedestal on which she had placed her lover, and to admit to herself that he was not much above the level of ordinary men. This discovery did not lessen her affection, though it made her occasionally melancholy. But she was, on the whole, happy.
In September he was compelled to leave her to go to Havre, where he was detained for several months. Love had cast out all fear from her heart. She was certain that he considered himself, in every sense of the word, her husband; and therefore, during his absence, she frankly told him how much she missed him, and in her letters shared her troubles and pleasures with him. She wrote the last thing at night to tell him of her love and her loneliness. She could not take his slippers from their old place by the door. She would not look at a package of books sent to her, but said she would keep them until he could read them to her while she was mending her stockings. She drew pictures of the happy days to come, when in the farm, either in America or France, to which they both looked forward as their Ultima Thule, they would spend long evenings by their fireside, perhaps with children about their knees. If Eliza sent her a worrying letter, half the worry was gone when she had confided it to him. If ne'er-do-weel Charles, temporarily prosperous, or promising to be so, wrote her one that pleased her, straightway she described the delight with which he would make a friend of Imlay. When the latter had been away but a short time, she found there was to be a new tie between them. As the father of her unborn child he became doubly dear to her, while the consciousness that another life depended upon her made her more careful of her health. "This thought," she told him, "has not only produced an overflowing of tenderness to you, but made me very attentive to calm my mind and take exercise, lest I should destroy an object in whom we are to have a mutual interest, you know." As Mr. Kegan Paul says, "No one can read her letters without seeing that she was a pure, high-minded, and refined woman, and that she considered herself, in the eyes of God and man, his wife."
During the first part of his absence, Imlay appears to have been as devoted as she could have wished him to be. When her letters to him did not come regularly,—as, indeed, how could they in those troubled days?—he grew impatient. His impatience Mary greeted as a good sign.
The business at Havre apparently could not be easily settled. The date of Imlay's return became more and more uncertain, and Mary grew restless at his prolonged stay. This she let him know soon enough. She was not a silent heroine willing to let concealment prey on her spirits. It was as impossible for her to smile at grief as it was to remain unconscious of her lover's shortcomings. Her first complaints, however, are half playful, half serious. They were inspired by her desire to see him more than by any misgiving as to the cause of his detention.
On the 29th of December she wrote:—
You seem to have taken up your abode at Havre. Pray, sir! when do you think of coming home? or, to write very considerately, when will business permit you? I shall expect (as the country people say in England) that you will make a power of money to indemnify me for your absence. . . .
Well! but, my love, to the old story,—am I to see you this week, or this month? I do not ask what you are about, for as you did not tell me, I would not ask Mr. , who is generally pretty communicative.
But the playfulness quickly disappeared. Mary was ill, and her illness aggravated her normal sensitiveness, while the terrible death-drama of the Revolution was calculated to deepen rather than to relieve her gloom.
Imlay's answers to her letters were kind and reassuring, and contained ample explanation of his apparent coldness. To give him the benefit of the doubt, he was probably at this time truthful in pleading business as an excuse for his long absence. His reasons, at all events, not only satisfied Mary but made her ashamed of what seemed to her a want of faith in him. She was as humble in her penitence as if she had been grievously at fault.
As it continued impossible for Imlay to leave Havre, it was arranged that Mary should join him there. She could not go at once on account of her health. While she had been so unhappy, she had neglected to take that care of herself which her condition necessitated, and she was suffering the consequences. Once her mind was at rest, she made what amends she could by exercise in the bracing winter air, in defiance of dirt and intense cold, and by social relaxation, at least such as could be had while the guillotine was executing daily tasks to the tune of Ça ira, and women were madly turning in the mazes of the Carmagnole. Though she could not boast of being quite recovered, she was soon able to report to Imlay, "I am so lightsome, that I think it will not go badly with me." Her health sufficiently restored, and an escort—the excited condition of the country making one more than usually indispensable—having been found, she began her welcome journey. It was doubly welcome. One could breathe more freely away from Paris, the seat of the Reign of Terror, where the Revolution, as Vergniaud said, was, Saturn-like, devouring its own children; and for Mary the journey had likewise the positive pleasure of giving her her heart's desire. Before Imlay's warm assurances of his love, her uneasiness melted away as quickly as the snow at the first breath of spring.
She arrived in Havre in the February of 1794. About a fortnight later Imlay left for Paris, but many proofs of his affection had greeted her, and during these few days he had completely calmed her fears. Judging from the letters she sent him during this absence, he must have been as lover-like as in the first happy days of their union. One was written the very day after his departure.
Imlay's absence was brief, nor did he again leave Mary until the following August. In April their child, a daughter, was born, whom Mary called Fanny in memory of her first and dearest friend. Despite her past imprudences, she was so well that she remained in bed but a day. Eight days later she was out again. Though she felt no ill effects at the time, her rashness had probably something to do with her illness when her second child was born. These months at Havre were a pleasant oasis in the dreary desert of her existence. She seems to have had a house of her own in Havre, and to have seen a little of the Havrais, whom she found "ugly without doubt," and their houses smelling too much of commerce. They were, in a word, bourgeois. But her husband and child were all the society she wanted. With them any wilderness would have been a paradise. Her affection increased with time, and Imlay, though discovered not to be a demigod, grew ever dearer to her. Her love for her child, which she confessed was at first the effect of a sense of duty, developed soon into a deep and tender feeling. With Imlay's wants to attend to, the little Fanny, at one time ill with small-pox, to nurse, and her book on the Revolution to write, the weeks and months passed quickly and happily. In August Imlay was summoned to Paris, and at once the sky of her paradise was overcast. She wrote to him,—
You too have somehow clung round my heart. I found I could not eat my dinner in the great room, and when I took up the large knife to carve for myself, tears rushed into my eyes. Do not, however, suppose that I am melancholy, for, when you are from me, I not only wonder how I can find fault with you, but how I can doubt your affection.