Footsteps

by Richard Holmes

  Strictly speaking, the “Lessons” recall a time when Fanny was beginning to crawl and talk, so they cannot refer to events in the household much before the winter of 1794 (though there is mention of weaning). However, the picture they give is somehow timeless, or outside time. I was tempted to think of domestic events as operating on a different timescale from that of the external, historical time of the Revolution; a slower rhythm altogether, more like the rhythm of plants or animals; so that it did not seem false to build this into my picture of Mary and Imlay together at this point, before their final separation in France. Indeed, in her memories I think Mary actually pushed them back to the time of their first happiness together, for the “Papa” figure of the “Lessons” is a radiant, smiling presence, only a little anxious or tired sometimes from overwork.

  The first three Lessons present a child’s basic vocabulary, and the natural order of things in and around their house. “The bird sings. The fire burns. The cat jumps. The dog runs. The cow lies down. The man laughs. The child cries.” It seems somehow inevitable that the man should be laughing—his birthright. We also see Mary’s instinctive combination of discipline and love in dealing with Fanny. “Hide your face. Wipe your nose. Wash your hands. Dirty mouth. Why do you cry? A clean mouth. Shake hands. I love you. Kiss me now. Good girl.” Was it only my imagination that brought the little scene alive with Mary’s suddenly tender voice?

  In Lesson Seven there is a discussion of crying, and how we all have to accept being hurt, and from that a memory of weaning:

  At ten months you had four pretty white teeth, and you used to bite me. Poor Mamma! Still I did not cry, because I am not a child, but you hurt me very much. So I said to Papa, it is time the little girl should eat… Yes, says Papa, and he tapped you on the cheek, you are old enough to learn to eat? Come to me, and I will teach you, my little dear, for you must not hurt poor Mamma, who has given you her milk, when you could not take anything else.

  In Lesson Eight there is a vivid picture of Fanny getting Papa to play with her. Mary reminds Fanny that she could still only crawl, and her “running” across the room was “quick, quick, on your hands and feet like a dog”. Then she describes the scene, with deft and simple touches and explanations, which catch the charm of family life better than anything I ever found in her novels:

  Away you ran to Papa, and putting both your arms round his leg, for your hands were not big enough, you looked up at him, and laughed. What did this laugh say, when you could not speak? Cannot you guess by what you now say to Papa?—Ah! it was, Play with me, Papa!—play with me! Papa began to smile, and you knew that smile was always—Yes. So you got a ball, and Papa threw it along the floor—roll, roll, roll; and you ran after it again—and again. How pleased you were!

  Nothing could be more simple, yet Mary’s delight in the love between father and child is perfectly eloquent.

  In Lesson Nine there is a list of Fanny’s accomplishments, which includes a momentary glimpse of the Fédéré soldiers: “You can trundle a hoop, you say; and jump over a stick. O, I forgot!—and march like the men in the red coats, when Papa plays a pretty tune on the fiddle.”

  It is nice to think of Imlay playing the violin, Kentucky-style perhaps, while Fanny pranced like a conquering hero.

  Finally, in Lesson Fourteen, there is a glimpse into what must have been the growing tensions in the household, and for the first and only time we see “Papa” distracted by outside affairs and business. Mary is teaching Fanny about what she calls “thinking”. Mary’s “thinking” has nothing to do with schoolroom learning—in fact, all the Lessons are free from any hint of formal teaching. Thinking means imagining how someone else feels, and what effect your behaviour will have on them. (Indeed, it is very close to loving.) She begins the lesson by recalling how once, when Mary had a headache, Fanny made a noise and Papa had to tell her to be quiet; and how Fanny learned from this. Mary explains it all with quick intuitive humour—itself a beautiful demonstration of the imagination at work on her little child’s mind:

  You say that you do not know how to think. Yes, you do a little. The other day Papa was tired; he had been walking about all the morning. After dinner he fell asleep on the sofa. I did not bid you be quiet; but you thought of what Papa said to you when my head ached. This made you think that you ought not to make a noise, when Papa was resting himself. So you came to me, and said to me, very softly—Pray reach me my ball, and I will go and play in the garden, till Papa wakes. You were going out, but thinking again, you came back to me on your tiptoes. Whisper—whisper! Pray Mama, call me, when Papa wakes; for I shall be afraid to open the door to see, lest I should disturb him. Away you went. Creep—creep—and shut the door as softly as I could have done myself. That was thinking.

  Again, it is completely simple—one moment of domestic intimacy seen through the eyes of a child. (Was Imlay often tired now, did he get irritable more often, was his cheerfulness disappearing? Perhaps.) But to me, in the midst of all the public drama of Mary’s life, it gave a sense of the new emotional centre that had been created in Mary’s world, and the change that this must have produced in her whole outlook. It altered everything.

  7

  The moment of intimacy was soon over. On 26 July 1794 the opposition to Robespierre finally asserted itself in the Convention, and within three days he and Saint-Just were executed and the extreme wing of the Jacobins in Paris was destroyed in the coup d’état of Thermidor.

  Almost at once Imlay set out for Paris, determined to exploit the commercial opportunities of the liberalised régime, and Mary’s letters begin again in August. Soon it appears she is worried and discontented, and deeply uncertain about their future. Without Imlay life in Le Havre-Marat is boring—full of “fat-bottomed” nymphs and cupids on the mantelpiece, and the dull faces of “square-headed money-getters”. Moreover they disagree about each other’s attitudes. Imlay says Mary lacks judgment, Mary that Imlay lacks feeling.

  “I will allow you to cultivate my judgment,” she writes, “if you will permit me to keep alive the sentiments in your heart, which may be termed romantic, because, the offspring of the senses and the imagination, they resemble the mother more than the father, when they produce the suffusion I admire.—In spite of icy age, I hope still to see it, if you have not determined only to eat and drink, and be stupidly useful to the stupid.”

  The sarcasm in Mary’s tone hardly requires comment, and it is repeated in the other letters of August. Clearly all was not well, and I suspected that Imlay’s reasons for going to Paris so precipitously were not entirely commercial: Mary was proving a demanding wife with whom to live.

  But there was another side to these letters, softer and more affectionate, which showed the transformation in Mary’s outlook in an almost philosophical way. It appears in the wholly new emphasis she gave to human affections and the faculty of the imagination in forming them.

  Writing on 19 August of the growth of her feelings for her child—“my affections grow on me, till they become too strong for my peace”—she expressed it quite simply in the capacity to love. Her attitude towards their little girl was “at first very reasonable—more the effect of reason, a sense of duty, than feeling—now, she has got into my heart and imagination, and when I walk out without her, her little figure is ever dancing before me.” The same thing had happened to her feelings for Imlay—she does not know how—but he possesses her even in his absence. “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.”

  But of course Mary did nor intend to accept that absence for long. In early September, growing impatient with his explanations, she suddenly closed up the house at Le Havre-Marat and took the diligence for Paris. It appears to have been a nightmare journey. Fanny was tee
thing and had only recently recovered from smallpox; the maid had announced that she was pregnant, and naturally Mary would not abandon her; while the coach, overladen and badly driven (a metaphor of the present chaos in France), overturned no less than four times. Imlay seems to have taken rooms for them all in one of their old hotels in Saint-Germain, but the reunion was ominously brief. Within a few days urgent business called him away—this time to London.

  Now at last Mary really did begin to feel abandoned: she was not to see her husband again for six months. All that was left to her were the few remaining members of the expatriate circle—the Schweizers, Count von Schlabrendorf and a new recruit, Archie Hamilton-Rowan, a genial Irish lawyer and active member of the United Irishmen, who had already been prosecuted in Dublin for sedition.

  Rowan vividly recalled his first sight of Mary, as she walked into one of their soirées, defiantly accompanied by little Fanny. “[A friend] whispered to me that she was the author of the Rights of Woman. I started. ‘What!’ I said within myself, ‘this is Miss Mary Wollstonecraft parading about with a child at her heels, with as little ceremony as if it were a watch she had just bought at the jeweller’s. So much for the rights of women,’ thought I.”

  In fact Rowan quickly became a close friend of Mary’s, frequently took “a dish of tea” and some good conversation with her, and when finally Mary left France her last letters were to him, affectionately recalling his help and support—one more conversion to the cause.

  Writing to Evarina at the end of September, Mary tried to put the best face on things, describing Imlay as “a brother you would love and respect—I hope the time is not very distant when we shall all meet”, and endearingly singing the praises of her child. “I want you to see my little girl, who is more like a boy—She is ready to fly away with spirits—and has eloquent health in her cheeks and eyes—She does not promise to be a beauty, but appears wonderfully intelligent; and, though I am sure she has her father’s quick temper and feelings, her good humour runs away with all the credit of my good nursing …”

  But in her many letters to Imlay in London—there are sixteen of them between September 1794 and April 1795—she runs the gamut of emotions, from tearful melancholy despair to sudden, high-spirited teasing; from bitter, depressed reflections on the Revolution to jaunty headstrong thoughts about the future that Liberty may eventually bring them all. Sometimes she makes Paris catch something of the glamour of their earliest days together:

  I am making a progress in the language among other things. I have also made some new acquaintance. I have almost charmed a judge of the tribunal, R—, who, though I should not have thought it possible, has humanity, if not beaucoup d’esprit. But let me tell you, if you do not make haste to come back, I shall be half in love with the author of the “Marseillaise”, who is a handsome man, a little too broad-faced or so, and plays sweetly on the violin.

  No doubt little Fanny also liked the violin of Rouget de l’Isle, a forty-year-old army officer, as well as the musical hero of the Republic: it would have reminded her of Papa.

  In other letters, however, Mary is overwhelmingly bitter, and obviously suspects Imlay’s sexual fidelity. Indeed, in the spring, it is known that he took up with a young actress in London.

  I consider fidelity and constancy as two distinct things; yet the former is necessary, to give life to the other … You know my opinion of men in general; you know that I think them systematic tyrants, and that it is the rarest thing in the world, to meet with a man with sufficient delicacy of feeling to govern desire. When I am thus sad, I lament that my little darling, fondly as I doat on her, is a girl.—I am sorry to have a tie to a world that for me is ever sown with thorns.

  Without Imlay’s side of the correspondence, it remains difficult to judge fairly between them. All we know is that he continued to write regularly (“your hasty notes”); continued to support Mary and Fanny financially (volume II of the History of the Revolution was not being written, and Mary could expect no further advances from Johnson); and continued to talk of the “permanent views and future comfort” of their life together. Yet when he wrote that “our being together is paramount to every other consideration”, Mary regarded his declaration as a cheat and an insult; and surely she was right to do so. None the less it was Imlay who finally persuaded Mary to return to England in April 1795—something that the most dangerous moments of the Revolution had not succeeded in doing.

  There is one passage in this increasingly tragic exchange of letters which stands out with a kind of magnificence, far beyond the immediate clash of personalities, and which places Mary on a philosophical high ground above the immediate experience of the Revolution and her revolutionary love affair. It concerns the powers of the Imagination in the human heart, and it looks forward with prophetic insight to the major creative work of the next generation of the Romantics—to Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817), and to Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820). In the latter case I was to discover a connection that was indeed a direct and touching one. For when in July 1814 the young Shelley eloped to France with Mary Godwin, Mary brought with her a special travelling box, containing all her mother’s works including the Letters to Imlay which Godwin had edited. Their shared journal records that they opened this box on their first night together in Paris, at the Hotel de Vienne. So, in an odd way, the circle was completed: or rather—for me—it was started up once more.

  Mary first recalls to Imlay their early happiness together, during the Neuilly days: “There is nothing picturesque in your present pursuits; my imagination then rather chooses to ramble back to the barrier with you, or to see you coming to meet me, and my basket of grapes.—With what pleasure do I recollect your looks and words, when I have been sitting on the window, regarding the waving corn!”

  In a way this says everything about their love: how excitingly it had been launched amid the storm and danger of the Terror—which brought out the best in both of them—and then ran aground and wrecked in the calmer and safer months that followed. It was essentially a “barrier affair”, one of those thousands of relationships, passionate and spontaneous, that so often start up in times of war or crisis—the fire of life burning more brightly in the mouth of destruction—but which rarely survive a time of peace and security. What use are recriminations in such matters?

  Mary then goes on, in her best style, half-mocking at first, but gradually gathering passion and seriousness to produce what is in effect a hymn to the Imagination—and what was, for me, a new definition, in a new language, of Imagination au Pouvoir.

  Believe me, sage sir, you have not sufficient respect for the Imagination.—I could prove to you in a trice that it is the mother of sentiment, the great distinction of our nature, the only purifier of the passions.—Animals have a portion of Reason, and equal, if not more exquisite, senses; but no trace of Imagination, or her offspring Taste, appears in any of their actions. The impulse of the senses,—passions if you will—and the conclusions of Reason, draw men together; but the Imagination is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay—producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, rendering men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.

  “Imagination is the true fire, stolen from heaven”: here at last the cool, rationalist Mary was speaking like a full-blooded Romantic, seeing man’s finest aspect in the rebellious, Promethean element in his character which will never settle for “the conclusions of Reason” or the “comforts” of society. It is what he is capable of imagining which alone “expands his heart” and makes him truly—and in a rapturous, revolutionary sense—“social”.

  But what did this mean in terms of Mary’s original hopes of the French Revolution, her glimpse of the Golden Age? In one sense it is clearly a retreat, a revulsion even from the extreme calculating rationalism of the Jacobins, and a rejection of public revolutionary action in favour of the more inward, enduring truth
s of the heart. Mary’s glimpse of the Golden Age was not in the National Convention, or on the boulevards of Paris, but in the friendly salons of the Girondists and in the lovers’ garden at Neuilly with its prospect of the corn harvest.

  Yet Mary Wollstonecraft did not simply retreat into a sentimental, conservative, “feminine” view of family life and the sacredness of personal relationships. Far from it—she remained a social rebel to the end. To her critique of the French as a nation historically unprepared for revolution, she added a much broader understanding of the human qualities required to make a transformation in public affairs. She pointed, as I saw it, precisely to the Romantic revolution—that “expansion of the heart”—which would be needed to make real and enduring social progress in the coming age. Central to this perception remained the concept of “rights”—the rights of woman and the rights of man—and the pre-eminent need for feeling and imagination to shape and reform the entire social fabric, and the institutions which governed it. This it seemed to me was the essential inheritance which she left to the next generation, and beyond.

  In practical terms, Mary’s loyalty to France and the sufferings of her people remained unshaken to the end. In October 1794 she had already seen that the Terror would never return: “The liberty of the press will produce a great effect here.—The cry of blood will not be in vain!—Some more monsters will perish—and the Jacobins are conquered.”

  Yet the winter of 1794-5 was extremely harsh. Though the Maximum Laws were repealed there were something like famine conditions within the barrier, the weather was bitterly cold and Mary took turns with her maidservant queuing for food and wood. She caught a violent chest cold and a hacking cough, which by February convinced her that she had “a galloping consumption”. She gave up the Saint-Germain hotel and moved in with a German couple, who had a child the same age as Fanny, and who were living “just above poverty”. She sank her own griefs in those around her, writing on 10 February: “This has been such a period of barbarity and misery, I ought not to complain of having my share. I wish one moment that I had never heard of the cruelties that have been practised here, and the next envy the mothers who have been killed with their children.”