LITERARY WORK.

1793-1796.

The first volume of “An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, and the Effect it has produced in Europe,” which Mary wrote during the months she lived in France, was published by Johnson in 1794. It was favorably received and criticised, especially by that portion of the public who had sympathized with the Revolutionists in the controversy with Burke. One admirer, in 1803, declared it was not second even to Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” It went very quickly through two editions, surest proof of its success. The “Analytical Review” called it

Mary had apparently spent in idleness the years which had elapsed since the “Rights of Women” had taken England by storm. But in reality she must have made good use of them. This new book marks an enormous advance in her mental development. It is but little disfigured by the faults of style, and is never weakened by the lack of method, which detract from the strength and power of the work by which she is best known. In the “French Revolution” her arguments are well weighed and balanced, and flowers of rhetoric, with a few exceptions, are sacrificed for a simple and concise statement of facts. Unfortunately the first volume was never followed by a second. Had Mary finished the book, as she certainly intended to do when she began it, it probably would still be ranked with the standard works on the Revolution.

As the title demonstrates, her object in writing this history was to explain the moral significance, as well as the historical value, of the incidents which she recorded. This moral element is uppermost in every page of her book. The determination to discover the truth at all hazards is its key-note. This end Mary hoped to accomplish, first by tracing the French troubles to their real causes, and then by giving an unprejudiced account of them. The result of a thorough study and investigation of her subject was the formation of doctrines which are in close sympathy with those of the evolutionists of to-day. Nothing strikes the reader so much as her firm belief in the theory of development, and her conclusion therefrom that progress in government consists in the gradual substitution of altruistic principles for the egotism which was the primal foundation of law and order. Profession of this creed is at once made in both the preface and first chapter of the “French Revolution.” In the former, she writes:—

In considering this subject, she concludes that the civilization of the ancients was deficient because it paid more attention to the cultivation of taste in the few than to the development of understanding in the many, and that that of the moderns is superior to it because of the more general diffusion of knowledge which followed the invention of printing. Her arguments in support of her theories are excellent.

This despotism, she further asserts, always continues so long as men are unqualified to judge with precision of their civil and political rights. But once they begin to think, and hence to learn the true facts of history, they must discover that the first social systems were founded on passion,—“individuals wishing to fence round their own wealth or power, and make slaves of their brothers to prevent encroachment,”—and that the laws of society could not have been originally “adjusted so as to take in the future conduct of its members, because the faculties of man are unfolded and perfected by the improvements made by society.” This knowledge necessarily destroys belief in the sanctity of prescription, and when once it is made the basis of government, the ruling powers will have as much consideration for the rights of others as for their own.

One of the first means, therefore, by which this much-to-be-desired end is to be attained, is the destruction of blind reverence of the past.

With uncompromising honesty, she says:—

After a brief analysis of the laws of progress in general, Mary proceeds to their special application in the case of France. The illumination of the French people she believes was hastened by the efforts of such men, on the one hand, as Rousseau and Voltaire, who warred against superstition, and on the other, as Quesnay and Turgot, who opposed unjust taxation. It was through them that the nation awoke to a consciousness of its wrongs, and saw for the first time, in the clear light of truth, the inveterate pride of the nobles, the rapacity of the clergy, and the prodigality of the court. The farmer then realized to the full the injustice of a government which could calmly allow taxes and feudal claims to swallow all but the twentieth part of the profit of his labor. Citizens discovered the iniquity of laws which gave so little security to their lives and property, that these could be sported with impunity by the aristocracy. In a word, the people found that without a pretext of justice, they were forced to be hewers of wood and drawers of water for a chosen few. Once enlightened they rebelled against the nobles who treated them as beasts of burden and trod them under foot with the mud; and they boldly demanded their rights as human beings and as citizens.

Having thus given the raison d’Être of the great French crisis, she describes with striking energy the events which ensued. She makes manifest the folly and blindness of the court, the shortcomings and vile intrigues of ministers, the duplicity and despotism of the parliaments, which prevented the petitions and demands of the people from receiving the attention and consideration which alone could have satisfied them. That there were evils in the French government, not even its friends could deny. The recognition of them necessitated their being done away with. There were but two methods by which this could be accomplished: they must either be reformed or destroyed. The government refused to accept the first course; the people resolved to adopt the second. Mary’s treatment of this question is interesting. The following passage contains her chief arguments upon the subject, and the conclusion she drew from them, so very different from the result of Burke’s reasoning on the same point in the “Reflections.” This passage is an excellent specimen of the style in which the book is written. The hasty measures of the French, she says, being worthy of philosophical investigation, fall into two distinct inquiries:—

Among the most remarkable passages in the book are those relating to Marie Antoinette. As was the case when she wrote her answer to Burke, the misery of millions unjustly subjected moved Mary more than the woes of one woman justly deprived of an ill-used liberty. Her love and sympathy for the people made her perhaps a little too harsh in her judgment of the queen. “Some hard words, some very strong epithets, are indeed used of Marie Antoinette,” Mr. Kegan Paul says in his short but appreciative criticism of this book, “showing that she, who could in those matters know nothing personally, could not but depend on Paris gossip; but this is interesting, as showing what the view taken of the queen was before passion rose to its highest, before the fury of the people, with all the ferocity of word and deed attendant on great popular movements, had broken out.” The following lines, therefore, reflecting the feelings and opinions of the day, must be read with as much, if not more interest than those of later and better-informed historians:—

Mary’s inflexible hatred of the cruelty of the court and the nobility, which had led to the present horrors, though great, did not prevent her from seeing the tyranny and brutality in which the people indulged so soon as they obtained the mastery. Her treatment of the facts of the Revolution is characterized by honesty. She is above all else an impartial historian and philosopher. She distinguishes, it is true, between the well-meaning multitude—those who took the Bastille, for example—and the rabble composed of the dregs of society,—those who headed the march to Versailles. She declares, “There has been seen amongst the French a spurious race of men, a set of cannibals, who have gloried in their crimes; and, tearing out the hearts that did not feel for them, have proved that they themselves had iron bowels.” But while she makes this distinction, she does not hesitate to admit that the retaliation of the French people, suddenly all become sovereigns, was as terrible as that of slaves unexpectedly loosed from their fetters. It is but fair, after quoting her denunciations of Marie Antoinette, to show how far the new rule was from receiving her unqualified approbation. Describing the silence and ruin which have succeeded the old-time gayety and grandeur of Versailles, she exclaims:—

The same impartiality is preserved in the relation of even the most exciting and easily misconceived incidents of the Revolution. The courageous and resolute resistance of the Third Estate to the clergy and nobility is described with dignified praise which never descends into fulsome flattery. The ignorance, vanity, jealousy, disingenuousness, self-sufficiency, and interested motives of members of the National Assembly are unhesitatingly exposed in recording such of their actions as, examined superficially, might seem the outcome of a love of freedom. In giving the details of the taking of the Bastille, and the women’s march on Versailles, Mary becomes really eloquent. Mr. Kegan Paul’s opinion may be here advantageously cited. “Her accounts of the Bastille siege and of the Versailles episode,” he says, “are worth reading beside those of the master to whose style they are so great a contrast. Carlyle has seized on the comic element in the march to Versailles, Mary Wollstonecraft on the tragic; and hers seems to me the worthier view.”

Many of the remarks upon civilization and the influence of the cultivation of science on the understanding, with which the book is interspersed, are full of wisdom and indicative of deep thought and careful research. Hers was, to use with but slight change the words with which she concludes, the philosophical eye, which, looking into the nature and weighing the consequence of human actions, is able to discern the cause which has produced so many dreadful effects.

Notwithstanding its excellence and the reputation it once had, this work is now almost unknown. But few have ever heard of it, still fewer read it; a fact due, of course, to its incompleteness. The first and only volume ends with the departure of Louis from Versailles to Paris, when the Revolution was as yet in its earliest stages. This must ever be a matter of regret. That succeeding volumes, had she written them, would have been even better is very probable. There was marked development in her intellectual powers after she published the “Rights of Women.” The increased merit of her later works somewhat confirms Southey’s declaration, made three years after her death, that “Mary Wollstonecraft was but beginning to reason when she died.”

The last book she finished and published during her life-time was her “Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark.” Her journey, as has been explained in the last chapter, was undertaken to attend to certain business affairs for Imlay. Landing in Sweden, she went from there to Norway, then again to Sweden, and finally to Denmark and Hamburg, in which latter places she remained a comparatively short period. Not being free to go and come as she chose, she was sometimes detained in small places for two or three weeks, while she could stay but a day or two in large cities. But she had letters of introduction to many of the principal inhabitants of the towns and villages to which business called her, and was thus able to see something of the life of the better classes. The then rough mode of travelling also brought her into close contact with the peasantry. As the ground over which she travelled was then but little visited by English people, she knew that her letters would have at least the charm of novelty.

They were published by her friend Johnson in 1796. Hitherto, her work had been purely of a philosophical, historical, or educational nature. The familiar epistolary style in which she had begun to record her observations of the French people had been quickly changed for the more formal tone of the “French Revolution.” These travels, consequently, marked an entirely new departure in her literary career. Their success was at once assured. Even the fastidious Godwin, who had condemned her other books, could find no fault with this one. Contemporary critics agreed in sharing his good opinion.

“Have you ever met with Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘Letters from Sweden and Norway’?” Southey asked in a letter to Thomas Southey. “She has made me in love with a cold climate and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight.” The impression they produced was lasting. When, several years later, he wrote an “Epistle” to A. S. Cottle to be published in the latter’s volume of “Icelandic Poetry,” he again alluded to them. In referring to the places described in northern poems he declared,—

The “Annual Register” for 1796 honored the “Letters” by publishing in its columns a long extract from them containing a description of the Norwegian character. The “Monthly Magazine” for July of the same year concluded that the book, “though not written with studied elegance, interests the reader in an uncommon degree by a philosophical turn of thought, by bold sketches of nature and manners, and above all by strong expressions of delicate sensibility.” The verdict of the “Analytical Review” was as follows:—

The qualities most desirable in a writer of travels are quickness of perception, active interest in the places and people described, appreciation of local color, a nice sense of discrimination, and a pleasant, simple style. It is true that occasionally affected and involved phrases occur in Mary’s letters from the North, and that the tone of many passages is a trifle too sombre. But the former defects are much less glaring and fewer in number than those of her earlier writings; while, when it is remembered that during her journey her heart was heavy-laden with disappointment and despair, her melancholy reflections must be forgiven her. With the exception of these really trifling shortcomings, she may be said to have ably fulfilled the required conditions. It may be asserted of her, in almost the identical words which Heine uses in praise of Goethe’s “Italian Journey,” that she, during her travels, saw all things, the dark and the light, colored nothing with her individual feelings, and pictured the land and its people in the true outlines and true colors in which God clothed it.

Determined to avoid the mistake common to most travellers, of speaking from feeling rather than from reason, she shows her readers the virtues and faults of the people among whom she travelled, without overestimating the former or exaggerating the latter. She found Swedes and Norwegians unaffected and hospitable, but sensual and indolent. Both good and evil she attributes to the influence of climate and to the comparatively low stage of culture attained in these northern countries. The long winter nights, she explains in her letters, have made the people sluggish. Their want of interest in politics, literature, and scientific pursuits have concentrated their attention upon the pleasures of the senses. They are hospitable because of the excitement and social amusements hospitality insures. They care for the flesh-pots of Egypt because they have not yet heard of the joys of the Promised Land. The women of the upper classes are so indolent that they exercise neither mind nor body; consequently the former has but a narrow range, the latter soon loses all beauty. The men seek no relaxation from their business occupations save in Brobdingnagian dinners and suppers. If they are godly, they are never cleanly, cleanliness requiring an effort of which they are incapable. Indolence and indifference to culture throughout Sweden and Norway are the chief characteristics of the natives.

To Mary the coarseness of the people seemed the more unbearable because of the wonderful beauty of their country as she saw it in midsummer. She could not understand their continued indifference to its loveliness. Her own keen enjoyment of it shows itself in all her letters. She constantly pauses in relating her experiences to dwell upon the grandeur of cliffs and sea, upon the impressive wildness of certain districts, full of great pine-covered mountains and endless fir woods, contrasting with others more gentle and fertile, which are covered with broad fields of corn and rye. She loves to describe the long still summer nights and the gray dawn when the birds begin to sing, the sweet scents of the forest, and the soft freshness of the western breeze. The smallest details of the living picture do not escape her notice. She records the musical tinkling of distant cow-bells and the mournful cry of the bittern. She even tells how she sometimes, when she is out in her boat, lays down her oars that she may examine the purple masses of jelly-fish floating in the water. Truly, her ways were not as those of the Philistines around her.

The following extract from a letter written from Gothenburg gives a good idea of the impression made upon her by the moral ugliness and natural beauty which she met wherever she went. The passage is characteristic, since its themes are the two to which she most frequently recurs:—

As might be expected, judging from Mary’s natural benevolence, the poverty and misery she saw during her journey awakened feelings of deep compassion. She describes in tones of pity the wretched condition of the lower classes in Sweden. Servants, she writes, are no better than slaves. They are beaten and maltreated by their masters, and are paid so little that they cannot afford to wear sufficient clothing or to eat decent food. Laborers live in huts wretched beyond belief, and herd together like animals. They have so accustomed themselves to a stifling atmosphere, that fresh air is never let into their houses even in summer, and the mere idea of cleanliness is beyond their comprehension. Indolence is their failing as well as that of their superiors in rank. Many in their brutishness refuse to exert themselves save to find the food absolutely necessary to support life, and are too sluggish to be curious. It is pleasant to know that they have at least one good quality, in the exercise of which they surpass the rich. This is politeness, the national virtue. Mary observes:—

Mary found the condition of the Norwegians somewhat better. The lower classes were freer, more industrious, and more opulent. She describes their inns as comfortable, whereas those of the Swedes had not been even inhabitable. The upper classes, though, like the Swedes, over-fond of the pleasures of the table, narrow in their range of ideas, and wholly without imagination, at least gave some signs of better days in their dawning interest in culture. She writes:—

She remained in Copenhagen and Hamburg but a short time. Imlay’s unkindness and indecision had, by the time she reached Holland, so increased her melancholy that the good effect of the bracing northern air was partially destroyed. She lost her interest in the novelty of her surroundings, and as she says in one of her last letters, stayed much at home. But her perceptive faculties were not wholly deadened. She notes with her usual precision the indolence and dulness of the Danes, and the unwavering devotion of the Hamburgers to commerce, and describes the towns of Hamburg and Copenhagen with graphic force. These descriptions are well worth reading.

It was always impossible for Mary not to reflect and moralize upon what passed around her. She not only wanted to examine and record phenomena and events, but to discover a reason for their existence. She invariably sought for the primal causes and the final results of the facts in which she was interested. The civilization of the northern countries through which she travelled, so different from the culture of England and France, gave her ample food for thought. The reflections it aroused found their way into her letters. Some of them are really remarkable, as for example, the following:—

“Arriving at Sleswick, the residence of Prince Charles of Hesse-Cassel, the sight of the soldiers recalled all the unpleasing ideas of German despotism, which imperceptibly vanished as I advanced into the country. I viewed, with a mixture of pity and horror, these beings training to be sold to slaughter, or be slaughtered, and fell into reflections on an old opinion of mine, that it is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of the Deity throughout the whole of nature. Blossoms come forth only to be blighted; fish lay their spawn where it will be devoured; and what a large portion of the human race are born merely to be swept prematurely away! Does not this waste of budding life emphatically assert, that it is not men, but man, whose preservation is so necessary to the completion of the grand plan of the universe? Children peep into existence, suffer, and die; men play like moths about a candle, and sink into the flame; war and the ‘thousand ills which flesh is heir to’ mow them down in shoals, whilst the more cruel prejudices of society palsy existence, introducing not less sure, though slower decay.”