Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous Women — Mary W. Shelley, Part 1

MARY W.

SHELLEY

Shelley, beloved!

the year has a new name from any thou knowest.

When Spring arrives, leaves that you never saw will shadow the ground, and flowers you never beheld will star it, and the grass will be of another growth.

Thy name is added to the list which makes the earth bold in her age, and proud of what has been.

Time, with slow, but unwearied feet, guides her to the goal that thou hast reached; and I, her unhappy child, am advanced still nearer the hour when my earthly dress shall repose near thine, beneath the tomb of Cestius.

--_Journal of Mary Shelley_ [Illustration: MARY SHELLEY] When Emerson borrowed from Wordsworth that fine phrase about plain living and high thinking, no one was more astonished than he that Whitman and Thoreau should take him at his word.

He was decidedly curious about their experiment.

But he kept a safe distance between himself and the shirt-sleeved Walt; and as for Henry Thoreau--bless me!

Emerson regarded him only as a fine savage, and told him so.

Of course, Emerson loved solitude, but it was the solitude of a library or an orchard, and not the solitude of plain or wilderness.

Emerson looked upon Beautiful Truth as an honored guest.

He adored her, but it was with the adoration of the intellect.

He never got her tag in jolly chase of comradery; nor did he converse with her, soft and low, when only the moon peeked out from behind the silvery clouds, and the nightingale listened.

He never laid himself open to damages.

And when he threw a bit of a bomb into Harvard Divinity School it was the shrewdest bid for fame that ever preacher made.

I said "shrewd"--that's the word.

Emerson had the instincts of Connecticut--that peculiar development of men who have eked out existence on a rocky soil, banking their houses against grim Winter or grimmer savage foes.

With this Yankee shrewdness went a subtle and sweeping imagination, and a fine appreciation of the excellent things that men have said and done.

But he was never so foolish as to imitate the heroic--he, simply admired it from afar.

He advised others to work their poetry up into life, but he did not do so himself.

He never cast the bantling on the rocks, nor caused him to be suckled with the she-wolf's teat.

He admired "abolition" from a distance.

When he went away from home it was always with a return ticket.

He has summed up Friendship in an essay as no other man ever has, and yet there was a self-protective aloofness in his friendship that made icicles gather, as George William Curtis has explained.

In no relation of his life was there a complete abandon.

His "Essay on Self-Reliance" is beef, iron and wine, and "Works and Days" is a tonic for tired men; and yet I know that, in spite of all his pretty talk about living near Nature's heart, he never ventured into the woods outside of hallooing distance from the house.

He could neither ride a horse, shoot, nor sail a boat--and being well aware of it, never tried.

All his farming was done by proxy; and when he writes to Carlyle late in life, explaining how he is worth forty thousand dollars, well secured by first mortgages, he makes clear one-half of his ambition.

And yet, I call him master, and will match my admiration for him 'gainst that of any other, six nights and days together.

But I summon him here only to contrast his character with that of another--another who, like himself, was twice married.

In his "Essay on Love" Emerson reveals just an average sophomore insight;

and in his work I do not find a mention or a trace of influence exercised by either of the two women he wedded, nor by any other woman.

Shelley was what he was through the influence of the two women he married.

Shelley wrecked the life of one of these women.

She found surcease of sorrow in death; and when her body was found in the Serpentine he had a premonition that the hungry waves were waiting for him, too.

But before her death and through her death, she pressed home to him the bitterest sorrow that man can ever know: the combined knowledge that he has mortally injured a human soul and the sense of helplessness to minister to its needs.

Harriet Westbrook said to Shelley, drink ye all of it.

And could he speak now he would say that the bitterness of the potion was a formative influence as potent as that of the gentle ministrations of Mary Wollstonecraft, who broke over his head the precious vase of her heart's love and wiped his feet with the hairs of her head.

In the poetic sweetness, gentleness, lovableness and beauty of their natures, Emerson and Shelley were very similar.

In a like environment they would have done the same things.

A pioneer ancestry with its struggle for material existence would have given Shelley caution; and a noble patronymic, fostered by the State, lax in its discipline, would have made Emerson toss discretion to the winds.

Emerson and Shelley were both apostles of the good, the true and the beautiful.

One of them rests at Sleepy Hollow, his grave marked by a great rough-hewn boulder, while overhead the winds sigh a requiem through the pines.

The ashes of the other were laid beneath the moss-grown wall of the Eternal City, and the creeping vines and flowers, as if jealous of the white, carven marble, snuggle close over the spot with their leaves and petals.

Yet both of these men achieved immortality, for their thoughts live again in the thoughts of the race, and their hopes and their aspirations mingle and are one with the men and women of earth who think and feel and dream.

* * * * * It was Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin who awoke in Shelley such a burst of song that men yet listen to its cadence.

It was she who gave his soul wings: her gentle spirit blending with his made music that has enriched the world.

Without her he was fast beating out his life against the bars of unkind condition, but together they worked and sang.

All his lines were recited to her, all were weighed in the critical balances of her woman's judgment.

She it was who first wrote it out, and then gave it back.

Together they revised; and after he had passed on, she it was who collected the scattered leaves, added the final word, and gave us the book we call "Shelley's Poems."

Perhaps we might call all poetry the child of parents, but with Shelley's poems this is literally true.

Mary Shelley delighted in the name Wollstonecraft.

It was her mother's name; and was not Mary Wollstonecraft the foremost intellectual woman of her day--a woman of purpose, forceful yet gentle, appreciative, kind?

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Seventeen Hundred Fifty-nine; and tiring of the dull monotony of a country town went up to London when yet a child and fought the world alone.

By her own efforts she grew learned; she had all science, all philosophy, all history at her fingers' ends.

She became able to speak several languages, and by her pen an income was secured that was not only sufficient for herself, but ministered to the needs of an aged father and mother and sisters as well.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote one great book (which is all any one can write): "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman."

It sums up all that has since been written on the subject.

Like an essay by Herbert Spencer, it views the matter from every side, anticipates every objection--exhausts the subject.

The literary style of Mary Wollstonecraft's book is Johnsonese, but its thought forms the base of all that has come after.

It is the great-great-grandmother of all woman's clubs and these thousand efforts that women are now putting forth along economic, artistic and social lines.

But we have nearly lost sight of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Can you name me, please, your father's grandmother?

Aye, I thought not; then tell me the name of the man who is now Treasurer of the United States!

And so you see we do not know much about other people, after all.

But Mary Wollstonecraft pushed the question of woman's freedom to its farthest limit; I told you that she exhausted the subject.

She prophesied a day when woman would have economic freedom--that is, be allowed to work at any craft or trade for which her genius fitted her and receive a proper recompense.

Woman would also have social freedom: the right to come and go alone--the privilege of walking upon the street without the company of a man--the right to study and observe.

Next, woman would have political freedom: the right to record her choice in matters of lawmaking.

And last, she would yet have sex freedom: the right to bestow her love without prying police and blundering law interfering in the delicate relations of married life.

To make herself understood.

Mary Wollstonecraft explained that society was tainted with the thought that sex was unclean; but she held high the ideal that this would yet pass away, and that the idea of holding one's mate by statute law would become abhorrent to all good men and women.

She declared that the assumption that law could join a man and a woman in holy wedlock was preposterous, and that the caging of one person by another for a lifetime was essentially barbaric.

Only the love that is free and spontaneous and that holds its own by the purity, the sweetness, the tenderness and the gentleness of its life is divine.

And further, she declared it her belief that when a man had found his true mate such a union would be for life--it could not be otherwise.

And the man holding his mate by the excellence that was in him, instead of by the aid of the law, would be placed, loverlike, on his good behavior, and be a stronger and manlier being.

Such a union, freed from the petty, spying and tyrannical restraints of present usage, must come ere the race could far advance.

Mary Wollstonecraft's book created a sensation.

It was widely read and hotly denounced.

A few upheld it: among these was William Godwin.

But the air was so full of taunt and threat that Miss Wollstonecraft thought best to leave England for a time.

She journeyed to Paris, and there wrote and translated for certain English publishers.

In Paris she met Gilbert Imlay, an American, seemingly of very much the same temperament as herself.

She was thirty-six, he was somewhat younger.

They began housekeeping on the ideal basis.

In a year a daughter was born to them.

When this baby was three months old, Imlay disappeared, leaving Mary penniless and friendless.

It was a terrible blow to this trusting and gentle woman.

But after a good cry or two, philosophy came to her rescue and she decided that to be deserted by a man who did not love her was really not so bad as to be tied to him for life.

She earned a little money and in a short time started back for England with her babe and scanty luggage--sorrowful, yet brave and unsubdued.

She might have left her babe behind, but she scorned the thought.

She would be honest and conceal nothing.

Right must win.

Now, I am told that an unmarried woman with a babe at her breast is not received in England into the best society.

The tale of Mary's misfortune had preceded her, and literary London laughed a hoarse, guttural guffaw, and society tittered to think how this woman who had written so smartly had tried some of her own medicine and found it bitter.

Publishers no longer wanted her work, old friends failed to recognize her, and one man to whom she applied for work brought a rebuke upon his head, that lasted him for years.

Godwin, philosopher, idealist, enthusiast and reformer, who made it his rule to seek out those in trouble, found her and told a needless lie by declaring he had been commissioned by a certain nameless publisher to get her to write certain articles about this and that.

Then he emptied his pockets of all the small change he had, as an advance payment, and he hadn't very much, and started out to find the publisher who would buy the prospective "hot stuff."

Fortunately he succeeded.

After a few weeks, Mr. Godwin, bachelor, aged forty, found himself very much in love with Mary Wollstonecraft and her baby.

Her absolute purity of purpose, her frankness, honesty and high ideals surpassed anything he had ever dreamed of finding incarnated in woman.

He became her sincere lover;

and she, the discarded, the forsaken, reciprocated; for it seems that the tendrils of affection, ruthlessly uprooted, cling to the first object that presents itself.

And so they were married; yes, these two who had so generously repudiated the marriage-tie were married March Twenty-ninth, Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, at Old Saint Pancras Church, for they had come to the sane conclusion that to affront society was not wise.

On August Thirtieth, in the year Seventeen Hundred Ninety-seven, was born to them a daughter.

Then the mother died--died did brave Mary Wollstonecraft, and left behind a girl baby one week old.

And it was this baby, grown to womanhood, who became Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.

* * * * * William Godwin wrote one great book: "Political Justice."

It is a work so high and noble in its outlook that only a Utopia could ever realize its ideals.

When men are everywhere willing to give to other men all the rights they demand for themselves, and co-operation takes the place of competition, then will Godwin's philosophy be not too great and good for daily food.

Among the many who read his book and thought they saw in it the portent of a diviner day was one Percy Bysshe Shelley.

And so it came to pass that about the year Eighteen Hundred Thirteen, this Percy Bysshe Shelley called on Godwin, who was living in a rusty, musty tenement in Somerstown.

The young man was twenty: tall and slender, with as handsome a face as was ever given to mortal.

The face was pale as marble: the features almost feminine in their delicacy: thin lips, straight nose, good teeth, abundant, curling hair, and eyes so dreamy and sorrowful that women on the street would often turn and follow the "angel soul garbed in human form."

This man Shelley was sick at heart, bereft, perplexed, in sore straits, and to whom should he turn for advice in this time of undoing but to Godwin, the philosopher!

Besides, Godwin had been the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, and the splendid precepts of these two had nourished into being all the latent excellence of the youth.

Yes, he would go to Godwin, the Plato of England!