She is too ready to moralize, and her moralizing degenerates unfortunately often into commonplace platitudes. She is even at times disagreeably pompous and authoritative, and preaches rather than argues. This was due partly to a then prevailing tendency in literature. Every writer—essayist, poet, and novelist—preached in those days. Mary frequently forgets she has a cause to prove in her desire to teach a lesson. She exhorts her sisters as a minister might appeal to his brethren, and this resemblance is made still more striking by the oratorical flights or prayers with which she interrupts her argument to address her Creator. Moreover, the book is throughout, as Leslie Stephen says, “rhetorical rather than speculative.” It is unmistakably the creation of a zealous partisan, and not of a calm advocate. It reads more like an extempore declamation than a deliberately written essay. Godwin says, as if in praise, that it was begun and finished within six weeks. It would have been better had the same number of months or years been devoted to it. Because of the lack of all method it is so full of repetition that the argument is weakened rather than strengthened. She is so certain of the truth of abstract principles from which she reasons, that she does not trouble herself to convince the sceptical by concrete proofs. Owing to this want of system, the “Vindication” has little value as a philosophical work. Women to-day, with none of her genius, have written on the same subject books which exert greater influence than hers, because they have appreciated the importance of a definite plan.
Great as are these faults, they are more than counterbalanced by the merits of the book. All the flowers of rhetoric cannot conceal its genuineness. As is always the case with the work of honest writers, it commands respect even from those who disapprove of its doctrine and criticise its style. Despite its moralizing it is strong with the strength born of an earnest purpose. It was written neither for money nor for amusement, too often the inspiration to book-making. The one she had not time to seek; the other she could have obtained with more certainty by translating for Mr. Johnson, or by contributing to the “Analytical Review.” She wrote it because she thought it her duty to do so, and hence its vigor and eloquence. All her pompous platitudes cannot conceal the earnestness of her denunciation of shams. The “Rights of Women” is an outcry against them. The age was an artificial one. Ladies played at being shepherdesses, and men wept over dead donkeys. Sensibility was a cultivated virtue, and philanthropy a pastime. Women were the arch-sufferers from this evil; but, pleased at being likened unto angels, they failed to see that the ideal set up for them was false. It is to Mary’s glory that she could penetrate the mists of prevailing prejudices and see the clear unadulterated truth. The excess of sentimentalism had given rise to the other extreme of naturalism. In France the reaction against arbitrary laws, empty forms, and the unjust privileges of rank, led to the French Revolution. In England its outcome was a Wesley in religious speculation, a Wilkes in political action, and a Godwin and a Paine in social and political theorizing. But those who were most eager to uphold reason as a guide to the conduct of men, had nothing to say in behalf of women. Even the reformers, by ignoring their cause, seemed to look upon them as beings belonging to another world. Day, in his “Sandford and Merton,” was the only man in the least practical where the weaker sex was concerned. Mary knew that no reform would be complete which did not recognize the fact that what is law and truth for man must be so for women also. She carried the arguments for human equality to their logical conclusion. Her theories are to the philosophy of the Revolutionists what modern rationalism is to the doctrine of the right of private judgment. She saw the evil to which greater philosophers than she had been indifferent. The same contempt for conventional standards which characterized her actions inspired her thoughts. Once she had evolved this belief, she felt the necessity of proclaiming it to the world at large; and herein consists her greatness. “To believe your own thought,” Emerson says, “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.” The “Vindication of the Rights of Women” will always live because it is the work of inspiration, the words of one who speaketh with authority.
Furthermore, another and very great merit of the book is that the ideas expressed in it are full of common sense, and eminently practical. Mary’s educational theories, far in advance of her time, are now being to a great extent realized. The number of successful women physicians show how right she was in supposing medicine to be a profession to which they are well suited. The ability which a few women have manifested as school directors and in other minor official positions confirms her belief in the good to be accomplished by giving them a voice in social and political matters. But what is especially to her credit is her moderation. Apostles of a new cause or teachers of a new doctrine are, as a rule, enthusiasts or extremists who lose all sense of the fitness of things. A Diogenes, to express his contempt for human nature, must needs live in a tub. A Fox knows no escape from the shams of society, save flight to the woods and an exchange of linen and cloth covering for a suit of leather. But Mary’s enthusiasm did not make her blind; she knew that women were wronged by the existing state of affairs; but she did not for this reason believe that they must be removed to a new sphere of action. She defended their rights, not to unfit them for duties assigned them by natural and social necessities, but that they might fulfil them the better. She eloquently denied their inferiority to men, not that they might claim superiority, but simply that they might show themselves to be the equals of the other sex. Woman was to fight for her liberty that she might in deed and in truth be worthy to have her children and her husband rise up and call her blessed!
CHAPTER VII.
VISIT TO PARIS.
1792-1793.
The “Vindication of the Rights of Women” made Mary still more generally known. Its fame spread far and wide, not only at home but abroad, where it was translated into German and French. Like Paine’s “Rights of Man,” or Malthus’ “Essay on the Theory of Population,” it advanced new doctrines which threatened to overturn existing social relations, and it consequently struck men with fear and wonder, and evoked more censure than praise. To-day, after many years’ agitation, the question of women’s rights still creates contention. The excitement caused by the first word in its favor may, therefore, be easily imagined. If one of the bondsmen helping to drag stones for the pyramids, or one of the many thousand slaves in Athens, had claimed independence, Egyptians or Greeks could not have been more surprised than Englishmen were at a woman’s assertion that, mentally, she was man’s equal. Some were disgusted with such a bold breaking of conventional chains; a few were startled into admiration. Much of the public amazement was due not only to the principles of the book, but to its warmth and earnestness. As Miss Thackeray says, the English authoresses of those days “kept their readers carefully at pen’s length, and seemed for the most part to be so conscious of their surprising achievement in the way of literature, as never to forget for a single minute that they were in print.” But here was a woman who wrote eloquently from her heart, who told people boldly what she thought upon subjects of which her sex, as a rule, pretended to know nothing, and who forgot herself in her interest in her work. It was natural that curiosity was felt as to what manner of being she was, and that curiosity changed into surprise when, instead of the virago expected, she was found to be, to use Godwin’s words, “lovely in her person, and, in the best and most engaging sense, feminine in her manners.” The fable was in this case reversed. It was the sheep who had appeared in wolf’s clothing.
In her own circle of friends and acquaintances she was lionized. Some of her readers were converted into enthusiasts. One of these—a Mr. John Henry Colls—a few years later addressed a poem to her. However, his admiration unfortunately did not teach him justly to appreciate its object, nor to write good poetry, and his verses have been deservedly forgotten. The reputation she had won by her answer to Burke was now firmly established. She was respected as an independent thinker and a bold dealer with social problems. The “Analytical Review” praised her in a long and leading criticism.
“The lesser wits,” her critic writes, “will probably affect to make themselves merry at the title and apparent object of this publication; but we have no doubt, if even her contemporaries should fail to do her justice, posterity will compensate the defect; and have no hesitation in declaring that if the bulk of the great truths which this publication contains were reduced to practice, the nation would be better, wiser, and happier than it is upon the wretched, trifling, useless, and absurd system of education which is now prevalent.”
But the conservative avoided her and her book as moral plagues. Many people would not even look at what she had written. Satisfied with the old-fashioned way of treating the subjects therein discussed, they would not run the risk of finding out that they were wrong. Their attitude in this respect was much the same as that of Cowper when he refused to read Paine’s “Rights of Man.” “No man,” he said, “shall convince me that I am improperly governed, while I feel the contrary.”