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:—
“Weeping, scarcely conscious that I weep, O France! over the vestiges of thy former oppression, which, separating man from man with a fence of iron, sophisticated all, and made many completely wretched, I tremble, lest I should meet some unfortunate being, fleeing from the despotism of licentious freedom, hearing the snap of the guillotine at his heels, merely because he was once noble, or has afforded an asylum to those whose only crime is their name; and, if my pen almost bound with eagerness to record the day that levelled the Bastille with the dust, making the towers of despair tremble to their base, the recollection that still the abbey is appropriated to hold the victims of revenge and suspicion palsies the hand that would fain do justice to the assault, which tumbled into heaps of ruins, walls that seemed to mock the resistless force of time. Down fell the temple of despotism; but—despotism has not been buried in its ruins! Unhappy country! when will thy children cease to tear thy bosom? When will a change of opinion, producing a change of morals, render thee truly free? When will truth give life to real magnanimity, and justice place equality on a stable seat? When will thy sons trust, because they deserve to be trusted; and private virtue become the guarantee of patriotism? Ah! when will thy government become the most perfect, because thy citizens are the most virtuous?”
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,—
“... Scenes like these
Have almost lived before me, when I gazed
Upon their fair resemblance traced by him
Who sung the banished man of Ardebeil,
Or to the eye of Fancy held by her,
Who among Women left no equal mind
When from the world she passed; and I could weep
To think that She is to the grave gone down!”
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:—