Indeed, there must have been beneath all his coldness a substratum of warm and strong feeling. He possessed to a rare degree the power of making friends and of giving sympathy to his fellow-beings. The man who can command the affection of others, and enter into their emotions, must know how to feel himself. It was for more than his intellect that he was loved by men like Holcroft and Josiah Wedgwood, like Coleridge and Lamb, and that he was sought after by beautiful and clever women. His talents alone would not have won the hearts of young men, and yet he invariably made friends with those who came under his influence. Willis Webb and Thomas Cooper, who, in his earlier London life, lived with him as pupils, not only respected but loved him, and gave him their confidence. In a later generation, youthful enthusiasts, of whom Bulwer and Shelley are the most notable, looked upon Godwin as the chief apostle in the cause of humanity, and, beginning by admiring him as a philosopher, finished by loving him as a man. Those who know him only through his works or by reading his biography, cannot altogether understand how it was that he thus attracted and held the affections of so many men and women. But the truth is that, while Godwin was naturally a man of an uncommonly cold temperament, much of his emotional insensibility was artificially produced by his puritanical training. He was perfectly honest when in his philosophy of life he banished the passions from his calculations. He was so thoroughly schooled in stifling emotion and its expression, that he thought himself incapable of passional excitement, and, reasoning from his own experience, failed to appreciate its importance in shaping the course of human affairs. But it may be that people brought into personal contact with him felt that beneath his passive exterior there was at least the possibility of passion. Mary Wollstonecraft was the first to develop this possibility into certainty, and to arouse Godwin to a consciousness of its existence. She revolutionized not only his life, but his social doctrines. Through her he discovered the flaw in his arguments, and then honestly confessed his mistake to the world. A few years after her death he wrote in the Introduction to “St. Leon:”—
“... I think it necessary to say on the present occasion ... that for more than four years I have been anxious for opportunity and leisure to modify some of the earlier chapters of that work [“Political Justice”] in conformity to the sentiments inculcated in this. Not that I see cause to make any change respecting the principle of justice, or anything else fundamental to the system there delivered; but that I apprehend domestic and private affections inseparable from the nature of man, and from what may be styled the culture of the heart, and am fully persuaded that they are not incompatible with a profound and active sense of justice in the mind of him that cherishes them.”
When Godwin met Mary, after her desertion by Imlay, he was forty years of age, in the full prime and vigor of his intellect, and in the height of his fame. She was thirty-seven, only three years his junior. She was the cleverest woman in England. Her talents had matured, and grief had made her strong. She was strikingly handsome. She had, by her struggles and sufferings, acquired what she calls in her “Rights of Women” a physionomie. Even Mrs. Inchbald and Mrs. Reveley, hard as life had gone with them, had never approached the depth of misery which she had fathomed. The eventful meeting took place in the month of January, 1796, shortly after Mary had returned from her travels in the North. Miss Hayes invited Godwin to come to her house one evening when Mary expected to be there. He accepted her invitation without hesitation, but evinced no great eagerness.
“I will do myself the pleasure of waiting on you Friday,” he wrote, “and shall be happy to meet Mrs. Wollstonecraft, of whom I know not that I ever said a word of harm, and who has frequently amused herself with depreciating me. But I trust you acknowledge in me the reality of a habit upon which I pique myself, that I speak of the qualities of others uninfluenced by personal considerations, and am as prompt to do justice to an enemy as to a friend.”
The meeting was more propitious than their first some few years earlier had been. Godwin had, with others, heard her sad story, and felt sorry for her, and perhaps admired her for her bold practical application of his principles. This was better than the positive dislike with which she had once inspired him. But still his feeling for her was negative. He would probably never have made an effort to see her again. What Mary thought of him has not been recorded. But she must have been favorably impressed, for when she came back to London from her trip to Berkshire, she called upon him in his lodgings in Somer’s Town. He, in the mean time, had read her “Letters from Norway,” and they had given him a higher respect for her talents. The inaccuracies and the roughness of style which had displeased him in her earlier works had disappeared. There was no fault to be found with the book, but much to be said in its praise. Once she had pleased him intellectually, he began to discover her other attractions, and to enjoy being with her. Her conversation, instead of wearying him, as it once had, interested him. He no longer thought her forward and conceited, but succumbed to her personal charms. How great these were can be learned from the following description of her character written by Mrs. Shelley, who obtained her knowledge from her mother’s intimate acquaintances. She says:—
“Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those beings who appear once perhaps in a generation to gild humanity with a ray which no difference of opinion nor chance of circumstance can cloud. Her genius was undeniable. She had been bred in the hard school of adversity, and having experienced the sorrows entailed on the poor and the oppressed, an earnest desire was kindled in her to diminish these sorrows. Her sound understanding, her intrepidity, her sensibility and eager sympathy, stamped all her writings with force and truth, and endowed them with a tender charm which enchants while it enlightens. She was one whom all loved who had ever seen her. Many years are passed since that beating heart has been laid in the cold, still grave, but no one who has ever seen her speaks of her without enthusiastic veneration. Did she witness an act of injustice, she came boldly forward to point it out and induce its reparation; was there discord between friends or relatives, she stood by the weaker party, and by her earnest appeals and kindliness awoke latent affection, and healed all wounds. ‘Open as day to melting charity,’ with a heart brimful of generous affection, yearning for sympathy, she had fallen on evil days, and her life had been one course of hardship, poverty, lonely struggle, and bitter disappointment.
“Godwin met her at the moment when she was deeply depressed by the ingratitude of one utterly incapable of appreciating her excellence; who had stolen her heart, and availed himself of her excessive and thoughtless generosity and lofty independence of character, to plunge her in difficulties and then desert her. Difficulties, worldly difficulties, indeed, she set at naught, compared with her despair of good, her confidence betrayed, and when once she could conquer the misery that clung to her heart, she struggled cheerfully to meet the poverty that was her inheritance, and to do her duty by her darling child.”
Godwin now began to see her frequently. She had established herself in rooms in Gumming Street, Pentonville, where she was very near him. They met often at the houses of Miss Hayes, Mr. Johnson, and other mutual friends. Her interests and tastes were the same as his; and this fact he recognized more fully as time went on. It is probably because his thoughts were so much with her, that the work he accomplished during this year was comparatively small. None of the other women he knew and admired had made him act spontaneously and forget to reason out his conduct as she did. He really had at one time thought of making Amelia Alderson his wife, but this, for some unrecorded reason, proving an impossibility, he calmly dismissed the suggestion from his mind and continued the friend he had been before. Had Mrs. Reveley been single he might have allowed himself to love her, as he did later, when he was a widower and she a widow. But so long as her husband was alive, and he knew he had no right to do so, he, with perfect equanimity, regulated his affection to suit the circumstances. But he never reasoned either for or against his love for Mary Wollstonecraft. It sprang from his heart, and it had grown into a strong passion before he had paused to deliberate as to its advisability.
As for Mary, Godwin’s friendship coming just when it did was an inestimable service. Never in all her life had she needed sympathy as she did then. She was virtually alone. Her friends were kind, but their kindness could not quite take the place of the individual love she craved. Imlay had given it to her for a while, and her short-lived happiness with him made her present loneliness seem more unendurable. Her separation from him really dated back to the time when she left Havre. Her affection for him had been destroyed sooner than she thought because she had struggled bravely to retain it for the sake of her child. The gayety and many distractions of London life could not drown her heart’s wretchedness. It was through Godwin that she became reconciled to England, to life, and to herself. He revived her enthusiasm and renewed her interest in the world and mankind; but above all he gave her that special devotion without which she but half lived. In the restlessness that followed her loss of Imlay’s love, she had resolved to make the tour of Italy or Switzerland. Therefore when she had returned to London, expecting it to be but a temporary resting-place, she had taken furnished lodgings. “Now, however,” as Godwin says in his Memoirs, “she felt herself reconciled to a longer abode in England, probably without exactly knowing why this change had taken place in her mind.” She moved to other rooms in the extremity of Somer’s Town, and filled them with the furniture she had used in Store Street in the first days of her prosperity, and which had since been packed away. The unpacking of this furniture was with her what the removal of widows’ weeds is with other women. Her first love had perished; but from it rose another stronger and better, just as the ripening of autumn’s fruits follows the withering of spring’s blossoms. She mastered the harvest-secret, learning the value of that death which yields higher fruition.
In July, Godwin left London and spent the month in Norfolk. Absence from Mary made him realize more than he had hitherto done that she had become indispensable to his happiness. She was constantly in his thoughts. The more he meditated upon her, the more he appreciated her. There was less pleasure in his excursion than in the meeting with her which followed it. They were both glad to be together again; nor did they hesitate to make their gladness evident. At the end of three weeks they had confessed to each other that they could no longer live apart. Henceforward their lines must be cast in the same places. Godwin’s story of their courtship is eloquent in its simplicity. It is almost impossible to believe that it was written by the author of “Political Justice.”