Religion, therefore, is an essential part of Mary Wollstonecraft's educational plan. It is true that the child cannot grasp the fundamental truths, its power of reasoning being as yet limited, and should not for this reason be permitted to read the Bible. But her girls are taught from the first that "religion ought to be the active director of our affections" and that "happiness can only arise from imitating God in a life guided by considerations of virtue. Virtue, according to her mouth-piece Mrs. Mason, is "the exercise of benevolent affections to please God and bring comfort and happiness here, and become angels hereafter."
In the "Original Stories" we have some of the theories of the Rights of Women presented to us in a nutshell. They claim for girls equality of education with boys, and indirectly deny the sexual character theory, based on that of innate principles, which Mary Wollstonecraft agreed with Godwin did not exist. Rousseau held that Reason was the prerogative of Man, and that Woman's substitute for it was Sensibility. Man was made to think, and Woman to feel. "Whatever is in Nature is right", was the axiom he applied to the case of Woman. Nature meant her to be kept in a state of subjection to Man, and to give her an education without regarding the limitations of her sex would have seemed to him flying in the face of providence.
Mary Wollstonecraft's views of society were sufficiently pessimistic to consider the average parent utterly unfit to educate a child. She therefore adhered to Rousseau's idea of a preceptor. Her two girls, Mary and Caroline, aged 14 and 12, far from having been kept in ignorance, and further handicapped by the death of their mother, had already imbibed some false notions and prejudices. Mary's judgment was not sufficiently cool to make her realise that appearances are often deceptive, and that bodily defects may be found together with excellent moral qualities. She had an unfortunate turn for ridicule. Her sister Caroline, by being vain of her person, proved that she did not understand the source of true merit. It was, therefore, the task of their monitress to carefully eradicate these prejudices and to substitute for them correct notions of true virtue. In Mrs. Mason, Mary Wollstonecraft enriched English literature with the portrait of the typical British matron with "no nonsense about her", but in making this woman her mouth-piece she scarcely did justice to the qualities of her own heart. It was the struggle of her life to make her heart yield to the dictates of Reason, and Mrs. Mason certainly does not impress the reader as struggling very hard. She is the embodiment of pure, undiluted Reason in all its unyielding sternness. Any show of tenderness towards her charges would have seemed to her a confession of weakness. When after a long spell of life together she returns them to their father, they have advanced just far enough in her affection to be termed "candidates for her friendship"; which, by the way, is meant to imply that they have made satisfactory progress in the faculty of Reason.
Mary Wollstonecraft for the moment does not seem to realise that the essential quality in an educator should be to make her pupils not only respect, but also love her, and Mrs. Mason is a most unloveable person. Her haughty arrogance and insufferable self-sufficiency were not likely to escape her eldest pupil's sense of humour and could not but seriously affect her influence over the girls. Thus the children of Mary Wollstonecraft's fancy are brought up in the midst of reasoning logic, unwarmed by the sunshine of parental love.
To make matters worse, this champion of liberty, who found fault with Rousseau for failing to see that his schemes of freedom applied with equal justice to women; who was soon herself to protest against the abuse of parental authority, who held with Locke that "if the mind be curbed and humbled too much in children, if the spirit be abased and broken much by too strict a hand over them, they lose all their vigour and industry",[40] herself made the fatal mistake of aiding and abetting the thraldom of the young girl. The education which Mary and Caroline receive is nothing but a dreary course of constant admonition, in which the word liberty would be utterly misplaced. She has entirely failed to catch the spirit of Rousseau's Emile, in which the instructor only prevents the pupil from hurting himself overmuch through his ignorance, leaving him otherwise free to draw the conclusions of awakening Reason, and above all allowing him to live out his life. Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton go together for long walks in the woods, get lost and owe their rescue to the lucky accident of meeting a boy who takes them to his home. When Mr. Barlow is informed that the boys have turned up, he goes to meet them on their way home and merely tells them to be more careful in future, availing himself of the incident to instil certain lessons in geography which smack of Rousseau. But their liberty is in no way cramped. With Mary Wollstonecraft, however, the case is entirely different. One wonders what sort of paragons Mrs. Mason was going to turn out. The chances would seem pretty even between prim old maids and confirmed young hypocrites, depending on those very innate tendencies she was fain to deny! She held that children should not be left too much freedom, because, the faculty of Reason being as yet insufficiently developed in them, they might make the wrong use of it. But the restrictions on their liberty should be such as to remain almost unnoticed by them. They should not have a variety of prohibitions imposed upon them, as was the case with Lady Kingsborough's children, whom she immediately restored to some degree of liberty. One cannot help thinking that theory and practice often clash, owing to the perpetual conflict between reason and the feelings. Granting, however, that Mrs. Mason had the best and most disinterested intentions, what, we may ask, can be left of liberty to children whom their monitress "never suffers out of her sight?"
In her catalogue of living creatures Mary puts animals at the bottom on account of their being incapable of Reason. They are guided exclusively by instinct, which is a faculty of a coarser growth than Reason. The love of their young, for instance, though sweet to behold, and worthy of imitation, is not in their case dictated by Reason. Next upon the list come children; in them the latent faculty ought to be developed by older and wiser people bringing what Godwin would call "the artillery of Reason" to bear upon the infant mind. Mary Wollstonecraft protests against the arrogance of those philosophers who, while granting their own sex the privilege of an education, wilfully exclude the other half of humanity from the blessings of Reason, which is the only guide to virtue and moral perfection.
When Mary wrote the "Original Stories" she was not more than twenty-nine herself, and had known neither the passion of love nor motherhood. Her all-embracing love of humanity made the subject of interest to her, but there is upon the whole too much of Reason and too little of the heart in the little volume. Circumstances over which she had no control were soon to teach her for good and all that the affections will not be suppressed and peremptorily demand their share. When next she touched upon the subject she was a mother and confronted with the task of educating her own child in the long and frequent absences of a faithless and undeserving father. The "First Lessons for an Infant" in Volume II of the posthumous edition of her works are the result of the joint teachings of maternal love and bitter experience. Here she is herself, an essentially human, loving woman, overflowing with tenderness and bound up closely with her child not merely by the ties of duty, but by those of an all-absorbing affection. Having thus tried to do justice to the author by accounting for what seems contradictory, we may frankly say that Mrs. Mason is an insufferable pedant. The Mr. Barlow of Sandford and Merton, while constantly moralising,—in doing which he draws far more sweeping conclusions than even Mrs. Mason—and arranging incidents to illustrate and anticipate his moral lessons like the best of stage-managers[41], at least does not obtrude her own personality. But the impeccable Mrs. Mason in her boundless self-confidence never loses an opportunity to introduce her own personality. Her benevolence is unlimited, and she is utterly incapable of doing wrong. If she inflicts bodily pain, it is that Reason has whispered to her that in doing so she avoids a greater evil. She puts her foot deliberately on a wounded bird's head, "turning her own the other way". She teaches by example rather than precept, and the example somehow seems to be always herself. Never for a moment are the girls allowed a rest from the moral deluge. The first eight chapters of the little book contain the moral food for one single day, carefully divided into a morning, an afternoon and an evening of incessant moralising. Yet she is "naive" enough to imagine that she teaches imperceptibly, by rendering the subject amusing! If Mary Wollstonecraft had possessed the slightest indication of a possible sense of humour, the absurdity of the Mrs. Mason portrait would have struck her. But she had not, and while relating the most ludicrous incidents, she always remains terribly in earnest!
There is something distinctly oppressive, too, about Mrs. Mason's benevolence. She relieves the distress of the poor, but while doing so her coldly critical eye wanders about the humble cottage and makes the poor wretch feel uncomfortably conscious of its generally unfinished appearance. With her, Reason is always enthroned. The passions are not to be mentioned in her presence. And yet, her cupboard, too, has its skeleton. Early attachments, we are informed, have been broken, her own husband has died, followed by her only child, "in whom her husband died again". Her afflictions have taught her to pin her faith on the hope of eternity, in doing which she has unfortunately forgotten to learn the lesson of earthly suffering and to realise her own imperfections. The virtue of modesty, which she recommends to the girls in contrasting the sweet and graceful rose to the bold and flaunting tulip (!) was not among her many accomplishments.
The little book prepares the reader's mind for the "Vindication of the Rights of Women," which was soon to follow, in that it contains a long plea for the glorious faculty of Reason, leading to virtue. The heart should be carefully regulated by the understanding to prevent its running amuck. All errors are due to a relegation of Reason to an inferior position; a systematical application, however, cannot fail to conduct towards perfection.
One seems too be listening to the sweeping assertions of Political Justice, which was to appear a few years later and in which the general philosophical tendencies of the revolutionary movement were gathered up and stated with bold radicalism. The main line of thought which Godwin followed, and the tendency to resort to "first principles" is everywhere manifest. To call girls "rational creatures" for doing what their monitress expects of them is to give them the most unstinted praise. The absolute subjection of the poor children to their governess is the necessary outcome of the infallibility of the latter's superior Reason, which renders implicit obedience the interest of the former. In her discussion of the filial duties in connection with the parental affections in the Vindication, Mary Wollstonecraft insists on just such a degree of obedience as is compatible with the child's obvious interest. Nor is the respect due to superior Reason lost sight of when she opines with respect to marriage that, although after one and twenty a parent has no right to withhold his consent on any account, yet the son ought to promise not to marry for two or three years, should the object of his choice not meet with the approbation of his "first friend". Thus the principles of liberty and obedience are made to fit each other.