In leaving Mary Wollstonecraft, Imlay took a step that, from the commencement of their association, must have been foreseen as a probable contingency by the woman, who regarded love as the most evanescent of the human passions. In leaving her he merely exercised the right of retirement, which had been reserved alike to him and her by the conditions of their lawless contract. Yet his disposition to leave her was no sooner known to the Free Lovers of her English acquaintance, than they began to think very ill of him. On being assured of his purpose to quit her, because he could not live harmoniously with her, they were quick in declaring him a prodigy of conjugal faithlessness. It is not manifest at the first glance why these enthusiastic advocates of the Free Contract were so indignant with him for retiring from the partnership in accordance with the terms on which he had entered it,—i.e. on the understanding that he should be at liberty to get out of it when he pleased, and that Mary should be at liberty to retire from it when she pleased. The advantage claimed by the Free Lovers for their conjugal arrangement over marriage is, that spouses have this liberty of withdrawing from one another on the death of their mutual affection. Why, then, was Imlay so severely blamed for using the liberty especially reserved to him by the contract he formed with Mary,—by the terms that may be fairly called her own terms? The Free Lovers spoke of him as though, instead of entering into a contract of Free Love with a middle-aged (thirty-four years old) woman, who was a Free Lover in principle before she knew him, he had engaged the affections of a young girl, and lured her into lawful wedlock. They stigmatized him as the heartless betrayer of virginal simplicity and innocence. They charged him with monstrous wickedness in retiring from the contract, which by their own rule he was free to withdraw from as soon as he liked.
The fact is the Free Lovers of ninety years since were angry with Imlay for leaving Mary, not because he acted in violation of their principles or broke the terms of his contract with Mary, but because his rupture with the woman of letters afforded a strong example of the badness of their conjugal method, and tended to discredit their substitute for lawful marriage. The opponents of Free Love were and are in the habit of insisting that libertines would use its freedom, to desert their conjugal mates for slight causes. Imlay’s secession from Mary countenanced this view of Free Love. The opponents of Free Love opposed it on the ground that, if conjugal partnerships could be withdrawn from at pleasure, they would be entered into lightly and without due preliminary inquiry and forethought. The levity with which Mary entered into a contract of Free Love with Imlay, soon after making his acquaintance, and before she learnt his real character (as her friends insist), countenanced this view. Hence the rage of the Free Lovers against Imlay, who retired from the partnership, whilst Mary wished to retain him in it.
Though it seems to have revived some months later, and after its temporary extinction to have regained all its original passionateness, it is not to be imagined that Mary Wollstonecraft’s love of Gilbert Imlay continued to burn steadily after the death of his affection for her. All the more instructive and pathetic are the efforts she made, for her child’s sake, and her own honour’s sake, to hold him to herself, for months after his first manifestation of a desire to be quit of her. Striving to make herself useful to him, in the hope that a care for his selfish interests would retain him in the partnership from which he wished to retreat, she took an interest in his commercial concerns, and went on the voyage to Denmark and Norway, not more for the sake of her own health, than for the advantage of his affairs in those countries. This she did (as Mr. Kegan Paul says) after ‘Imlay’s affection had ceased, and his desertion’ (retirement would be a better word) ‘had practically begun.’ Striving to be useful to him, she tried to please him, even feigned still to love him, though strong affection for him had perished from her heart. To qualify her to do business for him in the foreign lands for which she was bound, Imlay gave her a power-of-attorney, in which he styled her ‘Mary Imlay, my best friend and wife,’—‘a document,’ says Mr. Kegan Paul, ‘which in many cases and countries would be considered as constituting marriage:’ as though it gave the poor woman a colour of matronly honour in history, and were somehow or other a proof that she had, from the commencement of the Free Love contract, ‘considered herself his wife in the eyes of God and man.’ No doubt the document would have been proof of marriage in Scotland to this century, and in other countries previous to the Council of Trent. But Imlay and Mary were not living in Scotland. Nor were they living in times prior to the Council of Trent. The power-of-attorney was signed by Imlay when he had made up his mind never to make her his wife; and she took it abroad with her, when she knew he had ceased to love her and had not made her his wife. For those who peruse them, by the light of the hints given in these and previous pages, there is pathetic instruction in the letters Mary sent her no-longer-loving ‘protector’ from abroad. They are the letters of a woman alternately hoping against hope to revive in Imlay’s breast his old love of her, and despairing to hold him much longer as a friend or even as an acquaintance. From pity, kindness or self-interest (possibly from all three) he wrote to her sometimes in the language of a lover,—letters animating her with hopes, to be dashed by the next post. Returning to England (not in late autumn, as Mr. Kegan Paul asserts, but) on 4th October, 1795, she soon found the vanity of all her hopes and efforts to retain him. By this time Imlay had formed another attachment, had entered into another contract of Free Love,—a fact all the more galling to Mary, because he called his new passion a sacred passion, and justified it with the familiar arguments of the Free Lovers. Resolute to exercise his Free-Love right to retire from the association that had become distasteful to him, he was set on fulfilling the moral engagements of the new partnership in mutual tenderness. His language and tone on these matters were the more exasperating to Mary, because of their conformity to the doctrines of her own philosophic school. In justice to him it must be admitted, even by Mary’s partisans, that he showed no wish to shirk the pecuniary sacrifices, expected from a man of honour, when he transfers his affections from an old to a new mistress. Offering her, pressing upon her, money for her necessities, he undertook to make proper settlements on Mary and her child. With proper spirit she rejected indignantly these offers for herself, though she consented to his proposal to make a settlement on their child. But the bond he gave for this purpose was of no advantage to the child, as neither the principal nor interest of the promised sum was paid; probably because the man of divers financial speculations fell into poverty.
There are passages in the concluding Letters to Imlay fit to be given in evidence that, as the hour of their final separation drew nearer, Mary’s love for him revived and regained all its former force; and it is conceivable that, under the influence of jealousy of the object of Imlay’s new attachment, Mary loved him again in a wild, tempestuous way, as all hope of recovering him to herself and her child died in her breast. Certainly she acted like a woman driven to distraction by the anguish of despised and disappointed love. On the other hand, she did nothing more than many a violent woman has done under the goadings and torture of wounded vanity and injured pride. In her rage and misery, Gilbert Imlay’s whilom mate in Free-Love went one cold and dismal winter’s day to the river’s side near Putney Bridge. On coming to the scene, where she intended to escape from life, she either walked into the river and stood in it, or walked on the Bridge in the pouring rain, until the skirts of her clothing were saturated and heavily charged with water. This having been done, so that a few minutes later her garments should operate as a dead weight in drawing her beneath the tide’s surface, and, at the same time, deprive her limbs of the power to struggle against the cold current, she climbed the parapet of the Bridge,[1] and threw herself into the deep stream. This deliberate attempt at self-murder was, however, unsuccessful, Mary being picked up and saved by the watermen of a passing boat.
Self-murder being a form of wickedness denied by the moral and social proprieties to all persons in their minds, not belonging to the lower orders, and being, therefore, a departure from righteousness that would disqualify Mary for her place of honour in the annals of a respectable county family, it has been decreed by Mary Wollstonecraft’s admirers that she was out of her right mind, to the extent of not knowing what she was doing when she thus attempted to kill herself. Is it not written in Mr. Kegan Paul’s book that Mary’s attempt to drown herself was made when she was ‘driven to despair and was for a time quite out of her mind?’ In connexion with this verdict, it is well to remember that, some time before going down to Putney, Mary wrote a very powerfully worded letter to Imlay, saying therein, ‘I go to find comfort, and my only fear is, that my poor body will be insulted by an endeavour to recall my hated existence. But I shall plunge into the Thames, where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek.’ After writing this quite lucid and well-worded letter, Mary went down to Putney; and, after providing in the most deliberate manner for the achievement of her purpose, she climbed over the side of the Bridge and threw herself into the deep water. When she did all this she was so completely out of her mind, that she should not be deemed accountable for her actions, and cognizant of what she was doing. This is Mr. Kegan Paul’s view of the matter.
It is impossible to trace precisely the course of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life in the last three months of 1795 and the first month of 1796 (from the stormy, hysterical, changeful epistles, that conclude the series of published Letters to Imlay, and other letters of the same period, which I have examined for the illustration of her story); but in December she was still writing to him with a faint, flickering hope of recalling him to her side. On some day of December, subsequent to the 8th of that month, she wrote to him in these words:—
‘Imlay, believe me, it is not romance, you have acknowledged to me feelings of this kind. You could restore me to life and hope, and the satisfaction you would feel would amply repay you. In tearing myself from you, it is my own heart I pierce; and the time will come, when you will lament that you have thrown away a heart that, even in the moment of passion, you cannot despise. I would owe everything to your generosity, but, for God’s sake, keep me no longer in suspense! Let me see you once more.’
This letter is followed by another, written in the same month, ending with ‘I part with you in peace.’ But the final parting was still later. Even so late as 26th January, 1796, she is writing to Mr. A. Hamilton Rowan in terms which indicate a faint, lingering hope that even yet Imlay would at some time of the future, change and return to her. ‘Mr. Imlay,’ she says, ‘would be glad to supply all my pecuniary wants; but unless he returns to himself, I would perish first;’—words showing that, even so late as the last week of January, 1796, she could think of what she would do if Imlay should return to himself, i.e. to her.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter by William Godwin, the daughter who lived to be Mrs. Shelley and mother of the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley, was born on 30th August, 1797, just five calendar months after the marriage (celebrated at old St. Pancras Church, on 29th March, 1797), that united the author of The Rights of Woman and the author of Political Justice in lawful wedlock, when they had already been living several months together in Free Love. The date of the commencement of their association in Free Love is unknown; but whilst it must have been as far back as December, 1796, there is reason for thinking the free-contract was entered into some weeks earlier. It follows, therefore, that the woman who leapt from Putney Bridge in the winter of 1795-6, and had not absolutely despaired, on 26th January, 1796, of seeing her Free Lover Imlay return to himself and her, in something much less than a year, probably in so short a time as nine months, possibly in a much shorter time than nine months, was living in Free Love with her old friend William Godwin,—who was in his forty-first year when he thus took Mary Wollstonecraft Imlay, ætat. thirty-seven, under his protection.
An extant note shows that Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft, or, at least, accepted an invitation to meet her, at the residence of their common friend, Miss Hayes, in January, 1796; and there is reason to believe that the appointment agreed to by this note of acceptance was the first occasion on which Godwin met Mary Wollstonecraft since her return from Norway. That their acquaintance was of much older standing, and had been much more fruitful of intercourse, than Mr. Kegan Paul represents, and Mrs. Shelley imagined, is certain. That Godwin now renewed his acquaintance with her under circumstances, disposing him to think far more favourably of her than he had heretofore done, is also certain. On meeting her again in 1796, the philosopher, who had made her a Free Lover, recognized a martyr to his anti-matrimonial doctrines in the woman, whom he had some four years earlier regarded as too talkative and eager for admiration. Bound, by his principles, to approve the terms of her association with Imlay, he could not withhold his sympathy from a woman who had suffered so severely from her devotion to Free Love doctrine. Approaching her as a fair disciple, who had suffered for the truth’s sake, and for the cause of which he was the chief living representative and vindicator, he desired to show his respect for her, and to comfort her. ‘I found a wounded heart; as that heart cast itself upon me, it was my ambition to heal it,’ he wrote to her soon after their lawful marriage, in reference to the renewal of their acquaintance. They are notable words: indicating, as they do, who made the first advances to the state of mutual regard, that resulted in their marriage. He found in her what he was prepared to find—a wounded heart. The owner of the wounded heart cast herself on the philosopher, who desired to soothe its sorrow.