Another thing to come under the saucy young Templar’s notice was that, whilst having altogether the ‘appearance of a Dissenting minister,’ his companion lacked the colloquial address of a gentleman of society and breeding. His articulation wanted distinctness, and his uneasy utterance was attended by a show of effort and distress, that might almost be called an impediment. But though painful on being noticed for the first time, this difficulty ceased to trouble listeners when they grew accustomed to it, and even gave an agreeable distinctiveness to a somewhat harsh and discordant voice.
William Godwin’s moral nature resembled his appearance and manner, in comprising several agreeable and commendable qualities, without being altogether pleasing or in any degree remarkable for dignity. To the last, also, it resembled them in affording indications of the humility of his original condition and earlier circumstances. The man of intellect, whose costume and bearing reminded people that he had formerly been a Dissenting minister in small market-towns, never survived the influence of the rural conventicle; never outlived the social influences of the humble and unrefined people, who had surrounded him in his days of ministerial service. The egregious vanity, that animated him from youth to old age, was not the almost generous infirmity to be observed in the elegant and refined, but the mean and despicable vanity of the rude and vulgar-minded. Ever accessible to flatterers, he swallowed the grossest adulations with keen relish;—with ludicrous greed, if it were prepared for his palate by feminine artifice. When the postman laid a letter on his Skinner-Street shop-counter, the philosopher’s countenance flushed if he saw himself designated in the superscription ‘Mr. Godwin,’ instead of ‘William Godwin, esquire.’
On the other hand, he had numerous good qualities. He was, upon the whole, truthful and honest; just to men he disliked and principles he disapproved, and altogether the benevolent man he commended himself for being. In all that related to, his opinions on politics, religion, and the social virtues, and his ways of promulgating and enforcing those opinions, he was sincere as sunlight, and absolutely cantless. The only fault of his sympathetic and judicious benevolence was that it sometimes exceeded his means. Alike in the days when he was a needy hack, in his brief term of prosperity, and in the long period of his financial difficulties, poor people hung about him and had money from him. Beneficent to his indigent relatives, he was no less beneficent to persons not of his kindred. The interest he displayed in young men, and the pains he took for their mental, moral, and material welfare, cannot be too highly commended. From the date of his marriage with Mary Wollstonecraft, he was a bright example of domestic virtue. A good husband to that curious woman, who, during their brief association, tried him not a little with her captious and querulous temper; he was a good husband to his second wife, who (though by no means so bad a person as the wilder Shelleyan enthusiasts would have us believe) tried him for a long period almost as vexatiously as Mary Wollstonecraft tried him for a short one. A man is not to be extolled for being good to his own children. But it is much to Godwin’s credit that, whilst he was a good father to his daughter by Mary Wollstonecraft, and to his son by his second wife, he was quite as good a father to his three step-children—to Mary Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate daughter Fanny, to Charles Clairmont (the second Mrs. Godwin’s son by her former husband), and to Charles’s sister Jane,—the Jane Clairmont alias Claire of Byronic story.
But though he is to be respected for all these good, honest, wholesome qualities, it remains that Godwin’s unemotional nature and unrefined homeliness forbid the biographer to write rapturously about him. No considerable man of letters has, in recent times, been more curiously wanting in the mental, moral, and personal graces, which the fancy is apt to associate with famous followers of the higher arts. Though he wrote many novels (one of them being a tale of no uncommon vigour), he was curiously wanting in romantic fervour and imaginativeness. Though he was ambitious of writing for the stage, and made several essays in dramatic literature, he was absolutely devoid of poetical sensibility. Capable of firm, though cold, friendship, he was absolutely incapable of love. When it occurred to him, in his twenty-ninth year, that he might as well have a wife to cook his daily chop and look after his shirt-buttons, he commissioned his sister to look out for a suitable young woman. In middle-age, when he slipped from ordinary friendship into a closer alliance with Mary Wollstonecraft, he was careful to provide himself with a peculiar and private lodging at a convenient distance from their common home in ‘The Polygon,’ Somers Town, in order that he might be able to spend most of his time well out of her way. Some ten or twelve months later, Mary Wollstonecraft was on her death-bed, sinking tranquilly, even happily, out of this life, under the soothing influence of an anodyne, given her a short time before by her medical attendant. ‘Oh, Godwin, I am in heaven!’ she ejaculated, in gratitude for the effect of the medicine, to her husband, standing over her. ‘You mean, my dear,’ he replied with more self-command than tenderness, ‘that your physical sensations are somewhat easier.’ It is all well, and very amusing, for Mr. Kegan Paul to gush over the ‘blight’ that came to Godwin’s heart and life, from his ‘untimeous’ loss of the woman he never loved,—the woman whose tenderest feelings for him differed widely from the emotions of love. But readers of this page can need no assurance that the materialist, who reproved his wife so drolly for thinking herself in heaven, never took her to his embrace because he thought her an angel.
CHAPTER II.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT.
The new Settler in George Street, Blackfriars—Mary’s earlier Story—Woman of Letters—Her Five Years’ Work—Her Attachment to Mr. Johnson—Coteries of Philosophical Radicalism—Anti-Jacobin on the Free Contract—Godwin’s Apostasy—From Blackfriars to Store Street—The Slut becomes a modish Woman—Her Passion for Fuseli—Her Appeal to Mrs. Fuseli—Mr. Kegan Paul’s strange Treatment of Mr. Knowles—Rights of Woman—Plain Speech and Coarseness—Mary goes to Paris—She makes Imlay’s Acquaintance—Her Assignations with him at the Barrier—Their Association in Free Love—Mr. Kegan Paul speaks deliberately—His Apology for Mary’s Action—He falls between Two Stools—Wife in the eyes of God and Man—Letters to Imlay—Badness of Mary’s Temper—Her consequent Quarrels with Imlay—Her Sense of Shame at her Position—Birth of her illegitimate Child—Her Withdrawal from France—Her Norwegian Trip—Her Wretchedness and Rage—Dissolution of the Free Love Partnership—Mary’s Attempt to commit Suicide—Was she out of her Mind?—Her Union with Godwin in Free Love—Their subsequent Marriage—Their Squabbles and Differences—Their Daughter’s Birth—Mary Wollstonecraft’s Death—Mrs. Shelley’s biographical Inaccuracies.
On or about St. Michael’s Day of 1787, a woman, whose dress betrayed an unfeminine indifference to the refinements of costume, and whose intelligent countenance possessed no beauty superior to ordinary comeliness, took possession of her new quarters in a small house in George Street, Blackfriars, which had been hired for her occupation, and provided with a few needful articles of furniture, by Mr. Joseph Johnson, the bookseller and publisher of St. Paul’s Churchyard. No longer young, though courtesy would still style her so, this woman,—whose abundant brown-auburn tresses showed no threads of grey, whose clear and clever brown eyes would have been more effective had not one of them suffered from a slight paralytic drooping of the lid, whose complexion preserved a girlish freshness, and whose countenance would have been more agreeable had it not been for certain indications of sadness and asperity,—was in the middle of her twenty-ninth year, when she crossed the threshold of her new home for the first time. At that season of her history, no casual observer of her face was likely to regard it with admiration; but few attentive scrutinizers of its lineaments failed to discover in them the signs of intellectual force. To take a fair view of this woman’s future behaviour, and see how far she has been misrepresented by censors and flatterers, it is needful to glance at her earlier story.