Mary Wollstonecraft: Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories

The odd thing is that every one was equally thoughtless: it is not merely that Mary Wollstonecraft should consider such an intellectual stone as Chapter XV worth preparing for poor little fellow creatures that needed bread; but that her publisher Johnson should consider it the kind of thing to send forth, and that, with artists capable of dramatic interest available, he should hand the commission to illustrate it to William Blake, who, exquisitely charming as were his drawings for his own Songs , was as yet in no sense of the word an ingratiating illustrator of narratives of real life for young eyes. And there still remains the parent or friend who, picking up the book in a shop, considered it the kind of thing to strike a bliss into the soul of Master Henry or Miss Susan as a birthday present. It is all, at this date, so incredible, so shortsighted, so cruel, one could almost say. No one seems to have tried at all: the idea of wooing a child was not in the air – certainly Mary Wollstonecraft had none of it.

Who it was that first discerned the child to be a thing of joy, a character apart worth coming to without patronage, a flower, a fairy, I cannot say. But Blake, in his writings, had much to do with the discovery, and Wordsworth perhaps more. Certain, however, is it that Mary Wollstonecraft, even if she had glimmerings of this truth, had no more; and those she suppressed when the pen was in her hand.

I might remark here that the circumstance that Blake’s drawings for Salzmann’s Elements of Morality , which Mary Wollstonecraft translated in 1791, also for Johnson, are more interesting and dramatic, is due to the fact that he merely adapted the work of the German artist. Blake was uniformly below himself in this kind of employment. Only in the rapt freedoms of the angelic harper in his hut, in the picture opposite page 56 of the present work, does he approach his true genius; while in his conception of Mrs. Mason I have no confidence. Not slim and willowy and pensive was she in my mental picture of her: I figure a matron of sterner stuff and solider build.

But having said this against the Original Stories , I have said all, for as the casket enshrining Mrs. Mason its value remains unassailable.

It was well for Mrs. Mason that Mary Wollstonecraft set her on paper in 1788. Had she waited until the Vindication of the Rights of Women was written in 1792 (and dedicated to Talleyrand), had she waited until little Fanny Imlay was born into a stony world, Mrs. Mason would never have been. Because it is the likes of Mrs. Mason that keep the rights of women, as Mary Wollstonecraft saw them, in the background, and demand the production of marriage lines. Mrs. Mason would have been the first to regret the unwomanliness of the publication both of the book and of the baby. The Preface to this book suggests that Mary Wollstonecraft was at that time, before she had loved and lost and suffered, something of a Mrs. Mason herself; but Mrs. Mason remained Masonic to the end, whereas poor Mary’s heart and mind were always in conflict. She may have loved pure Reason, but she loved Gilbert Imlay too. And this Mrs. Mason never did.

Mrs. Mason never nods. Her tact, her mental reaction, her confidence, her sense of duty and knowledge of duty, are alike marvellous. When the higher mercy compels her to end a wounded lark’s misery by putting her foot on its head, she ‘turns her own the other way’. At the close of a walk during which her charges have been ‘rational’, she shakes hands with them. Her highest praise to Mary, after the fruit-picking incident on page 40, is to call her ‘my friend’; ‘and she deserved the name,’ adds the lady, ‘for she was no longer a child.’ No child could be her friend. One wonders what she made of the beautiful words ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me.. for of such is the kingdom of Heaven’; but of course she did not know them: her Testament was obviously the Old.

Yet we have, as it happens, a comment on Christ’s remark, in her statement on page 8, made in one of her recurring monologues on superiority and inferiority, that it is ‘only to animals that children can do good’. Mrs. Mason’s expression of alarm and dismay on hearing the words ‘A little child shall lead them’ could be drawn adequately, one feels, only by Mary Wollstonecraft’s friend Fuseli.

‘I govern my servants and you,’ said Mrs. Mason, ‘by attending strictly to truth, and this observance keeping my head clear and my heart pure, I am ever ready to pray to the Author of Good, the Fountain of truth.’ She never paid unmeaning compliments, (and here it is interesting to compare the second paragraph of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Preface, where she plays at being a Mrs. Mason too), or permitted any word to drop from her tongue that her heart did not dictate. Hence she allowed Mrs. Trimmer’s History of the Robins to be lent to a little girl, only on condition that the little girl should be made to understand that birds cannot really talk. She had in her garden, although large, only one bed of tulips, because the tulip flaunts, whereas the rose, of which she had a profusion, is modest. That God made both does not seem to have troubled her. She thought that the poor who were willing to work ‘had a right to the comforts of life’. During a thunderstorm she walked with the same security as when the sun enlivened the prospect, since her love of virtue had overcome her fear of death. She was weaned from the world, ‘but not disgusted.’ When she visited those who have been reduced from their original place in society by misfortunes, she made such alterations in her dress as would suggest ceremony, lest too much familiarity should appear like disrespect. She forbade Caroline to cry when in pain, because the Most High was educating her for eternity. She thought that all diseases were sent to children by the Almighty to teach them patience and fortitude. She never sought bargains, wishing every one to receive the just value for their goods; and when her two charges at last left her, to return to their father, she dismissed them with the words, ‘You are now candidates for my friendship, and on your advancement in virtue my regard will in future depend.’

The great fault of Mrs. Mason is that she had none. One seems to understand why her own children and husband died so quickly.

Since I have read this little book a new kind of nightmare has come into my slumbers: I dream that I am walking with Mrs. Mason. The greatness and goodness of Mrs. Mason surround me, dominate me, suffocate me. With head erect, vigilant eye, and a smile of assurance and tolerance on her massive features, she sails on and on, holding my neatly-gloved hand, discoursing ever of the infinite mercy of God, the infinite paltriness of myself, and the infinite success of Mrs. Mason. I think that Mrs. Mason’s most terrible characteristic to me (who have never been quite sure of anything) is the readiness with which her decisions spring fully-armed from her brain. She knows not only everything, but herself too: she has no doubts. Here she joins hands with so much that is most triumphant in the British character. The Briton also is without doubts. He marches forward. He is right. It is when I contemplate him in this mood – and Mrs. Mason too – that I most wonder who my ancestors can have been.

The awful reality of Mrs. Mason proves that Mary Wollstonecraft, had she known her own power and kept her mental serenity, might have been a great novelist. Mrs. Mason was the first and strongest British Matron. She came before Mrs. Proudie, and also, it is interesting to note, before Sir Willoughby Patterne. But she was, I fear, an accident; for there is nothing like her in our author’s one experiment in adult fiction, The Wrongs of Woman .