Much at Copenhagen reminds her of her previous sojourn in France, of the fate of the émigrés, and the pretensions of rulers. At the Rosenberg Palace she reflects on the ‘cabinets full of baubles and gems and swords’ which once symbolized royal power in Denmark. ‘It is a pity’, she remarks mischievously, ‘they do not lend them to the actors, instead of allowing them to perish ingloriously.’ Yet with a very modern reflex, she also sees the historical interest of the building. ‘Every object carried me back to past times, and impressed the manners of the age forcibly on my mind. In this point of view the preservation of old palaces, and their tarnished furniture, is useful; for they maybe considered as historical documents.’ She does not seem entirely immune, either, to the wayward charm of the ‘large silver lions’ mounted at the entrance to the banqueting rooms.
Several times she remarks that had she travelled in such primitive, or at least under-developed, societies before going to France, she would have taken a very different view of the French, and especially of the ‘common people’ and their behaviour during the Revolution. The concept of the ‘Noble Savage’ seems more than ever meaningless to her. What was achieved in France depended very greatly on the degree of sophistication which society in general had already reached. The ‘virtues of a nation’, she is more than ever convinced, ‘bear an exact proportion to their scientific improvements’.
This reflection leads her to a view of travel which strikingly rejects the old eighteenth-century idea of the Grand Tour as an extension of classical education and the reverential study of the masterpieces of antiquity. Travel should be, she argues, a kind of sociological inquiry, which brings us a much more critical and comparative idea of how societies develop and progress. We should be interested in the primitive for the light it throws on the ‘more polished’. We should be more forward-looking, and more conscious of social evolution. We should travel more intelligently and more self-critically. ‘If travelling, as the completion of a liberal education, were to be adopted on rational grounds, the northern states ought to be visited before the more polished parts of Europe, to serve as the elements even of the knowledge of manners, only to be acquired by tracing the various shades in different countries’ (Letter 19). This attitude foreshadows much of the more strictly anthropological travelling of the nineteenth century, with its emphasis on comparative studies of particular societies and climates.
VII
‘Demon Lover’
THE GENERAL TONE of philosophic detachment is hardly sustained through the final stages of the journey, which caused Wollstonecraft increasing frustration and exhaustion. The maid Marguerite, with her amusing Parisian chatter about German fashions, and ‘the arch, agreeable vanity peculiar to the French’ with which she retold her adventures at Gothenburg, had ‘a gaieté du coeur worth all my philosophy’, thought Wollstonecraft with a sigh. Her own ennui and depression returned with her approach to Hamburg. She could no longer avoid the realization that Gilbert Imlay had had no change of heart about meeting her, despite all her efforts in the Ellefsen affair. Her open appeals to Imlay dominate the last letters of the book, describing her arrival in the German city and her restless stay in the nearby suburb of Altona, determined to ‘sail with the first fair wind for England’. She speaks of the ‘cruellest of disappointments, last spring’ – a barely veiled reference to her return to London from Paris, and the first suicide attempt – and describes herself as ‘playing the child’ and weeping at the recollection (Letter 22).
Her disenchantment is intense, though she still sees things (and smells them) vividly. Her vision of the river Elbe – with its ironic reference to ‘treasure’ – reminds us of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, with the symbolic overtones of ‘Die Frau am Fenster’, waiting perhaps for her lover:
My lodgings at Altona are tolerably comfortable, though not in any proportion to the price I pay, but, owing to the present circumstances, all the necessaries of life are here extravagantly dear. Considering it as a temporary residence, the chief inconvenience of which, I am inclined to complain, is the rough streets that must be passed before Marguerite and the child can reach a level road.
The views of the Elbe, in the vicinity of the town, are pleasant, particularly as the prospects here afford so little variety. I attempted to descend, and walk close to the water’s edge, but there was no path, and the smell of glue, hanging to dry, an extensive manufactory of which is carried on close to the beach, I found extremely disagreeable. But to commerce every thing must give way, profit and profit are the only speculations – ‘double – double, toil and trouble’. I have seldom entered a shady walk without being soon obliged to turn aside to make room for the rope-makers, and the only tree, I have seen, that appeared to be planted by the hand of taste, is in the churchyard, to shade the tomb of the poet Klopstock’s wife.
Most of the merchants have country houses to retire to, during the summer, and many of them are situated on the banks of the Elbe, where they have the pleasure of seeing the packet-boats arrive, the periods of most consequence to divide their week.
The moving picture, consisting of large vessels and small-craft, which are continually changing their position with the tide, renders this noble river, the vital stream of Hamburg, very interesting, and the windings have sometimes a very fine effect, two or three turns being visible, at once, intersecting the flat meadows: a sudden bend often increasing the magnitude of the river, and the silvery expanse, scarcely gliding, though bearing on its bosom so much treasure, looks for a moment, like a tranquil lake.
Nothing can be stronger than the contrast which this flat country and strand afford, compared with the mountains, and rocky coast, I have so lately dwelt so much among. In fancy I return to a favourite spot, where I seemed to have retired from man and wretchedness, but the din of trade drags me back to all the care I left behind, when lost in sublime emotions. Rocks aspiring towards the heavens, and, as it were, shutting out sorrow, surrounded me, whilst peace appeared to steal along the lake to calm my bosom, modulating the wind that agitated the neighbouring poplars. Now I hear only an account of the tricks of trade, or listen to the distressful tale of some victim of ambition. (Letter 24)
Her tirades against the commercial spirit here reach their climax. She sees Hamburg as ‘an ill, close-built, swarming’ city, and as a symbol of everything that has corrupted Imlay and come between them. She bitterly attacks the profit motive, and ‘the mushroom fortunes’ that have started up during the war. She excoriates a race of traders and dealers who are insolent, vulgar and ‘seem of the species of the fungus’ themselves. These are among her most savage passages. She describes these ‘sordid accumulators of cent per cent’ as the most degraded form of masculine ambition, brutishly opposed to everything that is finest and most progressive in the spirit of the age.
Mary Wollstonecraft is caught here in a terrible paradox, of course. For her own journey in search of the treasure ship had been undertaken partly for commercial reasons and to help Imlay in the recovery of a ‘mushroom fortune’ of war. Not only must she have felt betrayed by Imlay, but to some extent self-betrayed. It is this, surely, that gives such despair to her final accusation, a passage which threatens to overturn the entire form of A Short Residence, transforming the voice of the literary traveller into that of the abandoned lover. Many previous passages in the book press towards this final act of self-exposure, giving what I have called the confessional tension to the entire work. But here it is most explicit, and most moving.
Situation seems to be the mould in which men’s characters are formed; so much so, inferring from what I have lately seen, that I mean not to be severe when I add, previously asking why priests are in general cunning, and statesmen false? that men entirely devoted to commerce never acquire, or lose, all taste and greatness of mind. An ostentatious display of wealth without elegance, and a greedy enjoyment of pleasure without sentiment, embrutes them till they term all virtues, of an heroic cast, romantic attempts at something above our nat
ure, and anxiety about the welfare of others, a search after misery, in which we have no concern. But you will say that I am growing bitter, perhaps personal. Ah! shall I whisper to you – that you – yourself, are strangely altered, since you have entered deeply into commerce – more than you are aware of – never allowing yourself to reflect, and keeping your mind, or rather passions in a continual state of agitation – Nature has given you talents, which lie dormant, or are wasted in ignoble pursuits – you will rouse yourself, and shake off the vile dust that obscures you, or my understanding, as well as my heart, deceives me, egregiously – only tell me when? … Men are strange machines, and their whole system of morality is in general held together by one grand principle, which loses its force the moment they allow themselves to break with impunity over the bounds which secured their self-respect. A man ceases to love humanity, and then individuals, as he advances in the chase after wealth, as one clashes with his interest, the other with his pleasures: to business, as it is termed, every thing must give way, nay, is sacrificed, and all the endearing charities of citizen, husband, father, brother, become empty names. But – but what? Why, to snap the chain of thought, I must say farewell. Cassandra was not the only prophetess whose warning voice has been disregarded. How much easier is it to meet with love in the world, than affection! (Letter 23)
The distance between this, and the most passionate of the private letters, is less than ‘the thickness of a piece of paper’.
The strangely desultory and gloomy note on which the book ends – passing in a single anxious paragraph from Hamburg to Dover – makes the reader more than ever curious to know what was the practical outcome of Mary Wollstonecraft’s journey. What was the upshot of the Ellefsen affair? The way the book breaks off suggests that negotiations were broken off too. We know tantalizingly little. Nystrom was never able to establish if the crucial interview with Peder Ellefsen in Risor actually took place, or if the sympathetic Judge Wulfsberg of Tonsberg was able to arrange an out-of-court settlement. Yet there is one piece of evidence which might suggest that Wollstonecraft’s efforts were by no means in vain. For the treasure ship itself was mysteriously recovered that autumn.
Swedish shipping records show that on 6 October 1795 a light cargo boat called the Maria and Margaretha was re-registered at Gothenburg as the property of Imlay’s partner, Elias Backman. Its tonnage was slightly increased from that registered at Le Havre, which might perhaps mean that she had been refitted and rerigged. It is not impossible that this could have been done at Ellefsen’s expense, and thus represented some form of settlement and quid pro quo. The proximity of the re-registration date to that of Wollstonecraft’s departure from Hamburg on the 17 September 1795 suggests that the two events were at least connected. The record is of course inconclusive, and the affair ends as mysteriously as it began. No authority knows what happened to the Bourbon plate. Yet the possibility that Mary Wollstonecraft had pulled off a most delicate piece of business negotiation, in a twilight world of wartime illegality, remains provokingly open. It seems quite within the scope of her extraordinary talents. One would certainly like to believe it.
The affair of the treasure ship is also important for the peculiar tension and atmosphere it lends her book. Though never once referred to explicitly in the text, it exerts its unseen pressure on the narrative of A Short Residence. It gives Wollstonecraft’s travels their secret urgency, their sense of a mysterious, almost nightmare pursuit. It adds immeasurably to the feeling of inexplicable anxiety, of gloomy foreboding, which so marks Wollstonecraft’s reflections on men and affairs and drives her continually to seek Romantic solace in the wilderness of the Scandinavian landscape, hoping to escape into a sublime vision of grand, impartial Nature: its magnificent forests, waterfalls and seashores, so remote from the petty concerns of men.
It also, if I am not mistaken, subtly alters our perception of Gilbert Imlay, her unnamed correspondent. Mary Wollstonecraft’s unrequited love for him, increasingly desperate and bitter, already casts him in the role of Romantic villain, withholding his affections and cruel in his absence. (How just or unjust this picture was, in biographical terms, is a subject more fully explored in Godwin’s Memoirs.) But the additional knowledge of his business interest in Wollstonecraft’s expedition, adds – however unfairly – to our sense that he is exploiting her. In the context of the book, he becomes an almost demonic figure, driving her on to the limits of her physical, emotional and intellectual resources. I have already suggested that, in real life, I do not think this entirely reflected Imlay’s attitude to his ‘best friend and wife’. But in purely literary terms, the portrait she draws of him (always anonymously) is both haunting and convincing. It is a brilliant piece of emotional projection. Imlay is slowly transformed into her demon lover, and his shadow comes to brood over the Scandinavian countryside like something out of the Icelandic sagas or the enchanted folk music of Edvard Grieg. He tempts her over dizzy gulfs or the edge of precipitous waterfalls, he tortures her with the delusive promises of love and treasure and happiness. I do not wish to over-emphasize this aspect; it is nothing more than a mist that occasionally thickens round the largely factual and inquiring style of the narrative. But I think it is there, and that the later Romantic poets – especially Coleridge and Shelley – deeply and instinctively responded to it in their own work. And so did William Godwin.
VIII
‘Wild Geese’
Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark was published by Joseph Johnson in January 1796. It was the most popular book Wollstonecraft ever wrote, and she must have been delighted with its reception. After the miseries and desperation of the previous year, the suicide attempts and the end of her relationship with Imlay, it represented a personal triumph over her circumstances. The professional writer had regained her self-respect, and also found a new readership. The reviews were widespread and favourable. The book was swiftly translated into Dutch, German, Swedish and Portuguese. An American edition appeared in Wilmington, Delaware, through the good offices of her friend, the Irish revolutionary, Archibald Hamilton Rowan. A second edition was published by Johnson in 1802. The younger generation of writers were fascinated with it, and admiring references appear in the journals, poems or correspondence of Coleridge, Southey, Wordsworth and Hazlitt. Though only one further nineteenth-century edition was published (by Cassell’s Library, 1886), its underground reputation remained secure. Shelley and Mary took a copy with them when they eloped to France in 1814, and I have recently discovered that Robert Louis Stevenson had a copy of the first edition when he went to Samoa in 1890, which still exists in a private collection, sporting his Vailima bookplate.
The book was generally admired in Godwin’s circle, among those who knew the full circumstances surrounding its writing. Anna Seward and Mary Hays praised it, and the young Amelia Alderson, then an unknown and aspiring writer, wrote a fan letter which expressed the feelings of many of her younger contemporaries: ‘I remember the time when my desire of seeing you was expressed by fear – but as soon as I read your letters from Norway, the cold awe which the philosopher has excited, was lost in the tender sympathy called forth by the woman. I saw nothing but the interesting creature of feeling and imagination.’
Some indeed felt that the feminist philosopher had sacrificed too much to ‘feeling and imagination’, and indulged rather shockingly in the modish melancholy and emotional self-revelations of the New Sensibility. (Though Godwin, as we have seen, turned this point to her literary advantage, by describing her in the Memoirs as a sort of ‘female Werther’.) The acid and amusing French traveller-writer, Bernard de la Tocnaye, made several criticisms of her observations in his Promenade en Suède, and added that she had caused great offence to the ladies of Gothenburg by criticizing their bad teeth. But his greatest mockery was reserved for her highly emotional style in the description of landscape (failing to note that this is balanced by her accurate observations of natural phenomena). He summarizes in the fo
llowing passage, which I have translated from his sprightly and sarcastic French:
In her book [Mary Wollstonecraft] often makes use of that special new vocabulary which is deemed sentimental, the grotesque linguistic garb adapted from Laurence Sterne, and the new-fangled ‘moonlight and apparitions’ style of writing. So we meet with nothing but cowbells a-tinkling on the hillsides – the waves murmuring their melodies – the spirits of peace wandering o’er the hills – eternity in every moment – the sylphs dancing in the air – the dews gently falling – the crescent moon in the ethereal vault – and everything inviting her to turn aside her steps and wander afar, etc., etc., etc. In short, it’s all modish nonsense. (Une Promenade en Suède, 1801, Vol. 1, pp. 25–9)
Well, there are no sylphs in Mary Wollstonecraft (though there are nymphs and one satyr). But it is true that her book was consciously literary in many aspects. This is partly what so excited her readers. She understood a great deal about the traditional genre of travel-writing, and had perceptively reviewed and criticized the shortcomings of earlier works for Johnson’s Analytical. These included the picturesque outpourings of Gilpin’s Tours, Jean-Pierre Brissot’s dry, topographical account of North America, and J. G. Forster’s wild visions of the stars and icebergs of the southern seas (which fascinated Coleridge). Her private letters also show how fond she was of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey and Rousseau’s Promenades, and the image of her as a ‘solitary walker’ became a kind of private joke between her and Godwin. Throughout the text of A Short Residence she quotes freely from a small group of favourite eighteenth-century authors of an introspective kind – especially Thomas Gray, William Cowper and Edward Young of the Night Thoughts. She shows a marked tendency to identify with Shakespeare’s Hamlet – that Danish Prince of melancholy. Many of her more empurpled landscape descriptions are direct extensions of Edmund Burke’s doctrine of the sublime in nature, which so influenced the Romantic poets, reaching towards the fusion of the human spirit with some half-perceived and animating world-soul.