Delphi Complete Works of William Godwin 1st ed. (2022), page 159
part #1 of Delphi Classics Series
The day on which we entered the house in Merionethshire may be considered, in some sense, as the first of our marriage. Here we were to make our establishment, and set up our tabernacle; at Matlock and other places we shifted as we could. Here then was a rock upon which we were in danger to be destroyed. They were no trifling and fugitive discussions we had to adjust; I, on my part, had formed habits, of which it would be difficult for me to divest myself.
We arrived in the evening, and were in want of repose. We sat down to the fire-side where I had sat with my father a thousand times; we ate a delicious meal, while Mary listened with attention to many little anecdotes I related of the deceased, and stories of my boyish exploits and sorrows.
The next morning we walked round the apartments. There was a handsome, retired closet, opening into the principal drawing-room and at a short distance from my bed-chamber, the window of which commanded the most admirable prospect we had. The steeple and roofs of a beautiful village were distinctly visible; the river, beset with willows, meandered below; a venerable wood of everlasting oaks grew on one side, beyond which was discovered the silver main; while the other side was skirted by the crags of the gigantic mountain, that from my infancy I almost adored. This closet was my favourite retreat. Here I had been permitted to con my lessons while I was yet of schoolboy age; and here it had ever since been my custom to retire with some favourite author, when I wished to feel my mind in its most happy state. In this closet I meditated, I composed, I wrote. If I wanted an ampler space to move in, I had but to open the door, and the largest drawing-room in the house offered itself for my promenade. By the side of the closet was a private staircase, which led me, by a short cut, to the river, the wood, and the mountain. I preferred this sequestered nook to all the rest of the mansion taken together. I entered it now, after a twelvemonth’s absence, with a full recollection of all the castles which I had sat there and builded in the air, the odes, the tragedies, and heroic poems which, in the days of visionary childhood, upon that spot I had sketched and imagined. I turned to Mary, with the purpose of telling her the many ravishing associations which this closet presented to my mind.
‘This is an enchanting closet!’ said she.
‘It is.’ – My heart knocked at my bosom, my very soul was full of its little history, as I spoke.
‘Do you know, Fleetwood, I shall take this closet for mine? I will have all my drawings brought here, and arrange my favourite flowers in the window. Will you give it me?’
‘Surely, my love! I am glad it pleases you so much.’
My sensations at this moment were of a singular and complicated nature. I had been on the point of employing all my eloquence to describe to Mary how I loved this closet – how unalterably it had fixed its hold upon me as my favourite retreat. For this purpose I had recollected in rapid succession all the endearments that made it mine, all the delights which, almost from prattling infancy, it had afforded me. In an unlucky moment my wife pronounced the decree, ‘It shall never be yours again!’ The decision was unexpected, and my animal spirits were suddenly driven back upon my heart.
Yet I call Heaven to witness, it was only the suddenness of the blow, and not any intimation of selfishness, that produced this effect. On the contrary, the moment I had had time to recover myself, my sentiment was, – ‘Mary, it is for ever yours! Dear, angelic sweetness, I shall be too happy, to witness your gratification! Shall I think this too great a sacrifice, who would offer up my life for you? It is no sacrifice! I have more joy in considering the things I love as yours, than in regarding them as my own.’
Presently the bell was rung; and the flower-stage,, the portfolios, and the drawings, one after another, made their appearance. In the midst of the confusion, I withdrew to have some necessary consultations with my steward.
After an absence of three hours, I returned, and visited Mary in her retreat. By this time all her little sources of occupation and amusement were in order. I observed with delight the arrangements she had made. I gazed on the features of her charming face; she never looked more beautiful, than thus surrounded with the emblems of the innocence of her mind and the elegance of her taste. My heart exulted in beholding these human graces, associated and set off with a back-ground of my favourite steeple, mountain, and prospect to the neighbouring main. I fed my eyes with the pleasing scene. I sat down by her side, viewed her drawings, and admired the delicate forms and brilliant colouring of the flowers she loved. I turned to the prospect from the window, with the purpose of pointing out to her in detail the objects of which it consisted.
What a fool is man! My own folly, however much I may feel ashamed of it, I have sat down with the purpose to relate. The next morning, and the morning after, I missed my favourite, my old, my long-accustomed retreat, and sought in vain for a substitute for it. My library was in the other wing of the house, and answered to the drawing-room I have mentioned. It had a closet in it, built in the fashion of that which had caught Mary’s fancy, with no other difference than that the prospect from the window, though for the most part the same, was in two or three points essentially inferior. I repaired to this closet; I took two or three books from the library, one after another; I tried to compose myself. It would not do. This, in the days of my boyhood, had been my father’s privacy; and, when by his death the use of the whole mansion devolved to me, I felt the closet which Mary had chosen as already mine, the scene of a thousand remembered pleasures, the object of my love.
Discontented here, I resolved to seek the garden. Immediately I missed my private staircase. I had no resource, but in the public staircase of the whole house. I could not get to that part of the garden which led to the river and the mountain, but by a formidable circuit. If I might not resort to my favourite haunts at perfect liberty, if I could not reach them unseen by any human eye, they were nothing to me. My domestics knew my customary seasons of taking the air; they watched the variations of my temper; and, when I was pensive and melancholy, were careful that the shadow of no one of them should obtrude in my path.
I will go, and tell Mary what she has done. I will confess to her all my weakness. Nothing could be further from her thought than to occasion me this disturbance, and it will afford her the purest pleasure to repair it.
May I perish, if ever I breathe a syllable on the subject! What, shall I paint me thus pitiful and despicable in her eyes? Shall I tell her, that I love nobody but myself, and regard her gratifications with indifference? I will not tell her so! I will act so, that, if any one else should affirm it, he shall affirm the most impudent falsehood.
She will never know that I have made this sacrifice at the shrine of love. So much the better. I shall know it. It shall be to my own heart a testimony of my affection. I do love her: Heaven only knows how much. I love her for her misfortunes and her desolate condition; I love her for the charms of her person, and her unrivalled virtues. The smallest indulgence to her, is dearer to me than ten thousand gratifications to myself.
The generous exultation with which I surrendered my own accommodation in silence was temporary; the want of that accommodation which I had so long enjoyed, daily and hourly recurred. There is something wonderfully subtle in the operations of the human mind. Do I differ with another, in project for the future, or judgment on our past conduct? I immediately begin to find a hundred arguments to prove, how absurd and unreasonable he is, how just am I. No man can completely put himself in the place of another, and conceive how he would feel, were the circumstances of that other his own: few can do it even in a superficial degree. We are so familiar with our own trains of thinking: we revolve them with such complacency: it appears to us, that there is so astonishing a perverseness in not seeing things as we see them! The step is short and inevitable from complacency in our own views, to disapprobation and distaste toward the views of him by whom we are thwarted.
‘Mary, Mary,’ said I sometimes to myself, as I recurred to the circumstance, ‘I am afraid you are selfish! and what character can be less promising in social life, than hers who thinks of no one’s gratification but her own?’ It was true, I could not tell her, ‘This, which you so inconsiderately desire me to give up, is my favourite apartment.’ But she should have enquired of my servants. The housekeeper or the steward could have informed her. She should have considered, that a man, at my time of life, must have fallen upon many methods of proceeding from which he cannot easily be weaned.
The thing of which I could reasonably accuse her, was, at worst, a rapidity of decision incident to her early years. Could she suspect that my practice was, to leave the closet adjoining to the library, and carry my books to the other end of the house? – I was incapable, however, of passing a just judgment in the case, and the transaction had an unfavourable effect upon my mind.
CHAPTER II
SUCH WAS THE incident of the first morning of our arrival in Merionethshire. Another question arose. Mary had heard of several respectable families in our neighbourhood, particularly the Philipses and the Morgans, the female members of which she understood to be agreeable and entertaining; and she was desirous to have intercourse with them. For this purpose it was necessary to go in form to our village church, and to have it given out that there were certain days on which Mrs Fleetwood would sit to receive company. In the evening of our first day in Merionethshire, my wife entered on the subject.
To a person of habits different from mine, this circumstance would have been trivial. To me the idea came with many a painful twinge. I had all my life shrunk from this mummery, this unmeaning intercourse. I had travelled from one side of Europe to the other, in search of persons whose conversation should be tolerable to me. Mary saw with how ill a grace I received the proposition.
‘My love,’ said she, ‘act in this matter as you please. Whatever shall be your determination, I promise to be satisfied. I will just mention what occurs to me concerning it, and will then be silent for ever. We are sitting down in Merionethshire, perhaps for life. Whatever we decide, cannot be reversed; we cannot repel our neighbours in the present instance, and call them about us again hereafter. Recollect, then, my dear Fleetwood, the disadvantages under which I have hitherto laboured. My dear mother, the best of mothers, and most admirable of women,’ – and at this recollection she burst into an agony of tears.
‘My dearest creature,’ interposed I, ‘do not distress yourself with the melancholy recollection! Mary, I love you. There is no honest gratification, no gratification which you can desire, that I will not be zealous to procure you.’
‘Hear me, Fleetwood!’ said she. ‘Consult the merits of the case, and not the ardour of your kindness. We had no lady visitors. I have had no female acquaintance. Shall it be always thus? The manners of my sex are different from yours; what is graceful in a man, would be shocking in a woman; and what would be becoming in a woman, is effeminate and reproachful in the stronger sex. I am afraid I can never learn, and improve myself in the genuine female character, without the observation of my own sex. “The eye sees not itself, but by reflection from some other thing.” Let me say, too, that the society of her own sex is one of the natural consolations of a woman. I can feel a strong and entire affection for a man; I acknowledge it for you. But there is a certain repose and unbending in the occasional familiarity of woman with woman, of the softer and more fragile nature with its like, that powerfully conduces to the healthful and contented condition of the mind. Fleetwood, I have the greatest reluctance to thwart you in any thing. Choose for me. Determine as you will, I swear you shall never find in me, either by word or look, the hint of a reproach.’
Our discussion terminated in the formal churching, and the commencement of a tremendous series of wedding visits. Artful hussy! In the way she put it to me, could I refuse? Could I refuse a thing upon which, in this mild and specious temper of mind, her heart appeared to be set? – I wrong her. There was no art in what she did; it was all the most adorable ingenuousness and sincerity. Or, if I may venture, by a bold allowance of speech, to call it art, it was that art, with which nature adorns her lovely sex more richly than with all the mines of Golconda, – the art of persuasion, compelling us to feel the impossibility of resisting their honourable desires, and cheerfully to resign the compass of domestic affairs into their hands, to set us to what point they please.
On the first two mornings of our residence in Wales, I made a pleasant excursion, by way of exhibiting to Mary the beauties of the country. In the former I showed my wife the precipice from which, at the age of fourteen, I had fallen into the basin, then swelled by continual rains into a lake, which forms the source of the Desunny. She would climb the acclivity along with me. She made me point out to her the inequalities of the almost perpendicular rock along which the lamb had frisked, while William pursued. She particularly noted the place from which the peasant and the lamb had been precipitated together. We fancied, as we viewed it, that we could see the mark among the tufts of grass, where my foot had slipped thirty years before. After having remained a long time on the spot, we took occasion, by Mary’s desire, to make our way home by the cottage of William and the heroic girl, who had come in her boat to save him. The father had long since been dead; William and his wife had the appearance, by means of perpetual labour and frequent exposition to the air in all weathers, of an old man and woman. They had had a large family of children; but these were all grown up, the girls gone to service, and the boys to sea; only their youngest child, a robust lad of fifteen, was at home with them.
In our mountainous country the use of a carriage is exceedingly limited, and three fourths of the most exquisite points of view in my neighbourhood would have been lost to my wife, if she had not been an excellent walker. It was with pleasure that I perceived I could take her a walk of ten or twelve miles in extent, or invite her to climb the highest precipices,, without her sustaining the smallest injury. When a woman is so unfortunately delicate, or has been so injudiciously brought up, as to be unable to walk more than a mile at a time, this effects a sort of divorce, deciding at once that, in many of the pleasures most gratifying to her husband’s feelings and taste, she can be no partaker.
Our excursion of the second day was less adventurous than that of the first, and we were able to make more use of the carriage. After dinner I proposed reading with Mary a play of my favourite Fletcher. The piece was that admirable one of a Wife for a Month. Mary seemed to enter strongly into the feelings of the poet; we admired equally the high and generous sentiments of the tragedy, and the glorious imagery with which those sentiments are adorned.
The character of Valerio particularly riveted her attention. She agreed with me that no poet of ancient or modern times, as far as her acquaintance with them extended, was able, like the writer before us, to paint with all that body and retinue of circumstances which give life to a picture, a free, heroic, and gallant spirit. We especially commended his style, and coincided in opinion with Dryden, who confesses himself ‘apt to believe, that the English language in this author arrived to its highest perfection; what words have since been taken in being rather superfluous than ornamental.’ Mary was roused in an extraordinary degree with the exhortations addressed by the queen to the heroine in the second act, stimulating her to the contempt of tyranny and death, and persuading her, that by such contempt she will even subdue the tyrant, and compel him to repent his ungenerous purpose. I read the sentiments of the royal speaker, as they occurred, in the animated eye and glowing cheek of the charmer who sat beside me. She could scarcely help starting from her chair.
I was delighted with the effect of my experiment. How exquisite a pleasure may thus be derived from reading with a woman of refined understanding so noble a composition as that which engaged us! It is a pleasure that should be husbanded. I have demonstrated to me, at once the acuteness of her taste, and her aptness to conceive and participate the most virtuous sentiments. I almost adore her for these high and excellent qualities. At the same time we are like instruments tuned to a correspondent pitch, and the accord that is produced is of the most delightful nature! We communicate with instantaneous flashes, in one glance of the eye, and have no need of words. When we have recourse to their aid, I instruct at once, and am instructed. I see how my companion feels the passages as they succeed; I learn new decrees of taste, and am confirmed in the old. Male and female taste are in some respects of different natures; and no decision upon a work of art can be consummate, till it has been pronounced on by both. Besides, that in such discussions we intermix
‘Grateful digressions, and solve high dispute
With conjugal caresses: from my lips
Not words alone please her.’
We proceeded, and came to the scene so wonderfully imagined, in which Valerio is seen dressing on the morning for church, and scorning with inimitable grandeur and ease the sentence of the tyrant, who had pronounced, that at the expiration of the first month of his married life he should lose his head. I had just read those words of his –
‘Thou, that hast been a soldier, Menalo,
A noble soldier, and defied all danger –
Wouldst thou live so long, till thy strength forsook thee;
Till thou grew’st only a long, tedious story
Of what thou hadst been; till thy sword hung up,
And lazy spiders fill’d the hilt with cobwebs?’
