Vindication (23 page)

Barlow's other plan was to persuade Étienne Sulpice Hallet, French architect, engineer and surveyor, to migrate with the settlers and to construct buildings and roads, in concert with the company's agents living on the spot. So far, no company agent had contracted to live on the spot, yet Barlow's ready voice rolls on to Ruth: ‘I have taken infinite pains to make every arrangement for [the settlers'] agreeable reception & happiness.'

Only when the settlers landed in America did they discover that the company had not found the money to buy the land, and could therefore give them no title to farms for which they had paid $15 an acre. After the long Atlantic crossing, and a further journey to the frontier, they found nothing but a few scattered log cabins and the fury of native Americans whose raids on settlers the promotions had neglected to mention.
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When a number of the emigrants made their way back to France, there were threats on Barlow's life. He lay low on the top floor of the quadrangle of the Palais d'Orléans (now the Palais-Royal), its entrance concealed by a gambling den on the floor below. In later years, Barlow looked back on 1791 as ‘the period of our deepest difficulties', when Ruth's virtues showed themselves superior to his own: ‘if I had been alone, or with a partner no better than myself, I should have sunk'. Barlow warned Ruth's influential brother, Abraham Baldwin (a Congressman since 1785; later, Senator for Georgia), of ‘misinformation'. He and Ruth were moving to England.

In October 1791, from their new perch in London, he declared his intention to move on to a new role as disseminator of revolution. The date coincides with the stateswoman portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in the course of writing her more famous
Vindication
. She was a central figure in
Johnson's circle where Barlow made his intellectual home for the following year. He invited her to tea, along with the radical dramatist Thomas Holcroft and the political philosopher Godwin.

His
Advice to the Privileged Orders
recommended commerce as a corrective to ‘feudal' privilege, and an end to monarchies. The British government ordered it burnt. Undeterred, Barlow proceeded to publish a volume of populist verse,
The Conspiracy of Kings
(March 1792), applauding the French as they ‘shake tyrants from their thrones and cheer the waking world'.

‘Be assured,' Jefferson wrote to Barlow, ‘that your endeavours to bring the trans Atlantic world into the road of reason, are not without their effect here.' This letter was to be carried by Mr Pinckney, the incoming American Minister in London. ‘He will arrive at an interesting moment in Europe. God send that all the nations who join in attacking the liberation of France may end in the attainment of their own.'

The worsening situation (the war to which Jefferson refers: the coalition of Prussia and Austria against revolutionary France) offered gains for neutral foreigners like Barlow. An American was persona grata in Paris, a product of a successful revolution and possessor of a passport granting him freedom to move between warring countries: an advantage for spying. Barlow was in France on a mysterious ‘mission' when riots broke out at the royal palace of the Tuileries in Paris on 20 June 1792. ‘The visit to the king by armed citizens was undoubtedly against the law,' he wrote to Ruth, ‘but the existence of a king is contrary to another law of a higher original.' Not so long ago he had dedicated
The Vision of Columbus
to his most gracious majesty Louis XVI.

Fellow-Americans who had known Barlow in his earlier incarnations as chaplain and Hartford conservative were puzzled by the extremity of this shift. A simple explanation has been his conversion to the French Revolution. The completeness of this conversion–going further than others in Johnson's circle–was a passport to their confidence, though its speed in the wake of Scioto suggests that Europe's distance from America (and ignorance of America's scope for nuance) allowed Barlow to assume the identity of a revolutionary American, a national image as cover for a more complex character. Mary Wollstonecraft, with her ‘fondness for tracing the passions in all their different forms', picked up a performing note in
his voice: phrases to Ruth like ‘I find heaven in your arms' were too ready, Mary thought, to be entirely honest. When Benjamin Franklin had played up to a simplified, Parisian construct of American identity, he was a diplomat; Barlow, too, in time, became a diplomat–American Ambassador in Paris under Napoleon–but how should we distinguish between the legitimate shifts of the diplomat and the shadier shifts of the opportunist? If we bring to public life the morality of private life, there may be no distinction to be made.

Fabulous wealth was to be the reward of the Barlow story. Where did it come from? When Ruth had joined Barlow in Paris in 1790, she had found herself ‘pent up in a narrow dirty street'; by the end of the decade, they owned a Paris house opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, grand enough to be coveted by Lady Hamilton (wife of the British Ambassador to Naples and mistress of Nelson); and soon after, Barlow, this opponent of ‘the privileged orders', is able to buy a ‘seat' in Washington, second only to Mount Vernon, home of the first President.

This fortune was not made in America. It came about somewhere in Europe, but nowhere amongst Barlow's account books and careful copies of business letters is there mention of any activity, after Scioto, that could lead to wealth on that scale. We'll return to Barlow and his associate Imlay when this story shifts to France. Suffice to say now that Barlow lingered in Paris week after week in 1792, and eventually Mary decided that Charles must sail on his own for America. Her chief concern from spring to autumn that year was the fate of her favourite brother. For the Barlows stayed on in Europe, and the scheme of adoption faded. Everina made no contact with Ruth Barlow; she and Bess never tried their luck across the Atlantic where Ruth had promised answers to all their needs: money, security, homes, husbands, and the society closed to a governess. America hovered on the Wollstonecrafts' horizon in the course of 1792, and not for the last time a fantasy of the fresh promise of the New World entered their minds. In the case of Charles Wollstonecraft it became a reality. He sailed in October with an introduction from Barlow to a Yale friend, James Watson, in New York: ‘This…will probably be handed you by Mr Wollstoncraft, a young gentleman of singular merit. I would thank you to notice him &
give such advice as may be necessary to speed him on his way to the Ohio, where he goes to be an American farmer.'

 

Every one of Mary's plans for her brothers and sisters failed: none of them was satisfied. All kept their beaks open. Her father's beak never ceased to clamour. In Wales, Bess found Mr Wollstonecraft in a poor state: skeletal, with a long beard, dirty, coughing, groaning, but still able to ‘
drink
very hearty' and ride ten miles a day. When Bess and her horse had a fall, she came round to hear her father calling to know if the horse's knees were hurt (for the horse had been borrowed). It was shaming for a governess to have her unkempt father turn up at the Castle, ostensibly to check whether a trunk had arrived but really after whatever pickings he could glean. When Mary wished him to ‘
save
in
trifles
', he flew into a rage and threatened to chase her up in London. With the help of Johnson, she took his affairs in hand. Godwin records: ‘The exertions she made, and the struggle into which she entered…were ultimately fruitless. To the day of her death her father was almost wholly supported by funds which she supplied to him.'

Mary's efforts for her family were more practical than loving. Love had been Fanny's, and the word returns in relation to Margaret King. Their correspondence has not survived–unsurprisingly, since it was secret–but Mary referred several times to their continued solidarity. On 3 March 1788, she enclosed a letter for her ‘dear Margaret King' in one to George Blood, who still lodged with his Dublin employer Mr Noble. ‘Be very careful to not let any body see it,' Mary warned, ‘–and keep it till she
sends
to Mr Noble's for it.' On 26 May she asked George again: ‘Have you delivered–or rather has my letter to M:K. been called for?…I have received another letter from that dear girl–I scarcely know how much I loved her till I was torn from her,' Margaret said, ‘From the time she left me my chief objects were to correct those faults she had pointed out & to cultivate my understanding as much as possible.' This fits the conclusion to
Real Life
, where Mrs Mason takes leave of her charges in this memorable way:

Mary had hoped not to lose touch with Margaret's step-grandmother Mrs FitzGerald. While in Dublin she had borrowed ten guineas on behalf of Betty Delane. The money had slipped through ‘quicksand'. Two years later she asked George Blood to return £10 (an amount due to Mary for Caroline's care) to Mrs FitzGerald together with a friendly message: ‘Tell Mrs Fitz-Gerald that I am well, and enjoy more worldly comfort than I ever did–you may add, that I should have written to her if she had asked me, as it would really give me pleasure to hear some times of her welfare–enquire about my Margaret &c.' George let this slide, and forgot. It was at this point that Mary let George know how he ‘disappointed' her. His neglect of her letters and ‘inconsiderate' excuses for his lack of punctiliousness in money matters were of a piece. Mr Noble had overworked him, he had whined, and he had again lent money to the painter Mr Home, a persistent borrower who had drained George before.

In the play of Mary's words, the sharp of ‘independence' and the plangent note of ‘tenderness' have as counterpoint the repeated flat of ‘disappointed'. Her brothers and George Blood repeatedly disappointed her efforts to renew their lives. Yet these years developed her own remarkable capacity to rise, and rise again. ‘Blessed be that Power who gave me an active mind!' she said in the manner so irritating to her dependants, ‘if it does not smooth[,] it enables me to jump over the rough places in life. I had had a number of draw-backs on my spirits and purse; but I still…cry avaunt despair–and I push forward.'

Her resilience was reinforced by the kindness of William Roscoe and Joseph Johnson. Once, when she asked the latter to add up her debts so she
might settle them, she added, ‘do not suppose that I feel any uneasiness on that score. The generality of people in trade would not be much obliged to me for a like civility,
but you were a man
before you were a bookseller.'

Johnson, Mary, the artist Fuseli and his wife planned to visit Paris for six weeks in August 1792. They got as far as Dover, then turned back in fear of bloodshed when Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette and their two children were caught trying to flee France. The flight to Varennes appeared to confirm a suspicion of the royal family as traitors to the Revolution, in league with France's enemy, the Austrian monarchy, the family of the unpopular Queen. The French monarchy fell, revolutionaries slaughtered the Swiss Guard at the Tuileries, the King and his family were sent to prison, and a republic was proclaimed. During these momentous events, Mary stayed a few weeks with Johnson in the country. When they returned to London on 12 September, she heard with amusement that ‘the world…married m[e] to him whilst we were away'.

She had set herself against marriage from the age of fifteen, but two samples of married happiness forced themselves on her attention: first, the Gabells with whom she had stayed for two or three weeks in the summer of 1790 at Warminster in Wiltshire; and more recently Ruth Barlow, whose husband found ‘heaven' in her arms. Neither fitted Mary's view of marriage as legalised rape. The caresses of the new-married Henry Gabell and large, sturdy Ann Gage had been absurdly unrestrained–though ‘as pure', Mary assured herself, as those Darwin ‘lavishes on his favourites'. She had to concede ‘
how much
happiness and innocent fondness constantly illumines the eyes of this good couple–so that I am never disgusted by the frequent
bodily
display of it'. They made her think rather crossly of Milton's Adam and Eve in Paradise, and count herself superior. Was this mistaken pride, she wondered, ‘whispering me that my soul is immortal & should have a nobler ambition'? Sometimes she felt an intruder, and then she longed for her little London room and a life wholly tuned to ‘intellectual pursuits'. She could not surrender those hard-won freedoms. There seemed no return route: ‘my die is cast'. Even so, the road not taken did not entirely fade from view.

Mary's independence as a single woman was threatened less by depen
dants than by her strange fixation on Henry Fuseli. In 1789 she had attended a masquerade at the Opera House with Fuseli and the son of an early object of his ardour, his Zurich friend Johann Caspar Lavater. On that occasion, Fuseli had stirred up trouble with a fancy-dress devil. From the autumn of 1790, and increasingly in 1791 and '92, Mary took up with the artist, who was eighteen years older. It seemed to her that she had never before encountered a man of such ‘grandeur of soul' and ‘quickness of comprehension'. In October 1791, Bess received a letter from her that was ‘brimful' of Fuseli.

After completing the
Rights of Woman
in a mounting burst of energy, Mary fell into inertia–‘palsied', Johnson put it–during 1792. In that state she became dependent on Fuseli to bestir her. A later protégé of his, the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, describes how Fuseli took hold of a disciple with ‘the most grotesque mixture of literature, art, scepticism, indelicacy, profanity, and kindness. He put me in mind of Archimago
*
in Spenser. Weak minds he destroyed. They mistook his wit for reason, his indelicacy for breeding, his swearing for manliness, and his infidelity for strength of mind; but he was accomplished in elegant literature, and had the art of inspiring young minds with high and grand views.' Mary, always on the lookout for ‘genius', found in Fuseli the real thing: a painter who, a century before Freud, explored the psyche. Fuseli was himself obsessed with the divinity of genius (his own above all), a worshipper of Rousseau, Shakespeare and Milton, and given to explosive quotations from Homer, Tasso, Dante, Ovid, Virgil and the
Niebelungenlied
. Between 1786 and '89 he had painted a series of nine scenes from Shakespeare, exhibited with others by leading artists like Sir Joshua Reynolds and Angelica Kauffmann at Boydell's gallery in London. At this time they were the rage. Fuseli's figure drawings have a Michelangelesque muscularity.
The Kiss
is not confined to lips; it carries through arms and thighs to the extremities of fingers and heels.