Romanticists and Others

By the turbulent close of the eighteenth century, when the air vibrated with dangerous ideas, there were those who, apprehensively or optimistically, foresaw a period of sexual anarchy, with

Chacune pour chacun commune,
Et chacun commun pour chacune.

This lively state, for one reason or another, did not materialize. Though the French Revolution had a temporary loosening effect on morals, the reaction was quick. Romanticists preached their new philosophy, but the world was usually too much for them. Rousseau, who started it all, had decried marriage, and 'without the least scruple' had popped five of his bastards, one after the other, into the foundling box. Then, having encouraged the notion that sexual indulgence required no licence by God or man, he had written works which extolled marriage as a supremely honourable institution. Later Romanticists, slightly more balanced than Rousseau, also damned the institution of marriage, but one by one went through the disgrace of it. It is doubtful whether, at heart, they seriously hoped to abolish marriage. What they wanted (insofar as they knew what they wanted) was a more intense, a more fully fashioned form of wooing. They professed themselves bored by the too public, too artificial pattern of courtship as practised (before the Deluge) at Versailles, and nauseated by the calculated man-trapping so aptly described by Sydney Smith, in which 'love must be made to the young man of fortune not only by the young lady . . . but by the father, mother, aunts, cousins, tutor, gamekeeper and stable-boy-assisted by the parson of the parish and the church warden'. A woman was not nubile, said the Romanticists, until the riches of her personality had been mined and brought to the surface. For every enriched woman, quickened with sensibility, spirituality (and sexuality), there was a similarly quickened male; the two would find each other by affinity. Love by formal introduction, love by parental arrangement was impossible. Both parties must be free before they could feel passion for each other, and their passion must be regarded not as a perversion but as a healthy and ennobling norm. The union of two people was no concern of the State, of the police or of the neighbours; it was a private and personal pact between a man and a woman, each of whom had equal rights as an individual. This was a philosophy which lent cover to some disorderly love affairs, especially among the poetical avant-garde, but as a Jane Austen character understandingly says: 'The coruscations of talent, elicited by impassioned feeling in the breast of man, are perhaps incompatible with some of the prosaic decencies of life.' In many instances high passion tended to die soon after the parties, boldly breaking all the rules, had yielded to it. There was a moral somewhere. The bourgeoisie, never having expected to dwell on the high peaks or to link their passion with thunder and cataracts, continued to live in a state of odious, and otiose, content. In the long run, however, the fervour of the Romanticists, diluted and progressively adulterated by popular fiction, was to confuse, colour and occasionally irradiate the amours of clerks and shopkeepers. Even the Church was to admit a polite form of romantic love as a force which, primed by spiritual fuel, could inspire and exalt.

Before such ideas could prevail, men had to be taught to look for other virtues in women besides stupidity. Mary Woilstonecraft, who published her Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1781, asked (echoing Mary Astell): 'Why should women be kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence? How grossly do they insult us who thus advise us only to reader ourselves gentle domestic brutes?* Because of man's 'seraglio attitude' to the other sex, young girls were encouraged to deck themselves with 'artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived tyranny'. Women should be taught to inspire respect, instead of to arouse emotion.

In an earlier work-Thoughts on the Education of Daughters -Mary Woilstonecraft had blamed passion for 'the absurd marriages we every day have an opportunity of observing1. Women should always try to fix in their minds the rational grounds for loving a person. In her ideal marriage women would be 'content to love but once in their lives, and after marriage let passion subside into friendship-into that tender intimacy which is the best refuge from care'.
One trouble with Englishwomen, thought Mary Wollstonecraft, was that they were too prudish before marriage and over-fond afterwards. 'It has ever occurred to me that it was sufficient for a woman to receive caresses and not bestow them. She ought to distinguish between fondness and tenderness.'

It remains to be said that the author of this very sober advice ran off with a dashing American captain, for whom she cherished a most powerful passion, but who abandoned her. She later lived with William Godwin, the libertarian philosopher, who disapproved heartily of marriage on rational grounds. Once marriage was abolished, he said, the intercourse of the sexes would 'fall under the same system as any other system of friendship'. Reasonable men would propagate the species, 'not because a certain sensible pleasure is annexed to this action, but because it is right that the species should be propagated, and the manner in which they exercise this function will be regulated by the dictates of reason and duty. Whether reason and duty left scope for courtship is not clear. Permanent cohabitation, Godwin thought, was the death of happiness, so he obtained rooms for himself twenty houses away from the shared abode in which he joined Mary Woilstonecraft for the more pleasurable occasions of social life. When she became pregnant, however, she asked him to marry her, since otherwise they would have been ostracized in circles she esteemed. With deep misgivings, Godwin agreed. Thus faltered and fell two more philosophers.