“I am surprised, and will you forgive me if I add, pleased, at Mrs Fenwick’s intelligence, that your objection to what you once desired is wholly grounded upon your opinion of my understanding. I cannot persuade myself to regard this as an invincible objection. If Mrs Fenwick has misunderstood you, if your objection have any other basis beside this, I think you owe it to me to correct my mistake.
“And so you would really demand in a partner an
understanding too little comprehensive to see into many things, and a heart,
for these are wholly or nearly inseparable, of too little sensibility to feel
many things? Surely to state such a requisition is sufficiently to display the
misapprehension on which it is founded. I should have thought experience would
have shown you how little is to be hoped from characters of this kind. Make one
generous experiment upon a man of a different sort. Can you fail to be aware
that the man of real powers will infallibly, at least when he loves, be
affectionate, attentive, familiar, and totally incapable of all questions of
competition or ideas of superiority; while the man of meaner or middling
understanding may almost always be expected to be jealous of rivalship,
obstinate, self-willed, and puffed up with the imaginary superiority he
ascribes to himself? Can you fail to be aware of the inferences which you ought
to draw from the respective characters of the two sexes? We are different in
our structure; we are perhaps still more different in our education. Woman
stands in need of the courage of man to defend her, of his constancy to inspire
her with firmness, and, at present at least, of his science and information to
furnish to her resources of amusement, and materials for studying. Women richly
repay us for all that we can bring into the common stock, by the softness of
their
| AN ARGUMENT. | 337 |
“You say you are incapable of reasoning with me. Believe me, there is no good to myself I would not cheerfully sacrifice, rather than consciously be guilty of an atom of sophistry. Ask yourself whether any word I have put down on this subject be not unquestionable truth, and I might almost say put down dispassionately. This, as I have just said, is the privilege of our sex, from superiority of education, to collect the materials of decision: your sex, though feeling both exquisitely and admirably, are often in danger of deciding from a partial view of the subject.
“But what I have just said was not the purpose for which I sat down to write, though I could not prevail on myself to omit it. I am willing to leave this question to time. There is no character I have so much repugnance to act as that of a tormentor. The point I have principally to press is one which, so far as I at present see, tends to decide whether you have a heart or have no heart; I mean the point of the continuance of our acquaintance.
“We have now lived on terms of the most cordial and
unreserved friendship for six years. For more than four of those six years I
suffered no thoughts respecting you, but those of single and unmixed
friendship, to find harbour in my heart. You showed, in a thousand instances,
that you valued my friendship, as I hope it deserved to be valued. On my part,
at a moment when what would have happened without my interference I regarded as
your ruin, I spared no exertion of my faculties or my industry, I defied
misrepresentation and obloquy in every shape they might assume, so I might
rescue you. Esteeming me probably more than you ever esteemed any other man,
you, with a resolution that does you the highest honour, preserved my
acquaintance, often in spite of Mr
Reveley, once in spite of myself. Again and again, when he
| 338 | WILLIAM GODWIN |
“You cannot form so despicable an opinion of me as to suppose that I can view you with no eyes but those of a lover. You saw the contrary for years; and believe me, I know what I say; I can conquer myself again and again, as often as the conquest shall be necessary. There is nothing upon earth that I desire so ardently, so fervently, so much with every sentiment and every pulse of my heart, as to call you mine. But dispose of that point as you please, I am too vigorous and robust of soul ever to be made the suicide of my body or the suicide of my mind. No objection to our intercourse can therefore arise from that point.
“If you are all at once become so thoroughly the slave of a miserable etiquette that you must not even risk the seeing me alone, you may dine here with my sister; she comes to me every other Sunday through the year: next Sunday is her day: or order me to invite Mrs Fenwick: when the heart is willing, such trifles are easily adjusted.
“It is, however, more than probable that in all I have said respecting our intercourse, I have been fighting a shadow. In one of your first intimations to me since your widowhood, you said you could not see me, or any unmarried man, for some time: that did not sound as if our intercourse was to be closed for ever. I think, however, you pay too little attention to my feelings. Two months of etiquette have now nearly elapsed, and no elucidation of this some time has yet reached my ears. You ought perhaps to have known that respecting persons in whom I feel myself interested, uncertainty fills my soul with tumults, and tortures my fancy with a thousand painful and monstrous images.”
