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THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
LXXVII
SHELLEY, GODWIN
AND THEIR CIRCLE
_EDITORS OF_
THE HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE
PROFESSOR GILBERT MURRAY, O.M., LL.D., F.B.A.
JULIAN S. HUXLEY, D.Sc., F.R.S.
PROFESSOR G. N. CLARK, LL.D., F.B.A.
SHELLEY, GODWIN
AND THEIR CIRCLE
_By_
H. N. BRAILSFORD
M.A.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
_First published in 1913, and reprinted in 1919, 1925, 1927, 1930, 1936
and 1942_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND 7
II THOMAS PAINE 56
III WILLIAM GODWIN AND THE REVOLUTION 78
IV "POLITICAL JUSTICE" 94
V GODWIN AND THE REACTION 142
VI GODWIN AND SHELLEY 168
VII MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT 186
VIII SHELLEY 212
BIBLIOGRAPHY 252
INDEX 255
SHELLEY, GODWIN, AND
THEIR CIRCLE
CHAPTER I
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND
The history of the French Revolution in England begins with a sermon and
ends with a poem. Between that famous discourse by Dr. Richard Price on
the love of our country, delivered in the first excitement that followed
the fall of the Bastille, and the publication of Shelley's _Hellas_
there stretched a period of thirty-two years. It covered the dawn, the
clouding and the unearthly sunset of a hope. It begins with the grave
but enthusiastic prose of a divine justly respected by earnest men, who
with a limited horizon fulfilled their daily duties in the city. It ends
in the rapt vision, the magical music of a singer, who seemed as he sang
to soar beyond the range of human ears. The hope passes from the
confident expectation of instant change, through the sobrieties of
disillusionment and the recantations of despair, to the iridescent
dreams of a future which has taken wing and made its home in a fairy
world.
In 1789 when Dr. Price preached to his ardent congregation of
Nonconformist Radicals in the meeting-house at the Old Jewry, the
prospect was definite and the place of the millennium was merely the
England over which George III. ruled. The hope was a robust but
pedestrian "mental traveller," and its limbs wore the precise garments
of political formulae. It looked for honest Parliaments and manhood
suffrage, for the triumph of democracy and the abolition of war. Its
scene as Wordsworth put it, was
Not in Utopia, subterraneous fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where,
But in the very world which is the world
Of all of us, the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all.
The impetus of its own aspiration carried it swiftly beyond the prosaic
demand for Parliamentary Reform. It evolved its programme for the
reconstruction of all human institutions, and projected the amendment of
human nature itself. America had made an end of kings and France was in
the full tide of revolution. Nothing was too mighty for this
new-begotten hope, and the path to human perfectibility stretched as
plain as the narrow road to Bunyan's Heavenly City.
There followed the phase when persecution from alarmed defenders of
things as they are, disgust at the failures of the revolution in France,
and contempt for the futilities of the revolution at home, drove the new
movement into as many refuges as its votaries had temperaments. For some
there was cynicism, for others recantation. "The French Revolution" as
Hazlitt put it, "was the only match that ever took place between
philosophy and experience; and waking from the trance of theory we hear
the words Truth, Reason, Virtue, Liberty, with the same indifference or
contempt that a cynic who has married a jilt or a termagant listens to
the rhapsodies of lovers." Godwin found his own alluring by-way, and
turning away at once from political repression and political agitation,
became the pioneer of philosophic anarchism. To Shelley at the end of
this marvellous thirty years of ardour, speculation, and despair, the
hope became winged. She had her place no longer in "the very world
which is the world of all of us." She had moved to
Kingless continents, sinless as Eden
Around mountains and islands inviolably
Prankt on the sapphire sea.
It requires no inordinate effort for us who live in an equable political
climate to realise the atmosphere of Dr. Price's Old Jewry sermon. The
lapse of a century indeed has made him a more intelligible figure than
he could have seemed to the generation which immediately followed him.
He was temperate in his rationalism and thrifty in his philanthropy. He
tended to Unitarianism in his theology, but was a sturdy defender of
Free Will. He had written a widely-read apology for the Colonial side in
the American Civil War. A stout individualist in his political theory,
inspired, as were nearly all the English progressive thinkers of his
day, by an extreme jealousy of State action, he yet guarded himself
carefully against anarchical conclusions, and followed Saint Paul in
teaching obedience to magistrates. He had written a treatise on ethics
which on some points anticipated Kant. But his most characteristic
pre-occupation was a study of finance in the interests of national
thrift and social benevolence. This cold moralist, who despised the
emotional aspects of human nature and found no place for the affections
in his scheme of the virtues, lapsed into passion when he attacked the
National Debt, and developed an arithmetical enthusiasm when he
explained his plan for providing through voluntary insurance for the old
age of the worthy poor. He was not quite the first of the philosophers
to dream of the abolition of war, and to plan an international tribunal
for the settlement of disputes between nations. In that he followed
Leibnitz, as he anticipated Kant.
It was such an essentially cold and calculating intellect as this which
in that age of ferment could launch the new doctrine of the infinite
perfectibility of mankind. Modern readers know the Rev. Dr. Price only
from the fulminations of Burke, in whose pages he figures now as an
incendiary and again as a fool. He was in point of fact the soul of
sobriety and the mirror of all the respectabilities in his serious
dissenting world. It is worth while to note that he was also, with his
friend Priestley, perhaps the only English Nonconformist preacher who
has ever enjoyed a European reputation. No less a man than Condorcet
refers to him as one of the formative minds of the century.
Dr. Price's sermon is worth a glance, not merely because it was the goad
which provoked Burke to eloquent fury, but still more because it is a
document which records for us the mood in which even the older and
graver progressives of his generation greeted the French Revolution. It
was an official discourse delivered before the Society for Commemorating
the Revolution in Great Britain. This typically English club claimed to
have met annually since 1688 for a dinner and a sermon. The centenary of
our own Revolution and the events in France gave it for a moment a
central place on the political stage. It was an eminently respectable
society, mainly composed of middle-class Nonconformists, with four
Doctors of Divinity on its Committee, an entrance fee of half-a-guinea,
and a radical peer, Earl Stanhope, for its Chairman. At its annual
meeting in November, 1789, Dr. Price "disdaining national partialities
and rejoicing in every triumph of liberty and justice over arbitrary
power," had moved an address congratulating the French National Assembly
on "the Revolution in that country and on the prospect it gives to the
two first kingdoms in the world of a common participation in the
blessings of civil and religious liberty." The sermon was an eloquent
expansion of this address.
It opens with a defence of the cosmopolitan attitude which could rejoice
at an improvement in the prospects of our hereditary rival. Christ
taught not patriotism, but universal benevolence, as the parable of the
Good Samaritan shows. "My neighbour" is he to whom I can do most good,
whether foreigner or fellow-citizen. We should love our country
"ardently but not exclusively," considering ourselves "citizens of the
world," and taking care "to maintain a just regard to the rights of
other countries." Patriotism had been in history a scourge of mankind.
It was among the Romans no better than "a principle holding together a
band of robbers in their attempts to crush all liberty but their own."
The aim of those who love their kind can be only to spread Truth, Virtue
and Liberty. To make mankind happy and free, it should suffice to
instruct them. "Ignorance is the parent of bigotry, intolerance,
persecution and slavery. Inform and instruct mankind and these evils
will be excluded." There follow some rambling remarks on the need for a
revisal of the Liturgy and the Articles, a complaint of the servility
shown in a recent address to King George, who ought to consider himself
rather the servant than the sovereign of his people, and a prediction
that France and England, each delivered from despotism by a happy
revolution, will now "not merely refrain from engaging in wars with one
another, but unite in preventing wars everywhere." As for our own
Revolution of 1688, it was a great but not a perfect work. It had left
religious toleration incomplete and the Parliamentary franchise unequal.
We must continue to enforce its principles, especially in the matter of
removing the disabilities that still weigh upon dissenters. Those
principles are briefly (1) Liberty of Conscience, (2) The right to
resist power when it is abused, and (3) The right to choose our own
governors, to cashier them for misconduct and to frame a government for
ourselves. There follows a curious little moral exhortation which shows
how far the good Dr. Price was from forgetting his duties as a preacher.
He had been distressed by the lax morals of some of his colleagues in
the agitation for Reform, and he pauses to deplore that "not all who are
zealous in this cause are as conspicuous for purity of morals as for
ability." He cannot reconcile himself to the idea of an immoral patriot,
and begs that they will at least hide their vices. The old man finds
his peroration in Simeon's prayer. He had seen the great salvation. "I
have lived to see thirty millions of people indignant and resolute,
spurning at slavery and demanding liberty with an irresistible voice,
their king led in triumph and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself
to his subjects. And now methinks I see the ardour for liberty catching
and spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the
dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of
priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience."
The world remembers the scholar Salmasius only because he provoked
Milton to a learned outbreak of bad manners. There is something immortal
even in the ill-temper of great men, and Dr. Price lives in modern
memory chiefly because he moved Burke to declamatory rage. His
_Reflections on the French Revolution_ was an answer to the Old Jewry
sermon, which, eloquent itself, was to beget much eloquence in others.
For four years the mighty debate went on, and it became as the
disputants conversed across the echoes of the Terror, rather a dialogue
between the past and the future, than a discussion between human voices.
Burke answered Dr. Price, and to Burke in turn replied Tom Paine with
the brilliant, confident, hard-hitting logic of a pamphlet (_The Rights
of Man_) which for all the efforts of Pitt to suppress it, is still read
and circulated to-day. Two notable answers were ephemeral, one from Mary
Wollstonecraft, and another (_Vindiciae Gallicae_) from Mackintosh, who
afterwards recanted his own opinions and lived to be known as Sir James.
To lift the discussion to the height of a philosophical argument was
reserved for William Godwin, a mind steeped in the French and English
speculation of his century, gifted with rare powers of analysis, and
inspired with a faith in human reason in general and his own logical
capacity in particular, which no English mind before him or after him
has approached. In spite of a lucid style and a certain cold eloquence
which illumines if it does not warm, Godwin's _Political Justice_ was
dead before its author, while Burke lives and was never more widely read
than to-day.
The ghosts of great men have an erratic habit in walking. It is passion
rather than any mere intellectual momentum which drives them from the
tomb. There is, moreover, in Burke a variety and a humanity which
appeals in some one of its phases and moods to all of us in turn. The
great store-house of his emotions and his phrases has the catholicity of
the Bible. Each man can find in it what he seeks. He is like the
luminous phantom which walked in _Faust_ through the witcheries of the
Brocken. Each man saw in her his own first love. He has been hero and
prophet to Whigs and Tories, and in our own generation we have seen him
bequeath an equal inspiration to a Cecil and a Morley. It is no part of
our task to attempt even the briefest exposition of his philosophy; we
are concerned with him here chiefly as an influence which helped by its
vehemence and its superb rhetorical exaggerations to drive the
revolutionary thinkers who answered him to parallel exaggerations and
opposite extremes. Inspired himself with a distrust of generalisation,
and a hatred of philosophers, he none the less evolved a philosophy as
he talked. Against his will he was forced into the upper air in his
furious pursuit of the "political aeronauts." His was a volcanic
intellect which flung up principles in its moments of eruption, and
poured them forth pell-mell with the vituperations and the exaltations.
No logical dissection can reach the inner truth of Burke. Every
statement of a principle in an orator or a pamphleteer is coloured by
the occasion, the emotion, and the mood of an audience to whom it is
addressed. Burke spoke amid the angers and alarms inspired first by the
subversive energy, and then by the doctrinaire cruelty of the French
Revolution. It was in the process of "diffusing the Terror" that most of
his philosophical _obiter dicta_ were uttered. The real nerve of the
thinking of a mind so vehement, so passionate, so essentially dramatic
is to be sought not in some principle which was the major premise of his
syllogisms, but in some pervading emotion. Fanny Burney said of him that
when he spoke of the Revolution his face immediately assumed "the
expression of a man who is going to defend himself against murderers."
That is exactly the tone of all his later utterances. His mission was to
spread panic because he felt it. By no other reading can one explain or
excuse the rage of his denunciation of the excellent Dr. Price.
If his was philosophy it was philosophy seeing red. He predicted the
Terror before it occurred, and by his work in stirring Europe to the
coalition against France, he did much to realise his own forebodings.
But, to do Burke justice, his was a disinterested fear, and it would be
fairer to call it a hatred of cruelty. Burke was not a man to take fire
because he thought a principle false. His was rather the practical logic
which found a principle false because it led to evil; and the evil which
caused his mind to blaze was nearly always cruelty. He hated the French
philosophers because in the groves of their Academy "at the end of every
vista you see nothing but the gallows." He pursued Rousseau and Dr.
Price because their teaching, on his reading of cause and effect, had
set the tumbrils rolling and weighted the guillotine for Marie
Antoinette. It was precisely the same impulse which had caused him to
pursue Warren Hastings for his cruelties towards the Begums of Oude. The
spring of all this speculation was a nerve which twitched with a
maddening sensitiveness at the sight of suffering.
To rouse Burke's genius to its noblest utterance, there must needs be a
suffering which he could personify and dramatise. He saw nothing of the
dull peasant misery which in truth explained the Revolution. He ignored
those catalogues of injustice and wrong that composed the mandates (the
_cahiers_) which the Deputies carried with them to the National
Assembly. He forgot the famines, the exactions, the oppressive
privileges which made revolt, and saw only the pathos of the Queen's
helplessness before it. In Paine's immortal epigram, he "pitied the
plumage and forgot the dying bird." But it is paradoxically true that
while he pursued the friends of humanity, his real impulse was the
hatred of cruelty which modern men call humanitarian. To that hatred he
was always true. No abstract principle, but always this dominating
passion, covers his inconsistencies, and bridges the gulf between his
earlier Whiggery and his later Toryism. In the French Revolution he saw
only cruelty, and he opposed it as he had opposed Indian Imperialism,
negro slavery, the savage criminal justice of his day, and the penal
laws against the Irish Catholics. Of Burke one must ask not so much What
did he believe? as Whom did he pity?
It was the contrast of temperament and attitude which made the cleavage
between Burke and the friends of the French Revolution deep and
irreconcilable. In the fundamentals of political theory he often seems
to agree with some of them, and they differ as often among themselves.
Burke seems often to retain the typical eighteenth century fiction that
the State is based on some original pact or social contract. That was
Rousseau's starting point, and it was Godwin's work (after Hume) to
shatter this heritage which French and English speculation had been
content to accept from Locke. There are passages in which Burke appears
to accept the notion, unintelligible to modern minds, of the natural, or
as he put it, "primitive," rights of man. He reserved his contempt for
those who sought to tabulate or codify these rights, and he would always
brush aside any argument based upon them, by asking the prior question,
what in the given emergency was best for the good of society, or the
happiness of men. Paine, when he was in his more _a priori_ moods, was
capable of deducing his whole practical system from the abstract rights
of man; Godwin was a modern in virtually dismissing the whole notion.
While Burke was belabouring Dr. Price, he whittled away the whole
theoretic significance of the English Revolution of 1688, but he
remained its partisan. He tried to deny Dr. Price's claim to "choose our
governors," but he could not relapse into the seventeenth-century Tory
doctrine of non-resistance, and would always allow in extreme cases the
right of rebellion. Here again there was no final opposition, for there
are passages in Godwin against rash rebellion and the anarchy of
revolution more impressive, if less emotional, than anything in Burke.
Modern criticism is disposed to base the greatness of Burke on his
inspired anticipation of the historical view of politics. Quotation has
made classical those noble passages which glorify the continuous life of
mankind, link the present by a chain of pieties to the past, conjure up
a glowing vision of the social organism, and celebrate the wisdom of our
ancestors and the infallibility of the race. There was, indeed, a real
opposition of temperament here; but Burke had no monopoly of the
historical vision. It is a travesty to suggest that the revolutionary
school despised history. Paine, indeed, was a self-taught man, who knew
nothing of history and cared less. But Godwin wrote history with success
and even penned a remarkable essay (_On Sepulchres_) in which he
anticipated the Comtist veneration for the great dead, and proposed a
national scheme for covering the country with monuments to their memory.
Condorcet, perhaps the greatest intellect and certainly the noblest
character among them, wrote the first attempt at a systematic
evolutionary interpretation of history.
But it makes some difference whether a man sees history from above or
from below. Burke saw it from the comfortable altitude of the Whig
aristocracy to which he had allied himself. The revolutionary school saw
its inverse, from the standpoint of the "swinish multitude" (an angry
indiscretion of Burke's) for whom it had worked to less advantage. Paine
was a man of the people, and Godwin belonged by birth to the dissenting
community for whom history had been chiefly a record of persecution,
illuminated by rebellion. For Burke the product of history was the
sacred constitution in which he saw an "entailed heritage," the social
fabric "well cramped and bolted together in all its parts." For Godwin
it was mainly a chronicle of criminal wars, savage oppressions, and
social misery. Burke, in a moment of paradoxical exaltation, was capable
of singing the praises of "prejudice," which "renders a man's virtue his
habit." For Condorcet, on the other hand, history was the orderly
procession of the human mind, advancing through a series of well-marked
epochs (he enumerated nine) from the pastoral state to the French
Revolution, each epoch marked primarily by the shedding of some moral,
social, or theological "prejudice," which had hampered its advance.
It is easy to criticise the naive intellectualism of such a view as
this, which ignores or thrusts into the background the economic causes
of advance and retrogression. But it is certainly not an unhistorical
view. Burke dreaded fundamental discussions which "turn men's duties
into doubts." The revolutionary school believed that all progress
depended on the daring and thoroughness of these discussions. History
for them was a continuous Socratic dialogue, in which the philosophers
of innovation were always arrayed against the sophists of authority.
They hoped everything from the leadership of the illuminated few who
gradually permeate the mass and raise it with them. Burke held that "the
individual is foolish, but the species is wise," and the "natural
aristocracy" in whom he trusted was to keep the inert mass in a
condition of stable equilibrium.
We retain from Burke to-day the sonorous generalisations, the
epigrammatic maxims, which each of us applies in his own way. But to
Burke's contemporaries they meant only one thing--a defence of the
unreformed franchise. All his reverence for the pre-ordained order of
providence, the "divine tactic" which had made society what it was,
meant for them in bald prose that Old Sarum should have two members.
Burke had not "a doubt that the House of Commons represents perfectly
the whole commons of Great Britain." They, with no mystical view of
history to guide them, pointed out that its electors were a mere handful
of 12,000 in the whole population, and that Birmingham, Manchester,
Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford had not a Member among them. While Burke
perorated about the ways of providence, they pointed to that auctioneer
who put up for sale to the highest bidder the fee simple of the Borough
of Gatton with the power of nominating two members for ever. That
auctioneer is worth quoting: "Need I tell you, gentlemen, that this
elegant contingency is the only infallible source of fortune, titles,
and honours in this happy country? That it leads to the highest
situations in the State? And that, meandering through the tempting
sinuosities of ambition, the purchaser will find the margin strewed with
roses, and his head quickly crowned with those precious garlands that
flourish in full vigour round the fountain of honour? On this halcyon
sea, if any gentleman who has made his fortune in either of the Indies
chooses once more to embark, he may repose in perfect quiet. No
hurricanes to dread; no tormenting claims of insolent electors to
evade; no tinkers' wives to kiss.... With this elegant contingency in
his pocket, the honours of the State await his plucking, and with its
emoluments his purse will overflow."
A reference to the elegant contingency of Gatton sufficed to deflate a
good deal of eloquence.
Burke, indeed, believed in the pre-ordained order of the world, but he
somehow omitted the rebels. When in his sublimest periods, he appealed
to "the known march of the ordinary providence of God," and saw in
revolution and change an assault on the divine order, one sees, rigid
and forbidding, the limitations of his thinking. The man who sees in
history a divine tactic must salute the regiment in its headlong charge
no less than the regiment which stands with fixed bayonets around the
ark of the covenant. Said the Hindoo saint, who saw all things in God
and God in all things, to the soldier who was slaying him, "And Thou
also art He." The march of providence embraced 1789 as well as 1688.
Paine and Godwin, Danton and Robespierre might have answered Burke with
a reminder that they also were His children.
The key to any understanding of the dialogue between Burke and the
Revolutionists is that each side was moved by a passion which meant
nothing to the other. Burke was hoarse with anger and fear at the
excesses in France. They were afire with an almost religious faith in
human perfectibility. Burke's is a great record of detailed reforms
achieved or advocated, but for organic change there was no place in his
system, and he indulged in no vision of human progress. "The only moral
trust with any certainty in our hands," he wrote, "is the care of our
own time." It was of to-morrow that the Revolution thought, and even of
the day after to-morrow. Nothing could shake its faith. Proscribed amid
the Terror for his moderation and independence, learning daily in the
garret where he hid of the violent deaths of friends and comrades,
witnessing, as it must have seemed to him, the ruin of his work and the
frustration of his brightest hopes, Condorcet, solitary and disguised,
sat down to write that sketch of human destinies which is, perhaps, the
most confident statement of a reasoned optimism in European literature.
He finished his _Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the
Human Mind_, left his garret, and went out to meet his death. A year
later, as if to show that the great prodigal hope could survive the
brain that conceived it, the representatives of the French people had
it circulated as a national document.
Its thesis is that no limit can be set to the perfection of human
faculties, that the progress and perfectibility of man are independent
of any power which can arrest them, and have no term unless it be the
duration of the globe itself. The progress might be swift or slow, but
the ultimate end was sure. Twenty years before, Turgot projecting a
system of universal education in France, had promised to transform the
nation in ten years. Condorcet was less sanguine, but his perspective
was short. The indefinite advance of mankind presupposed, he argued, the
elimination of inequality (1) among peoples, and (2) among classes, and
lastly the perfection of the individual. For all this he believed that
the Revolution had already laid the foundation. Negro slavery, for
example, would end; Africa would enter on a phase of culture dependent
on settled agriculture, and the East adopt free institutions. The time
was at hand when the sun would rise only on free men, and tyrants,
slaves, and priests would live only in history. The Revolution had
proclaimed the equality of men, and the future would proceed to realise
it. Monopolies abolished, fortunes would tend to a level of equality,
and a system of insurance (Dr. Price's specific) would mitigate or
abolish poverty. Universal education would reduce the natural inequality
of talents, and break down the barriers of class, so that men, retaining
still the desire to be instructed by others, would no longer need to be
controlled by their superiors. Science had made a dizzy progress in the
past generation, but its advance must be still more rapid when general
education enables it to be cultivated by still greater numbers, and by
women as well as men. To the fear which Malthus afterwards used as the
most formidable argument against revolutionary optimism, that a denser
population would leave the means of subsistence inadequate, he opposed
intensive cultivation, synthetic chemistry, and the progress of mankind
in self-control and virtue. Human character itself will change with the
amendment of human institutions. Passion can be dominated by reflection,
and by the deliberate encouragement of gentle and altruistic sentiments.
The business of politics is to destroy the opposition between
self-interest and altruism, and to make a world in which when a man
seeks his own good, he need no longer infringe the good of others. A
great share in this moral elevation would come from the destruction of
the inequality of the sexes, which Condorcet preached in France while
Mary Wollstonecraft was its pioneer in England. That inequality has been
ruinous even to the sex which it favoured, and rests in nothing but an
abuse of force. To remove it is not merely to raise the status of women
but to increase family happiness, and to reform morals. Wars too will
end, and with them a constant menace to liberty. The ultimate dream is a
perpetual confederation of mankind.
It would be a fascinating but too protracted study to follow this faith
in the perfectibility of mankind to its final enthusiasms of prophecy,
and to trace it to its origins in the speculations of Helvetius and
Holbach, of Priestley and Price. It was a creative impulse which made
for itself a psychology and a sociology; it rather led the thinking of
men than followed from their reasonings. They seem at every turn to
choose of two alternative views the one which would favour this
sovereign hope. Is it reason and opinion, or some innate character which
governs the actions of men? The philosophers of hope answer "opinion,"
for opinion can be indefinitely changed and led from prejudice to
science. Is it climate (as Montesquieu had urged) or political
institutions which differentiate the races of men? Clearly it is
institutions, for if it were climate there would be nothing to hope from
reform. Burke opposed to all their schemes of construction and
destruction, to their generalisations and philosophisings, the
unchangeable fact of human nature. They answered (diving into Helvetius)
that human nature is itself the product of "education" or, as we should
call it, "environment." Circumstances and above all political
institutions have made man what he is. Princes, as Holbach puts it, are
gardeners who can by varying systems of cultivation alter the character
of men as they would alter the form of trees. Change the institutions
and you will change human nature itself. There seemed no limit to the
improvement which would follow if we could but discard the fetters of
prejudice and despotism.
Wordsworth's "shades of the prison-house" which close upon the growing
boy, were an echo of this thought. Godwin's friend, Holcroft, embodied
it in a striking metaphor: "Men do not become what by nature they are
meant to be, but what society makes them. The generous feelings and
higher propensities of the soul are, as it were shrunk up, scared,
violently wrenched, and amputated, to fit us for our intercourse in the
world, something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their
children to make them fit for their future situation in life."
The men of the Revolution phrased that idea each in his own way,
according as they had been influenced, primarily, by Rousseau,
Helvetius, or Condorcet. It gave to their controversy with Burke the
appearance, not so much of a dispute between rival schools, as of a
dialogue between men who spoke to each other in unknown tongues.
* * * * *
Burke condescended to reason with Dr. Price. But the main answer of
authority to the friends of the French Revolution, was the answer which
Burke prescribed for "infidels"--"a refutation by criminal justice." A
curious parallel movement towards extremes went on simultaneously in the
two camps. While Burke separated himself from Fox, split the Whig party,
and devoted his genius to the task of fanning the general English
dislike of the Revolution into a panic rage of anger and fear, the
progressive camp in its turn was gradually captured by the
"intellectuals," and passed from a humdrum demand for political reform
into a ferment of moral and social speculation. Societies grew up in
all the chief centres of population, always with the same programme. "An
honest Parliament. An annual Parliament. A Parliament wherein each
individual will have his representative." Of these the most active, the
most extreme, and the best organised was undoubtedly the London
Corresponding Society.
It was founded by a Scottish boot-maker named Thomas Hardy. The sober,
limited character of the man is plain to read in his records and
pamphlets. The son of a sea-captain, who had had his education in a
village school in Perthshire where the scholars paid a penny a week, he
was a leading member of the Scots' Kirk in Covent Garden, and had drawn
his political education not at all from godless French philosophers, but
from the Protestant fanatic, Lord George Gordon, and from Dr. Price's
book on the American War. He gathered his own friends together to found
his society, and nine of them met for the first time in the "Bell"
tavern in Exeter Street in January, 1792. "They had finished their daily
labour and met there by appointment. After having their bread and cheese
and porter for supper, as usual, and their pipes afterwards, with some
conversation, on the hardness of the times and the dearness of all the
necessaries of life, which they in common with their fellow-citizens
felt to their sorrow, the business for which they had met was brought
forward--Parliamentary Reform."
The Corresponding Society drew the bulk of its members from tradesmen,
mechanics and shopkeepers, who contributed their penny a week, and
organised itself under Hardy's methodical guidance into numerous
branches each with twenty members. It is said to have counted in the end
some 30,000 members in London alone. It was a focus of discontent and
hope which soon attracted men of more conspicuous talents and wider
experience. Horne Tooke, man about town, ex-clergyman, and philologist,
who had been at first the friend and lieutenant and then the rival and
enemy of Wilkes, was there to bridge the years between the last great
popular agitation and the new hopes of reform. He was a man cautious and
even timid in action, but there was a vanity in him which led him to say
"hanging matters" when he had an inflammable audience in front of him
within the four walls of a room. There was Tom Paine, the man who had
first dared to propose the independence of the United States, a veteran
of revolution who had served on Washington's staff, penned those
brilliant exhortations which led the American rebels to victory, and
acted as Foreign Secretary to the insurgent Congress. On the fringes of
the little inner circle of intellectuals one catches a glimpse of
William Blake the poet, and Ritson, the first teacher and theorist of
vegetarianism. Not the least interesting member of the group was Thomas
Holcroft, the inseparable friend and ally of William Godwin. Holcroft's
vivid and masterful personality stands out indeed as the most attractive
among the abler members of the circle. The son of a boot-maker, he had
earned his bread as cobbler, ostler, village schoolmaster, strolling
player and reporter. His insatiable passion for knowledge had given him
a mastery of French and German. He went in 1783 to Paris as
correspondent of the _Morning Herald_, on the modest salary of a
guinea-and-a-half a week. It was there that he acquired his familiarity
with the writings of the French political philosophers, and performed
the quaint achievement of pirating _Figaro_ for the English stage. No
printed copy was obtainable, and Holcroft contrived to commit the whole
play to memory by attending ten performances, much as Mozart had pirated
the ancient exclusive music of St. Peter's in Rome. He was at this
period a thriving literary craftsman, and the author of a series of
popular plays in which the critics of the time had just begun to note
and resent an obtrusive democratic tendency.
Under the influence of these eager speculative spirits, the
Corresponding Society must have travelled far from its original business
of Parliamentary Reform. Here is an extract from evidence given before
the Privy Council, which relates the proceedings at one of its later
meetings:
"The most gentlemanlike person took the chair and talked about an equal
representation of the people, and of putting an end to war. Holcroft
talked about the Powers of the Human Mind.... Mr. Holcroft talked a
great deal about Peace, of his being against any violent or coercive
means, that were usually resorted to against our fellow-creatures, urged
the more powerful operation of Philosophy and Reason to convince man of
his errors; that he would disarm his greatest enemy by these means and
oppose his Fury. He spoke also about Truth being powerful, and gave
advice to the above effect to the delegates present who all seemed to
agree, as no person opposed his arguments."
One may doubt, however, whether the whole society was composed of
"natural Quakers," who, like Holcroft and Godwin, preached
non-resistance before Tolstoy. The dour commonsense of Hardy maintained
the theory--he vowed that it was only theory--that every citizen should
possess arms and know their use. As the Revolution went forward in
France, the agitation in England became increasingly reckless. When the
society held its anniversary dinner after the Terror, in May, 1794, at
the "Crown and Anchor" Tavern, the band played "Ca ira," the
"Carmagnole" and the "Marseillaise." The chief toasts were "the Rights
of Man," and "the Armies contending for Liberty," which was a
sufficiently clear phrase for describing the Republican armies that were
at war with England. There followed an ode composed by Sir William
Jones, a translation of the Athenian song which celebrated the deeds of
the tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton;
Verdant myrtle's branchy pride
Shall my thirsty blade entwine.
One may doubt whether Sir William Jones ever felt the smallest
inclination to satisfy the thirst of his blade, but there was provision
enough for more commonplace appetites. Two years before, Hardy's worthy
mechanics had supped on porter and cheese and talked of the hardness of
the times. Their movement had been captured by a group of eager,
sophisticated, literary persons, who went much farther than
Parliamentary Reform, and with the aid of claret and the subtler French
intoxicants, "turned indignant" as another Ode puts it:
From Kings who seek in Gothic night
To hide the blaze of moral light.
Fill high the animating glass
And let the electric ruby pass.
It was a cheerful indignation, a festive rage.
That dinner must have marked the height of the revolutionary tide in
England. The reaction was already rampant and vindictive, and before the
year 1794 was out it had crushed the progressive movement and postponed
for thirty-eight years the triumph of Parliamentary Reform. It requires
a strenuous exercise of the imagination to conceive the panic which
swept over England as the news of the French Terror circulated. It
fastened impartially on every class of the community, and destroyed the
emotional balance no less of Pitt and his colleagues than of the working
men who formed the Church and King mobs. Proclamations were issued to
quell insurrections which never had been planned, and the militia called
out when not a hand had been raised against the King throughout Great
Britain. So great was the fear, so deep the moral indignation that "even
respectable and honest men," (the phrase is Holcroft's) "turned spies
and informers on their friends from a sense of public duty." A mob
burned Dr. Priestley's house near Birmingham for no better reason than
because he was supposed to have attended a Reform dinner, which in fact,
he did not attend. Hardy's bookshop in Piccadilly was rushed by a mob,
and his wife, about to be confined, was injured in her efforts to
escape, and died a few hours afterwards. A hunt went on all over the
kingdom for booksellers and printers to prosecute, and when Thomas Paine
was prosecuted in his absence for publishing _The Rights of Man_, the
jury was so determined to find him guilty that they would not trouble to
hear the case for the Crown.
Twenty years before, the French philosopher Helvetius, after an
experience of Jesuit persecution and Court disfavour in France, made a
quaint proposal for re-organising the whole discussion of moral and
political questions. The first step, he thought, was to compile a
dictionary in which all the terms required in such debates would receive
an authoritative definition. But this dictionary, he urged, must be
composed in the English language, and published first in England, for
only there was discussion free, and the press unfettered. In the
reaction over which Pitt and Dundas presided, that envied liberty was
totally eclipsed. The _Habeas Corpus_ Act was suspended; the Privy
Council sat as a sort of Star Chamber to question political suspects,
and there was even talk of importing Hessian and Hanoverian mercenaries
to check an insurrection which nowhere showed its head. The frailest of
all human endowments is the sense of humour. The sense of proportion had
been eclipsed in the panic, and most of the cases which may be studied
to-day in the State trials impress the modern reader as tasteless and
cruel farces. Men were tried and sentenced never for deeds, but always
for words. For a sermon closely resembling Dr. Price's, a dissenting
minister named Winterbotham was tried at Exeter, and sentenced to four
years' imprisonment and a fine of L200. The attorney, John Frost,
returning from France, admitted in a chance conversation in a
coffee-house that he thought society could manage very well without
kings; he was imprisoned, set in the pillory and struck off the rolls.
One favourite expedient was to produce a spy who would swear that he had
heard some suspect Radical declare in a coach or a coffee-house, that he
would "as soon have the King's head off as he would tear a bit of paper"
(evidence against a group of Manchester prisoners), or that he "would
cut off the King's head as easily as he would shave himself" (case
against Thomas Hardy). The climax of really entertaining absurdity was
reached when two debtors imprisoned in the Fleet were tried and
sentenced for nailing a seditious libel to its doors. The libel was a
notice that "This house is to let," that "infamous bastilles are no
longer necessary in Europe," and that "peaceable possession" would be
secured "on or before the first day of January, 1793, being the
commencement of the first year of liberty in Great Britain."
The farce of this panic became a tragedy when the reformers of Scotland
ventured to summon a Convention at Edinburgh to voice the demand for
shorter Parliaments and universal male suffrage. It met in October,
1793, and was attended by delegates from the London Corresponding
Society as well as from Scottish branches. Nothing was intended beyond
the holding of what we should call to-day a conference or congress. But
the word "Convention" with its reminiscence of the French revolutionary
assembly seems to have caused the Government some particular alarm. The
Convention, after some days of orderly debate, was invaded by the
magistrates and broken up. Margarot and Sinclair (the English
delegates), Skirving, Palmer and Thomas Muir, were tried before that
notorious hanging judge, whom Stevenson portrayed as Weir of Hermiston,
and sentenced to fourteen years' deportation at Botany Bay.
Of these five, all of them young men of brilliant promise and high
courage, only one, Margarot, lived to return to England. Muir, daring,
romantic and headstrong, contributed to the history of the movement a
page of adventure which might invite the attention of a novelist. He
escaped from Botany Bay on a whaler, was wrecked on the coast of South
America, contrived to wander to the West Indies, there shipped on a
Spanish vessel for Europe, fell in with an English frigate, was wounded
in the fight that followed, and had the good fortune to find among the
officers who took him prisoner an old friend, who recognised him, and
assisted him to conceal his identity. He was landed in Spain, invited
to Paris and pensioned by the Convention, but died shortly after his
arrival. Less romantic but even finer is Sinclair's story. He obtained
bail while his comrades were tried and sentenced. He might have broken
his bail, and his friends urged him to do so, but with the certainty
that Botany Bay lay before him he none the less returned to Edinburgh,
as Horne Tooke puts it "in discharge of his faith as a private man
towards his bail, and in discharge of his duty towards an oppressed and
insulted public; he has returned not to take a fair trial, but, as he is
well persuaded, to a settled conviction and sentence." Joseph Gerrald,
another member of the same group gave the same fine example of courage,
surrendered to his bail, and was sent for fifteen years to Botany Bay.
The ferment was more than an intellectual stirring. It brought with it a
moral elevation and a great courage that did not shrink from venturing
life and fortune for a disinterested end. The modern reader is apt to
indulge a smile when he reads in the ardent declamation of this time
professions of a love of Virtue and praises of Universal Benevolence. We
are impatient of abstractions and shy of capital letters. But it was no
abstraction which carried a man with honour to the fevers and
privations of Botany Bay, when he might have sought safety and fame in
Paris. The English reformers were resolved to brave the worst that Pitt
could do to them, and challenged the fate of their Scottish comrades.
They prepared in their turn to hold a "Convention" for Parliamentary
Reform, and showed a doubtful prudence in keeping its details secret
while the intention was boldly avowed. The counter-stroke came promptly.
Twelve of the leading members of the Corresponding Society, including
Hardy, Horne Tooke and Holcroft were arrested and sent, for the most
part to the Tower, on a charge of high treason. The records of their
preliminary examination before the Privy Council go to show that Pitt
and Dundas had allowed themselves to be persuaded by their spies that
every species of treason and folly was in preparation, from an armed
insurrection down to a plan to murder the King by blowing a poisoned
arrow from an air-gun. The Government had said that there was a
treasonable conspiracy; it had to produce the traitors.
There was some delay in arresting Holcroft. His conduct is worth
recording because it is so typical of the naive courage, the doctrinaire
hardihood of the group. These men whom the reaction accused of
subverting morality, were in fact dervishes of principle, who rushed on
the bayonets in the name of manhood and truth and sincerity. Godwin when
he came in his systematic treatise to describe how a free people would
conduct a defensive war, declared that it would scorn to resort to a
stratagem or an ambuscade. In the same spirit Holcroft hearing that a
warrant was out against him for high treason, walked boldly into the
Chief Justice's court, and announced that he came to be put upon his
trial "that if I am a guilty man, the whole extent of my guilt may
become notorious, and if innocent that the rectitude of my principles
and conduct may be no less public." When a messenger did, in fact, go to
Holcroft's house about the same hour to arrest him, his daughters,
obedient to the same ideal of sincerity, actually invited him to take
their father's papers.
One may doubt whether English liberties have ever run a graver danger in
modern times than at the trial of the twelve reformers. The Government
sought to overwhelm them with a mass of evidence which they lacked the
means to sift and confute. But no definite act was charged against them,
and the whole case turned on a monstrous attempt to give a wide
constructive interpretation to the law of high treason. High treason in
English law has the perfectly definite meaning of an attempt on the
King's life, or the levying of war against him. Chief Justice Eyre, in
his charge to the Grand Jury, sought to stretch it until it assumed a
Russian latitude, and would include any effort by agitation to alter the
form of government or the constitution of Parliament. The issue, before
a jury which probably had not escaped the general panic, seemed very
doubtful, and it was the general opinion that the decisive blow for
liberty was struck by William Godwin. Long years afterwards Horne Tooke,
in a dramatic scene, called Godwin to him in public, and kissed the hand
which had saved his life.
Godwin contributed to the _Morning Chronicle_ a long letter, or more
properly, a pamphlet, in which he analysed the Chief Justice's charge
and brought to the light what really was latent in it, a claim to treat
as high treason any effort, however peaceful and orderly, to bring about
a fundamental change in our institutions. The letter shows none of
Godwin's speculative daring, and his gift of cold and dignified
eloquence is severely repressed. He wrote to attain his immediate end,
and from that standpoint his pleading was a masterpiece. A certain
deadly courtesy, a tone of quiet reasonableness made it possible for the
most prejudiced reader to follow it with assent. The argument was
irresistible, and the single touch of emotion at the end was worthy of a
great orator. A few lines depicted these men who, moved by public
spirit, had acted in good faith within the law, as it had been
universally understood in England, overwhelmed by a sudden extension of
its most terrible articles, applied to them without precedent or
warning. Should the awful sentence be read over these men, that they
should be hanged (but not until they were dead), and then, still living,
suffer the loss of their members and see their bowels torn out? The
ghastly barbarity of the whole procedure could not have been more
effectively exposed. Looking back upon this trial there is no reason to
think that the reformers exaggerated its importance. Had the Government
won its case, it must have succeeded in destroying the very possibility
of opposition or agitation in England. It was believed that no less than
three hundred signed warrants lay ready for issue on the day that Hardy
and his friends were convicted. But the stroke was too daring, the
threat too impudent. When the trial began, the prosecution lightened
its own task by dropping the charge against Holcroft and three of his
comrades. But for nine days the charge was pressed against Thomas Hardy,
and when he was acquitted a further six days was spent in the effort to
convict Horne Tooke, and four in a last vain attempt to succeed against
Thelwall.
The popular victory checked the excesses of the reaction. As Holcroft
wrote: "The whole power of Government was directed against Thomas Hardy:
in his fate seemed involved the fate of the nation, and the verdict of
Not Guilty appeared to burst its bonds, and to have released it from
inconceivable miseries and ages of impending slavery." The reaction,
indeed, was restrained; but so also was the movement of reform. The
subsequent history of its leaders is one of unheroic failure, and of an
unpopularity which was harder to endure than danger. Windham referred to
the twelve in debate as "acquitted felons," and Holcroft was constrained
first to produce his plays under a borrowed name, and then to seek a
refuge in voluntary exile on the continent. The passions roused by the
Terror arrested the progress of the revolutionary movement in England.
The alarms and glories of the struggle with Napoleon buried it in
oblivion.
It is this complex experience which lies behind Godwin's political
writings. The French Revolution produced its simple effects in Burke and
Tom Paine--revolt and disgust in the one, enthusiasm and hope in the
other. In Godwin the reaction is more complicated. He retained to the
last his ardent faith in progress, and the perfectibility of mankind. No
events could shake that, but it was the work of experience to reinforce
all the native individualism of his confident and self-reliant temper,
to harden into an extreme dogma that general belief in _laissez faire_
which was the common property of most of the English progressives of his
day, and to beget in him not merely a doubt in the efficacy of violent
revolutions, but a dislike of all concerted political effort and the
whole collective work of political associations. He had felt the lash of
repression, saved one friend from the hangman, and seen others depart
for Botany Bay: he remained to the end, the uncompromising foe of every
species of governmental coercion. He had listened to Horne Tooke
perorating "hanging matters" at the Corresponding Society; he had seen
the "electric ruby" circulating at its dinners; he had witnessed the
collapse of Thomas Hardy's painstaking and methodical organisation. The
fruit of all these experiences was the first statement in European
literature of philosophic anarchism--a statement which hardly yields to
Tolstoy's in its trenchant and unflinching logic.
"Logic" is more often a habit of consecutive and reasoned writing than
the source of a thinker's opinion. The logical writer is the man who can
succeed in displaying plausible reasons for what he believes by
instinct, or knows by experience. There is history and temperament
behind the coldest logic. The history which set Godwin against all State
action, whether undertaken in defence of order or privilege, or on
behalf of reform, is to be read in the excesses of Pitt and the
futilities of the Corresponding Society. The question of temperament
involves a subtler psychological judgment. If you feel in yourself
something less than the heroic temper which will make a militant
agitation or a violent revolution against the monstrous ascendency of
privilege and ordered force, you are lucky if you can convince yourself
that agitation is commonly mischievous, and association but a means of
combating one evil by creating another. Godwin was certainly no coward.
But he was fortunate in evolving a theory which excused him from
attempting the more dangerous exploits of civic courage. His ideal was
the Stoic virtue, the isolated strength, which can stand firm in passive
protest against oppression and wrong. He stood firm, and Pitt was
content to leave him standing.
* * * * *
We have seen the first bold statement of the hope which the French
Revolution kindled in Dr. Price's Old Jewry sermon. We have watched the
brave incautious effort to realise it in the plans of the Corresponding
Society. In these crowded years that began with the fall of the Bastille
and closed with the Terror, it was to enter on yet another phase, and in
this last incarnation the hope was very near despair. To men in the
early prime of life, aware of their powers and their gift of influence,
the Revolution came as a call to action. To a group of still younger
men, poets and thinkers, forming their first eager views of life in the
leisure of the Universities, it was above all a stimulus to fancy.
Godwin was their prophet, but they built upon his speculations the
superstructure of a dream that was all their own. For some years,
Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth were caught and held in the close web
of logic which Godwin gave to the world in 1793 in the first edition of
_Political Justice_. Wordsworth read and studied and continually
discussed it. Southey confessed that he "read and studied and all but
worshipped Godwin." Coleridge wrote a sonnet which he afterwards
suppressed in which he blesses his "holy guidance" and hymns Godwin
"with an ardent lay."
For that thy voice in passion's stormy day
When wild I roamed the bleak heath of distress
Bade the bright form of Justice meet my way,
And told me that her name was Happiness.
To us who read Godwin with many a later Utopia in our memories, his most
valuable chapters are those which give his penetrating criticisms of
existing society. To these young men the excitement was in his picture
of a free community from which laws and coercion had been eliminated,
and in which property was in a continual flux actuated by the stream of
universal benevolence. They resolved to found a community based on
Godwinian principles, and to free themselves from the cramping and
dwarfing influences of a society ruined by laws and superstitions, they
lit on the simple expedient of removing themselves beyond its reach.
They lacked the manhood and the simplicity which had turned more prosaic
natures into agitators and reformers. It is a tale which every student
of literature has delighted to read, how Coleridge and Southey, bent on
founding their Pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehana, came to
Bristol to charter a ship, and while they waited, dimly aware that they
lacked funds for the adventure, anchored themselves in English homes by
marrying the Fricker sisters.
As one of the comrades, Robert Lovell, quaintly puts it in a letter to
Holcroft, "Principle, not plan, is our object." Lovell had visited
Holcroft in gaol, and one can well understand how that near view of the
fate which awaited the reformer under Pitt, confirmed them in their idea
of crossing the Atlantic. "From the writings of William Godwin and
yourself," Lovell went on, "our minds have been illuminated; we wish our
actions to be guided by the same superior abilities." Holcroft, older
and more combative than his poet-disciples, advised the founding of a
model colony in this country. But the lure of a distant scene was too
attractive. Cottle, the friend and publisher of the Pantisocrats, has
left his account of their aims. Theirs was to be "a social colony in
which there was to be a community of property and where all that was
selfish was to be proscribed." It would realise "a state of society free
from the evils and turmoils that then agitated the world, and present
an example of the eminence to which men might arrive under the
unrestrained influence of sound principles." It would "regenerate the
whole complexion of society, and that not by establishing formal laws,
but by excluding all the little deteriorating passions, injustice,
wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking, and thereby setting an example
of human perfectibility."
What is left of the dream to-day? Some verses in Coleridge's earlier
poems, the address to Chatterton for instance
O Chatterton! that thou wert yet alive,
Sure thou wouldst spread the canvas to the gale;
And love with us the tinkling team to drive
O'er peaceful Freedom's undivided dale.
and those lines, half comical, half pathetic, in which the "sweet
harper" is assured as some requital for a hard life and a cruel death,
that the Pantisocrats will raise a "solemn cenotaph" to his memory
"Where Susquehana pours his untamed stream." Long afterwards, Coleridge
described Pantisocracy in _The Friend_ as "a plan as harmless as it was
extravagant," which had served a purpose by saving him from more
dangerous courses. "It was serviceable in securing myself and perhaps
some others from the paths of sedition. We were kept free from the
stains and impurities which might have remained upon us had we been
travelling with the crowd of less imaginative malcontents through the
dark lanes and foul by-roads of ordinary fanaticism."
Pantisocracy was indeed a happy episode for English literature. One may
doubt whether the "Ancient Mariner" would have been written, had
Coleridge travelled with Gerrald and Sinclair along the "dark lane" that
led to Botany Bay. Nature can work strange miracles with the instinct of
self-preservation, and even for poets she has a care. The prudence which
teaches one man to be a Whig, will make of another a Utopian.