WILLIAM GODWIN AND THE REVOLUTION
Tom Paine is still reviled and still admired. The name of Mary
Wollstonecraft is honoured by the growing army of free women. Both may
be read in cheap editions. William Godwin, a more powerful intellect,
and in his day a greater influence than either, is now forgotten, or
remembered only because he was the father of Shelley's wife. Yet he
blazed in the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Hazlitt has told
us, "as a sun in the firmament of reputation." "No one was more talked
of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth,
justice was the theme, his name was not far off.... No work in our time
gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the
celebrated _Enquiry Concerning Political Justice_. Tom Paine was
considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old woman; Edmund
Burke a flashy sophist."
William Godwin came into the world in 1756, at Wisbech, in the Fen
country, with the moral atmosphere of a dissenting home for inheritance.
His father and grandfather were Independent ministers, who taught the
metaphysical dissent of the extreme Calvinistic tradition. The quaint
ill-spelled letters of his mother reveal a strong character, a meagre
education and rigid beliefs. William was unwholesomely precocious as a
boy, pious, studious and greedy for distinction and praise. He was
brought up on the _Account of the Pious Deaths of Many Godly Children_,
and would move his school-fellows to tears by his early sermons on the
Last Judgment. At seventeen we find him, destined for the hereditary
profession, a student in the Theological College at Hoxton. His mental
development was by no means headlong, but he was a laborious reader and
an eager disputant, endowed with all the virtues save modesty.
He emerged from College as he had entered it, a Tory in politics and a
Sandemanian in religion. The Sandemanians were super-Calvinists, and
their tenets may be summarily defined. A Calvinist held that of ten
souls nine will be damned. A Sandemanian hoped that of ten Calvinists
one may with difficulty be saved. In the Calvinist mould Godwin's mind
was formed, and if the doctrine was soon discarded, the habit of
thought characteristic of Calvinism remained with him to the end. It is
a French and not a British creed, Latin in its systematic completeness,
Latin in the logical courage with which it pursues its assumptions to
their last conclusion, Latin in its faith in deductive reasoning and its
disdain alike of experience and of sentiment. Had Godwin been bred a
Methodist or a Churchman, he could not have written _Political Justice_.
To him in these early years religion presented itself as a supernatural
despotism based on terror and coercion. Its central doctrine was eternal
punishment, and when in mature life, Godwin became a free-thinker, his
revolt was not so much the readjustment of a speculative thinker who has
reconsidered untenable dogmas, as the rebellion of a humane and liberal
mind against a system of terrorism. To some agnostics God is an
unnecessary hypothesis. To Godwin He was rather a tyrant to be deposed.
It was a view which Shelley with less provocation adopted with even
greater heat.
Godwin's firm dogmatic creed began to crumble away during his early
experiences as a dissenting minister in country towns. He published a
forgotten volume of sermons, and his development both in politics and
theology was evidently slow. At twenty-seven, as a young pastor at
Beaconsfield, we find him a Whig and a Unitarian, who looked up to Dr.
Priestley as his master. He had now begun to study the French
philosophers, whom Hoxton had doubtless refuted, but did not read. He
was not a successful pastor, and it was as much his relative failure in
the pulpit as his slowly broadening beliefs which caused him to take to
letters for a livelihood. His long literary career begins in 1783 with
some years of prentice work in Grub Street. He wrote a successful
pamphlet in defence of the Coalition, which brought him to the notice of
the Whig chiefs, worked with enthusiasm at a _Life of Chatham_ which has
the merit of a rather heavy eloquence, contributed for seven years to
the _Annual Register_ and wrote three novels which evidently enjoyed an
ephemeral success. He lived the usual nomadic life of the young man of
letters, and differed from most of his kind chiefly by his industry, his
abstinence, and his methodical habits of study, which he never relaxed
even when he was writing busily for bread.
We find him rising early, and reading some portion of a Greek or Latin
classic before breakfast. He acquired by this practice a literary
knowledge of the classics and used it in his later essays with an ease
and intimacy which many a scholar would envy. He wrote for three or four
hours in the morning, composing slowly and frequently recasting his
drafts. The afternoon and evening were devoted to eager converse and hot
debate with friends, and to the reading of modern books in English,
French and Italian, with not infrequent visits to the theatre. A brief
diary carefully kept with a system of signs and abbreviations in a queer
mixed jargon of English, French and Latin records his anxious use of his
time, and shows to the end of his eighty years few wasted days. If
industry was his most conspicuous virtue, he gave proof at the outset of
his life of an independence rare among poor men who have their career to
make. Sheridan, who acted as the literary agent of the Whigs, wished to
engage him as a professional pamphleteer and offered him a regular
salary. He refused to tie himself to a party, though his views at this
time were those of an orthodox and enthusiastic admirer of Fox.
Godwin was to become the apostle of Universal Benevolence. It was a
virtue for which in later life he gave many an opportunity to his richer
friends, but if he stimulated it in others he never refused to practise
it himself. While he was still a struggling and underpaid journeyman
author, wandering from one cheap lodging to another, he burdened himself
with the care and maintenance of a distant relative, an orphaned
second-cousin, named Thomas Cooper. Cooper came to him at the age of
twelve and remained with him till he became an actor at seventeen.
Godwin had read Rousseau's _Emile_, not seldom with dissent, and all
through his life was deeply interested in the problems of education.
They furnished him with the themes of some of the best essays in his
_Enquirer_ and his _Thoughts on Man_, and young Cooper was evidently the
subject on whom he experimented. He was a difficult, proud,
high-spirited lad, and the process of tuition was clearly not as smooth
as it was conscientious. Godwin's leading thought was that the utmost
reverence is due to boys. He cared little how much he imparted of
scholastic knowledge. He aimed at arousing the intellectual curiosity of
his charge and fostering independence and self-respect. Sincerity and
plain-speaking were to govern the relation of tutor and pupil. Corporal
punishment was of course a prohibited barbarity, but it must be admitted
that in Godwin's case a violent tongue and an impatient temper more than
supplied its place. The diary shows how pathetically the tutor exhorted
himself to avoid sternness, "which can only embitter the temper," and
not to impute dulness, stupidity or intentional error. Some letters show
how he failed. Cooper complains that Godwin had called him "a foolish
wretch," "a viper" and a "tiger." Godwin replies by complimenting him on
his "sensibility," and his "independence," asks for his "confidence" in
return, and assures him that he does not expect "gratitude" (a virtue
banned in the Godwinian ethics). This essay in education can have been
only relatively successful, for Cooper seems to have felt a quite
commonplace gratitude to Godwin, and for many a year afterwards sent him
vivacious letters, which testify to the real friendship which united
them.
Imperious and hot-tempered though he was, Godwin made friends and kept
them. Thomas Holcroft came into Godwin's life in 1786. Thanks to
Hazlitt's spirited memoir, based as it was on ample autobiographical
notes, no personality of this group stands before us so clearly limned,
and there is none more attractive. Mrs. Shelley describes him as a "man
of stern and irascible character," but he was also lovable and
affectionate. There was in his mind and will some powerful initial
force of resolve and mental independence. He thought for himself, and
yet he could assimilate the ideas of other men. He was a reasoner and a
doctrinaire; and yet he must have had in himself those untamed volcanic
emotions which we associate with the heroes of the romantic novels of
the age. He believed in the almost unlimited powers of the human mind,
and his own career, which saw his rise from stable-boy and cobbler to
dramatist, was itself a monument to the human will. Looking in their
mirrors, the progressives of that generation were tempted to think that
perfection might have been within their reach had not their youth been
stunted by the influence of Calvin and the British Constitution.
Rectitude, courage and unflinching truth were Holcroft's ideal. He
firmly believed (an idea which lay in germ in Condorcet and was for a
time adopted by Godwin) that the will guided by reason might transform
not only the human mind but the human body. Like the Christian
Scientists of to-day he asserted, as Mrs. Shelley tells us, that "death
and disease existed only through the feebleness of man's mind, that pain
also had no reality."
He was a man of fifty when he met Godwin at thirty, and he had packed
into his half century a more various experience of men and things than
the studious and sedentary Godwin could have acquired if he had lived
the life of the Wandering Jew. Theirs was a friendship of mutual
stimulation and intimate exchange which is commoner between a man and a
woman than between two men. They met almost daily, and in spite of some
violent lovers' quarrels, their affection lasted till Holcroft's death
in 1809. It is not hard to understand their quarrels. Neither of them
had natural tact, and Godwin's sensibility was morbid. Unflinching
truthfulness, even in literary criticism, must have tried their tempers,
and the single word "demele," best translated "row," occurs often in
Godwin's diary as his note on one of their meetings. It is not easy to
decide which influenced the other more. Godwin's was the trained,
systematic, academical mind, but Holcroft added to a rich and curious
experience of life and a vein of native originality, wide reading and
something more than a mere amateur's taste for music and art. It was
Holcroft who drove Godwin out of his compromising Unitarianism into a
view which for some years he boldly described as Atheism. His religious
opinions were afterwards modified (or so he supposed) by S. T.
Coleridge; but that influence is not conspicuous in his posthumous
essay on religion, and the best label for his attitude is perhaps
Huxley's word, "Agnostic."
As the French Revolution approached, the two friends fell under the
prevailing excitement. Godwin attended the Revolution Society's dinners,
and Holcroft was, as we have seen, a leading member of the Corresponding
Society. There is no difficulty in accounting for most of the opinions
which the two friends held in common, and which Godwin was soon to
embody in _Political Justice_. Some were common to all the group; others
lie in germ at least in the writings of the Encyclopaedists. Even
communism was anticipated by Mably, and was held in some tentative form
by many of the leading men of the Revolution. (See Kropotkin: _The Great
French Revolution_.) The puzzle is rather to account for the anarchist
tendency which seems to be wholly original in Godwin. It was a revolt
not merely against all coercive action by the State, but also against
collective action by the citizens. The root of it was probably the
extreme individualism which felt that a man surrendered too much of
himself, too much of truth and manhood in any political association. The
beginnings of this line of thought may be detected in a vivid
contemptuous account of the riotous Westminster election of 1788, in
which Holcroft had worked with the Foxites: "Scandal, pitiful, mean,
mutual scandal, never was more plentifully dispersed. Electioneering is
a trade so despicably degrading, so eternally incompatible with moral
and mental dignity that I can scarcely believe a truly great mind
capable of the dirty drudgery of such vice. I am at least certain no
mind is great while thus employed. It is the periodical reign of the
evil nature or demon."
This, to be sure, is no more than a hint of a tendency, but it shows
that experience was already fermenting in the brain of one member at
least of the pair, and it took these alchemists no great while to distil
from it their theoretic spirit. The doings of the Corresponding Society
were destined to enlarge and confirm this experience. In the hopes, the
indignations, and the perils of the years of revolutionary excitement
Godwin had his intimate share. He was one of a small committee which
undertook the publication of Paine's _Rights of Man_, and when the
repression began, those who were struck down were his associates and in
some cases his intimates. Holcroft, as we have seen, was tried for high
treason, and Joseph Gerrald, who was sent to Botany Bay, was a friend
for whom he felt both admiration and affection. If the fate of these men
was a haunting pain to their friends, their high courage and idealistic
faith was a noble stimulus. "Human Perfectibility" had its martyrs, and
the words of Gerrald as he stood in the dock awaiting the sentence that
was to send him to his death among thieves and forgers, deserve a
respectful record: "Moral light is as irresistible by the mind as
physical by the eye. All attempts to impede its progress are vain. It
will roll rapidly along, and as well may tyrants imagine that by placing
their feet upon the earth they can stop its diurnal motion, as that they
shall be able by efforts the most virulent and pertinacious to
extinguish the light of reason and philosophy, which happily for mankind
is everywhere spreading around us." It was in this atmosphere of
enthusiasm and devotion that _Political Justice_ was written.
The main work of Godwin's life was begun in July, 1791. He was fortunate
in securing a contract from the publisher Robinson, on generous terms
which ultimately brought him in one thousand guineas. _Political
Justice_ has been generally classed among the answers to Burke, but
Godwin's aim was in fact something more ambitious. A note in his diary
deserves to be quoted: "My original conception proceeded on a feeling of
the imperfections and errors of Montesquieu, and a desire of supplying a
less faulty work. In the just fervour of my enthusiasm I entertained the
vain imagination of "hewing a stone from the rock," which by its
inherent energy and weight, should overbear and annihilate all
opposition and place the principles of politics on an immoveable basis."
When he came to answer his critics, he apologised for extravagances on
the plea of haste and excitement; but in fact the work was slowly and
deliberately written, and was not completed until January, 1793. Its
doctrines, since the book is not now readily accessible, will be
summarised fully and in Godwin's own phraseology in the next chapter,
but it seems proper to draw attention here to the cool yet unprovocative
courage of its writer. It is filled with "hanging matters." Pitt was,
perhaps, no more disposed to punish a man for expounding the fundamental
principles of philosophic anarchism than was the Russian autocracy in
our own day when it tolerated Tolstoy. It was not for writing _Utopia_
that Sir Thomas More lost his head. But the book is quite unflinching in
its application of principle, and its attacks on monarchy are as
uncompromising as those for which Paine was outlawed. The preface calmly
discusses the possibility of prosecution, issues what is in effect a
quiet challenge, and concludes with the consolation that "it is the
property of truth to be fearless and to prove victorious over every
adversary." The fact was that Godwin watched the dangers of his friends
"almost with envy" (letter to Gerrald). But he held that a man who
deliberately provokes martyrdom acts immorally, since he confuses the
progress of reason by exciting destructive passions, and drives his
adversaries into evil courses.
"For myself," he wrote, "I will never adopt any conduct for the express
purpose of being put upon my trial, but if I be ever so put, I will
consider that day as a day of triumph." Godwin escaped punishment for
his activity on behalf of Holcroft and the twelve reformers, because his
activity was successful. He escaped prosecution for _Political Justice_
because it was a learned book, addressed to educated readers, and issued
at the astonishing price of three guineas. The propriety of prosecuting
him was considered by the Privy Council; and Pitt is said to have
dismissed the suggestion with the remark that "a three guinea book could
never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare."
That this three-guinea book was bought and read to the extent of no less
than four thousand copies is a tribute not merely to its vitality, but
to the eagerness of the middle-classes during the revolutionary ferment
to drink in the last words of the new philosophy.
A new edition was soon called for, and was issued early in 1796. Much of
the book was recast and many chapters entirely rewritten, as the
consequence not so much of any material change in Godwin's views, as of
the profit he had derived from private controversies. Condorcet (though
he is never mentioned) is, if one may make a guess, the chief of the new
influences apparent in the second edition. It is more cautious, more
visibly the product of a varied experience than the first draft, but it
abandons none of his leading ideas. A third edition appeared in 1799,
toned down still further by a growing caution. These revisions
undoubtedly made the book less interesting, less vivid, less readable.
No modern edition has ever appeared, and its direct influence had become
negligible even before Godwin's death. It is harder to account for the
oblivion into which the book has fallen, than to explain its early
popularity. It is not a difficult book to read. "The young and the
fair," Godwin tells us, "did not feel deterred from consulting my
pages." His style is always clear and often eloquent. His vocabulary
seems to a modern taste overloaded with Latin words, but the
architecture of his sentences is skilful in the classical manner. He can
vary his elaborate periods with a terse, strong statement which comes
with the force of an unexpected blow. He has a knack of happy
illustration, and a way of enforcing his points by putting problems in
casuistry which have an alluring human interest. The book moved his own
generation profoundly, and even to-day his more enthusiastic passages
convey an irresistible impression of sincerity and conviction.