GODWIN AND THE REACTION
_Political Justice_ brought its author instant fame. Society was for a
moment intimidated by the boldness of the attack. The world was in a
generous mood, and men did not yet resent Godwin's flattering suggestion
that they were demigods who disguised their own greatness. He had
assailed all the accepted dogmas and venerable institutions of
contemporary civilisation, from monarchy to marriage, but it was only
after several years that society recovered its breath, and turned to
rend him. He became an oracle in an ever-widening circle of friends, and
was naively pleased to find, when he went into the country, that even in
remote villages his name was known. He was everywhere received as a
sage, and some years passed before he discovered how much of this
deference was a polite disguise for the vulgar curiosity that attends a
sudden celebrity. Prosperity was a wholesome stimulus. He was "exalted
in spirits," and became for a time (he tells us) "more of a talker than
I was before, or have been since."
In this mood he wrote the one book which has lived as a popular
possession, and held its place among the classics which are frequently
reprinted. _Caleb Williams_ (published in 1794) is incomparably the best
of his novels, and the one great work of fiction in our language which
owes its existence to the fruitful union of the revolutionary and
romantic movements. It spoke to its own day as Hugo's _Les Miserables_
and Tolstoy's _Resurrection_ spoke to later generations. It is as its
preface tells us, "a general review of the modes of domestic and
unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man." It
conveys in the form of an eventful personal history the essence of the
criticism against society, which had inspired _Political Justice_.
Godwin's imagination was haunted by a persistent nightmare, in which a
lonely individual finds arrayed against him all the prejudices of
society, all the forms of convention, all the forces of law. They hurl
themselves upon him in a pitiless pursuit, and wherever he flees, the
pervading corruptions, the ingrained cowardices of over-governed mankind
beset his feet like gins and pitfalls. It was a hereditary nightmare,
and with a less pedestrian imagination, his daughter, Mary Shelley, used
the same theme of a remorseless pursuit in _Frankenstein_.
Caleb Williams, a promising lad of humble birth but good parts, is
broken at the outset of his career, in the tremendous clash between two
formidable characters, who represent, each in his own way, the
corruptions of aristocracy. Mr. Tyrrel is a brutal English squire, a
coarse and domineering bully, whom birth and wealth arm with the power
to crush his dependents. Mr. Falkland personifies the spirit of chivalry
at its best and its worst. All his native humanity and acquired polish
is in the end turned to cruelty by the influence of a worship of honour
and reputation which make him "the fool of fame." As the absorbing story
unfolds itself, we realise (if indeed we are not too much enthralled by
the plot to notice the moral) that all the institutions of society and
law are nicely adjusted to give the moral errors of the great their
utmost scope. Society is a vast sounding-board which echoes the first
whispers of their private folly, until it swells into a deafening chorus
of cruelty and wrong. There are vivid scenes in a prison which give life
to Godwin's reasoned criticisms of our penal methods. There is a band
of outlaws whose rude natural virtues remind us, by contrast with the
corruption of all the officers of the law, how much less demoralising it
is to revolt against a crazy system of coercion than to become its tool.
To describe the book in greater detail would be to destroy the pleasure
of the reader. It is a forensic novel. It sets out to frame an
indictment of society, and a novelist who imposes this task on himself
must in the end create an impression of improbability by the partiality
with which he selects his material. But there is fire enough in the
telling, and interest enough in the plot to silence our criticisms while
we read. _Caleb Williams_ is a capital story; it is also a living and
humane book, which conveys with rare power and reasoned emotion the
revolt of a generous mind against the oppressions of feudalism and the
stupidities of the criminal law.
Three years later (1797) Godwin once more restated the main positions of
_Political Justice_. _The Enquirer_ is a volume of essays, which range
easily over a great variety of subjects from education to English style.
His opinions have neither advanced nor receded, and the mood is still
one of assurance, enthusiasm, and hope. The only noteworthy change is in
the style. _Political Justice_ belongs to the generation of Gibbon,
eloquent, elaborate and periodic at its best; heavy and slightly verbose
at its worst. With _The Enquirer_ we are just entering the generation of
Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. The language is simpler and more flexible, the
construction of the sentences more varied, the mood more vivacious, and
the tone more conversational. The best things in the book belong to that
social psychology, the observation of men in classes and professions, in
which this age excelled. There is an outspoken attack on the clergy, as
a class of men who have vowed themselves to study without enquiry, who
must reason for ever towards a conclusion fixed by authority, whose very
survival depends on the perennial stationariness of their understanding.
Another essay attempts a vivacious criticism of "common honesty," the
moral standard of the average decent citizen, a code of negative virtues
and moral mediocrity which is content to avoid the obvious unsocial sins
and concerns itself but little to enforce positive benevolence. The
reader who would meet Godwin at his best should turn to the essay _On
Servants_. Starting from the universal reluctance of the upper and
middle classes to allow their children to associate closely with
servants, he enlarges the confession of the systematic degradation of a
class which this separation involves, into a condemnation of our whole
social structure.
* * * * *
The year 1797 marks the culmination of Godwin's career, and it would
have been well for his fame if it had been its end. He had just passed
his fortieth year; he had made the most notable contribution to English
political thought since the appearance of the _Wealth of Nations_; he
had won the gratitude and respect of his friends by his intervention in
the trial of the Twelve Reformers. He was famous, prosperous, popular,
and his good fortune brought to his calm temperament the stimulus of
excitement and high spirits which it needed. There came to him in this
year the crown of a noble love. It was in the winter of 1791 that he
first met Mary Wollstonecraft, the one woman of genius who belonged to
the English revolutionary circle. He was not impressed, thought that she
talked too much, and in his diary spelled her name incorrectly.
In the interval between 1791 and 1797 Mary Wollstonecraft was to write
one of the books which belong to the spiritual foundations of the next
century, to taste fame and detraction, to know the joys of love and
maternity, and to experience a misery and wrong which made life itself
an unendurable shame. A later chapter will attempt an estimate of the
ideas and personality of this brilliant and courageous woman. A few
sentences must suffice here to recall the bare facts of her life
history. Born in 1759, the child of a drunken and disreputable father,
she had struggled with indomitable energy, first as a teacher and then
as a translator and literary "hack," to keep herself and help her still
more unfortunate sisters. In 1792 she published _A Vindication of the
Rights of Woman_, a plea for the human dignity of her sex and for its
claim to education. At the end of this year she went to Paris as much to
see the Revolution as to perfect herself in French. She there met a
clever and interesting American, one Gilbert Imlay, a traveller of some
little note, a soldier in the War of Independence, and now a speculative
merchant. He lived with her, and in documents acknowledged her as his
wife, though neither felt the need of a binding ceremony. A baby, Fanny,
was born, but Imlay's business imposed long separations. He gradually
tired of the woman who had honoured him too highly, and entered on more
than one intrigue. Mary Wollstonecraft attempted in despair to drown
herself in the Thames, was saved and nursed back to life and courage by
devoted friends. She again took up her pen to gain a livelihood, and for
the sake of her child's future, gradually returned to the literary
circle which valued her, not merely for her genius and originality, but
also for her beauty, her vivacity, and her charm, for her daring and
independence, and her warm, impulsive, affectionate heart.
Godwin met her again while she was bruised and lonely and
disillusionised with mankind. Her charming volume of travel sketches
(_Letters from Norway, 1796_) had made, as it well might, a deep
impression on his taste. He was, what Imlay was not, her intellectual
equal, and his character deserved her respect. He has left in the little
book which he published to vindicate her memory, a delicate sketch of
their mutual love: "The partiality we conceived for each other was in
that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined
style of love. It grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It would
have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was
before and who was after. One sex did not take the priority which
long-established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that
delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either
party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil
spreader or the prey in the affair. When in the course of things, the
disclosure came, there was nothing in a manner for either party to
disclose to the other.... There was no period of throes and resolute
explanation attendant on the tale. It was friendship melting into love."
The two lovers, in strict obedience to the principles of _Political
Justice_, made their home, at first with no legal union, in a little
house in the Polygon, Somers Town, then the extreme limit of London,
separated from the suburban village of Camden Town by open fields and
green pastures. A few doors away Godwin had his study, where he spent
most of his industrious day, often breakfasted and sometimes slept. Both
partners of this daringly unconventional union had their own particular
friends and retained their separate places in society. Some quaint notes
have survived, which passed between them, borrowing books or making
appointments. "Did I not see you, friend Godwin," runs one of these, "at
the theatre last night? I thought I met a smile, but you went out
without looking round. We expect you at half-past four." It was the
coming of a child which induced them to waive their theories and face
for its sake a repugnant compliance with custom. They were married in
Old St. Pancras Church on March 29, 1797, and the insignificant fact was
communicated only gradually, and with laboured apologies for the
inconsistency, to their friends.
Southey, who met them in this month, has left a lively portrait: "Of all
the lions or literati I have seen here, Mary Imlay's countenance is the
best, infinitely the best: the only fault in it is an expression
somewhat similar to what the prints of Horne Tooke display--an
expression indicating superiority; not haughtiness, not sarcasm in Mary
Imlay, but still it is unpleasant. Her eyes are light brown, and ...
they are the most meaning I ever saw.... As for Godwin himself he has
large noble eyes and a _nose_--oh, most abominable nose. Language is not
vituperatious enough to describe the effect of its downward elongation."
Godwin, if one may trust the portrait by Northcote, had impressive if
not exactly handsome features. The head is shapely, the brow ample, the
nose decidedly too long, the shaven lips and chin finely chiselled. The
whole suggestion is of a character self-absorbed and contemplative. He
was short and sturdy in build, and in his sober dress and grave
deportments, suggested rather the dissenting preacher than the prophet
of philosophic anarchism. He was not a ready debater or a fluent talker.
His genius was not spontaneous or intuitive. It was rather an elaborate
effort of the will, which deliberately used the fruits of his
accumulative study and incessant activity of mind. He resembled, says
Hazlitt, who admired and liked him, "an eight-day clock that must be
wound up long before it can strike. He is ready only on reflection:
dangerous only at the rebound. He gathers himself up, and strains every
nerve and faculty with deliberate aim to some heroic and dazzling
achievement of intellect; but he must make a career before he flings
himself armed upon the enemy, or he is sure to be unhorsed."
No two minds could have presented a greater contrast. Had Mary
Wollstonecraft lived they must have moulded each other into something
finer than Nature had made of either. The year of married life was
ideally happy, and the strange experiment in reconciling individualism
with love apparently succeeded. Mrs. Godwin, for all her revolutionary
independence, leaned affectionately on her husband, and he, in spite of
his rather overgrown self-esteem, regarded her with reverence and pride.
She was quick in her affections and resentments, but looking back many
years later Godwin declares that they were "as happy as is permitted to
human beings." "It must be remembered, however, that I honoured her
intellectual powers and the nobleness and generosity of her
propensities; mere tenderness would not have been adequate to produce
the happiness we experienced."
Godwin's novels suggest that, on the whole, he shared her views about
women, though in a later essay (on "Friendship," in _Thoughts on Man_),
there are some passages which suggest a less perfect understanding. But
he never used his pen to carry on her work, and the emancipation of
women had to await its philosopher in John Stuart Mill. The happy
marriage ended abruptly and tragically. On August 30, 1797, was born the
child Mary, who was to become Shelley's wife, and carry on in a second
generation her parents' tradition of fearless love and revolutionary
hope. Ten days after the birth, the mother died in spite of all that the
devotion of her husband and the skill of his medical friends could do
to save her. A few broken-hearted letters are left to record Godwin's
agony of mind.
* * * * *
With the death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, ended all that was happy
and stimulating in Godwin's career. It was for him the year of private
disaster, and from it he dated also the triumph of the reaction in
England. The stimulus of the revolutionary period was withdrawn. He
lived no longer among ardent spirits who would brave everything and do
anything for human perfectibility. Some were in Botany Bay, and others,
like the indomitable Holcroft, were absorbed in the struggle to live,
with the handicap of political persecution against them. Godwin, indeed,
never fell into despair over the ruin of his political hopes. Like
Beethoven he revered Napoleon, at all events until he assumed the title
of Emperor, and would console himself with the conviction that this
"auspicious and beneficent genius" had "without violence to the
principles of the French Revolution ... suspended their morbid
activity," while preserving "all the great points" of its doctrine. But
while all England hung on the event of the titanic struggle against
this "beneficent genius," what was a philanthropist to do? The world was
rattling back into barbarism, and the generation which emerged from the
long nightmare of war, famine, and repression, was incomparably less
advanced in its thinking, narrower and timider in its whole habit of
mind than the men who were young in 1789. There was nothing to do, and a
philosopher whose only weapon was argument, kept silence when none would
listen. Of what use to talk of "peace and the powers of the human mind,"
while all England was gloating over the brutal cartoons of Gillray, and
trying on the volunteer uniforms, in which it hoped to repel Napoleon's
invasion? We need not wonder that Godwin's output of philosophic writing
practically ceased with the eighteenth century. He was henceforth a man
without a purpose, who wrote for bread and renounced the exercise of his
greater powers.
The end of Godwin's active apostolic life is clearly marked in a
pamphlet which he issued in 1801 ("Thoughts occasioned by the Perusal of
Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon, preached at Christ Church, April 15, 1800,
being a reply to the attacks of Dr. Parr, Mr. Mackintosh, the author
[Malthus] of the _Essay on Population_ and others"). It is a masterly
piece of writing. Coleridge scribbled in the copy that now lies on the
shelves of the British Museum this tribute to its author: "I remember
few passages in ancient or modern authors that contain more just
philosophy in appropriate, chaste or beautiful diction than the fine
following pages. They reflect equal honour on Godwin's head and heart.
Though I did it in the zenith of his reputation, yet I feel remorse even
to have only spoken unkindly of such a man.--S. T. C."
Godwin tells how the reaction burst over him, and he dates it from 1797:
"After having for four years heard little else than the voice of
commendation, I was at length attacked from every side, and in a style
which defied all moderation and decency.... The cry spread like a
general infection, and I have been told that not even a petty novel for
boarding-school misses now ventures to aspire to favour unless it
contains some expression of dislike or abhorrence to the new
philosophy." Some of the attacks were scurrilous and all of them
proceeded on the common assumption of the defenders of authority in all
ages and nations, that the man who would innovate in morals is himself
immoral.
He goes on to sketch the present case of the revolutionary party: "The
societies have perished, or where they have not, have shrunk to a
skeleton; the days of democratical declamation are no more; even the
starving labourer in the alehouse is become the champion of
aristocracy.... Jacobinism was destroyed; its party as a party was
extinguished; its tenets were involved in almost universal unpopularity
and odium; they were deserted by almost every man high or low in the
island of Great Britain." Even the young Pantisocrats had gone over to
the enemy, and Wordsworth, grave and disillusionised, tried to forget
that he had ever exhorted his fellow-students to burn their books and
"read Godwin on Necessity." The defection of Dr. Parr and Mackintosh was
symptomatic. Both had been Godwin's personal friends, and both of them
had hailed the new philosophy. No one remembers them to-day, but they
were in their time intellectual oracles. The scholar Parr was called by
flatterers the Whig Johnson, and Mackintosh enjoyed in Whig society a
reputation as a brilliant talker, and an encyclopaedic mind which reminds
us of Macaulay's later fame. They had both to make their peace with the
world and to bury their compromised past; the easiest way was to fall
upon Godwin.
Malthus was a more worthy antagonist, though Godwin did not yet perceive
how formidable his attack in reality was. To the picture of human
perfection he opposed the nightmare of an over-populated planet, and
combated universal benevolence by teaching that even charity is an
economic sin. English society cares little either for Utopias or for
science. But it welcomes science with rapture when it destroys Utopias.
If Godwin had pricked men's consciences, Malthus brought the balm.
Altruism was exposed at length for the thing it was, an error in the
last degree unscientific and uneconomic. The rickety arithmetic of
Malthusianism was used against the revolutionary hope, exactly as a
travestied version of Darwinianism was used in our own day against
Socialism. Godwin preserved his dignity in this controversy and made
concessions to his critics with a rare candour. But while he abandons
none of his fundamental doctrines, one feels that he will never fight
again.
Only once in later years did Godwin the philosopher break his silence,
and then it was to attempt in 1820 an elaborate but far from impressive
answer to Malthus. The history of that controversy has been brilliantly
told by Hazlitt. It seems to-day too distant to be worth reviving. Our
modern pessimists write their jeremiads not about the future
over-population of the planet, but about the declining birth-rate. That
elaborate civilisations shows a decline in fertility is a fact now so
well recognised, that we feel no difficulty in conceding to Godwin that
the reasonable beings of his ideal community might be trusted to show
some degree of self-control.
Godwin possessed two of the cardinal virtues of a thinker, courage and
candour. No fear of ridicule deterred him from pushing his premises to
their last conclusion; no false shame restrained him in a controversy
from recanting an error. He discarded the wilder developments of his
theory of "universal benevolence," and gave it in the end a form which
has ceased to be paradoxical. When he wrote _Political Justice_ he was a
celibate student who had escaped much of the formative experience of a
normal life. As a husband and a father he revised his creed, and devoted
no small part of his later literary activity to the work of preaching
the claims of those "private affections" which he had scouted as an
elderly youth of forty. The re-adjustment in his theory was so simple,
that only a great philosopher could have failed to make it sooner.
Justice requires me to use all my powers to contribute to the sum of
human benefit. But as regards opportunity, I am not equally situated
towards all my fellows. By devoting myself more particularly to wife or
child with an exclusive affection which is not in the abstract
altogether reasonable, I may do more for the general good than I could
achieve by a severely impartial benevolence.
He developed this view first in his _Memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft_,
then in the preface to _St. Leon_, and finally in the pamphlet which
answered Mackintosh and Dr. Parr. The man who would be "the best moral
economist of his time" will use much of it to seek "the advantage and
content of those with whom he has most frequent intercourse," and this
not merely from calculation, but from affection. "I ought not only in
ordinary cases to provide for my wife and children, my brothers and
relations before I provide for strangers, but it would be well that my
doing so should arise from the operation of those private and domestic
affections by which through all ages of the world the conduct of mankind
has been excited and directed."
The recantation is sufficiently frank. The family, dissipated in
_Political Justice_ by the explosive charities of "universal
benevolence," is now happily re-united. Godwin maintains, however, that
his moral theory and his political superstructure stands intact, and the
claim is not unreasonable. He retains his criterion of justice and
utility, though he has seen better how to apply it. The duty of
universal benevolence is still paramount; the end of contributing to the
general good still sovereign, and a reasoned virtue is still to be
recommended in preference to instinctive goodness, even where their
results are commonly the same. "The crown of a virtuous character
consists in a very frequent and very energetic recollection of the
criterion by which all his actions are to be tried.... The person who
has been well instructed and accomplished in the great schools of human
experience has passions and affections like other men. But he is aware
that all these affections tend to excess, and must be taught each to
know its order and its sphere. He therefore continually holds in mind
the principles by which their boundaries are fixed."
What Godwin means is something elementary, and for that reason of the
first importance. Let a man love his wife above other women, but
"universal benevolence" will forbid him to exploit other women in order
to surround her with luxury. Let him love his sons, but virtue will
forbid him to accumulate a fortune for them by the sweated labour of
poor men's children. Let him love his fellow-countrymen, but reason
forbids him to seek their good by enslaving other races and waging
aggressive wars. Godwin, in short, no longer denies the beauty and duty
(to use Burke's phrase) of loving "the little platoon to which I
belong," but he urges that these domestic affections are in little
danger of neglect. Men learned to love kith and kin, neighbours and
comrades, while still in the savage state. The characteristic of a
civilised morality, the necessary accompaniment of all the varied and
extended relationships which modern existence has brought with it, must
be a new and emphatic stress on my duty to the stranger, to the unknown
producer with whom I stand in an economic relationship, and to the
foreigner beyond my shores. "Let us endeavour to elevate philanthropy
into a passion, secure that occasions enough will arise to drag us down
from an enthusiastic eminence. A virtuous man will teach himself to
recollect the principle of universal benevolence as often as pious men
repeat their prayers."
If the central tendencies of Godwin's teaching survive these later
modifications, it is none the less true that some of his theoretic
foundations have been shaken in the work of reconstruction. The isolated
individual shut up in his own animal skin and communicating with his
fellows through the antennae of his logical processes, has vanished away.
Allow him to extend his personality through the private affections, and
he has ceased to be the abstract unit of individualism. Godwin should
have revised not only his doctrine of the family, but his hatred of
co-operation. There is still something to be learned from the view of
his school that the human mind, as it begins to absorb the collective
experience of the race, is an infinitely variable spiritual stuff, an
intellectual protoplasm. They stated the view with a rash emphasis,
until one is forced to ask whether a mind which is originally nothing at
all, can absorb, or as psychologists say, "apperceive" anything
whatever. Nothing comes out of nothing, and nothing can be added to
nothing.
Godwin and his school set out to show that the human mind is not
necessarily fettered for all time by the prejudices and institutions in
which it has clothed itself. When he had done stripping us, it was a
nice question whether even our nakedness remained. He treated our
prejudices and our effete institutions as though they were something
external to us, which had come out of nowhere and could be flung into
the void from whence they came. When you have called opinion a
prejudice, or traced an institution to false reasoning, you have, after
all, only exhibited an interesting zoological fact about human beings.
We are exactly the sort of creature which evolves such prejudices.
Godwin in unwary moments would talk as though aristocracy and positive
law had come to us from without, by a sort of diabolic revelation. This,
however, is not a criticism which destroys the value of his thinking.
His positions required restatement in terms of the idea of development.
If he did not anticipate the notion of evolution, he was the apostle of
the idea of progress. We may still retain from his reasonings the
hopeful conclusion that the human mind is a raw material capable of
almost unlimited variation, and, therefore, of some advance towards
"perfection." We owe an inestimable debt to the school which proclaimed
this belief in enthusiastic paradoxes.
Godwin's influence as a thinker permeated the older generation of
"philosophic radicals" in England. The oddest fact about it is that it
had apparently no part in founding the later philosophic anarchism of
the Continent. None of its leaders seem to have read him; and _Political
Justice_ was not translated into German until long after it had ceased
to be read in England. Its really astonishing blindness to the
importance of the economic factor in social changes must have hastened
its decline. Godwin writes as though he had never seen a factory nor
heard of capital. In all his writing about crime and punishment, full as
it is of insight, sympathy and good sense, it is odd that a mind so
fertile nowhere anticipated the modern doctrine of the connection
between moral and physical degeneracy. He saw in crime only error, where
we see anaemia: he would have cured it with syllogisms, where we should
administer proteids. His entire psychology, both social and individual,
is vitiated by a naive and headstrong intellectualism. Life is rather a
battle between narrow interests and the social affections than a debate
between sound and fallacious reasoning. He saw among mankind only
sophists and philosophers, where we see predatory egoists and their
starved and stunted victims. But we have advanced far enough on our own
lines of thinking to derive a new stimulus from Godwin's one-sided
intellectualism. Our danger to-day is that we may succumb to an economic
and physiological determinism. We are obsessed by financiers and
bacilli; it is salutary that our attention should be directed from time
to time to the older bogeys of the revolution, to kings and priests,
authority and superstition, to prejudice and political subjection. "The
greatest part of the people of Europe," wrote Helvetius, "honour virtue
in speculation; this is an effect of their education. They despise it in
practice; that is an effect of the form of their governments." We think
that we have got beyond that epigram to-day. But have we quite exhausted
its meaning?
Precisely because of its revolutionary _naivete_, its unscientific
innocence, there is in Godwin's democratic anarchism a stimulus
peculiarly tonic to the modern mind. No man has developed more firmly
the ideal of universal enlightenment, which has escaped feudalism, only
to be threatened by the sociological expert. No writer is better fitted
to remind us that society and government are not the same thing, and
that the State must not be confounded with the social organism. No
moralist has written a more eloquent page on the evil of coercion and
the unreason of force. _Political Justice_ is often an imposing system.
It is sometimes an instructive fallacy. It is always an inspiring
sermon. Godwin hoped to "make it a work from the perusal of which no man
should rise without being strengthened in habits of sincerity, fortitude
and justice." There he succeeded.