Part 4 (1/2)
The picture of this easy-going Utopia, in which something will always turn up for n.o.body's child, concludes with two sections which exhibit in nice juxtaposition the extravagance and the prudence of G.o.dwin. We may look forward to great physical changes. We shall acquire an empire over our bodies, and may succeed in making even our reflex notions conscious.
We must get rid of sleep, one of the most conspicuous infirmities of the human frame. Life can be prolonged by intellect. We are sick and we die because in a certain sense we consent to suffer these accidents. When the limit of population is reached, men will refuse to propagate themselves further. Society will be a people of men, and not of children, adult, veteran, experienced; and truth will no longer have to recommence her career at the end of thirty years. Meanwhile let the friends of justice avoid violence, eschew ma.s.sacres, and remember that prudent handling will win even rich men for the cause of human perfection.
So ends _Political Justice_, the strangest amalgam in our literature of caution with enthusiasm, of visions with experience, of French logic with English tactlessness, a book which only genius could have made so foolish and so wise.
CHAPTER V
G.o.dWIN 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 G.o.dwin's flattering suggestion that they were demiG.o.ds who disguised their own greatness. He had a.s.sailed all the accepted dogmas and venerable inst.i.tutions 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 navely 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.sics 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_.
G.o.dwin'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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 coa.r.s.e 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 inst.i.tutions 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 G.o.dwin'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) G.o.dwin 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 a.s.surance, 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 cla.s.ses and professions, in which this age excelled. There is an outspoken attack on the clergy, as a cla.s.s 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 G.o.dwin at his best should turn to the essay _On Servants_. Starting from the universal reluctance of the upper and middle cla.s.ses to allow their children to a.s.sociate closely with servants, he enlarges the confession of the systematic degradation of a cla.s.s which this separation involves, into a condemnation of our whole social structure.
The year 1797 marks the culmination of G.o.dwin's career, and it would have been well for his fame if it had been its end. He had just pa.s.sed 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 grat.i.tude 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 n.o.ble 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 s.e.x 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 doc.u.ments acknowledged her as his wife, though neither felt the need of a binding ceremony. A baby, f.a.n.n.y, 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.
G.o.dwin 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 s.e.x 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 a.s.sume 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 G.o.dwin 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 pa.s.sed between them, borrowing books or making appointments. ”Did I not see you, friend G.o.dwin,” 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 G.o.dwin himself he has large n.o.ble eyes and a _nose_--oh, most abominable nose. Language is not vituperatious enough to describe the effect of its downward elongation.”
G.o.dwin, 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 st.u.r.dy 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 acc.u.mulative 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. G.o.dwin, 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 G.o.dwin 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 n.o.bleness and generosity of her propensities; mere tenderness would not have been adequate to produce the happiness we experienced.”
G.o.dwin's novels suggest that, on the whole, he shared her views about women, though in a later essay (on ”Friends.h.i.+p,” in _Thoughts on Man_), there are some pa.s.sages which suggest a less perfect understanding. But he never used his pen to carry on her work, and the emanc.i.p.ation 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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 G.o.dwin's agony of mind.
With the death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, ended all that was happy and stimulating in G.o.dwin'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. G.o.dwin, indeed, never fell into despair over the ruin of his political hopes. Like Beethoven he revered Napoleon, at all events until he a.s.sumed the t.i.tle 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 t.i.tanic 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 G.o.dwin'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 G.o.dwin'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 pa.s.sages 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 G.o.dwin'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.”