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, 1936and 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, ANDTHEIR CIRCLE

CHAPTER I

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND

The history of the French Revolution in England begins with a sermon andends with a poem. Between that famous discourse by Dr. Richard Price onthe love of our country, delivered in the first excitement that followedthe fall of the Bastille, and the publication of Shelley's _Hellas_there stretched a period of thirty-two years. It covered the dawn, theclouding and the unearthly sunset of a hope. It begins with the gravebut enthusiastic prose of a divine justly respected by earnest men, whowith a limited horizon fulfilled their daily duties in the city. It endsin the rapt vision, the magical music of a singer, who seemed as he sangto soar beyond the range of human ears. The hope passes from theconfident expectation of instant change, through the sobrieties ofdisillusionment and the recantations of despair, to the iridescentdreams of a future which has taken wing and made its home in a fairyworld. 

In 1789 when Dr. Price preached to his ardent congregation ofNonconformist Radicals in the meeting-house at the Old Jewry, theprospect was definite and the place of the millennium was merely theEngland over which George III. Ruled. The hope was a robust butpedestrian "mental traveller, " and its limbs wore the precise garmentsof political formulæ. It looked for honest Parliaments and manhoodsuffrage, for the triumph of democracy and the abolition of war. Itsscene 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 prosaicdemand for Parliamentary Reform. It evolved its programme for thereconstruction of all human institutions, and projected the amendment ofhuman nature itself. America had made an end of kings and France was inthe full tide of revolution. Nothing was too mighty for thisnew-begotten hope, and the path to human perfectibility stretched asplain as the narrow road to Bunyan's Heavenly City. 

There followed the phase when persecution from alarmed defenders ofthings as they are, disgust at the failures of the revolution in France, and contempt for the futilities of the revolution at home, drove the newmovement into as many refuges as its votaries had temperaments. For somethere was cynicism, for others recantation. "The French Revolution" asHazlitt put it, "was the only match that ever took place betweenphilosophy and experience; and waking from the trance of theory we hearthe words Truth, Reason, Virtue, Liberty, with the same indifference orcontempt that a cynic who has married a jilt or a termagant listens tothe rhapsodies of lovers. " Godwin found his own alluring by-way, andturning away at once from political repression and political agitation, became the pioneer of philosophic anarchism. To Shelley at the end ofthis marvellous thirty years of ardour, speculation, and despair, thehope became winged. She had her place no longer in "the very worldwhich 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 politicalclimate to realise the atmosphere of Dr. Price's Old Jewry sermon. Thelapse of a century indeed has made him a more intelligible figure thanhe could have seemed to the generation which immediately followed him. He was temperate in his rationalism and thrifty in his philanthropy. Hetended to Unitarianism in his theology, but was a sturdy defender ofFree Will. He had written a widely-read apology for the Colonial side inthe American Civil War. A stout individualist in his political theory, inspired, as were nearly all the English progressive thinkers of hisday, by an extreme jealousy of State action, he yet guarded himselfcarefully against anarchical conclusions, and followed Saint Paul inteaching obedience to magistrates. He had written a treatise on ethicswhich on some points anticipated Kant. But his most characteristicpre-occupation was a study of finance in the interests of nationalthrift and social benevolence. This cold moralist, who despised theemotional aspects of human nature and found no place for the affectionsin his scheme of the virtues, lapsed into passion when he attacked theNational Debt, and developed an arithmetical enthusiasm when heexplained his plan for providing through voluntary insurance for the oldage of the worthy poor. He was not quite the first of the philosophersto dream of the abolition of war, and to plan an international tribunalfor the settlement of disputes between nations. In that he followedLeibnitz, as he anticipated Kant. 

It was such an essentially cold and calculating intellect as this whichin that age of ferment could launch the new doctrine of the infiniteperfectibility of mankind. Modern readers know the Rev. Dr. Price onlyfrom the fulminations of Burke, in whose pages he figures now as anincendiary and again as a fool. He was in point of fact the soul ofsobriety and the mirror of all the respectabilities in his seriousdissenting world. It is worth while to note that he was also, with hisfriend Priestley, perhaps the only English Nonconformist preacher whohas ever enjoyed a European reputation. No less a man than Condorcetrefers 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 goadwhich provoked Burke to eloquent fury, but still more because it is adocument which records for us the mood in which even the older andgraver progressives of his generation greeted the French Revolution. Itwas an official discourse delivered before the Society for Commemoratingthe Revolution in Great Britain. This typically English club claimed tohave met annually since 1688 for a dinner and a sermon. The centenary ofour own Revolution and the events in France gave it for a moment acentral place on the political stage. It was an eminently respectablesociety, mainly composed of middle-class Nonconformists, with fourDoctors of Divinity on its Committee, an entrance fee of half-a-guinea, and a radical peer, Earl Stanhope, for its Chairman. At its annualmeeting in November, 1789, Dr. Price "disdaining national partialitiesand rejoicing in every triumph of liberty and justice over arbitrarypower, " had moved an address congratulating the French National Assemblyon "the Revolution in that country and on the prospect it gives to thetwo first kingdoms in the world of a common participation in theblessings of civil and religious liberty. " The sermon was an eloquentexpansion of this address. 

It opens with a defence of the cosmopolitan attitude which could rejoiceat an improvement in the prospects of our hereditary rival. Christtaught not patriotism, but universal benevolence, as the parable of theGood 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 theworld, " and taking care "to maintain a just regard to the rights ofother countries. " Patriotism had been in history a scourge of mankind. It was among the Romans no better than "a principle holding together aband 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, Virtueand Liberty. To make mankind happy and free, it should suffice toinstruct them. "Ignorance is the parent of bigotry, intolerance, persecution and slavery. Inform and instruct mankind and these evilswill be excluded. " There follow some rambling remarks on the need for arevisal of the Liturgy and the Articles, a complaint of the servilityshown in a recent address to King George, who ought to consider himselfrather the servant than the sovereign of his people, and a predictionthat France and England, each delivered from despotism by a happyrevolution, will now "not merely refrain from engaging in wars with oneanother, but unite in preventing wars everywhere. " As for our ownRevolution of 1688, it was a great but not a perfect work. It had leftreligious toleration incomplete and the Parliamentary franchise unequal. We must continue to enforce its principles, especially in the matter ofremoving the disabilities that still weigh upon dissenters. Thoseprinciples are briefly (1) Liberty of Conscience, (2) The right toresist power when it is abused, and (3) The right to choose our owngovernors, to cashier them for misconduct and to frame a government forourselves. There follows a curious little moral exhortation which showshow 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 inthe agitation for Reform, and he pauses to deplore that "not all who arezealous in this cause are as conspicuous for purity of morals as forability. " He cannot reconcile himself to the idea of an immoral patriot, and begs that they will at least hide their vices. The old man findshis peroration in Simeon's prayer. He had seen the great salvation. "Ihave 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 himselfto his subjects. And now methinks I see the ardour for liberty catchingand spreading, a general amendment beginning in human affairs; thedominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion ofpriests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience. "

The world remembers the scholar Salmasius only because he provokedMilton to a learned outbreak of bad manners. There is something immortaleven in the ill-temper of great men, and Dr. Price lives in modernmemory chiefly because he moved Burke to declamatory rage. His_Reflections on the French Revolution_ was an answer to the Old Jewrysermon, which, eloquent itself, was to beget much eloquence in others. For four years the mighty debate went on, and it became as thedisputants conversed across the echoes of the Terror, rather a dialoguebetween the past and the future, than a discussion between human voices. Burke answered Dr. Price, and to Burke in turn replied Tom Paine withthe brilliant, confident, hard-hitting logic of a pamphlet (_The Rightsof Man_) which for all the efforts of Pitt to suppress it, is still readand circulated to-day. Two notable answers were ephemeral, one from MaryWollstonecraft, and another (_Vindiciae Gallicae_) from Mackintosh, whoafterwards recanted his own opinions and lived to be known as Sir James. 

To lift the discussion to the height of a philosophical argument wasreserved for William Godwin, a mind steeped in the French and Englishspeculation of his century, gifted with rare powers of analysis, andinspired with a faith in human reason in general and his own logicalcapacity in particular, which no English mind before him or after himhas approached. In spite of a lucid style and a certain cold eloquencewhich illumines if it does not warm, Godwin's _Political Justice_ wasdead before its author, while Burke lives and was never more widely readthan to-day. 

The ghosts of great men have an erratic habit in walking. It is passionrather than any mere intellectual momentum which drives them from thetomb. There is, moreover, in Burke a variety and a humanity whichappeals in some one of its phases and moods to all of us in turn. Thegreat store-house of his emotions and his phrases has the catholicity ofthe Bible. Each man can find in it what he seeks. He is like theluminous phantom which walked in _Faust_ through the witcheries of theBrocken. Each man saw in her his own first love. He has been hero andprophet to Whigs and Tories, and in our own generation we have seen himbequeath an equal inspiration to a Cecil and a Morley. It is no part ofour task to attempt even the briefest exposition of his philosophy; weare concerned with him here chiefly as an influence which helped by itsvehemence and its superb rhetorical exaggerations to drive therevolutionary thinkers who answered him to parallel exaggerations andopposite extremes. Inspired himself with a distrust of generalisation, and a hatred of philosophers, he none the less evolved a philosophy ashe talked. Against his will he was forced into the upper air in hisfurious pursuit of the "political aeronauts. " His was a volcanicintellect which flung up principles in its moments of eruption, andpoured them forth pell-mell with the vituperations and the exaltations. 

No logical dissection can reach the inner truth of Burke. Everystatement of a principle in an orator or a pamphleteer is coloured bythe occasion, the emotion, and the mood of an audience to whom it isaddressed. Burke spoke amid the angers and alarms inspired first by thesubversive energy, and then by the doctrinaire cruelty of the FrenchRevolution. It was in the process of "diffusing the Terror" that most ofhis philosophical _obiter dicta_ were uttered. The real nerve of thethinking of a mind so vehement, so passionate, so essentially dramaticis to be sought not in some principle which was the major premise of hissyllogisms, but in some pervading emotion. Fanny Burney said of him thatwhen he spoke of the Revolution his face immediately assumed "theexpression of a man who is going to defend himself against murderers. "That is exactly the tone of all his later utterances. His mission was tospread panic because he felt it. By no other reading can one explain orexcuse the rage of his denunciation of the excellent Dr. Price. 

If his was philosophy it was philosophy seeing red. He predicted theTerror before it occurred, and by his work in stirring Europe to thecoalition against France, he did much to realise his own forebodings. But, to do Burke justice, his was a disinterested fear, and it would befairer to call it a hatred of cruelty. Burke was not a man to take firebecause he thought a principle false. His was rather the practical logicwhich found a principle false because it led to evil; and the evil whichcaused his mind to blaze was nearly always cruelty. He hated the Frenchphilosophers because in the groves of their Academy "at the end of everyvista you see nothing but the gallows. " He pursued Rousseau and Dr. Price because their teaching, on his reading of cause and effect, hadset the tumbrils rolling and weighted the guillotine for MarieAntoinette. It was precisely the same impulse which had caused him topursue Warren Hastings for his cruelties towards the Begums of Oude. Thespring of all this speculation was a nerve which twitched with amaddening sensitiveness at the sight of suffering. 

To rouse Burke's genius to its noblest utterance, there must needs be asuffering which he could personify and dramatise. He saw nothing of thedull peasant misery which in truth explained the Revolution. He ignoredthose catalogues of injustice and wrong that composed the mandates (the_cahiers_) which the Deputies carried with them to the NationalAssembly. He forgot the famines, the exactions, the oppressiveprivileges which made revolt, and saw only the pathos of the Queen'shelplessness before it. In Paine's immortal epigram, he "pitied theplumage and forgot the dying bird. " But it is paradoxically true thatwhile he pursued the friends of humanity, his real impulse was thehatred of cruelty which modern men call humanitarian. To that hatred hewas always true. No abstract principle, but always this dominatingpassion, covers his inconsistencies, and bridges the gulf between hisearlier Whiggery and his later Toryism. In the French Revolution he sawonly cruelty, and he opposed it as he had opposed Indian Imperialism, negro slavery, the savage criminal justice of his day, and the penallaws against the Irish Catholics. Of Burke one must ask not so much Whatdid he believe? as Whom did he pity?

It was the contrast of temperament and attitude which made the cleavagebetween Burke and the friends of the French Revolution deep andirreconcilable. In the fundamentals of political theory he often seemsto agree with some of them, and they differ as often among themselves. Burke seems often to retain the typical eighteenth century fiction thatthe State is based on some original pact or social contract. That wasRousseau's starting point, and it was Godwin's work (after Hume) toshatter this heritage which French and English speculation had beencontent to accept from Locke. There are passages in which Burke appearsto accept the notion, unintelligible to modern minds, of the natural, oras he put it, "primitive, " rights of man. He reserved his contempt forthose who sought to tabulate or codify these rights, and he would alwaysbrush aside any argument based upon them, by asking the prior question, what in the given emergency was best for the good of society, or thehappiness of men. Paine, when he was in his more _a priori_ moods, wascapable of deducing his whole practical system from the abstract rightsof man; Godwin was a modern in virtually dismissing the whole notion. While Burke was belabouring Dr. Price, he whittled away the wholetheoretic significance of the English Revolution of 1688, but heremained its partisan. He tried to deny Dr. Price's claim to "choose ourgovernors, " but he could not relapse into the seventeenth-century Torydoctrine of non-resistance, and would always allow in extreme cases theright of rebellion. Here again there was no final opposition, for thereare passages in Godwin against rash rebellion and the anarchy ofrevolution more impressive, if less emotional, than anything in Burke. 

Modern criticism is disposed to base the greatness of Burke on hisinspired anticipation of the historical view of politics. Quotation hasmade classical those noble passages which glorify the continuous life ofmankind, link the present by a chain of pieties to the past, conjure upa glowing vision of the social organism, and celebrate the wisdom of ourancestors and the infallibility of the race. There was, indeed, a realopposition of temperament here; but Burke had no monopoly of thehistorical vision. It is a travesty to suggest that the revolutionaryschool despised history. Paine, indeed, was a self-taught man, who knewnothing of history and cared less. But Godwin wrote history with successand even penned a remarkable essay (_On Sepulchres_) in which heanticipated the Comtist veneration for the great dead, and proposed anational scheme for covering the country with monuments to their memory. Condorcet, perhaps the greatest intellect and certainly the noblestcharacter among them, wrote the first attempt at a systematicevolutionary interpretation of history. 

But it makes some difference whether a man sees history from above orfrom below. Burke saw it from the comfortable altitude of the Whigaristocracy to which he had allied himself. The revolutionary school sawits inverse, from the standpoint of the "swinish multitude" (an angryindiscretion of Burke's) for whom it had worked to less advantage. Painewas a man of the people, and Godwin belonged by birth to the dissentingcommunity for whom history had been chiefly a record of persecution, illuminated by rebellion. For Burke the product of history was thesacred constitution in which he saw an "entailed heritage, " the socialfabric "well cramped and bolted together in all its parts. " For Godwinit was mainly a chronicle of criminal wars, savage oppressions, andsocial misery. Burke, in a moment of paradoxical exaltation, was capableof singing the praises of "prejudice, " which "renders a man's virtue hishabit. " For Condorcet, on the other hand, history was the orderlyprocession of the human mind, advancing through a series of well-markedepochs (he enumerated nine) from the pastoral state to the FrenchRevolution, 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 naïve intellectualism of such a view asthis, which ignores or thrusts into the background the economic causesof advance and retrogression. But it is certainly not an unhistoricalview. Burke dreaded fundamental discussions which "turn men's dutiesinto doubts. " The revolutionary school believed that all progressdepended on the daring and thoroughness of these discussions. Historyfor them was a continuous Socratic dialogue, in which the philosophersof innovation were always arrayed against the sophists of authority. They hoped everything from the leadership of the illuminated few whogradually permeate the mass and raise it with them. Burke held that "theindividual is foolish, but the species is wise, " and the "naturalaristocracy" in whom he trusted was to keep the inert mass in acondition of stable equilibrium. 

We retain from Burke to-day the sonorous generalisations, theepigrammatic maxims, which each of us applies in his own way. But toBurke's contemporaries they meant only one thing--a defence of theunreformed franchise. All his reverence for the pre-ordained order ofprovidence, 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 perfectlythe whole commons of Great Britain. " They, with no mystical view ofhistory to guide them, pointed out that its electors were a mere handfulof 12, 000 in the whole population, and that Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford had not a Member among them. While Burkeperorated about the ways of providence, they pointed to that auctioneerwho put up for sale to the highest bidder the fee simple of the Boroughof Gatton with the power of nominating two members for ever. Thatauctioneer is worth quoting: "Need I tell you, gentlemen, that thiselegant contingency is the only infallible source of fortune, titles, and honours in this happy country? That it leads to the highestsituations in the State? And that, meandering through the temptingsinuosities of ambition, the purchaser will find the margin strewed withroses, and his head quickly crowned with those precious garlands thatflourish in full vigour round the fountain of honour? On this halcyonsea, if any gentleman who has made his fortune in either of the Indieschooses once more to embark, he may repose in perfect quiet. Nohurricanes to dread; no tormenting claims of insolent electors toevade; no tinkers' wives to kiss.... With this elegant contingency inhis pocket, the honours of the State await his plucking, and with itsemoluments his purse will overflow. "

A reference to the elegant contingency of Gatton sufficed to deflate agood deal of eloquence. 

Burke, indeed, believed in the pre-ordained order of the world, but hesomehow omitted the rebels. When in his sublimest periods, he appealedto "the known march of the ordinary providence of God, " and saw inrevolution and change an assault on the divine order, one sees, rigidand forbidding, the limitations of his thinking. The man who sees inhistory a divine tactic must salute the regiment in its headlong chargeno less than the regiment which stands with fixed bayonets around theark of the covenant. Said the Hindoo saint, who saw all things in Godand God in all things, to the soldier who was slaying him, "And Thoualso art He. " The march of providence embraced 1789 as well as 1688. Paine and Godwin, Danton and Robespierre might have answered Burke witha reminder that they also were His children. 

The key to any understanding of the dialogue between Burke and theRevolutionists is that each side was moved by a passion which meantnothing to the other. Burke was hoarse with anger and fear at theexcesses in France. They were afire with an almost religious faith inhuman perfectibility. Burke's is a great record of detailed reformsachieved or advocated, but for organic change there was no place in hissystem, and he indulged in no vision of human progress. "The only moraltrust with any certainty in our hands, " he wrote, "is the care of ourown time. " It was of to-morrow that the Revolution thought, and even ofthe day after to-morrow. Nothing could shake its faith. Proscribed amidthe Terror for his moderation and independence, learning daily in thegarret 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 thefrustration of his brightest hopes, Condorcet, solitary and disguised, sat down to write that sketch of human destinies which is, perhaps, themost confident statement of a reasoned optimism in European literature. He finished his _Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of theHuman Mind_, left his garret, and went out to meet his death. A yearlater, as if to show that the great prodigal hope could survive thebrain that conceived it, the representatives of the French people hadit circulated as a national document. 

Its thesis is that no limit can be set to the perfection of humanfaculties, that the progress and perfectibility of man are independentof any power which can arrest them, and have no term unless it be theduration of the globe itself. The progress might be swift or slow, butthe ultimate end was sure. Twenty years before, Turgot projecting asystem of universal education in France, had promised to transform thenation in ten years. Condorcet was less sanguine, but his perspectivewas short. The indefinite advance of mankind presupposed, he argued, theelimination of inequality (1) among peoples, and (2) among classes, andlastly the perfection of the individual. For all this he believed thatthe Revolution had already laid the foundation. Negro slavery, forexample, would end; Africa would enter on a phase of culture dependenton settled agriculture, and the East adopt free institutions. The timewas at hand when the sun would rise only on free men, and tyrants, slaves, and priests would live only in history. The Revolution hadproclaimed the equality of men, and the future would proceed to realiseit. Monopolies abolished, fortunes would tend to a level of equality, and a system of insurance (Dr. Price's specific) would mitigate orabolish poverty. Universal education would reduce the natural inequalityof talents, and break down the barriers of class, so that men, retainingstill the desire to be instructed by others, would no longer need to becontrolled by their superiors. Science had made a dizzy progress in thepast generation, but its advance must be still more rapid when generaleducation enables it to be cultivated by still greater numbers, and bywomen as well as men. To the fear which Malthus afterwards used as themost formidable argument against revolutionary optimism, that a denserpopulation would leave the means of subsistence inadequate, he opposedintensive cultivation, synthetic chemistry, and the progress of mankindin self-control and virtue. Human character itself will change with theamendment 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 betweenself-interest and altruism, and to make a world in which when a manseeks his own good, he need no longer infringe the good of others. Agreat share in this moral elevation would come from the destruction ofthe inequality of the sexes, which Condorcet preached in France whileMary Wollstonecraft was its pioneer in England. That inequality has beenruinous even to the sex which it favoured, and rests in nothing but anabuse of force. To remove it is not merely to raise the status of womenbut to increase family happiness, and to reform morals. Wars too willend, and with them a constant menace to liberty. The ultimate dream is aperpetual confederation of mankind. 

It would be a fascinating but too protracted study to follow this faithin the perfectibility of mankind to its final enthusiasms of prophecy, and to trace it to its origins in the speculations of Helvétius andHolbach, of Priestley and Price. It was a creative impulse which madefor itself a psychology and a sociology; it rather led the thinking ofmen than followed from their reasonings. They seem at every turn tochoose of two alternative views the one which would favour thissovereign hope. Is it reason and opinion, or some innate character whichgoverns the actions of men? The philosophers of hope answer "opinion, "for opinion can be indefinitely changed and led from prejudice toscience. Is it climate (as Montesquieu had urged) or politicalinstitutions which differentiate the races of men? Clearly it isinstitutions, for if it were climate there would be nothing to hope fromreform. Burke opposed to all their schemes of construction anddestruction, to their generalisations and philosophisings, theunchangeable fact of human nature. They answered (diving into Helvétius)that human nature is itself the product of "education" or, as we shouldcall it, "environment. " Circumstances and above all politicalinstitutions have made man what he is. Princes, as Holbach puts it, aregardeners who can by varying systems of cultivation alter the characterof men as they would alter the form of trees. Change the institutionsand you will change human nature itself. There seemed no limit to theimprovement which would follow if we could but discard the fetters ofprejudice and despotism. 

Wordsworth's "shades of the prison-house" which close upon the growingboy, were an echo of this thought. Godwin's friend, Holcroft, embodiedit in a striking metaphor: "Men do not become what by nature they aremeant to be, but what society makes them. The generous feelings andhigher propensities of the soul are, as it were shrunk up, scared, violently wrenched, and amputated, to fit us for our intercourse in theworld, something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate theirchildren 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, Helvétius, or Condorcet. It gave to their controversy with Burke theappearance, not so much of a dispute between rival schools, as of adialogue between men who spoke to each other in unknown tongues. 

 * * * * *

Burke condescended to reason with Dr. Price. But the main answer ofauthority to the friends of the French Revolution, was the answer whichBurke prescribed for "infidels"--"a refutation by criminal justice. " Acurious parallel movement towards extremes went on simultaneously in thetwo camps. While Burke separated himself from Fox, split the Whig party, and devoted his genius to the task of fanning the general Englishdislike of the Revolution into a panic rage of anger and fear, theprogressive camp in its turn was gradually captured by the"intellectuals, " and passed from a humdrum demand for political reforminto a ferment of moral and social speculation. Societies grew up inall the chief centres of population, always with the same programme. "Anhonest Parliament. An annual Parliament. A Parliament wherein eachindividual will have his representative. " Of these the most active, themost extreme, and the best organised was undoubtedly the LondonCorresponding 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 andpamphlets. The son of a sea-captain, who had had his education in avillage school in Perthshire where the scholars paid a penny a week, hewas a leading member of the Scots' Kirk in Covent Garden, and had drawnhis political education not at all from godless French philosophers, butfrom the Protestant fanatic, Lord George Gordon, and from Dr. Price'sbook on the American War. He gathered his own friends together to foundhis society, and nine of them met for the first time in the "Bell"tavern in Exeter Street in January, 1792. "They had finished their dailylabour and met there by appointment. After having their bread and cheeseand porter for supper, as usual, and their pipes afterwards, with someconversation, on the hardness of the times and the dearness of all thenecessaries of life, which they in common with their fellow-citizensfelt to their sorrow, the business for which they had met was broughtforward--Parliamentary Reform. "

The Corresponding Society drew the bulk of its members from tradesmen, mechanics and shopkeepers, who contributed their penny a week, andorganised itself under Hardy's methodical guidance into numerousbranches each with twenty members. It is said to have counted in the endsome 30, 000 members in London alone. It was a focus of discontent andhope which soon attracted men of more conspicuous talents and widerexperience. Horne Tooke, man about town, ex-clergyman, and philologist, who had been at first the friend and lieutenant and then the rival andenemy of Wilkes, was there to bridge the years between the last greatpopular agitation and the new hopes of reform. He was a man cautious andeven 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 himwithin the four walls of a room. There was Tom Paine, the man who hadfirst dared to propose the independence of the United States, a veteranof revolution who had served on Washington's staff, penned thosebrilliant exhortations which led the American rebels to victory, andacted as Foreign Secretary to the insurgent Congress. On the fringes ofthe little inner circle of intellectuals one catches a glimpse ofWilliam Blake the poet, and Ritson, the first teacher and theorist ofvegetarianism. Not the least interesting member of the group was ThomasHolcroft, the inseparable friend and ally of William Godwin. Holcroft'svivid and masterful personality stands out indeed as the most attractiveamong the abler members of the circle. The son of a boot-maker, he hadearned his bread as cobbler, ostler, village schoolmaster, strollingplayer and reporter. His insatiable passion for knowledge had given hima mastery of French and German. He went in 1783 to Paris ascorrespondent of the _Morning Herald_, on the modest salary of aguinea-and-a-half a week. It was there that he acquired his familiaritywith the writings of the French political philosophers, and performedthe quaint achievement of pirating _Figaro_ for the English stage. Noprinted copy was obtainable, and Holcroft contrived to commit the wholeplay to memory by attending ten performances, much as Mozart had piratedthe ancient exclusive music of St. Peter's in Rome. He was at thisperiod a thriving literary craftsman, and the author of a series ofpopular plays in which the critics of the time had just begun to noteand resent an obtrusive democratic tendency. 

Under the influence of these eager speculative spirits, theCorresponding Society must have travelled far from its original businessof Parliamentary Reform. Here is an extract from evidence given beforethe Privy Council, which relates the proceedings at one of its latermeetings:

"The most gentlemanlike person took the chair and talked about an equalrepresentation of the people, and of putting an end to war. Holcrofttalked about the Powers of the Human Mind.... Mr. Holcroft talked agreat deal about Peace, of his being against any violent or coercivemeans, that were usually resorted to against our fellow-creatures, urgedthe more powerful operation of Philosophy and Reason to convince man ofhis errors; that he would disarm his greatest enemy by these means andoppose his Fury. He spoke also about Truth being powerful, and gaveadvice to the above effect to the delegates present who all seemed toagree, as no person opposed his arguments. "

One may doubt, however, whether the whole society was composed of"natural Quakers, " who, like Holcroft and Godwin, preachednon-resistance before Tolstoy. The dour commonsense of Hardy maintainedthe theory--he vowed that it was only theory--that every citizen shouldpossess arms and know their use. As the Revolution went forward inFrance, the agitation in England became increasingly reckless. When thesociety held its anniversary dinner after the Terror, in May, 1794, atthe "Crown and Anchor" Tavern, the band played "Ça ira, " the"Carmagnole" and the "Marseillaise. " The chief toasts were "the Rightsof Man, " and "the Armies contending for Liberty, " which was asufficiently clear phrase for describing the Republican armies that wereat war with England. There followed an ode composed by Sir WilliamJones, a translation of the Athenian song which celebrated the deeds ofthe tyrannicides, Harmodius and Aristogeiton;

 Verdant myrtle's branchy pride Shall my thirsty blade entwine. 

One may doubt whether Sir William Jones ever felt the smallestinclination to satisfy the thirst of his blade, but there was provisionenough for more commonplace appetites. Two years before, Hardy's worthymechanics had supped on porter and cheese and talked of the hardness ofthe times. Their movement had been captured by a group of eager, sophisticated, literary persons, who went much farther thanParliamentary Reform, and with the aid of claret and the subtler Frenchintoxicants, "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 inEngland. The reaction was already rampant and vindictive, and before theyear 1794 was out it had crushed the progressive movement and postponedfor thirty-eight years the triumph of Parliamentary Reform. It requiresa strenuous exercise of the imagination to conceive the panic whichswept over England as the news of the French Terror circulated. Itfastened impartially on every class of the community, and destroyed theemotional balance no less of Pitt and his colleagues than of the workingmen who formed the Church and King mobs. Proclamations were issued toquell insurrections which never had been planned, and the militia calledout when not a hand had been raised against the King throughout GreatBritain. So great was the fear, so deep the moral indignation that "evenrespectable and honest men, " (the phrase is Holcroft's) "turned spiesand informers on their friends from a sense of public duty. " A mobburned Dr. Priestley's house near Birmingham for no better reason thanbecause 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 toescape, and died a few hours afterwards. A hunt went on all over thekingdom for booksellers and printers to prosecute, and when Thomas Painewas prosecuted in his absence for publishing _The Rights of Man_, thejury was so determined to find him guilty that they would not trouble tohear the case for the Crown. 

Twenty years before, the French philosopher Helvétius, after anexperience of Jesuit persecution and Court disfavour in France, made aquaint proposal for re-organising the whole discussion of moral andpolitical questions. The first step, he thought, was to compile adictionary in which all the terms required in such debates would receivean authoritative definition. But this dictionary, he urged, must becomposed in the English language, and published first in England, foronly there was discussion free, and the press unfettered. In thereaction over which Pitt and Dundas presided, that envied liberty wastotally eclipsed. The _Habeas Corpus_ Act was suspended; the PrivyCouncil sat as a sort of Star Chamber to question political suspects, and there was even talk of importing Hessian and Hanoverian mercenariesto check an insurrection which nowhere showed its head. The frailest ofall human endowments is the sense of humour. The sense of proportion hadbeen eclipsed in the panic, and most of the cases which may be studiedto-day in the State trials impress the modern reader as tasteless andcruel farces. Men were tried and sentenced never for deeds, but alwaysfor words. For a sermon closely resembling Dr. Price's, a dissentingminister named Winterbotham was tried at Exeter, and sentenced to fouryears' imprisonment and a fine of £200. The attorney, John Frost, returning from France, admitted in a chance conversation in acoffee-house that he thought society could manage very well withoutkings; 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 hadheard some suspect Radical declare in a coach or a coffee-house, that hewould "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 "wouldcut off the King's head as easily as he would shave himself" (caseagainst Thomas Hardy). The climax of really entertaining absurdity wasreached when two debtors imprisoned in the Fleet were tried andsentenced for nailing a seditious libel to its doors. The libel was anotice that "This house is to let, " that "infamous bastilles are nolonger necessary in Europe, " and that "peaceable possession" would besecured "on or before the first day of January, 1793, being thecommencement of the first year of liberty in Great Britain. "

The farce of this panic became a tragedy when the reformers of Scotlandventured to summon a Convention at Edinburgh to voice the demand forshorter Parliaments and universal male suffrage. It met in October, 1793, and was attended by delegates from the London CorrespondingSociety as well as from Scottish branches. Nothing was intended beyondthe holding of what we should call to-day a conference or congress. Butthe word "Convention" with its reminiscence of the French revolutionaryassembly seems to have caused the Government some particular alarm. TheConvention, after some days of orderly debate, was invaded by themagistrates and broken up. Margarot and Sinclair (the Englishdelegates), Skirving, Palmer and Thomas Muir, were tried before thatnotorious 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 highcourage, only one, Margarot, lived to return to England. Muir, daring, romantic and headstrong, contributed to the history of the movement apage of adventure which might invite the attention of a novelist. Heescaped from Botany Bay on a whaler, was wrecked on the coast of SouthAmerica, contrived to wander to the West Indies, there shipped on aSpanish vessel for Europe, fell in with an English frigate, was woundedin the fight that followed, and had the good fortune to find among theofficers who took him prisoner an old friend, who recognised him, andassisted him to conceal his identity. He was landed in Spain, invitedto Paris and pensioned by the Convention, but died shortly after hisarrival. Less romantic but even finer is Sinclair's story. He obtainedbail while his comrades were tried and sentenced. He might have brokenhis bail, and his friends urged him to do so, but with the certaintythat 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 mantowards his bail, and in discharge of his duty towards an oppressed andinsulted public; he has returned not to take a fair trial, but, as he iswell 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 amoral elevation and a great courage that did not shrink from venturinglife and fortune for a disinterested end. The modern reader is apt toindulge a smile when he reads in the ardent declamation of this timeprofessions of a love of Virtue and praises of Universal Benevolence. Weare impatient of abstractions and shy of capital letters. But it was noabstraction which carried a man with honour to the fevers andprivations of Botany Bay, when he might have sought safety and fame inParis. The English reformers were resolved to brave the worst that Pittcould do to them, and challenged the fate of their Scottish comrades. They prepared in their turn to hold a "Convention" for ParliamentaryReform, and showed a doubtful prudence in keeping its details secretwhile the intention was boldly avowed. The counter-stroke came promptly. Twelve of the leading members of the Corresponding Society, includingHardy, Horne Tooke and Holcroft were arrested and sent, for the mostpart to the Tower, on a charge of high treason. The records of theirpreliminary examination before the Privy Council go to show that Pittand Dundas had allowed themselves to be persuaded by their spies thatevery species of treason and folly was in preparation, from an armedinsurrection down to a plan to murder the King by blowing a poisonedarrow from an air-gun. The Government had said that there was atreasonable conspiracy; it had to produce the traitors. 

There was some delay in arresting Holcroft. His conduct is worthrecording because it is so typical of the naïve courage, the doctrinairehardihood of the group. These men whom the reaction accused ofsubverting morality, were in fact dervishes of principle, who rushed onthe bayonets in the name of manhood and truth and sincerity. Godwin whenhe came in his systematic treatise to describe how a free people wouldconduct a defensive war, declared that it would scorn to resort to astratagem or an ambuscade. In the same spirit Holcroft hearing that awarrant was out against him for high treason, walked boldly into theChief Justice's court, and announced that he came to be put upon histrial "that if I am a guilty man, the whole extent of my guilt maybecome notorious, and if innocent that the rectitude of my principlesand conduct may be no less public. " When a messenger did, in fact, go toHolcroft's house about the same hour to arrest him, his daughters, obedient to the same ideal of sincerity, actually invited him to taketheir father's papers. 

One may doubt whether English liberties have ever run a graver danger inmodern times than at the trial of the twelve reformers. The Governmentsought to overwhelm them with a mass of evidence which they lacked themeans to sift and confute. But no definite act was charged against them, and the whole case turned on a monstrous attempt to give a wideconstructive interpretation to the law of high treason. High treason inEnglish law has the perfectly definite meaning of an attempt on theKing's life, or the levying of war against him. Chief Justice Eyre, inhis charge to the Grand Jury, sought to stretch it until it assumed aRussian latitude, and would include any effort by agitation to alter theform of government or the constitution of Parliament. The issue, beforea jury which probably had not escaped the general panic, seemed verydoubtful, and it was the general opinion that the decisive blow forliberty was struck by William Godwin. Long years afterwards Horne Tooke, in a dramatic scene, called Godwin to him in public, and kissed the handwhich had saved his life. 

Godwin contributed to the _Morning Chronicle_ a long letter, or moreproperly, a pamphlet, in which he analysed the Chief Justice's chargeand brought to the light what really was latent in it, a claim to treatas high treason any effort, however peaceful and orderly, to bring abouta fundamental change in our institutions. The letter shows none ofGodwin's speculative daring, and his gift of cold and dignifiedeloquence is severely repressed. He wrote to attain his immediate end, and from that standpoint his pleading was a masterpiece. A certaindeadly courtesy, a tone of quiet reasonableness made it possible for themost prejudiced reader to follow it with assent. The argument wasirresistible, and the single touch of emotion at the end was worthy of agreat orator. A few lines depicted these men who, moved by publicspirit, had acted in good faith within the law, as it had beenuniversally understood in England, overwhelmed by a sudden extension ofits most terrible articles, applied to them without precedent orwarning. Should the awful sentence be read over these men, that theyshould be hanged (but not until they were dead), and then, still living, suffer the loss of their members and see their bowels torn out? Theghastly barbarity of the whole procedure could not have been moreeffectively exposed. Looking back upon this trial there is no reason tothink that the reformers exaggerated its importance. Had the Governmentwon its case, it must have succeeded in destroying the very possibilityof opposition or agitation in England. It was believed that no less thanthree hundred signed warrants lay ready for issue on the day that Hardyand his friends were convicted. But the stroke was too daring, thethreat too impudent. When the trial began, the prosecution lightenedits own task by dropping the charge against Holcroft and three of hiscomrades. 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 toconvict Horne Tooke, and four in a last vain attempt to succeed againstThelwall. 

The popular victory checked the excesses of the reaction. As Holcroftwrote: "The whole power of Government was directed against Thomas Hardy:in his fate seemed involved the fate of the nation, and the verdict ofNot Guilty appeared to burst its bonds, and to have released it frominconceivable miseries and ages of impending slavery. " The reaction, indeed, was restrained; but so also was the movement of reform. Thesubsequent history of its leaders is one of unheroic failure, and of anunpopularity which was harder to endure than danger. Windham referred tothe twelve in debate as "acquitted felons, " and Holcroft was constrainedfirst to produce his plays under a borrowed name, and then to seek arefuge in voluntary exile on the continent. The passions roused by theTerror arrested the progress of the revolutionary movement in England. The alarms and glories of the struggle with Napoleon buried it inoblivion. 

It is this complex experience which lies behind Godwin's politicalwritings. The French Revolution produced its simple effects in Burke andTom Paine--revolt and disgust in the one, enthusiasm and hope in theother. In Godwin the reaction is more complicated. He retained to thelast his ardent faith in progress, and the perfectibility of mankind. Noevents could shake that, but it was the work of experience to reinforceall 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 hisday, and to beget in him not merely a doubt in the efficacy of violentrevolutions, but a dislike of all concerted political effort and thewhole collective work of political associations. He had felt the lash ofrepression, saved one friend from the hangman, and seen others departfor Botany Bay: he remained to the end, the uncompromising foe of everyspecies of governmental coercion. He had listened to Horne Tookeperorating "hanging matters" at the Corresponding Society; he had seenthe "electric ruby" circulating at its dinners; he had witnessed thecollapse of Thomas Hardy's painstaking and methodical organisation. Thefruit of all these experiences was the first statement in Europeanliterature of philosophic anarchism--a statement which hardly yields toTolstoy's in its trenchant and unflinching logic. 

"Logic" is more often a habit of consecutive and reasoned writing thanthe source of a thinker's opinion. The logical writer is the man who cansucceed in displaying plausible reasons for what he believes byinstinct, or knows by experience. There is history and temperamentbehind the coldest logic. The history which set Godwin against all Stateaction, whether undertaken in defence of order or privilege, or onbehalf of reform, is to be read in the excesses of Pitt and thefutilities of the Corresponding Society. The question of temperamentinvolves a subtler psychological judgment. If you feel in yourselfsomething less than the heroic temper which will make a militantagitation or a violent revolution against the monstrous ascendency ofprivilege and ordered force, you are lucky if you can convince yourselfthat agitation is commonly mischievous, and association but a means ofcombating one evil by creating another. Godwin was certainly no coward. But he was fortunate in evolving a theory which excused him fromattempting the more dangerous exploits of civic courage. His ideal wasthe Stoic virtue, the isolated strength, which can stand firm in passiveprotest against oppression and wrong. He stood firm, and Pitt wascontent to leave him standing. 

 * * * * *

We have seen the first bold statement of the hope which the FrenchRevolution kindled in Dr. Price's Old Jewry sermon. We have watched thebrave incautious effort to realise it in the plans of the CorrespondingSociety. In these crowded years that began with the fall of the Bastilleand closed with the Terror, it was to enter on yet another phase, and inthis last incarnation the hope was very near despair. To men in theearly 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 youngermen, poets and thinkers, forming their first eager views of life in theleisure of the Universities, it was above all a stimulus to fancy. Godwin was their prophet, but they built upon his speculations thesuperstructure of a dream that was all their own. For some years, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth were caught and held in the close webof logic which Godwin gave to the world in 1793 in the first edition of_Political Justice_. Wordsworth read and studied and continuallydiscussed it. Southey confessed that he "read and studied and all butworshipped Godwin. " Coleridge wrote a sonnet which he afterwardssuppressed 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 mostvaluable chapters are those which give his penetrating criticisms ofexisting society. To these young men the excitement was in his pictureof a free community from which laws and coercion had been eliminated, and in which property was in a continual flux actuated by the stream ofuniversal benevolence. They resolved to found a community based onGodwinian principles, and to free themselves from the cramping anddwarfing influences of a society ruined by laws and superstitions, theylit on the simple expedient of removing themselves beyond its reach. They lacked the manhood and the simplicity which had turned more prosaicnatures into agitators and reformers. It is a tale which every studentof literature has delighted to read, how Coleridge and Southey, bent onfounding their Pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehana, came toBristol to charter a ship, and while they waited, dimly aware that theylacked funds for the adventure, anchored themselves in English homes bymarrying the Fricker sisters. 

As one of the comrades, Robert Lovell, quaintly puts it in a letter toHolcroft, "Principle, not plan, is our object. " Lovell had visitedHolcroft in gaol, and one can well understand how that near view of thefate which awaited the reformer under Pitt, confirmed them in their ideaof crossing the Atlantic. "From the writings of William Godwin andyourself, " Lovell went on, "our minds have been illuminated; we wish ouractions to be guided by the same superior abilities. " Holcroft, olderand more combative than his poet-disciples, advised the founding of amodel colony in this country. But the lure of a distant scene was tooattractive. Cottle, the friend and publisher of the Pantisocrats, hasleft his account of their aims. Theirs was to be "a social colony inwhich there was to be a community of property and where all that wasselfish was to be proscribed. " It would realise "a state of society freefrom the evils and turmoils that then agitated the world, and presentan example of the eminence to which men might arrive under theunrestrained influence of sound principles. " It would "regenerate thewhole 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 exampleof human perfectibility. "

What is left of the dream to-day? Some verses in Coleridge's earlierpoems, 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 "sweetharper" 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, Coleridgedescribed Pantisocracy in _The Friend_ as "a plan as harmless as it wasextravagant, " which had served a purpose by saving him from moredangerous courses. "It was serviceable in securing myself and perhapssome others from the paths of sedition. We were kept free from thestains and impurities which might have remained upon us had we beentravelling with the crowd of less imaginative malcontents through thedark lanes and foul by-roads of ordinary fanaticism. "

Pantisocracy was indeed a happy episode for English literature. One maydoubt whether the "Ancient Mariner" would have been written, hadColeridge travelled with Gerrald and Sinclair along the "dark lane" thatled to Botany Bay. Nature can work strange miracles with the instinct ofself-preservation, and even for poets she has a care. The prudence whichteaches one man to be a Whig, will make of another a Utopian. 

CHAPTER II

THOMAS PAINE

"Where Liberty is, there is my country. " The sentiment has a Latin ring;one can imagine an early Stoic as its author. It was spoken by BenjaminFranklin, and no saying better expresses the spirit of eighteenthcentury humanity. "Where is not Liberty, there is mine. " The answer isThomas Paine's. It is the watchword of the knight errant, the marchingmusic that sent Lafayette to America, and Byron to Greece, the motto ofevery man who prizes striving above enjoyment, honours comradeship abovepatriotism, and follows an idea that no frontier can arrest. Paine wasindeed of no century, and no formula of classification can confine him. His writing is of the age of enlightenment; his actions belong toromance. His clear, manly style, his sturdy commonsense, the rapier playof his epigrams, the formal, logical architecture of his thoughts, hiscomplacent limitations, his horror of mystery and Gothic half-lights, his harsh contempt for all the sacred muddle of priestly traditions andaristocratic politics, his assurance, his intellectual courage, hishumanity--all that, in its best and its worst, belongs to the century ofVoltaire and the Revolution. In his spirit of adventure, in his passionfor movement and combat, there Paine is romantic. Paine thought in proseand acted epics. He drew horizons on paper and pursued the infinite indeeds. 

Tom Paine was born, the son of a Quaker stay-maker, in 1737, atThetford, in the county of Norfolk. His parents were poor, but he owedmuch, he tells us, to a good moral education and picked up "a tolerablestock of useful learning, " though he knew no language but his own. A"Friend" he was to the end in his independence, his rationalism, and hishumanity, though he laughed when he thought of what a sad-coloured worldthe Quakers would have made of the creation, if they had been consulted. The boy craved adventure, and was prevented at seventeen from enlistingin the crew of the privateer _Terrible_, Captain Death, only to sailsomewhat later in the _King of Prussia_, Captain Mendez. One cruiseunder a licensed pirate was enough for him, and he soon settled inLondon, making stays for a living and spending his leisure in the studyof astronomy. He qualified as an exciseman, acquiring in this employmenta grasp of finance and an interest in budgets of which he afterwardsmade good use in his writings. Cashiered for negligence, he turnedschoolmaster, and even aspired to ordination in the Church of England. Reinstated as a "gauger, " he was eventually dismissed for writing apamphlet in defence of the excisemen's agitation for higher wages. Hewas twice married, but his first wife died within a year of marriage, and the second, with whom he had started a "tobacco-mill, " agreed on itsfailure, apparently for no definite fault on either side, to a mutualseparation. At thirty-seven, penniless, lonely, and stamped withfailure, yet conscious of powers which had found no scope in the OldWorld, he emigrated in 1774 to America with a letter from BenjaminFranklin as his passport to fortune. 

Opportunity came promptly, and Paine was presently settled inPhiladelphia as the editor of the _Pennsylvania Magazine_. From thepages of this periodical, his admirable biographer, Mr. Moncure D. Conway, has unearthed a series of articles which show that Paine hadsomehow brought with him from England a mental equipment which rankedhim already among the moral pioneers of his generation. He advocatesinternational arbitration; he attacks duelling; he suggests morerational ideas of marriage and divorce; he pleads for mercy to animals;he demands justice for women. Above all, he assails negro slavery, andwith such mastery and fervour, that five weeks after the appearance ofhis article, the first American Anti-Slavery Society was founded atPhiladelphia. The abolition of slavery was a cause for which he neverceased to struggle, and when in later life he became the target ofreligious persecutors, it was in their dual capacity of Christians andslave-owners that men stoned him. The American colonies were now at theparting of the ways in the struggle with the Mother Country. The revolthad begun with a limited object, and few if any of its leaders realisedwhither they were tending. Paine it was, who after the slaughter atLexington, abandoned all thoughts of reconciliation and was the first topreach independence and republicanism. 

His pamphlet, _Common-Sense_ (1776), achieved a circulation which was anevent in the history of printing, and fixed in men's minds as firmresolves what were, before he wrote, no more than fluid ideas. It spoketo rebels and made a nation. Poor though Paine was, he poured the wholeof the immense profits which he received from the sale of his littlebook into the colonial war-chest, shouldered a musket, joinedWashington's army as a private, and was soon promoted to be aide-de-campto General Greene. Paine's most valuable weapon, however, was still hispen. Writing at night, after endless marches, by the light of camp firesat a moment of general depression, when even Washington thought that thegame was "pretty well up, " Paine began to write the series of pamphletsafterwards collected under the title of _The American Crisis_. They didfor the American volunteers what Rouget de Lisle's immortal song did forthe French levies in the revolutionary wars, what Körner's martialballads did for the German patriots in the Napoleonic wars. These superbpages of exhortation were read in every camp to the disheartened men;their courage commanded victory. Burke himself wrote nothing finer thanthe opening sentences of the first "crisis, " a trumpet call indeed, butphrased by an artist who knew the science of compelling music frombrass:--

"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and thesunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of hiscountry; but he that stands it now, deserves the thanks of man andwoman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have thisconsolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious thetriumph. What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly; it is dearnessonly that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a properprice upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial anarticle as freedom should not be highly rated. "

"Common-sense" Paine was now the chief of the moral forces behind thefighting Republic, and his power of thinking boldly and stating clearlydrove it forward to its destiny under the leadership of men whom Naturehad gifted with less trenchant minds. He was in succession ForeignSecretary to Congress and clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, and wefind him converting despair into triumph by the magic of self-sacrifice. He it was who in 1780 saved the finances of the war in a moment ofdespair, by starting the patriotic subscription with the gift of his ownsalary, and in 1781 proved his diplomatic gift in a journey to Paris byobtaining money-aid from the French Court. 

Paine might have settled down to enjoy his fame, after the war, on thelittle property which the State of New York gave him. He loathedinaction and escaped middle age. In 1787 he returned to England, partlyto carry his pen where the work of liberation called for it, partly toforward his mechanical inventions. Paine, self-educated though he was, was a capable mathematician, and he followed the progress of the appliedsciences with passion. His inventions include a long list of thingspartly useful, partly whimsical, a planing machine, a crane, a smokelesscandle and a gunpowder motor. But his fame as an inventor rests on hisconstruction of the first iron bridge, made after his models and plansat Wearmouth. He was received as a leader and teacher in the ardentcircle of reformers grouped round the Revolution Society and theCorresponding Society. Others were the dreamers and theorists ofliberty. He had been at the making of a Republic, and his Americanexperience gave the stimulus to English Radicalism which events inFrance were presently to repeat. His fame was already European, and atthe fall of the Bastille, it was to Paine that Lafayette confided itskey, when a free France sent that symbol of defeated despotism as apresent to a free America. He seemed the natural link between threerevolutions, the one which had succeeded in the New World, the otherwhich was transforming France, and the third which was yet to come inEngland. 

Burke's _Reflections_ rang in his ears like a challenge, and he satpromptly down in his inn to write his reply. _The Rights of Man_ is ananswer to Burke, but it is much more. The vivid pages of history inwhich he explains and defends the French Revolution which Burke hadattacked and misunderstood, are only an illustration to his mainargument. He expounds the right of revolution, and blows away the cobwebargument of legality by which his antagonist had sought to confineposterity within the settlement of 1688. Every age and generation mustbe free to act for itself. Man has no property in man, and the claim ofone generation to govern beyond the grave is of all tyrannies the mostinsolent. Burke had contended for the right of the dead to govern theliving, but that which a whole nation chooses to do, it has a right todo. The men of 1688, who surrendered their own rights and boundthemselves to obey King William and his heirs, might indeed choose to beslaves; but that could not lessen the right of their children to befree. Wrongs cannot have a legal descent. Here was a bold and triumphantanswer to a sophistical argument; but it served Paine only as a prefaceto his exposition of the American constitution, which was "to Libertywhat a grammar is to language, " and to his plea for the adoption inEngland of the French charter of the Rights of Man. 

Paine felt that he had made one Republic with a pamphlet, why notanother? He had the unlimited faith of his generation in the efficacy ofargument, and experience had proved his power. As Carlyle, in hiswhimsical dramatic fashion, said of him, "He can and will free all thisworld; perhaps even the other. " Godwin, as became the philosopher of themovement, set his hopes on the slower working of education: to make menwise was to make them free. Paine was the pamphleteer of the human camp. He saw mankind as an embattled legion and believed, true man of actionthat he was, that freedom could be won like victory by the impetus of aresolute charge. He quotes the epigram of his fellow-soldier, Lafayette, "For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; andto be free it is sufficient that she wills it. " Godwin would have sentmen to school to liberty; Paine called them to her unfurled standard. It is easy to understand the success of Paine's book, which appeared inMarch, 1791. It was theory and practice in one; it was the armed logicwhich had driven King George's regiments from America, the edgedargument which had razed the Bastille. It was bold reasoning, and it wasalso inspired writing. Holcroft and Godwin helped to bring out _TheRights of Man_, threatened with suppression or mutilation by thepublishers, and a panting incoherent shout of joy in a note fromHolcroft to Godwin is typical of the excitement which it caused:--

"I have got it--if this do not cure my cough it is a damned perversemule of a cough. The pamphlet--from the row--But mum--we don't sellit--oh, no--ears and eggs--verbatim, except the addition of a shortpreface, which as you have not seen, I send you my copy. --Not a singlecastration (Laud be unto God and J. S. Jordan!) can I discover--Hey, forthe new Jerusalem! The Millennium! And peace and eternal beatitude beunto the soul of Thomas Paine. "

The usual prosecutions of booksellers followed; but everywhere the newsocieties of reform were circulating the book, and if it helped to sendsome good men to Botany Bay, copies enough were sold to earn a sum of athousand pounds for the author, which, with his usual disinterestedness, he promptly gave to the Corresponding Society. A second part appeared in1792; and at length Pitt adopted Burke's opinion that criminal justicewas the proper argument with which to refute Tom Paine. Acting on a hintfrom William Blake, who, in a vision more prosaic and veridical than wasusual with him, had seen the constables searching for his friend, Paineescaped to France, and was convicted in his absence of high treason. 

Paine landed at Calais an outlaw, to find himself already elected itsdeputy to the Convention. As in America, so in France, his was the firstvoice to urge the uncompromising solution. He advocated the abolition ofthe monarchy; but his was a courage that always served humanity. Thework which he did as a member, with Sieyès, Danton, Condorcet, and fiveothers, of the little committee named to draft the constitution, wasephemeral. His brave pleading for the King's life was a deed thatdeserves to live. He loved to think of himself as a woodman swinging anaxe against rotten institutions and dying beliefs; but he weighted noguillotines. Paine argued against the command that we should "love ourenemies, " but he would not persecute them. This knight-errant wouldfling his shield over the very spies who tracked his steps. In Paris hesaved the life of one of Pitt's agents who had vilified him, andprocured the liberation of a bullying English officer who had struck himin public. The Terror made mercy a traitor, and Paine found himselfoverwhelmed in the vengeance which overtook all that was noblest in theRevolution. He spent ten months in prison, racked with fever, and ananecdote which seems to be authentic, tells how he escaped death by thenegligence of a jailor. This overworked official hastily chalked thesign which meant that a prisoner was marked for next batch of theguillotine's victims, on the inside instead of the outside of Paine'scell-door. 

Condorcet, in hiding and awaiting death, wrote in these months his_Sketch_ of human progress. Paine, meditating on the end that seemednear, composed the first part of his _Age of Reason_. Paine was, likeFranklin, Jefferson and Washington, a deist; and he differed from themonly in the courage which prompted him to declare his belief. He camefrom gaol a broken man, hardly able to stand, while the Convention, returned to its sound senses, welcomed him back to his place of honouron its benches. The record of his last years in America, whither hereturned in 1802, belongs rather to the history of persecution than tothe biography of a soldier of liberty. His work was done; and, thoughhis pen was still active and influential, slave-owners, ex-royalists, and the fanatics of orthodoxy combined to embitter the end of the manwho had dared to deny the inspiration of the Bible. His book was burnedin England by the hangman. Bishops in their answers mingled grudgingconcessions with personal abuse. An agent of Pitt's was hired to write ascurrilous biography of the Government's most dreaded foe. In America, the grandsons of the Puritan colonists who had flogged Quaker women aswitches, denied him a place on the stage-coach, lest an offended Godshould strike it with lightning. 

Paine died, a lonely old man, in 1809. His personal character standswritten in his career; and it is unnecessary to-day even to mention thelibels which his biographer has finally refuted. In a generation ofbrave men he was the boldest. He could rouse the passions of men, and hecould brave them. If the Royalist Burke was eloquent for a Queen, Republican Paine risked his life for a King. No wrong found himindifferent; and he used his pen not only for the democracy which mightreward him, but for animals, slaves and women. Poverty never left him, yet he made fortunes with his pen, and gave them to the cause he served. A naïve vanity was his only fault as a man. It was his fate to escapethe gallows in England and the guillotine in France. He deserved themboth; in that age there was no higher praise. A better democrat neverwore the armour of the knight-errant; a better Christian never assailedOrthodoxy. 

Neither by training nor by temperament was Paine a speculative thinker;but his political writing has none the less an immense significance. Godwin was a writer removed by his profoundly individual genius from theaverage thought of his day. Paine agreed more nearly with the advancedminds of his generation, and he taught the rest to agree with him. Noone since him or before him has stated the plain democratic case againstmonarchy and aristocracy with half his spirit and force. Earlier writerson these themes were timid; the moderns are bored. Paine is writing ofwhat he understands, and feels to be of the first importance. He caresas much about abolishing titles as a modern reformer may feel aboutnationalising land. His main theory in politics has a lucid simplicity. Men are born as God created them, free and equal; that is the assumptionalike of natural and revealed religion. Burke, who "fears God, " lookswith "awe to kings, " with "duty to magistrates, " and with "respect tonobility, " is but erecting a wilderness of turnpike gates between manand his Maker. Natural rights inhere in man by reason of his existence;civil rights are founded in natural rights and are designed to secureand guarantee them. He gives an individual twist to the doctrine of thesocial compact. Some governments arise out of the people, others overthe people. The latter are based on conquest or priestcraft, and theformer on reason. Government will be firmly based on the social compactonly when nations deliberately sit down as the Americans have done, andthe French are doing, to frame a constitution on the basis of the Rightsof Man. 

As for the English Government, it clearly arose in conquest; and tospeak of a British Constitution is playing with words. Parliament, imperfectly and capriciously elected, is supposed to hold the commonpurse in trust; but the men who vote the supplies are also those whoreceive them. The national purse is the common hack on which each partymounts in turn, in the countryman's fashion of "ride and tie. " Theyorder these things better in France. As for our system of conductingwars, it is all done over the heads of the people. War is with us theart of conquering at home. Taxes are not raised to carry on wars, butwars raised to carry on taxes. The shrewd hard-hitting blows range overthe whole surface of existing institutions. Godwin from his intellectualeminence saw in all the follies and crimes of mankind nothing worse thanthe effects of "prejudice" and the consequences of fallacious reasoning. Paine saw more self-interest in the world than prejudice. When he cameto preach the abolition of war, first through an alliance of Britain, America and France, and then through "a confederation of nations" and aEuropean Congress, he saw the obstacle in the egoism of courts andcourtiers which appear to quarrel but agree to plunder. Another sevenyears, he wrote in 1792, would see the end of monarchy and aristocracyin Europe. While they continue, with war as their trade, peace has notthe security of a day. 

Paine's writing gains rather than loses in theoretic interest, becausethe warmth of his sympathies melts, as he proceeds, the icy logic of hiseighteenth century individualism. He starts where all his schoolstarted, with a sharp antithesis between society and government. 

"Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; theformer promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections; thelatter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encouragesintercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, thelast a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing; but governmenteven in its best state is a necessary evil.... Government, like dress, is the badge of our lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built onthe ruins of the bowers of paradise. "

That was the familiar pessimism which led in practical politics to_laissez faire_, and in speculation to Godwin's philosophic anarchism. Paine himself seems for a moment to take that road. He enjoys telling ushow well the American colonies managed in the early stages of the warwithout any regular form of government. He assures us that "the moreperfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government. " Buthe had served an apprenticeship to life; looking around him at thestreets filled with beggars and the jails crowded with poor men, hesuddenly forgets that the whole purpose of government is to secure theindividual against the invasion of his rights, and straightway burstsinto a new definition:--"Civil government does not consist inexecutions; but in making such provision for the instruction of youthand the support of age as to exclude as much as possible profligacy fromthe one and despair from the other. Instead of this the resources of acountry are lavished upon kings ... And the poor themselves arecompelled to support the fraud that oppresses them. "

It is amazing how much good Paine can extract from a necessary evil. Hehas suddenly conceived of government as the instrument of the socialconscience. He means to use it as a means of securing a betterorganisation of society. Paine was a man of action, and no mere logiccould hold him. He proceeds in a breathless chapter to evolve aprogramme of social reform which, after the slumbers of a century, hisRadical successors have just begun to realise. Some hints came to himfrom Condorcet, but most of these daringly novel ideas sprang fromPaine's own inventive brain, and all of them are presented by thewhilom exciseman, with a wealth of financial detail, as if he were aChancellor of the Exchequer addressing the first Republican Parliamentin the year One of Liberty. He would break up the poor laws, "theseinstruments of civil torture. " He has saved the major part of the costof defence by a naval alliance with the other Sea Powers, and theabolition of capture at sea. Instead of poor relief he would give asubsidy to the children of the very poor, and pensions to the aged. Fourpounds a year for every child under fourteen in every necessitous familywill ensure the health and instruction of the next generation. It willcost two millions and a half, but it will banish ignorance. He would paythe costs of compulsory education. Pensions are to be granted not ofgrace but of right, as an aid to the infirm after fifty years, and asubsidy to the aged after sixty. Maternity benefit is anticipated in adonation of twenty shillings to every poor mother at the birth of achild. Casual labour is to be cared for in some sort ofworkhouse-factories in London. These reforms are to be financed partlyby economies and partly by a graduated income-tax, for which Painepresents an elaborate schedule. When the poor are happy and the jailsempty, then at last may a nation boast of its constitution. In thispregnant chapter Paine not only sketched the work of the future; heexploded his own premises. 

The odium that still clings to Paine's theological writings comes mainlyfrom those who have not read them. When Mr. Roosevelt the other daycalled him "a dirty little Atheist, " he exposed nothing but his ownignorance. Paine was a deist, and he wrote _The Age of Reason_ on thethreshold of a French prison, primarily to counteract the atheism whichhe thought he saw at work among the Jacobins--an odd diagnosis, forRobespierre was at least as ardent in his deism as Paine himself. Hebelieved in a God, Whose bounty he saw in nature; he taught the doctrineof conditional immortality, and his quarrel with revealed religion waschiefly that it set up for worship a God of cruelty and injustice. Fromthe stories of the Jewish massacres ordained by divine command, down tothe orthodox doctrine of the scheme of redemption, he saw nothing but ahistory derogatory to the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty. Tobelieve the Old Testament we must unbelieve our faith in the moraljustice of God. It might "hurt the stubbornness of a priest" to destroythis fiction, but it would tranquilise the consciences of millions. Fromthis starting-point he proceeds in the later second and third parts to adetailed criticism designed to show that the books of the Bible were notwritten by their reputed authors, that the miracles are incredible, thatthe passages claimed as prophecy have been wrested from their contexts, and that many inconsistencies are to be found in the narrative portionsof the Gospels. 

Acute and fearless though it is, this detailed argument has only anhistorical interest to-day. When the violence of his persecutors hadgoaded Paine into anger, he lost all sense of tact in controversy, andlapsed occasionally into harsh vulgarities. But the anger was just, andthe zeal for mental honesty has had its reward. Paine had no sense forthe mystery and poetry of traditional religion. But what he attacked wasnot presented to him as poetry. He was assailing a dogmatic orthodoxywhich had itself converted poetry into literal fact. As literal fact itwas incredible; and Paine, taking it all at the valuation of its ownprofessors, assailed it with a disbelief as prosaic as their belief, butintellectually more honest. His interpretation of the Bible isunscientific, if you will, but it is nearer to the truth of history thanthe conventional belief of his day. If his polemics seem rough andsuperfluous to us, it is only because his direct frontal attacks forcedon the work of Biblical criticism, and long ago compelled theabandonment of most of the positions which he assailed. In spite of itsgrave faults of taste and temper and manner, _The Age of Reason_performed an indispensable service to honesty and morals. It was thebravest thing he did, for it threatened his name with an immortality oflibel. His place in history is secure at last. The neglected pioneer ofone revolution, the honoured victim of another, brave to the point offolly, and as humane as he was brave, no man in his generation preachedrepublican virtue in better English, nor lived it with a finer disregardof self. 

CHAPTER III

WILLIAM GODWIN AND THE REVOLUTION

Tom Paine is still reviled and still admired. The name of MaryWollstonecraft is honoured by the growing army of free women. Both maybe read in cheap editions. William Godwin, a more powerful intellect, and in his day a greater influence than either, is now forgotten, orremembered only because he was the father of Shelley's wife. Yet heblazed in the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Hazlitt has toldus, "as a sun in the firmament of reputation. " "No one was more talkedof, 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 timegave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as thecelebrated _Enquiry Concerning Political Justice_. Tom Paine wasconsidered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old woman; EdmundBurke a flashy sophist. "

William Godwin came into the world in 1756, at Wisbech, in the Fencountry, with the moral atmosphere of a dissenting home for inheritance. His father and grandfather were Independent ministers, who taught themetaphysical dissent of the extreme Calvinistic tradition. The quaintill-spelled letters of his mother reveal a strong character, a meagreeducation and rigid beliefs. William was unwholesomely precocious as aboy, pious, studious and greedy for distinction and praise. He wasbrought 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 theLast Judgment. At seventeen we find him, destined for the hereditaryprofession, a student in the Theological College at Hoxton. His mentaldevelopment was by no means headlong, but he was a laborious reader andan eager disputant, endowed with all the virtues save modesty. 

He emerged from College as he had entered it, a Tory in politics and aSandemanian in religion. The Sandemanians were super-Calvinists, andtheir tenets may be summarily defined. A Calvinist held that of tensouls nine will be damned. A Sandemanian hoped that of ten Calvinistsone may with difficulty be saved. In the Calvinist mould Godwin's mindwas formed, and if the doctrine was soon discarded, the habit ofthought characteristic of Calvinism remained with him to the end. It isa French and not a British creed, Latin in its systematic completeness, Latin in the logical courage with which it pursues its assumptions totheir last conclusion, Latin in its faith in deductive reasoning and itsdisdain alike of experience and of sentiment. Had Godwin been bred aMethodist or a Churchman, he could not have written _Political Justice_. To him in these early years religion presented itself as a supernaturaldespotism based on terror and coercion. Its central doctrine was eternalpunishment, and when in mature life, Godwin became a free-thinker, hisrevolt was not so much the readjustment of a speculative thinker who hasreconsidered untenable dogmas, as the rebellion of a humane and liberalmind against a system of terrorism. To some agnostics God is anunnecessary hypothesis. To Godwin He was rather a tyrant to be deposed. It was a view which Shelley with less provocation adopted with evengreater heat. 

Godwin's firm dogmatic creed began to crumble away during his earlyexperiences as a dissenting minister in country towns. He published aforgotten volume of sermons, and his development both in politics andtheology was evidently slow. At twenty-seven, as a young pastor atBeaconsfield, we find him a Whig and a Unitarian, who looked up to Dr. Priestley as his master. He had now begun to study the Frenchphilosophers, whom Hoxton had doubtless refuted, but did not read. Hewas not a successful pastor, and it was as much his relative failure inthe pulpit as his slowly broadening beliefs which caused him to take toletters for a livelihood. His long literary career begins in 1783 withsome years of prentice work in Grub Street. He wrote a successfulpamphlet in defence of the Coalition, which brought him to the notice ofthe Whig chiefs, worked with enthusiasm at a _Life of Chatham_ which hasthe merit of a rather heavy eloquence, contributed for seven years tothe _Annual Register_ and wrote three novels which evidently enjoyed anephemeral success. He lived the usual nomadic life of the young man ofletters, and differed from most of his kind chiefly by his industry, hisabstinence, and his methodical habits of study, which he never relaxedeven when he was writing busily for bread. 

We find him rising early, and reading some portion of a Greek or Latinclassic before breakfast. He acquired by this practice a literaryknowledge of the classics and used it in his later essays with an easeand intimacy which many a scholar would envy. He wrote for three or fourhours in the morning, composing slowly and frequently recasting hisdrafts. The afternoon and evening were devoted to eager converse and hotdebate with friends, and to the reading of modern books in English, French and Italian, with not infrequent visits to the theatre. A briefdiary carefully kept with a system of signs and abbreviations in a queermixed jargon of English, French and Latin records his anxious use of histime, and shows to the end of his eighty years few wasted days. Ifindustry was his most conspicuous virtue, he gave proof at the outset ofhis life of an independence rare among poor men who have their career tomake. Sheridan, who acted as the literary agent of the Whigs, wished toengage him as a professional pamphleteer and offered him a regularsalary. He refused to tie himself to a party, though his views at thistime were those of an orthodox and enthusiastic admirer of Fox. 

Godwin was to become the apostle of Universal Benevolence. It was avirtue for which in later life he gave many an opportunity to his richerfriends, but if he stimulated it in others he never refused to practiseit himself. While he was still a struggling and underpaid journeymanauthor, wandering from one cheap lodging to another, he burdened himselfwith the care and maintenance of a distant relative, an orphanedsecond-cousin, named Thomas Cooper. Cooper came to him at the age oftwelve and remained with him till he became an actor at seventeen. Godwin had read Rousseau's _Emile_, not seldom with dissent, and allthrough 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 thesubject on whom he experimented. He was a difficult, proud, high-spirited lad, and the process of tuition was clearly not as smoothas it was conscientious. Godwin's leading thought was that the utmostreverence is due to boys. He cared little how much he imparted ofscholastic knowledge. He aimed at arousing the intellectual curiosity ofhis charge and fostering independence and self-respect. Sincerity andplain-speaking were to govern the relation of tutor and pupil. Corporalpunishment was of course a prohibited barbarity, but it must be admittedthat in Godwin's case a violent tongue and an impatient temper more thansupplied its place. The diary shows how pathetically the tutor exhortedhimself to avoid sternness, "which can only embitter the temper, " andnot to impute dulness, stupidity or intentional error. Some letters showhow he failed. Cooper complains that Godwin had called him "a foolishwretch, " "a viper" and a "tiger. " Godwin replies by complimenting him onhis "sensibility, " and his "independence, " asks for his "confidence" inreturn, and assures him that he does not expect "gratitude" (a virtuebanned in the Godwinian ethics). This essay in education can have beenonly relatively successful, for Cooper seems to have felt a quitecommonplace gratitude to Godwin, and for many a year afterwards sent himvivacious letters, which testify to the real friendship which unitedthem. 

Imperious and hot-tempered though he was, Godwin made friends and keptthem. Thomas Holcroft came into Godwin's life in 1786. Thanks toHazlitt's spirited memoir, based as it was on ample autobiographicalnotes, no personality of this group stands before us so clearly limned, and there is none more attractive. Mrs. Shelley describes him as a "manof stern and irascible character, " but he was also lovable andaffectionate. There was in his mind and will some powerful initialforce of resolve and mental independence. He thought for himself, andyet he could assimilate the ideas of other men. He was a reasoner and adoctrinaire; and yet he must have had in himself those untamed volcanicemotions which we associate with the heroes of the romantic novels ofthe 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 todramatist, was itself a monument to the human will. Looking in theirmirrors, the progressives of that generation were tempted to think thatperfection might have been within their reach had not their youth beenstunted by the influence of Calvin and the British Constitution. Rectitude, courage and unflinching truth were Holcroft's ideal. Hefirmly believed (an idea which lay in germ in Condorcet and was for atime adopted by Godwin) that the will guided by reason might transformnot only the human mind but the human body. Like the ChristianScientists of to-day he asserted, as Mrs. Shelley tells us, that "deathand disease existed only through the feebleness of man's mind, that painalso had no reality. "

He was a man of fifty when he met Godwin at thirty, and he had packedinto his half century a more various experience of men and things thanthe studious and sedentary Godwin could have acquired if he had livedthe life of the Wandering Jew. Theirs was a friendship of mutualstimulation and intimate exchange which is commoner between a man and awoman than between two men. They met almost daily, and in spite of someviolent lovers' quarrels, their affection lasted till Holcroft's deathin 1809. It is not hard to understand their quarrels. Neither of themhad natural tact, and Godwin's sensibility was morbid. Unflinchingtruthfulness, even in literary criticism, must have tried their tempers, and the single word "démêlé, " best translated "row, " occurs often inGodwin's diary as his note on one of their meetings. It is not easy todecide which influenced the other more. Godwin's was the trained, systematic, academical mind, but Holcroft added to a rich and curiousexperience of life and a vein of native originality, wide reading andsomething more than a mere amateur's taste for music and art. It wasHolcroft who drove Godwin out of his compromising Unitarianism into aview which for some years he boldly described as Atheism. His religiousopinions were afterwards modified (or so he supposed) by S. T. Coleridge; but that influence is not conspicuous in his posthumousessay on religion, and the best label for his attitude is perhapsHuxley's word, "Agnostic. "

As the French Revolution approached, the two friends fell under theprevailing excitement. Godwin attended the Revolution Society's dinners, and Holcroft was, as we have seen, a leading member of the CorrespondingSociety. There is no difficulty in accounting for most of the opinionswhich the two friends held in common, and which Godwin was soon toembody in _Political Justice_. Some were common to all the group; otherslie in germ at least in the writings of the Encyclopædists. Evencommunism was anticipated by Mably, and was held in some tentative formby many of the leading men of the Revolution. (See Kropotkin: _The GreatFrench Revolution_. ) The puzzle is rather to account for the anarchisttendency which seems to be wholly original in Godwin. It was a revoltnot merely against all coercive action by the State, but also againstcollective action by the citizens. The root of it was probably theextreme individualism which felt that a man surrendered too much ofhimself, too much of truth and manhood in any political association. Thebeginnings of this line of thought may be detected in a vividcontemptuous account of the riotous Westminster election of 1788, inwhich Holcroft had worked with the Foxites: "Scandal, pitiful, mean, mutual scandal, never was more plentifully dispersed. Electioneering isa trade so despicably degrading, so eternally incompatible with moraland mental dignity that I can scarcely believe a truly great mindcapable of the dirty drudgery of such vice. I am at least certain nomind is great while thus employed. It is the periodical reign of theevil nature or demon. "

This, to be sure, is no more than a hint of a tendency, but it showsthat experience was already fermenting in the brain of one member atleast of the pair, and it took these alchemists no great while to distilfrom it their theoretic spirit. The doings of the Corresponding Societywere destined to enlarge and confirm this experience. In the hopes, theindignations, and the perils of the years of revolutionary excitementGodwin had his intimate share. He was one of a small committee whichundertook the publication of Paine's _Rights of Man_, and when therepression began, those who were struck down were his associates and insome cases his intimates. Holcroft, as we have seen, was tried for hightreason, and Joseph Gerrald, who was sent to Botany Bay, was a friendfor whom he felt both admiration and affection. If the fate of these menwas a haunting pain to their friends, their high courage and idealisticfaith was a noble stimulus. "Human Perfectibility" had its martyrs, andthe words of Gerrald as he stood in the dock awaiting the sentence thatwas to send him to his death among thieves and forgers, deserve arespectful record: "Moral light is as irresistible by the mind asphysical by the eye. All attempts to impede its progress are vain. Itwill roll rapidly along, and as well may tyrants imagine that by placingtheir feet upon the earth they can stop its diurnal motion, as that theyshall be able by efforts the most virulent and pertinacious toextinguish the light of reason and philosophy, which happily for mankindis everywhere spreading around us. " It was in this atmosphere ofenthusiasm and devotion that _Political Justice_ was written. 

The main work of Godwin's life was begun in July, 1791. He was fortunatein securing a contract from the publisher Robinson, on generous termswhich ultimately brought him in one thousand guineas. _PoliticalJustice_ has been generally classed among the answers to Burke, butGodwin's aim was in fact something more ambitious. A note in his diarydeserves to be quoted: "My original conception proceeded on a feeling ofthe imperfections and errors of Montesquieu, and a desire of supplying aless faulty work. In the just fervour of my enthusiasm I entertained thevain imagination of "hewing a stone from the rock, " which by itsinherent energy and weight, should overbear and annihilate allopposition and place the principles of politics on an immoveable basis. "

When he came to answer his critics, he apologised for extravagances onthe plea of haste and excitement; but in fact the work was slowly anddeliberately written, and was not completed until January, 1793. Itsdoctrines, since the book is not now readily accessible, will besummarised fully and in Godwin's own phraseology in the next chapter, but it seems proper to draw attention here to the cool yet unprovocativecourage of its writer. It is filled with "hanging matters. " Pitt was, perhaps, no more disposed to punish a man for expounding the fundamentalprinciples of philosophic anarchism than was the Russian autocracy inour 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 inits application of principle, and its attacks on monarchy are asuncompromising as those for which Paine was outlawed. The preface calmlydiscusses the possibility of prosecution, issues what is in effect aquiet challenge, and concludes with the consolation that "it is theproperty of truth to be fearless and to prove victorious over everyadversary. " The fact was that Godwin watched the dangers of his friends"almost with envy" (letter to Gerrald). But he held that a man whodeliberately provokes martyrdom acts immorally, since he confuses theprogress of reason by exciting destructive passions, and drives hisadversaries into evil courses. 

"For myself, " he wrote, "I will never adopt any conduct for the expresspurpose of being put upon my trial, but if I be ever so put, I willconsider that day as a day of triumph. " Godwin escaped punishment forhis activity on behalf of Holcroft and the twelve reformers, because hisactivity was successful. He escaped prosecution for _Political Justice_because it was a learned book, addressed to educated readers, and issuedat the astonishing price of three guineas. The propriety of prosecutinghim was considered by the Privy Council; and Pitt is said to havedismissed the suggestion with the remark that "a three guinea book couldnever 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 lessthan four thousand copies is a tribute not merely to its vitality, butto the eagerness of the middle-classes during the revolutionary fermentto drink in the last words of the new philosophy. 

A new edition was soon called for, and was issued early in 1796. Much ofthe book was recast and many chapters entirely rewritten, as theconsequence not so much of any material change in Godwin's views, as ofthe profit he had derived from private controversies. Condorcet (thoughhe is never mentioned) is, if one may make a guess, the chief of the newinfluences apparent in the second edition. It is more cautious, morevisibly the product of a varied experience than the first draft, but itabandons none of his leading ideas. A third edition appeared in 1799, toned down still further by a growing caution. These revisionsundoubtedly made the book less interesting, less vivid, less readable. No modern edition has ever appeared, and its direct influence had becomenegligible even before Godwin's death. It is harder to account for theoblivion into which the book has fallen, than to explain its earlypopularity. It is not a difficult book to read. "The young and thefair, " Godwin tells us, "did not feel deterred from consulting mypages. " His style is always clear and often eloquent. His vocabularyseems to a modern taste overloaded with Latin words, but thearchitecture of his sentences is skilful in the classical manner. He canvary his elaborate periods with a terse, strong statement which comeswith the force of an unexpected blow. He has a knack of happyillustration, and a way of enforcing his points by putting problems incasuistry which have an alluring human interest. The book moved his owngeneration profoundly, and even to-day his more enthusiastic passagesconvey an irresistible impression of sincerity and conviction. 

CHAPTER IV

"POLITICAL JUSTICE"

The controversy which produced _Political Justice_ was a dialoguebetween the future and the past. The task of speculation in England hadbeen, through a stagnant century, to define the conditions of politicalstability, and to admire the elaborate checks and balances of theBritish Constitution as though change were the only evil that threatenedmankind. For Burke, change itself was but an incident in the triumph ofcontinuity and conservation. For Godwin the whole life of mankind is arace through innovation to perfection, and his main concern is to exhortthe athlete to fling aside the garments of prejudice, tradition, andconstraint, until one asks at the end how much of flesh and blood hasbeen torn away with the garments. If one were to attempt in a phrase tosum up his work, the best title which one could invent for it would beProlegomena to all Future Progress. What in a word are the conditions ofprogress?

His attitude to mankind is by turns a pedagogue's disapprobation and apatron's encouragement. The worst enemy of progress was the systematicoptimism of Leibnitz and Pope, which Voltaire had overthrown. There isindeed enough of progress in the past to fire our courage and our hopes. In moments of depression, he would admire the beautiful invention ofwriting and the power of mind displayed in human speech. But the generalpanorama of history exhorts us to fundamental change. In bold sweepingrhetoric he assures us that history is little else than the record ofcrime. War has diminished neither its horror nor its frequency, and manis still the most formidable enemy to man. Despotism is still the fateof the greatest part of mankind. Penal laws by the terror of punishmenthold a numerous class in abject penury. Robbery and fraud are none theless continual, and the poor are tempted for ever to violence againstthe more fortunate. One person in seven comes in England on the poorrates. Can the poor conceive of society as a combination to protectevery man in his rights and secure him the means of existence? Is it notrather for them a conspiracy to engross its advantages for the favouredfew? Luxury insults them; admiration is the exclusive property of therich, and contempt the constant lacquey of poverty. Nowhere is a manvalued for what he is. Legislation aggravates the natural inequality ofman. A house of landlords sets to work to deprive the poor of the littlecommonage of nature which remained to them, and its bias stands revealedwhen we recollect that in England (as Paine had pointed out) while taxeson land produce half a million less than they did a century ago, taxeson articles of general consumption produce thirteen millions more. Robbery is a capital offence because the poor alone are tempted to it. Among the poor alone is all combination forbidden. Godwin was often anincautious rhetorician. He painted the present in colours of suchunrelieved gloom, that it is hard to see in it the possibility of abrighter future. Mankind seems hopeless, and he has to prove itperfectible. 

Are these evils then the necessary condition of society? Godwin answersthat question as the French school, and in particular Helvétius, haddone, by a preliminary assault on the assumptions of a reactionaryphilosophy. He proposes to exhort the human will to embark with aconscious and social resolve on the adventure of perfection. He mustfirst demonstrate that the will is sovereign. Man is the creature ofnecessity, and the nexus of cause and effect governs the moral worldlike the physical. We are the product of our conditions. But amongconditions some are within the power of the will to change and othersare not. Montesquieu had insisted that it is climate which ultimatelydifferentiates the races of mankind. Climate is clearly a despotismwhich we can never hope to reform away. Another school has taught thatmen come into the world with innate ideas and a predetermined character. Others again would dispute that man is in his actions a reasonablebeing, and would represent him as the toy of passion, a creature to whomit is useless to present an argument drawn from his own advantage. Thefirst task of the progressive philosopher is to clear away thesepreliminary obstacles. Man is the creature of conditions, but primarilyof those conditions which he may hope to modify--education, religion, social prejudice and above all government. He is also in the last resorta being whose conduct is governed by his opinions. Admit these premisesand the way is clear towards perfection. It is a problem which in someform and in some dialect confronts every generation of reformers. We arethe creatures of our own environment, but in some degree we areourselves a force which can modify that environment. We inherit a pastwhich weighs upon us and obsesses us, but in some degree each generationis born anew. Godwin used the new psychology against the oldsuperstition of innate ideas. A modern thinker in his place wouldadvance Weissmann's biological theory that the acquired modifications ofan organism are not inherited, as an answer to the pessimism which basesitself upon heredity. 

Godwin starts boldly with the thesis that "the characters of menoriginate in their external circumstances. " He brushes aside innateideas or instincts or even ante-natal impressions. Accidents in the wombmay have a certain effect, and every man has a certain disposition atbirth. But the multiplicity of later experiences wears out these earlyimpressions. Godwin, in all this, reproduces the current fallacy of hisgeneration. Impressions and experiences were for them somethingexternal, flung upon the surface of the mind. They were just beginningto realise that the mind works when it perceives. Change a nobleman'schild at birth with a ploughman's, and each will grow up quite naturallyin his new circumstances. Exercise makes the muscles; education, argument, and the exchange of opinion the mind. "It is impression thatmakes the man, and compared with the empire of impression, the meredifferences of animal structure are inexpressibly unimportant andpowerless. " Change continues through life; everything mental andphysical is in flux; why suppose that only in the propensities of thenew-born infant is there something permanent and inflexible? Helvétiushad been Godwin's chief precursor in this opinion. He had gone so far asto declare that men are at birth equal, some raw human stuff which"education, " in the broad sense of the word, proceeds to modify in thelong schooling from the cradle to the grave. Men differ in genius, hewould assert, by education and experience, not by natural organisation. The original acuteness of the senses has little to do with thedevelopment of talent. The new psychology had swept "faculties" away. Interest is the main factor in the development of perception andattention. The scarcity of attention is the true cause of the scarcityof genius, and the chief means of promoting it are emulation and thelove of glory. 

Godwin is too cautious to accept this ultra-revolutionary statement ofthe potential equality of men without some reserves. But the ideainspires him as it inspired all the vital thought of his day. It sethumane physicians at the height of the Terror to work on discovering amethod by which even defective and idiot children might be raised by"education" to the normal stature of the human mind. It fired Godwinhimself with a zeal for education. "Folly, " said Helvétius, "isfactitious. " "Nature, " said Godwin, "never made a dunce. " The failuresof education are due primarily to the teacher's error in substitutingcompulsion for persuasion and despotism for encouragement. Theexcellences and defects of the human character are not due to occultcauses beyond the reach of ingenuity to modify or correct, nor are falseviews the offspring of an irresistible destiny. Our conventional schoolsare the slaughterhouses of mind; but of all the external influenceswhich build up character and opinion, the chief are political. It isGodwin's favourite theme, and he carries it even further than Holbachand Helvétius had done. From this influence there is no escape, for itinfects the teacher no less than the taught. Equality will make menfrank, ingenuous and intrepid, but a great disparity of ranks rendersmen cold, irresolute, timid and cautious. However lofty the morality ofthe teacher, the mind of the child is continually corrupted by seeing, in the society around him, wealth honoured, poverty contemned, intrepidvirtue proscribed and servility encouraged. From the influence of socialand political institutions there is no escape: "They poison our mindsbefore we can resist or so much as suspect their malignity. Like thebarbarous directors of Eastern seraglios they deprive us of ourvirility, and fit us for their despicable employment from the cradle. Sofalse is the opinion that has too generally prevailed that politics isan affair with which ordinary men have little concern. "

Here Godwin is introducing into English thinking an idea originallyFrench. English writers from Locke to Paine had spoken of government assomething purely negative, so little important that only when a man sawhis property threatened or his shores invaded, was he forced torecollect that he had a country. Godwin saw its influence everywhere, insinuating itself into our personal dispositions and insensiblycommunicating its spirit to our private transactions. The idea in hishands made for hope. Reform, or better still, abolish governments, andto what heights of virtue might not men aspire? We need not say withRousseau that men are naturally virtuous. The child, as Helvétiusdelighted to point out, will do that for a coral or a doll which he willdo at a mature age for a title or a sceptre. Men are rather theinfinitely malleable, variable stuff on which education and persuasioncan play. 

The first essential dogma of perfectibility, the first presupposition ofprogress is, then, that men's characters depend on externalcircumstances. The second dogma, the second condition of hope is thatthe voluntary actions of men originate in their opinions. It is anorthodox Socratic position, but Godwin was not a student of Plato. Helaid down this dogma as the necessary basis of any reform by persuasion. There is much virtue in the word "voluntary. " In so far as actions arevoluntary, the doctrine is self-evident. A voluntary action isaccompanied by foresight, and the idea of certain consequences is itsmotive. A judgment "this is good" or "this is desirable, " has precededthe action, and it originates therefore in an opinion however fugitive. In moments of passion my attention is so engrossed by a particular viewof the subject that I forget considerations by which I am commonlyguided. Even in battles between reason and sense, he holds, thecontending forces assume a rational form. It is opinion contending withopinion and judgment with judgment. At this point the modern reader willbecome sceptical. These internal struggles assume a rational form onlywhen self-consciousness reviews them--that is to say when they are over. In point of fact, Godwin argues, sheer sensuality has a smaller empireover us than we commonly suppose. Strip the feast of its socialpleasures, and the commerce of the sexes of all its intellectual andemotional allurements, and who would be overcome?

One need not follow Godwin minutely in his handling of what is after alla commonplace of academic philosophy. He was concerned to insist thatmen's voluntary actions originate in opinion, that he might secure afulcrum for the leverage of argument and persuasion. Vice is error, anderror can always be corrected. "Show me in the clearest and mostunambiguous manner that a certain mode of proceeding is most reasonablein itself, or most conducive to my interest, and I shall infalliblypursue that mode, so long as the views you suggested to me continuepresent to my mind. " The practical problem is therefore to makeourselves and our fellows perfectly conscious of our motives, and alwaysprepared to render a reason for our actions. The perfection of humancharacter is to approach as nearly as possible to the absolutelyvoluntary state, to act always, in other words, from a clear andcomprehensive survey of the consequences which we desire to produce. 

The incautious reader may be invited to pause at this point, for in thispremise lies already the whole of philosophic anarchism. You haveadmitted that voluntary action is rational. You have conceded that allaction _ought_ to be voluntary. The silent assumption is that byeducation and effort it _can_ be made so. One may doubt whether in thesense required by Godwin's argument any human action ever is or can beabsolutely "voluntary, " rational or self-conscious. To attain it, weshould have to reason naked in a desert with algebraic symbols. To usewords is to think in step, and to beg our question. But Godwin is wellaware that most men rarely reason. He is here framing an ideal, withoutrealising its remoteness. The mischief of his faith in logic as a force, was that it led him to ignore the æsthetic and emotional influences, bywhich the mass of men can best be led to a virtuous ideal. Shelley, whowas a thorough Platonist, supplements, as we shall see (p. 234), thischaracteristic defect in his master's teaching. The main conclusionsfollow rapidly. Sound reasoning and truth when adequately communicatedmust always be victorious over error. Truth, then, is omnipotent, andthe vices and moral weaknesses of man are not invincible. Man, in short, is perfectible, or in other words, susceptible of perpetual improvement. These sentiments have to the modern ear a platitudinous ring. So farfrom being platitudes, they are explosives capable of destroying thewhole fabric of government. For if truth is omnipotent, why trust tolaws? If men will obey argument, why use constraint?

But let us move slowly towards this extreme conclusion. If reasonappears to-day to play but a feeble part in society, and exerts only alimited empire over the actions of men, it is because unletteredignorance, social habits and the positive institutions of governmentstand in the way. Where the masses of mankind are sunk in brutalignorance, one need not wonder that argument and persuasion have but asmall influence with them. Truth indeed is rarely recondite or difficultto communicate. Godwin might have quoted Helvétius: "It is with geniusas with an astronomer; he sees a new star and forthwith all can see it. "Nor need we fear the objection that by introducing an intellectualelement into virtue, we have removed it beyond the reach of simple men. A virtuous action, indeed, must be good both in intention and intendency. Godwin was like Helvétius and Priestley, a Utilitarian inethics, and defined duty as that mode of action on the part of theindividual which constitutes the best possible application of hiscapacity to the general benefit, in every situation that presentsitself. One may be mistaken as to what will contribute to the generalbenefit, as Sir Everard Digby was, for example, when he thought it hisduty to blow up King James and the Parliament. But the simple man needbe at no loss. An earnest desire will in some degree generate capacity. There Godwin opened a profoundly interesting and stimulating line ofthought. The mind is formed not by its innate powers, but by itsgoverning desires. As love brings eloquence to the suitor, so if I dobut ardently desire to serve my kind, I shall find out a way, and whileI study a plan shall find that my faculties have been exercised andincreased. Moreover, in the struggle after virtue I am not alone. 

Burke made the first of the virtues prudence. Godwin would have givensincerity that place. To him and his circle the chief business ofsocial converse was by argument and exhortation to strengthen the habitof virtue. There was something to be said for the practice of auricularconfession; but how much better would it be if every man were to makethe world his confessional and the human species the keeper of hisconscience. The practice of sincerity would give to our conversation aRoman boldness and fervour. The frank distribution of praise and blameis the most potent incentive to virtue. Were we but bold and impartialin our judgments, vice would be universally deserted and virtueeverywhere practised. Our cowardice in censure and correction is thechief reason of the perpetuation of abuses. If every man would tell allthe truth he knew, it is impossible to predict how short would be thereign of usurpation and folly. Let our motive be philanthropy, and weneed not fear ruggedness or brutality, disdain or superiority, since weaim at the interest of him we correct, and not at the triumph of thecorrector. In an aside Godwin demands the abolition of socialconventions which offend sincerity. If I must deny myself to a visitor, I should scorn the polite lie that I am "not at home. "

It is a consequence also of this doctrine, that there should be noprosecutions for libel, even in private matters. Truth depends on thefree shock of opinions, and the unrestrained discussion of privatecharacter is almost as important as freedom in speculative enquiry. "Ifthe truth were universally told of men's dispositions and actions, gibbets and wheels might be dismissed from the face of the earth. Theknave unmasked would be obliged to turn honest in his own defence. Nay, no man would have time to turn a knave. Truth would follow him in hisfirst irresolute essays, and public disapprobation arrest him in thecommencement of his career. " It is shameful for a good man to retort ona slander, "I will have recourse to the only means that are congenial toguilt: I will compel you to be silent. " Freedom in this matter, as inall others, will engender activity and fortitude; positive institution(Godwin's term for law and constraint) makes the mind torpid andlethargic. It is hardly necessary to reproduce Godwin's vigorousarguments for unfettered freedom in political and speculativediscussion, against censorships and prosecutions for religious andpolitical opinions. Even were we secure from the possibility of mistake, mischief and not good would accrue from the attempt to impose ourinfallible opinions upon our neighbours. Men deserve approbation only inso far as they are independent in their opinions and free in theiractions. 

Equally clear is it that the establishment of religion and all systemsof tests must be abolished. They make for hypocrisy, check advance inspeculation, and teach us to estimate a disinterested sincerity at acheap rate. We need not fear disorder as a consequence of completeliberty of speech. "Arguments alone will not have the power, unassistedby the sense or the recollection of oppression or treachery to hurry thepeople into excesses. Excesses are never the offspring of speculativereason, are never the offspring of misrepresentation only, but of powerendeavouring to stifle reason, and to traverse the commonsense ofmankind. "

A more original deduction from Godwin's demand for the unlimited freedomof opinion, was that he objected vehemently to any system of nationaleducation. Condorcet had drawn up a marvellously complete project foruniversal compulsory education, with full liberty indeed for theteachers, whose technical competence alone the State would guarantee, and with a scheme of free scholarships, an educational "ladder" moregenerous than anything which has yet been realised in fact. Godwinobjects that State-regulated institutions will stereotype knowledge andmake for an undesirable permanence and uniformity in opinion. Theydiffuse what is known and forget what remains to be known. They erect asystem of authority and separate a tenet from the evidence on which itrests, so that beliefs cease to be perceptions and become prejudices. NoGovernment is to be trusted with the dangerous power to create andregulate opinions through its schools. Such a power is, indeed, moredangerous than that of an Established Church, and would be used tostrengthen tyranny and perpetuate faulty institutions. 

Godwin, needless to say, takes, as did Condorcet, the side of franknessin the controversy which was a test of democratic faith in thisgeneration--whether "political imposture" is allowable, and whether astatesman should encourage the diffusion of "salutary prejudices" amongthe unlearned, the poor and women. This was indeed the main eighteenthcentury defence for monarchy and aristocracy. Kings and governors arenot wiser than other men, but it is useful that they should be thoughtso. Such imposture, Godwin argued, is as futile as the parallel use byreligion of the pains and penalties of the afterworld. It is the soberwho are demoralised by it, and not the lawless who are deterred. Toterrify men is a strange way of rendering them judicious, fearless andhappy. It is to leave men indolent and unbraced by truth. He objectseven to the trappings and ceremonies which are used to rendermagistrates outwardly venerable and awe-inspiring, so that they mayimpress the irrational imagination. These means may be used as easily tosupport injustice as to render justice acceptable. They divide men intotwo classes; those who may reason, and those who must take everything ontrust. This is to degrade them both. The masses are kept in perpetualvibration between rebellious discontent and infatuated credulity. Andcan we suppose that the practice of concealment and hypocrisy will makeno breaches in the character of the governing class?

The general effect of any meddling of authority with opinion is that themind is robbed of its genuine employment. Such a system produces beingswanting in independence, and in that intrepid perseverance and calmself-approbation which grow from independence. Such beings are the meredwarfs and mockeries of men. 

Godwin was at issue here as much with Rousseau as with Burke, but histrust in the people, it should be explained, was based rather on faithin what they might become, than on admiration for what they were. 

That all government is an evil, though doubtless a necessary evil, wasthe typical opinion of the individualistic eighteenth century. It wouldnot long have survived such proposals as Paine's scheme of old agepensions and Condorcet's project of national education. When men haveperceived that an evil can be turned to good account, they are alreadyon the road which will lead them to discard their premises. But Godwinwas quite unaffected by this new Liberalism. No positive good was to behoped from government, and much positive evil would flow from it at thebest. In his absolute individualism he went further. The whole idea ofgovernment was radically wrong. For him the individual was tightlyenclosed in his own skin, and any constraint was an infringement of hispersonality. He would have poured scorn on the half-mystical conceptionof a social organism. Nor did it occur to him that a man mightvoluntarily subject himself to government, losing none of his ownautonomy in the act, from a persuasion that government is on the wholea benefit, and that submission, even when his own views are thwarted, isa free man's duty within certain limits, accepted gladly for the sake ofpreserving an institution which commonly works well. He did not see theinstitution working well; he did not believe in the benefits; he wasconvinced that more than all the advantages of the best of governmentscould be obtained from the free operation of opinion in an unorganisedcommunity. 

His main point is lucidly simple. It was an application of the Whig andProtestant doctrine of the right of private judgment. "If in anyinstance I am made the mechanical instrument of absolute violence, inthat instance I fall under a pure state of external slavery. " Nor is thecase much better, if instead of waiting for the actual application ofcoercion, I act in obedience to authority from the hope and fear of theState's rewards and punishments. For virtue has ceased, and I am actingfrom self-interest. It is a triviality to distinguish, as Whig thinkersdo, between matters of conscience (in which the State should not meddle)and my conduct in the civil concerns of daily life (which the Stateshould regulate). What sort of moralist can he be, who makes noconscience of what he does in his daily intercourse with other men? "Ihave deeply reflected upon the nature of virtue, and am convinced that acertain proceeding is incumbent on me. But the hangman supported by anAct of Parliament assures me that I am mistaken. If I yield my opinionto his dictum, my action becomes modified, and my character also.... Countries exposed to the perpetual interference of decrees instead ofarguments, exhibit within their boundaries the mere phantoms of men. "

The root of the whole matter is that brute force is an offence againstreason, and an unnecessary offence, if in fact men are guided by opinionand will yield to argument. "The case of punishment is the case of youand me differing in opinion, and your telling me that you must be rightsince you have a more brawny arm. "

If I must obey, it is better and less demoralising to yield an externalsubmission so as to escape penalty or constraint, than to yield toauthority from a general confidence which enslaves the mind. Comply butcriticise. Obey but beware of reverence. If I surrender my conscience toanother man's keeping, I annihilate my individuality as a man, andbecome the ready tool of him among my neighbours who shall excel inimposture and artifice. I put an end moreover to the happy collision ofunderstandings upon which the hopes of human improvement depend. Governments depend upon the unlimited confidence of their subjects, andconfidence rests upon ignorance. 

Government (has not Burke said so?) is the perpetual enemy of change, and prompts us to seek the public welfare not in alteration andimprovement, but in a timid reverence for the decisions of ourancestors, as if it were the nature of the human mind always todegenerate and never to advance. Godwin thought with John Bright, "Westand on the shoulders of our forefathers--and see further. "

In proportion as weakness and ignorance shall diminish, the basis ofgovernment will also decay. That will be its true euthanasia. 

There is indeed nothing to be said for government save that for a time, and within jealously drawn limits, it may be a fatal and indispensablenecessity. A just government cannot be founded on force: for force hasno affinity with justice. It cannot be based upon the will of God; wehave no revelation that recommends one form of government rather thananother. As little can it be based upon contract. Who were the partiesto the pretended social contract? For whom did they consent, forthemselves or for their descendants, and to how great a variety ofpropositions? Have I assented or my ancestors for me, to the laws ofEngland in fifty volumes folio, and to all that shall hereafter be addedto them? In a few contemptuous pages Godwin buries the social contract. Men when they digest the articles of a contract are not empowered tocreate rights, but only to declare what was previously right. But thedoctrine of the natural rights of man fares no better at his hands. There is no such thing as a positive right to do as we list. One way ofacting in every emergency is reasonable, and the other is not. One waywill benefit mankind, and the other will not. It is a pestilent doctrineand a denial of all virtue, to say that we have a right to do what wewill with our own. Everything we possess has a destination prescribed toit by the immutable voice of reason and justice. 

Duties and rights are correlative. As it cannot be the duty of men orsocieties to do anything to the detriment of human happiness, so itappears with equal evidence that they cannot have the right to do so. There cannot be a more absurd proposition than that which affirms theright of doing wrong. The voice of the people is not the voice of God, nor does universal consent or a majority vote convert wrong into right. It is absurd to say that any set of people has a right to set up anyform of government it chooses, or any sect to establish any superstitionhowever detestable. All this would have delighted Burke, but Godwinstands firmly in his path by asserting what he calls the one negativeright of man. It is in a word, the right to exercise virtue, the rightto a region of choice, a sphere of discretion, which his neighbours mustnot infringe save by censure and remonstrance. When I am constrained, Icease to be a person, and become a thing. "I ought to exercise mytalents for the benefit of others, but the exercise must be the fruit ofmy own conviction; no man must attempt to press me into the service. "

Government is an evil, and the business of human advancement is todispense with it as rapidly as may be. In the period of transitionGodwin had but a secondary interest, and his sketch of it is slight. Hedismisses in turn despotism, aristocracy, the "mixed monarchy" of theWhigs, and the president with kingly powers of some American thinkers. His pages on these subjects are vigorous, well-reasoned, and pointed intheir satire. It required much courage to write them, but they do notcontain his original contribution to political theory. What is mostcharacteristic in his line of argument is his insistence on the moralcorruption that monarchy and aristocracy involve. The whole standard ofmoral values is subverted. To achieve ostentation becomes the firstobject of desire. Disinterested virtue is first suspected and thenviewed with incredulity. Luxury meanwhile distorts our whole attitude toour fellows, and in every effort to excel and shine we wrong thelabouring millions. Aristocracy involves general degradation, and cansurvive only amid general ignorance. "To make men serfs and villeins itis indispensably necessary to make them brutes.... A servant who hasbeen taught to write and read, ceases to be any longer a passivemachine. "

From the abolition of monarchy and aristocracy Godwin, and indeed thewhole revolutionary school, expected the cessation of war. War andconquest elevate the few at the expense of the rest, and cannot benefitthe whole community. Democracies have no business with war save to repelan invasion of their territory. He thought of patriotism and love ofcountry much as did Dr. Price. They are (as Hervé has argued in our ownday) specious illusions invented to render the multitude the blindinstruments of crooked designs. We must not be lured into pursuing thegeneral wealth, prosperity or glory of the society to which we belong. Society is an abstraction, an "ideal existence, " and is not on its ownaccount entitled to the smallest regard. Let us not be led away intorendering services to society for which no individual man is the better. Godwin is scornful of wars to maintain the balance of power, or toprotect our fellow-countrymen abroad. Some proportion must be observedbetween the evil of which we complain and the evil which the proposedremedy inevitably includes. War may be defensible in support of theliberty of an oppressed people, but let us wait (here he is clearlycensuring the practice of the French Republic) until the oppressedpeople rises. Do not interfere to force it to be free, and do not forgetthe resources of pacific persuasion. As to foreign possessions there islittle to be said. Do without them. Let colonies attend to their owndefence; no State would wish to have colonies if free trade wereuniversal. Liberty is equally good for every race of men, and democracy, since it is founded on reason, a universal form of government. Therefollow some naïve prescriptions for conducting democratic wars. Sincerity forbids ambuscades and secresy. Never invade, nor assume theoffensive. A citizen militia must replace standing armies. Training anddiscipline are of little value; the ardour of a free people will supplytheir place. 

Godwin's leading idea when he comes to sketch a shadowy constitution isan extreme dislike of overgrown national States. Political speculationin his day idealised the city republic of antiquity. Helvétius, hopingto get rid as far as possible of government, had advocated a system offederated commonwealths, each so small that public opinion and the fearof shame would act powerfully within it. He would have divided Franceinto thirty republics, each returning four deputies to a federalcouncil. The Girondins cherished the same idea, and lost their heads forit. Tolstoy, going back to the village community as the only possiblescene of a natural and virtuous life, exhibits the same tendency. 

For Godwin the true unit of society is the parish. Neighbours bestunderstand each others' concerns, and in a limited area there is no roomfor ambition to unfold itself. Great talents will have their sphereoutside this little circle in the work of moulding opinion. Within theparish public opinion is supreme, and acts through juries, which may atfirst be obliged to exert some degree of violence in dealing withoffenders:--"But this necessity does not arise out of the nature of man, but out of the institutions by which he has already been corrupted. Manis not originally vicious. He would not ... Refuse to be convinced bythe expostulations that are addressed to him, had he not been accustomedto regard them as hypocritical, and to conceive that while hisneighbour, his parent and his political governor pretended to beactuated by a pure regard to his interest or pleasure, they were inreality, at the expense of his, promoting their own.... Render the plaindictates of justice level to every capacity ... And the whole specieswill become reasonable and virtuous. It will then be sufficient forjuries to recommend a certain mode of adjusting controversies, withoutassuming the prerogative of dictating that adjustment. It will then besufficient for them to invite offenders to forsake their errors.... Where the empire of reason was so universally acknowledged, the offenderwould either readily yield to the expostulations of authority, or if heresisted, though suffering no personal molestation, he would feel soweary under the unequivocal disapprobation and the observant eye ofpublic judgment as willingly to remove to a society more congenial tohis errors. " The picture is not so Utopian as it sounds. It is a veryfair sketch of the social structure of a Macedonian village communityunder Turkish rule, with the massacres left out. 

For the rest Godwin was reluctantly prepared to admit the wisdom ofinstituting a single chamber National Assembly, to manage the commonaffairs of the parishes, to arrange their disputes and to provide fornational defence. But it should suffice for it to meet for one dayannually or thereabouts. Like the juries it would at first issuecommands, but would in time find it sufficient to publish invitationsbacked by arguments. Godwin, who is quite prepared to idealise hisdistrict juries, pours forth an unstinted contempt upon Parliaments andtheir procedure. They make a show of unanimity where none exists. Theprospect of a vote destroys the intellectual value of debate; the willof one man really dominates, and the existence of party frustratespersuasion. The whole is based upon "that intolerable insult upon allreason and justice, the deciding upon truth by the casting up ofnumbers. " He omits to tell us whether he would allow his juries tovote. Fortunately legislation is unnecessary: "The inhabitants of asmall parish living with some degree of that simplicity which bestcorresponds with the real nature and wants of a human being, would soonbe led to suspect that general laws were unnecessary and would adjudgethe causes that came before them not according to certain axiomspreviously written, but according to the circumstances and demand ofeach particular cause. "

Godwin had a clear mental picture of the gradual decay of authoritytowards the close of the period of transition; his vision of the earlierstages is less definite. He set his faith on the rapid working ofenquiry and persuasion, but he does not explain in detail how, forexample, we are to rid ourselves of kings. He once met the PrinceRegent, but it is not recorded that he talked to him of virtue andequality, as the early Quakers talked to the man Charles Stuart. He ischiefly concerned to warn his revolutionary friends against abruptchanges. There must be a general desire for change, a conviction of theunderstanding among the masses, before any change is wise. When a wholenation, or even an unquestionable majority of a nation, is resolved onchange, no government, even with a standing army behind it, can standagainst it. Every reformer imagines that the country is with him. Whatfolly! Even when the majority seems resolved, what is the quality oftheir resolution? They do, perhaps, sincerely dislike some specific tax. But do they dislike the vice and meanness that grow out of tyranny, andpant for the liberal and ingenuous virtue that would be fostered intheir own minds by better conditions? It is a disaster when theunillumined masses are instigated to violent revolution. Revolutions arealways crude, bloody, uncertain and inimical to tolerance, independence, and intellectual inquiry. They are a detestable persecution when aminority promotes them. If they must occur, at least postpone them aslong as possible. External freedom is worthless without the magnanimity, firmness and energy that should attend it. But if a man have thesethings, there is little left for him to desire. He cannot be degraded, nor become useless and unhappy. Let us not be in haste to overthrow theusurped powers of the world. Make men wise, and by that very operationyou make them free. It is unfortunate that men are so eager to strikeand have so little constancy to reason. We should desire neither violentchange nor the stagnation that inflames and produces revolutions. Ourprayer to governments should be, "Do not give us too soon; do not giveus too much; but act under the incessant influence of a disposition togive us something. "

These are the reflections of a man who wrote amid the Terror. He hadseen the Corresponding Society at work, and the experience made him morethan sceptical of any form of association in politics, and led him intoa curiously biassed argument, rhetorical in form, forensic in substance. Temporary combinations may be necessary in a time of turmoil, or tosecure some single limited end, such as the redress of a wrong done toan individual. Where their scope is general and their duration longcontinued, they foster declamation, cabal, party spirit and tumult. Theyare frequented by the artful, the intemperate, the acrimonious, andavoided by the sober, the sceptical, the contemplative citizen. Theyfoster a fallacious uniformity of opinion and render the mind quiescentand stationary. Truth disclaims the alliance of marshalled numbers. Theconditions most favourable to reasoned enquiry and calm persuasion areto be found in small and friendly circles. The moral beauty of thespectacle offered by these groups of friends united to pursue truth andfoster virtue, will render it contagious. So the craggy steep of sciencewill be levelled and knowledge rendered accessible to all. 

The conception of the State which Godwin sought to supplant was itselflimited and negative. Government was little else in his day than a meansfor internal defence against criminals and for external defence againstaggression. For the rest, it helped landlords to enclose commons, keptdown wages by poor relief and in a muddle-headed way interfered with thefreedom of trade. But its central activity was the repression of crime, and for Godwin's system the test question was his handling of theproblem of crime and punishment. He was no Platonist, but not for thefirst time we discover him in a familiar Socratic position. "Do youpunish a man, " asked Socrates, "to make him better or to make himworse?" Godwin starts by rejecting the traditional conception ofpunishment. The word means the infliction of evil upon a vicious being, not merely because the public advantage demands it, but because there isa certain fitness and propriety in making suffering the accompaniment ofvice, quite apart from any benefit that may be in the result. Noadherent of the doctrine of necessity in morals can justify thatattitude. The assassin could no more avoid the murder he committed thancould the dagger. Justice opposes any suffering, which is not attendedby benefit. Resentment against vice will not excuse useless torture. Wemust banish the conception of desert. To punish for what is past andirrecoverable must be ranked among the most baleful conceptions ofbarbarism. Xerxes was not more unreasonable when he lashed the waves ofthe sea, than that man would be who inflicted suffering on his fellowfrom a view to the past and not from a view to the future. 

Excluding all idea of punishment in the proper sense of the word, itremains only to consider such coercion as is used against personsconvicted of injurious action in the past, for the purpose of preventingfuture mischief. Godwin now invites us to consider the futility ofcoercion as a means of reforming, or as he would say, "enlightening theunderstanding" of a man who has erred. Our aim is to bring him to theacceptance of our conception of duty. Assuming that we possess more ofeternal justice than he, do we shrink from setting our wit against his?Instead of acting as his preceptor we become his tyrant. Coercion firstannihilates the understanding of its victim, and then of him who adoptsit. Dressed in the supine prerogatives of a master, he is excused fromcultivating the faculties of a man. Coercion begins by producing pain, by violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it tobe impressed. It includes a tacit confession of imbecility. 

With some hesitation Godwin allows the use of force to restrain a manfound in actual violence. We may not have time to reason with him. Buteven for self-defence there are other resources. "The powers of the mindare yet unfathomed. " He tells the story of Marius, who overawed thesoldier sent into his cell to execute him, with the words, "Wretch, haveyou the temerity to kill Marius?" Were we all accustomed to place anintrepid confidence in the unaided energy of the intellect, to despiseforce in others and to refuse to employ it ourselves, who shall say howfar the species might be improved? But punitive coercion deals only witha man whose violence is over. The only rational excuse for it is torestrain a man from further violence which he will presumably commit. Godwin condemns capital punishment as excessive, since restraint can beattained without it, and corporal chastisement as an offence against thedignity of the human mind. Let there be nothing in the state oftransition worse than simple imprisonment. Godwin, however, dissentsvehemently from Howard's invention of solitary confinement, designed toshield the prisoner from the contamination of his fellow criminals. Manis a social animal and virtue depends on social relations. As apreliminary to acquiring it is he to be shut out from the society of hisfellows? How shall he exercise benevolence or justice in his cell? Willhis heart become softened or expand who breathes the atmosphere of adungeon? Solitary confinement is the bitterest torment that humaningenuity can inflict. The least objectionable method of depriving acriminal of the power to harm society is banishment or transportation. Expose him to the stimulus of necessity in an unsettled country. Newconditions make new minds. But the whole attempt to apply law breaksdown. You must heap edict on edict, and to make your laws fit yourcases, must either for ever wrest them or make new ones. Law does notend uncertainty, and it debilitates the mind. So long as men arehabituated to look to foreign guidance and external rules fordirection, so long the vigour of their minds will sleep. 

If Fénelon, saint and philosopher, with an incompleted masterpiece inhis pocket, and Fénelon's chambermaid, were both in danger of burning todeath in the archiepiscopal palace at Cambrai, and if I could save onlyone of them, which ought I to save? It is a fascinating problem incasuistry, and Godwin with his usual decision of mind, has no doubtabout the solution. He would save Fénelon as the more valuable life, andabove all Fénelon's manuscript, and the maid, he is quite sure, wouldwish to give her life for his. Something (the modern reader will object)might be urged on the other side. Just because he was a saint, it mightbe argued that he was the fitter of the two to face the great adventure, and one may be sure that he himself would have thought so. A philosopherwho gives his life for a kitten will have advanced the Kingdom ofHeaven. The chambermaid, moreover, may have in her a potentiality oflove and happiness which are worth many a masterpiece of French prose. But Godwin has not yet exhausted his moral problem. How, if the maidwere my mother, wife or benefactress? Once more he gives his unflinchinganswer. Justice still requires of me in the interests of mankind tosave the more valuable life. "What magic is there in the pronoun 'my' tooverturn the decisions of everlasting truth?" My mother may be a fool, aliar, or a thief. Of what consequence then, is it that she is "mine"?Gratitude ought not to blind me to my duty, though she have suckled meand nursed me. The benevolence of a benefactor ought indeed to beesteemed, but not because it benefited me. A benefactor ought to beesteemed as much by another as by me, solely because he benefited ahuman being. Gratitude, in short, has no place in justice or virtue, andreason declines to recognise the private affections. 

Such, crudely stated, is Godwin's famous doctrine of "universalbenevolence. " The virtuous man is like Swift's Houyhnhnms, noblequadrupeds, wholly governed by reason, who cared for strangers as wellas for the nearest neighbour, and showed the same affection for theirneighbour's offspring as for their own. The centre of Godwin's moralteaching was yet another Socratic thought. Politics are "the propervehicle of a liberal morality, " and morals concern our relation to thewhole body of mankind. To realise justice is our prime concern asrational beings, and society is nothing but embodied justice. Justicedeals with beings capable of pleasure and pain. Here we are partakers ofa common nature with like faculties for suffering or enjoyment. "Justice, " then, "is that impartial treatment of every man in mattersthat relate to his happiness, which is measured solely by aconsideration of the properties of the receiver and the capacity of himwho gives. " Every man with whom I am in contact is a sentient being, andone should be as much to me as another, save indeed where equitycorrects equality, by suggesting to me that one individual may be ofmore value than another, because of his greater power to benefitmankind. Justice exacts from us the application of our talents, time, and resources with the single object of producing the greatest sum ofbenefit to sentient beings. There is no limit to what I am bound to dofor the general weal. I hold my person and property both in trust onbehalf of mankind. A man who needs £10 has an absolute claim on me, if Ihave it, unless it can be shown that the money could be morebeneficially applied. Every shilling I possess is irrevocably assignedby some claim of eternal justice. Every article of property, it follows, should belong to him in whose hands it will be of most benefit, and theinstrument of the greatest happiness. 

It is the love of distinction which attends wealth in corrupt societiesthat explains the desire for luxury. We desire not the direct pleasureto be derived from excessive possessions, but the consideration which isattached to it. Our very clothes are an appeal to the goodwill of ourneighbours, and a refuge from their contempt. Society would betransformed if the distinction were reversed, if admiration were nolonger rendered to the luxurious and avaricious and were accorded onlyto talent and virtue. Let not the necessity of rewarding virtue besuggested as a justification for the inequalities of fortune. Shall wesay, to a virtuous man: "If you show yourself deserving, you shall havethe essence of a hundred times more food than you can eat, and a hundredtimes more clothes than you can wear. You shall have a patent for takingaway from others the means of a happy and respectable existence, and forconsuming them in riotous and unmeaning extravagance. " Is this thereward that ought to be offered to virtue, or that virtue should stoopto take? Godwin is at his best on this theme of luxury: "Every man maycalculate in every glass of wine he drinks, and every ornament heannexes to his person, how many individuals have been condemned toslavery and sweat, incessant drudgery, unwholesome food, continualhardships, deplorable ignorance and brutal insensibility, that he may besupplied with these luxuries. It is a gross imposition that men areaccustomed to put upon themselves, when they talk of the propertybequeathed to them by their ancestors. The property is produced by thedaily labour of men who are now in existence. All that the ancestorsbequeathed to them was a mouldy patent which they show as a title toextort from their neighbours what the labour of those neighbours hasproduced. "

It is a flagrant immorality that one man should have the power todispose of the produce of another man's toil, yet to maintain this poweris the main concern of police and legislation. Morality recognises twodegrees of property, (1) things which will produce the greatest benefit, if attributed to me, in brief the necessities of life, my food, clothes, furniture and apartment; (2) the empire which every man may claim overthe produce of his own industry, even over that part of it which oughtnot to be used and appropriated by himself. Every man is a steward. Butsubject to censure and remonstrance, he must be free to dispose of hisproperty as his own understanding shall dictate. The ideal is equality, and all society should be what Coleridge called a Pantisocracy. It iswrong for any one to enjoy anything, unless something similar isaccessible to all, and wrong to produce luxuries until the elementarywants of all are satisfied. But it would be futile and wrong to attemptto equalise property by positive enactment. It would be useless untilmen are virtuous, and unnecessary when they are so. The momentaccumulation and monopoly are regarded by any society as dishonourableand mischievous, the revolution in opinion will ensure that comfortsshall tend to a level. 

Godwin objects to the plans put forward in France during the Revolutionfor interfering with bequests and inheritance. He would, however, checkthe incentives to accumulation by abolishing the feudal system, primogeniture, titles and entail. Property is sacred--that good men maybe free to give it away. Reform public opinion, and a man engaged inamassing wealth would soon hide his treasures as carefully as he nowdisplays them. The first step is to rob wealth of its distinction. Wealth is acquired to-day in over-reaching our neighbours, and spent ininsulting them. Establish equality on a firm basis of rational opinion, and you cut off for ever the great occasion of crime, remove theconstant spectacle of injustice with all its attendant demoralisation, and liberate genius now immersed in sordid cares. 

"In a state of society where men lived in the midst of plenty, and whereall shared alike the bounties of nature, the sentiments of oppression, servility and fraud would inevitably expire. The narrow principle ofselfishness would vanish. No man being obliged to guard his littlestore, or provide with anxiety and pain for his restless wants, eachwould lose his individual existence in the thought of the general good. No man would be an enemy to his neighbour, for they would have nosubject of contention, and of consequence philanthropy would resume theempire which reason assigns her. Mind would be delivered from herperpetual anxiety about corporal support, and freed to expatiate in thefield of thought, which is congenial to her. Each would assist theenquiries of all. "

Unnecessary tasks absorb most of our labour to-day. In the idealcommunity, Godwin reckons that half an hour's toil from every man dailywill suffice to produce the necessities of life. He modified thissanguine estimate in a later essay (_The Enquirer_) to two hours. Hedismisses all objections based on the sloth or selfishness of humannature, by the simple answer that this happy state of things will not berealised until human nature has been reformed. Need individualitysuffer? It need fear only the restraint imposed by candid publicopinion. That will not be irksome, because it will be frank. We shrinkfrom it to-day, only because it takes the form of clandestine scandaland backbiting. Godwin contemplates no Spartan plan of common labour orcommon meals. "Everything understood by the term co-operation is in somesense an evil. " To be sure, it may be indispensable in order to cut acanal or navigate a ship. But mechanical invention will gradually makeit unnecessary. The Spartans used slaves. We shall make machines ourhelots. Indeed, so odious is co-operation to a free mind, that Godwinmarvels that men can consent to play music in concert, or can demeanthemselves to execute another man's compositions, while to act a part ina play amounts almost to an offence against sincerity. Suchextravagances as this passage are amongst the most precious things in_Political Justice_. Godwin was a fanatic of logic who warns us againsthis individualist premises by pressing them to a fantastic conclusion. 

The sketch of the ideal community concludes with a demolition of thefamily. Cohabitation, he argued, is in itself an evil. It melts opinionsto a common mould, and destroys the fortitude of the individual. Thewishes of two people who live together can never wholly coincide. Hencefollow thwartings of the will, bickering and misery. No man is alwayscheerful and kind. We manage to correct a stranger with urbanity andgood humour. Only when the intercourse is too close and unremitted do wedegenerate into surliness and invective. In an earlier chapter Godwinhad formulated a general objection to all promises, which reminds us ofTolstoy's sermons from the same individualistic standpoint on the text, "Swear not at all. " Every conceivable mode of action has its tendency tobenefit or injure mankind. I am bound in duty to one course of action inevery emergency--the course most conducive to the general welfare. Why, then, should I bind myself by a promise? If my promise contradicts myduty it is immoral, if it agrees with it, it teaches me to do that froma precarious and temporary motive which ought to be done from itsintrinsic recommendations. By promising we bind ourselves to learnnothing from time, to make no use of knowledge to be acquired. Promisesdepose us from a full use of our understanding, and are to be toleratedonly in the trivial engagements of our day-to-day existence. It followsthat marriage is an evil, for it is at once the closest form ofcohabitation, and the rashest of all promises. Two thoughtless andromantic people, met in youth under circumstances full of delusion, havebound themselves, not by reason but by contract, to make the best, whenthey discover their deception, of an irretrievable mistake. Its maximis, "If you have made a mistake, cherish it. " So long as thisinstitution survives, "philanthropy will be crossed in a thousand ways, and the still augmenting stream of abuse continue to flow. "

Godwin has little fear of lust or license. Men will, on the whole, continue to prefer one partner, and friendship will refine the grossnessof sense. There are worse evils than open and avowed inconstancy--theloathsome combination of deceitful intrigue with the selfish monopolyof property. That a child should know its father is no great matter, forI ought not in reason to prefer one human being to another because he is"mine. " The mother will care for the child with the spontaneous help ofher neighbours. As to the business of supplying children with food andclothing, "these would easily find their true level and spontaneouslyflow from the quarter in which they abounded to the quarter that wasdeficient. " There must be no barter or exchange, but only giving frompure benevolence without the prospect of reciprocal advantage. 

The picture of this easy-going Utopia, in which something will alwaysturn up for nobody's child, concludes with two sections which exhibit innice juxtaposition the extravagance and the prudence of Godwin. We maylook forward to great physical changes. We shall acquire an empire overour bodies, and may succeed in making even our reflex notions conscious. We must get rid of sleep, one of the most conspicuous infirmities of thehuman frame. Life can be prolonged by intellect. We are sick and we diebecause in a certain sense we consent to suffer these accidents. Whenthe limit of population is reached, men will refuse to propagatethemselves further. Society will be a people of men, and not ofchildren, adult, veteran, experienced; and truth will no longer have torecommence her career at the end of thirty years. Meanwhile let thefriends of justice avoid violence, eschew massacres, and remember thatprudent handling will win even rich men for the cause of humanperfection. 

So ends _Political Justice_, the strangest amalgam in our literature ofcaution with enthusiasm, of visions with experience, of French logicwith English tactlessness, a book which only genius could have made sofoolish and so wise. 

CHAPTER V

GODWIN AND THE REACTION

_Political Justice_ brought its author instant fame. Society was for amoment intimidated by the boldness of the attack. The world was in agenerous mood, and men did not yet resent Godwin's flattering suggestionthat they were demigods who disguised their own greatness. He hadassailed all the accepted dogmas and venerable institutions ofcontemporary civilisation, from monarchy to marriage, but it was onlyafter several years that society recovered its breath, and turned torend him. He became an oracle in an ever-widening circle of friends, andwas naïvely pleased to find, when he went into the country, that even inremote villages his name was known. He was everywhere received as asage, and some years passed before he discovered how much of thisdeference was a polite disguise for the vulgar curiosity that attends asudden celebrity. Prosperity was a wholesome stimulus. He was "exaltedin spirits, " and became for a time (he tells us) "more of a talker thanI was before, or have been since. "

In this mood he wrote the one book which has lived as a popularpossession, and held its place among the classics which are frequentlyreprinted. _Caleb Williams_ (published in 1794) is incomparably the bestof his novels, and the one great work of fiction in our language whichowes its existence to the fruitful union of the revolutionary andromantic movements. It spoke to its own day as Hugo's _Les Misérables_and Tolstoy's _Resurrection_ spoke to later generations. It is as itspreface tells us, "a general review of the modes of domestic andunrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man. " Itconveys in the form of an eventful personal history the essence of thecriticism against society, which had inspired _Political Justice_. Godwin's imagination was haunted by a persistent nightmare, in which alonely individual finds arrayed against him all the prejudices ofsociety, all the forms of convention, all the forces of law. They hurlthemselves upon him in a pitiless pursuit, and wherever he flees, thepervading corruptions, the ingrained cowardices of over-governed mankindbeset his feet like gins and pitfalls. It was a hereditary nightmare, and with a less pedestrian imagination, his daughter, Mary Shelley, usedthe same theme of a remorseless pursuit in _Frankenstein_. 

Caleb Williams, a promising lad of humble birth but good parts, isbroken at the outset of his career, in the tremendous clash between twoformidable characters, who represent, each in his own way, thecorruptions of aristocracy. Mr. Tyrrel is a brutal English squire, acoarse and domineering bully, whom birth and wealth arm with the powerto crush his dependents. Mr. Falkland personifies the spirit of chivalryat its best and its worst. All his native humanity and acquired polishis in the end turned to cruelty by the influence of a worship of honourand reputation which make him "the fool of fame. " As the absorbing storyunfolds itself, we realise (if indeed we are not too much enthralled bythe plot to notice the moral) that all the institutions of society andlaw are nicely adjusted to give the moral errors of the great theirutmost scope. Society is a vast sounding-board which echoes the firstwhispers of their private folly, until it swells into a deafening chorusof cruelty and wrong. There are vivid scenes in a prison which give lifeto Godwin's reasoned criticisms of our penal methods. There is a bandof outlaws whose rude natural virtues remind us, by contrast with thecorruption of all the officers of the law, how much less demoralising itis 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 pleasureof the reader. It is a forensic novel. It sets out to frame anindictment of society, and a novelist who imposes this task on himselfmust in the end create an impression of improbability by the partialitywith which he selects his material. But there is fire enough in thetelling, and interest enough in the plot to silence our criticisms whilewe read. _Caleb Williams_ is a capital story; it is also a living andhumane book, which conveys with rare power and reasoned emotion therevolt of a generous mind against the oppressions of feudalism and thestupidities 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 rangeeasily over a great variety of subjects from education to English style. His opinions have neither advanced nor receded, and the mood is stillone of assurance, enthusiasm, and hope. The only noteworthy change is inthe style. _Political Justice_ belongs to the generation of Gibbon, eloquent, elaborate and periodic at its best; heavy and slightly verboseat its worst. With _The Enquirer_ we are just entering the generation ofHazlitt and Leigh Hunt. The language is simpler and more flexible, theconstruction of the sentences more varied, the mood more vivacious, andthe tone more conversational. The best things in the book belong to thatsocial psychology, the observation of men in classes and professions, inwhich this age excelled. There is an outspoken attack on the clergy, asa class of men who have vowed themselves to study without enquiry, whomust reason for ever towards a conclusion fixed by authority, whose verysurvival depends on the perennial stationariness of their understanding. Another essay attempts a vivacious criticism of "common honesty, " themoral standard of the average decent citizen, a code of negative virtuesand moral mediocrity which is content to avoid the obvious unsocial sinsand concerns itself but little to enforce positive benevolence. Thereader who would meet Godwin at his best should turn to the essay _OnServants_. Starting from the universal reluctance of the upper andmiddle classes to allow their children to associate closely withservants, he enlarges the confession of the systematic degradation of aclass which this separation involves, into a condemnation of our wholesocial structure. 

 * * * * *

The year 1797 marks the culmination of Godwin's career, and it wouldhave been well for his fame if it had been its end. He had just passedhis fortieth year; he had made the most notable contribution to Englishpolitical thought since the appearance of the _Wealth of Nations_; hehad won the gratitude and respect of his friends by his intervention inthe trial of the Twelve Reformers. He was famous, prosperous, popular, and his good fortune brought to his calm temperament the stimulus ofexcitement and high spirits which it needed. There came to him in thisyear the crown of a noble love. It was in the winter of 1791 that hefirst met Mary Wollstonecraft, the one woman of genius who belonged tothe English revolutionary circle. He was not impressed, thought that shetalked too much, and in his diary spelled her name incorrectly. 

In the interval between 1791 and 1797 Mary Wollstonecraft was to writeone of the books which belong to the spiritual foundations of the nextcentury, to taste fame and detraction, to know the joys of love andmaternity, and to experience a misery and wrong which made life itselfan unendurable shame. A later chapter will attempt an estimate of theideas and personality of this brilliant and courageous woman. A fewsentences must suffice here to recall the bare facts of her lifehistory. Born in 1759, the child of a drunken and disreputable father, she had struggled with indomitable energy, first as a teacher and thenas a translator and literary "hack, " to keep herself and help her stillmore unfortunate sisters. In 1792 she published _A Vindication of theRights of Woman_, a plea for the human dignity of her sex and for itsclaim to education. At the end of this year she went to Paris as much tosee the Revolution as to perfect herself in French. She there met aclever and interesting American, one Gilbert Imlay, a traveller of somelittle note, a soldier in the War of Independence, and now a speculativemerchant. He lived with her, and in documents acknowledged her as hiswife, though neither felt the need of a binding ceremony. A baby, Fanny, was born, but Imlay's business imposed long separations. He graduallytired of the woman who had honoured him too highly, and entered on morethan one intrigue. Mary Wollstonecraft attempted in despair to drownherself in the Thames, was saved and nursed back to life and courage bydevoted friends. She again took up her pen to gain a livelihood, and forthe sake of her child's future, gradually returned to the literarycircle which valued her, not merely for her genius and originality, butalso for her beauty, her vivacity, and her charm, for her daring andindependence, and her warm, impulsive, affectionate heart. 

Godwin met her again while she was bruised and lonely anddisillusionised with mankind. Her charming volume of travel sketches(_Letters from Norway, 1796_) had made, as it well might, a deepimpression on his taste. He was, what Imlay was not, her intellectualequal, and his character deserved her respect. He has left in the littlebook which he published to vindicate her memory, a delicate sketch oftheir mutual love: "The partiality we conceived for each other was inthat mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refinedstyle of love. It grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It wouldhave been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who wasbefore and who was after. One sex did not take the priority whichlong-established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep thatdelicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that eitherparty can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toilspreader or the prey in the affair. When in the course of things, thedisclosure came, there was nothing in a manner for either party todisclose to the other.... There was no period of throes and resoluteexplanation attendant on the tale. It was friendship melting into love. "

The two lovers, in strict obedience to the principles of _PoliticalJustice_, made their home, at first with no legal union, in a littlehouse in the Polygon, Somers Town, then the extreme limit of London, separated from the suburban village of Camden Town by open fields andgreen pastures. A few doors away Godwin had his study, where he spentmost of his industrious day, often breakfasted and sometimes slept. Bothpartners of this daringly unconventional union had their own particularfriends and retained their separate places in society. Some quaint noteshave survived, which passed between them, borrowing books or makingappointments. "Did I not see you, friend Godwin, " runs one of these, "atthe theatre last night? I thought I met a smile, but you went outwithout looking round. We expect you at half-past four. " It was thecoming of a child which induced them to waive their theories and facefor its sake a repugnant compliance with custom. They were married inOld St. Pancras Church on March 29, 1797, and the insignificant fact wascommunicated only gradually, and with laboured apologies for theinconsistency, to their friends. 

Southey, who met them in this month, has left a lively portrait: "Of allthe lions or literati I have seen here, Mary Imlay's countenance is thebest, infinitely the best: the only fault in it is an expressionsomewhat similar to what the prints of Horne Tooke display--anexpression indicating superiority; not haughtiness, not sarcasm in MaryImlay, but still it is unpleasant. Her eyes are light brown, and ... They are the most meaning I ever saw.... As for Godwin himself he haslarge noble eyes and a _nose_--oh, most abominable nose. Language is notvituperatious enough to describe the effect of its downward elongation. "Godwin, if one may trust the portrait by Northcote, had impressive ifnot exactly handsome features. The head is shapely, the brow ample, thenose decidedly too long, the shaven lips and chin finely chiselled. Thewhole suggestion is of a character self-absorbed and contemplative. Hewas short and sturdy in build, and in his sober dress and gravedeportments, suggested rather the dissenting preacher than the prophetof philosophic anarchism. He was not a ready debater or a fluent talker. His genius was not spontaneous or intuitive. It was rather an elaborateeffort of the will, which deliberately used the fruits of hisaccumulative study and incessant activity of mind. He resembled, saysHazlitt, who admired and liked him, "an eight-day clock that must bewound up long before it can strike. He is ready only on reflection:dangerous only at the rebound. He gathers himself up, and strains everynerve and faculty with deliberate aim to some heroic and dazzlingachievement of intellect; but he must make a career before he flingshimself armed upon the enemy, or he is sure to be unhorsed. "

No two minds could have presented a greater contrast. Had MaryWollstonecraft lived they must have moulded each other into somethingfiner than Nature had made of either. The year of married life wasideally happy, and the strange experiment in reconciling individualismwith love apparently succeeded. Mrs. Godwin, for all her revolutionaryindependence, leaned affectionately on her husband, and he, in spite ofhis rather overgrown self-esteem, regarded her with reverence and pride. She was quick in her affections and resentments, but looking back manyyears later Godwin declares that they were "as happy as is permitted tohuman beings. " "It must be remembered, however, that I honoured herintellectual powers and the nobleness and generosity of herpropensities; mere tenderness would not have been adequate to producethe happiness we experienced. "

Godwin's novels suggest that, on the whole, he shared her views aboutwomen, though in a later essay (on "Friendship, " in _Thoughts on Man_), there are some passages which suggest a less perfect understanding. Buthe never used his pen to carry on her work, and the emancipation ofwomen had to await its philosopher in John Stuart Mill. The happymarriage ended abruptly and tragically. On August 30, 1797, was born thechild Mary, who was to become Shelley's wife, and carry on in a secondgeneration her parents' tradition of fearless love and revolutionaryhope. Ten days after the birth, the mother died in spite of all that thedevotion of her husband and the skill of his medical friends could doto save her. A few broken-hearted letters are left to record Godwin'sagony of mind. 

 * * * * *

With the death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, ended all that was happyand stimulating in Godwin's career. It was for him the year of privatedisaster, and from it he dated also the triumph of the reaction inEngland. The stimulus of the revolutionary period was withdrawn. Helived no longer among ardent spirits who would brave everything and doanything 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. LikeBeethoven he revered Napoleon, at all events until he assumed the titleof Emperor, and would console himself with the conviction that this"auspicious and beneficent genius" had "without violence to theprinciples of the French Revolution ... Suspended their morbidactivity, " while preserving "all the great points" of its doctrine. Butwhile all England hung on the event of the titanic struggle againstthis "beneficent genius, " what was a philanthropist to do? The world wasrattling back into barbarism, and the generation which emerged from thelong nightmare of war, famine, and repression, was incomparably lessadvanced in its thinking, narrower and timider in its whole habit ofmind than the men who were young in 1789. There was nothing to do, and aphilosopher whose only weapon was argument, kept silence when none wouldlisten. 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, andtrying on the volunteer uniforms, in which it hoped to repel Napoleon'sinvasion? We need not wonder that Godwin's output of philosophic writingpractically ceased with the eighteenth century. He was henceforth a manwithout a purpose, who wrote for bread and renounced the exercise of hisgreater powers. 

The end of Godwin's active apostolic life is clearly marked in apamphlet which he issued in 1801 ("Thoughts occasioned by the Perusal ofDr. 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 masterlypiece of writing. Coleridge scribbled in the copy that now lies on theshelves of the British Museum this tribute to its author: "I rememberfew passages in ancient or modern authors that contain more justphilosophy in appropriate, chaste or beautiful diction than the finefollowing 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 evento 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 ofcommendation, I was at length attacked from every side, and in a stylewhich defied all moderation and decency.... The cry spread like ageneral infection, and I have been told that not even a petty novel forboarding-school misses now ventures to aspire to favour unless itcontains some expression of dislike or abhorrence to the newphilosophy. " Some of the attacks were scurrilous and all of themproceeded on the common assumption of the defenders of authority in allages and nations, that the man who would innovate in morals is himselfimmoral. 

He goes on to sketch the present case of the revolutionary party: "Thesocieties have perished, or where they have not, have shrunk to askeleton; the days of democratical declamation are no more; even thestarving labourer in the alehouse is become the champion ofaristocracy.... Jacobinism was destroyed; its party as a party wasextinguished; its tenets were involved in almost universal unpopularityand odium; they were deserted by almost every man high or low in theisland of Great Britain. " Even the young Pantisocrats had gone over tothe enemy, and Wordsworth, grave and disillusionised, tried to forgetthat he had ever exhorted his fellow-students to burn their books and"read Godwin on Necessity. " The defection of Dr. Parr and Mackintosh wassymptomatic. Both had been Godwin's personal friends, and both of themhad hailed the new philosophy. No one remembers them to-day, but theywere in their time intellectual oracles. The scholar Parr was called byflatterers the Whig Johnson, and Mackintosh enjoyed in Whig society areputation as a brilliant talker, and an encyclopædic mind which remindsus of Macaulay's later fame. They had both to make their peace with theworld and to bury their compromised past; the easiest way was to fallupon Godwin. 

Malthus was a more worthy antagonist, though Godwin did not yet perceivehow formidable his attack in reality was. To the picture of humanperfection he opposed the nightmare of an over-populated planet, andcombated universal benevolence by teaching that even charity is aneconomic sin. English society cares little either for Utopias or forscience. 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 thelast degree unscientific and uneconomic. The rickety arithmetic ofMalthusianism was used against the revolutionary hope, exactly as atravestied version of Darwinianism was used in our own day againstSocialism. Godwin preserved his dignity in this controversy and madeconcessions to his critics with a rare candour. But while he abandonsnone of his fundamental doctrines, one feels that he will never fightagain. 

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 impressiveanswer to Malthus. The history of that controversy has been brilliantlytold by Hazlitt. It seems to-day too distant to be worth reviving. Ourmodern pessimists write their jeremiads not about the futureover-population of the planet, but about the declining birth-rate. Thatelaborate civilisations shows a decline in fertility is a fact now sowell recognised, that we feel no difficulty in conceding to Godwin thatthe reasonable beings of his ideal community might be trusted to showsome degree of self-control. 

Godwin possessed two of the cardinal virtues of a thinker, courage andcandour. No fear of ridicule deterred him from pushing his premises totheir last conclusion; no false shame restrained him in a controversyfrom recanting an error. He discarded the wilder developments of histheory of "universal benevolence, " and gave it in the end a form whichhas ceased to be paradoxical. When he wrote _Political Justice_ he was acelibate student who had escaped much of the formative experience of anormal life. As a husband and a father he revised his creed, and devotedno small part of his later literary activity to the work of preachingthe claims of those "private affections" which he had scouted as anelderly 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 ofhuman benefit. But as regards opportunity, I am not equally situatedtowards all my fellows. By devoting myself more particularly to wife orchild with an exclusive affection which is not in the abstractaltogether reasonable, I may do more for the general good than I couldachieve 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 whichanswered Mackintosh and Dr. Parr. The man who would be "the best moraleconomist of his time" will use much of it to seek "the advantage andcontent of those with whom he has most frequent intercourse, " and thisnot merely from calculation, but from affection. "I ought not only inordinary cases to provide for my wife and children, my brothers andrelations before I provide for strangers, but it would be well that mydoing so should arise from the operation of those private and domesticaffections by which through all ages of the world the conduct of mankindhas been excited and directed. "

The recantation is sufficiently frank. The family, dissipated in_Political Justice_ by the explosive charities of "universalbenevolence, " is now happily re-united. Godwin maintains, however, thathis moral theory and his political superstructure stands intact, and theclaim is not unreasonable. He retains his criterion of justice andutility, though he has seen better how to apply it. The duty ofuniversal benevolence is still paramount; the end of contributing to thegeneral good still sovereign, and a reasoned virtue is still to berecommended in preference to instinctive goodness, even where theirresults are commonly the same. "The crown of a virtuous characterconsists in a very frequent and very energetic recollection of thecriterion by which all his actions are to be tried.... The person whohas been well instructed and accomplished in the great schools of humanexperience has passions and affections like other men. But he is awarethat all these affections tend to excess, and must be taught each toknow its order and its sphere. He therefore continually holds in mindthe principles by which their boundaries are fixed. "

What Godwin means is something elementary, and for that reason of thefirst importance. Let a man love his wife above other women, but"universal benevolence" will forbid him to exploit other women in orderto surround her with luxury. Let him love his sons, but virtue willforbid him to accumulate a fortune for them by the sweated labour ofpoor men's children. Let him love his fellow-countrymen, but reasonforbids him to seek their good by enslaving other races and wagingaggressive wars. Godwin, in short, no longer denies the beauty and duty(to use Burke's phrase) of loving "the little platoon to which Ibelong, " but he urges that these domestic affections are in littledanger of neglect. Men learned to love kith and kin, neighbours andcomrades, while still in the savage state. The characteristic of acivilised morality, the necessary accompaniment of all the varied andextended relationships which modern existence has brought with it, mustbe a new and emphatic stress on my duty to the stranger, to the unknownproducer with whom I stand in an economic relationship, and to theforeigner beyond my shores. "Let us endeavour to elevate philanthropyinto a passion, secure that occasions enough will arise to drag us downfrom an enthusiastic eminence. A virtuous man will teach himself torecollect the principle of universal benevolence as often as pious menrepeat their prayers. "

If the central tendencies of Godwin's teaching survive these latermodifications, it is none the less true that some of his theoreticfoundations have been shaken in the work of reconstruction. The isolatedindividual shut up in his own animal skin and communicating with hisfellows through the antennæ of his logical processes, has vanished away. Allow him to extend his personality through the private affections, andhe has ceased to be the abstract unit of individualism. Godwin shouldhave revised not only his doctrine of the family, but his hatred ofco-operation. There is still something to be learned from the view ofhis school that the human mind, as it begins to absorb the collectiveexperience of the race, is an infinitely variable spiritual stuff, anintellectual protoplasm. They stated the view with a rash emphasis, until one is forced to ask whether a mind which is originally nothing atall, can absorb, or as psychologists say, "apperceive" anythingwhatever. Nothing comes out of nothing, and nothing can be added tonothing. 

Godwin and his school set out to show that the human mind is notnecessarily fettered for all time by the prejudices and institutions inwhich it has clothed itself. When he had done stripping us, it was anice question whether even our nakedness remained. He treated ourprejudices and our effete institutions as though they were somethingexternal to us, which had come out of nowhere and could be flung intothe void from whence they came. When you have called opinion aprejudice, or traced an institution to false reasoning, you have, afterall, 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 positivelaw 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 ofthe idea of progress. We may still retain from his reasonings thehopeful conclusion that the human mind is a raw material capable ofalmost unlimited variation, and, therefore, of some advance towards"perfection. " We owe an inestimable debt to the school which proclaimedthis 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 ithad apparently no part in founding the later philosophic anarchism ofthe Continent. None of its leaders seem to have read him; and _PoliticalJustice_ was not translated into German until long after it had ceasedto be read in England. Its really astonishing blindness to theimportance of the economic factor in social changes must have hastenedits decline. Godwin writes as though he had never seen a factory norheard of capital. In all his writing about crime and punishment, full asit is of insight, sympathy and good sense, it is odd that a mind sofertile nowhere anticipated the modern doctrine of the connectionbetween moral and physical degeneracy. He saw in crime only error, wherewe see anæmia: he would have cured it with syllogisms, where we shouldadminister proteids. His entire psychology, both social and individual, is vitiated by a naïve and headstrong intellectualism. Life is rather abattle between narrow interests and the social affections than a debatebetween sound and fallacious reasoning. He saw among mankind onlysophists and philosophers, where we see predatory egoists and theirstarved and stunted victims. But we have advanced far enough on our ownlines of thinking to derive a new stimulus from Godwin's one-sidedintellectualism. Our danger to-day is that we may succumb to an economicand physiological determinism. We are obsessed by financiers andbacilli; it is salutary that our attention should be directed from timeto time to the older bogeys of the revolution, to kings and priests, authority and superstition, to prejudice and political subjection. "Thegreatest part of the people of Europe, " wrote Helvétius, "honour virtuein speculation; this is an effect of their education. They despise it inpractice; that is an effect of the form of their governments. " We thinkthat we have got beyond that epigram to-day. But have we quite exhaustedits meaning?

Precisely because of its revolutionary _naïveté_, its unscientificinnocence, there is in Godwin's democratic anarchism a stimuluspeculiarly tonic to the modern mind. No man has developed more firmlythe ideal of universal enlightenment, which has escaped feudalism, onlyto be threatened by the sociological expert. No writer is better fittedto remind us that society and government are not the same thing, andthat the State must not be confounded with the social organism. Nomoralist has written a more eloquent page on the evil of coercion andthe unreason of force. _Political Justice_ is often an imposing system. It is sometimes an instructive fallacy. It is always an inspiringsermon. Godwin hoped to "make it a work from the perusal of which no manshould rise without being strengthened in habits of sincerity, fortitudeand justice. " There he succeeded. 

CHAPTER VI

GODWIN AND SHELLEY

In a letter written in 1811 Shelley records how he suddenly heard with"inconceivable emotion" that Godwin was still alive. He "had enrolledhis name on the list of the honourable dead. " Godwin, to quote Hazlitt'srather cruel phrase, had "sunk below the horizon, " in his later years, and enjoyed "the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality. " Sereneunfortunately it was not. With a lonely home and two little girls tocare for, Godwin thought once more of marriage. Twice his wooing wasunsuccessful, and the philosopher who believed that reason wasomnipotent, tried in vain in long, elaborate letters to argue two ladiesinto love. His second wife came unsought. As he sat one day at hiswindow in the Polygon, a handsome widow spoke to him from theneighbouring balcony, with these arresting words, "Is it possible that Ibehold the immortal Godwin?" They were married before the close of theyear (1801). 

Mrs. Clairmont was a strange successor to Mary Wollstonecraft. She was avulgar and worldly woman, thoroughly feminine, and rather inclined toboast of her total ignorance of philosophy. A kindly and loyal wife shemay have been, but she was jealous of Godwin's friends, and would tellpetty lies to keep them apart from him. She brought with her twochildren of a former marriage--Charles (who was unhappy in this strangehome and went early abroad) and Jane. On this clever, pretty andmercurial daughter all her partiality was lavished; and the unhappygirl, pampered by a philistine mother in a revolutionary atmosphere, wasat the age of seventeen seduced by Byron, and became the mother of thefairy child, Allegra. The second Mrs. Godwin was the stepmother ofconvention, and treated both Fanny Imlay and Mary Godwin with consistentunkindness. It was the fate of the gentle, melancholy and lovable Fannyto take her own life at the age of twenty-two (1816). The destiny ofthese children, all gifted with what the age called sensibility, hasserved as the text of many a sermon against "the new philosophy. " Noone, however, can read the documents which this strange household leftbehind, without feeling that the parent of the disaster in their liveswas not their philosophic father, but this commonplace "womanly woman, "who flattered, intrigued, and lied. In 1803, there was born of thissecond marriage, a son, William, who inherited something of his father'sability. He became a journalist, and died at the early age oftwenty-nine, after publishing a novel of some promise, _Transfusion_, steeped in the same romantic fancies which colour Mary Shelley's morefamous _Frankenstein_. 

With the cares of this family on his shoulders Godwin began to form thehabit of applying to his wealthy friends for aid. In judging this partof his conduct, one must bear in mind both his own doctrine aboutproperty, and the practice of the age. Godwin was a communist, and so, in some degree, were most of his friends. When he applied to Wedgwood, the philosophic potter of Etruria, or to Ritson, the vegetarian, or inlater years to Shelley for money, he was simply giving virtue itsoccasion, and assisting property to find its level. He practised what hepreached, and he would himself give with a generosity which seemedprodigal, to his own relatives, to promising young men, and even tototal strangers. He supported one disciple at Cambridge, as he hadeducated Cooper in his younger days. It was the prevailing theory ofthe age that men of genius have the right to call on society in thepersons of its wealthier members for support. Helvétius, himself a richman, had maintained this view. Southey and Coleridge acted on it. Dr. Priestley, universally respected both for his character and his talents, received large gifts from friends, admirers, members of his congregationand aristocratic patrons. To Godwin, profoundly individualistic as hewas, a post in the civil service, or even a professorship, would haveseemed a more degrading form of charity than this private benevolence. 

Partly to mend his fortunes, partly to furnish himself with anoccupation when his mind refused original work, Godwin in 1805 turnedpublisher. It was a disastrous inspiration, due apparently to his wife, who believed herself to possess a talent for business. The firm wasestablished in Skinner Street, Holborn, and specialised in school booksand children's tales. They were well-printed, and well-illustrated, andGodwin, writing under the pseudonym of Edward Baldwin, to avoid theodium which had now overtaken his own name, compiled a series ofhistories with his usual industry and conscientious finish. Throughyears darkened with misfortune and clouded by failing health, he workedhard at the business of publishing. His capital was never adequate, though his friends and admirers twice came to his aid with publicsubscriptions. In 1822 he was evicted for arrears of rent, and in 1825the unlucky venture came to an end. 

These years were crowded with literary work, for neither "Baldwin" norGodwin allowed their common pen to idle. Two elaborate historical worksenjoyed and deserved a great reputation in their day, though subsequentresearch has rendered them obsolete--a _Life of Geoffrey Chaucer_ (1803)and a _History of the Commonwealth of England from its Commencement tothe Restoration of Charles II. _ (1824-8). It is not easy for moderntaste to do justice to Godwin's novels; but on them his contemporaryfame chiefly rested, and publishers paid for them high thoughdiminishing prices. They all belong to the romantic movement; some havea supernatural basis, and most of them discover a too obvious didacticpurpose. _St. Leon_ (1799), almost as popular in its day as _CalebWilliams_, mingles a romance of the elixir of life and the philosopher'sstone with an ardent recommendation of those family affections which_Political Justice_ had depreciated. _Fleetwood_ (1805) makes war ondebauchery with sincere and impressive dulness. _Mandeville_ (1817), _Cloudesley_ (1830) and _Deloraine_ (1833) are dead beyond the reach ofcuriosity, yet the Radical critics of his day, including Hazlitt, triedhard to convince themselves that Godwin was a greater novelist than theTory, Scott. It remains to mention Godwin's two attempts to conquer thetheatre with _Antonio_ (1800) and _Faulkener_ (1807). Neither playlived, and _Antonio_, written in a sort of journalese, cut up into blankverse lines, was too frigid to survive the first night. Godwin'sdisappointment would be comical if it were not painful. He regardedthese deplorable tragedies as the flower of his genius. 

Through these years of misfortune and eclipse, the friendships whichGodwin could still retain were his chief consolation. The publishedletters of Coleridge and Lamb make a charming record of their intimacy. Whimsical and affectionate in their tone, they are an unconscioustribute as much to the man who received them as to the men who wrotethem. Conservative critics have talked of Godwin's "coldness" because hecould reason. But the abiding and generous regard of such a nature asCharles Lamb's is answer enough to these summary valuations. ButGodwin's most characteristic relationship was with the young men whosought him out as an inspiration. He would write them long letters ofadvice, encouragement, and criticism, and despite his own poverty, wouldoften relieve their distresses. The most interesting of them was anadventurous young Scot named Arnot who travelled on foot through thegreater part of Europe during the Napoleonic wars. The tragedy whichseemed always to pursue Godwin's intimates drove another of them, Patrickson, to suicide while an undergraduate at Cambridge. BulwerLytton, the last of these admiring young men, left a note on Godwin'sconversational powers in his extreme old age, which assures us that hewas "well worth hearing, " even amid the brilliance of Lamb, Hunt, andHazlitt, and could display "a grim jocularity of sarcasm. "

One of these relationships has become historical, and has coloured thewhole modern judgment of Godwin. It would be no exaggeration to say thatGodwin formed Shelley's mind, and that _Prometheus Unbound_ and _Hellas_were the greatest of Godwin's works. That debt is too often forgotten, while literary gossip loves to remind us that it was repaid in chequesand _post-obits_. The intellectual relationship will be discussed in alater chapter; the bare facts of the personal connection must be toldhere. _Political Justice_ took Shelley's mind captive while he was stillat Eton, much as it had obsessed Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. Theinfluence with him was permanent; and _Queen Mab_ is nothing but Godwinin verse, with prose notes which quote or summarise him. Acorrespondence began in 1811, and the pupil met the master late in 1812, and again in 1813. They talked as usual of virtue and humanperfectibility; and as the intimacy grew, Shelley, whose chiefemployment at this time was to discover and relieve genius in distress, began to place his present resources and future prospects at Godwin'sdisposal. It was not an unnatural relationship to arise between agrateful disciple, heir to a great fortune, and a philosopher, aged, neglected, and sinking under the burden of debt. 

Shelley's romantic runaway match with Harriet Westbrook had meanwhileentered on the period of misery and disillusion. She had lost her earlylove of books and ideas, had taken to hats and ostentation, and hadbecome so harsh to him that he welcomed absence. It is certain that hebelieved her to be also in the vulgar sense of the word unfaithful. Atthis crisis, when the separation seemed already morally complete, he metMary Godwin, who had been absent from home during most of his earliervisits. She was a young girl of seventeen, eager for knowledge andexperience, and as her father described her, "singularly bold, somewhatimperious and active of mind, " and "very pretty. " They rapidly fell inlove. Godwin's conduct was all that the most conventional morality couldhave required of him. His theoretical views of marriage were stillunorthodox; he held at least that "the institution might with advantageadmit of certain modifications. " But nine years before in the preface to_Fleetwood_ he had protested that he was "the last man to recommend apitiful attempt by scattered examples to renovate the face of society. "He seems, indeed, to have forgotten his own happy experiment with MaryWollstonecraft, and protests with a vigour hardly to be expected from sostout an individualist against the idea, that "each man for himselfshould supersede and trample upon the institutions of the country inwhich he lives. A thousand things might be found excellent and salutaryif brought into general practice, which would in some cases appearridiculous and in others attended with tragical consequences ifprematurely acted upon by a solitary individual. "

On this view he acted. He forbade Shelley his house, and tried to make areconciliation between him and Harriet. On July 28, 1814, Mary secretlyleft her father's house, joined her lover, and began with him her lifeof ideal intimacy and devotion. Godwin felt and expressed the utmostdisapproval, and for two years refused to meet Shelley, until at theclose of 1816, after the suicide of the unhappy Harriet, he stood at hisdaughter's side as a witness to her marriage. His public conduct wascorrect. In private he continued to accept money from the erringdisciple whom he refused to meet, and salved his elderly conscience byinsisting that the cheques should be drawn in another name. There Godwintouched the lowest depths of his moral degeneration. Let us remember, however, that even Shelley, who saw the worst of Godwin, would neverspeak of him with total condemnation. "Added years, " he wrote near theend of his life, "only add to my admiration of his intellectual powers, and even the moral resources of his character. " In the poetical epistleto Maria Gisborne, he wrote of

 "That which was Godwin--greater none than he Though fallen, and fallen on evil times, to stand Among the spirits of our age and land Before the dread tribunal of To-come The foremost, while Rebuke cowers pale and dumb. "

The end came to the old man amid comparative peace and serenity. Heaccepted a sinecure from the Whigs, and became a Yeoman Usher of theExchequer, with a small stipend and chambers in New Palace Yard. It wasa tribute as much to his harmlessness as to his merit. The work of hislast years shows little decay in his intellectual powers. _His Thoughtson Man_ (1831) collects his fugitive essays. They are varied in subject, suave, easy and conversational in manner, more polished in style thanthose of the _Enquirer_, if a good deal thinner in matter. They avoidpolitical themes, but the idea of human perfectibility none the lesspervades the book with an unaggressive presence, a cold and wintry sun. One curious trait of his more cautious and conservative later mind isworth noting. When he wrote _Political Justice_, the horizons of sciencewere unlimited, the vistas of discovery endless. Now he questions eventhe mathematical data of astronomy, talks of the limitations of ourfaculties, and applauds a positive attitude that refrains fromconjecture. His last years were spent in writing a book in which heventured at length to state his views upon religion. Like Helvétius heperceived the advantages which an unpopular philosopher may derive fromposthumous publication. Freed at last from the vulgar worries of debtand the tragical burden of personal ties, the fighting ended which hadnever brought him the joy of combat, the material struggle over whichhad issued in defeat, he became again the thing that was himself, aluminous intelligence, a humane thinker. 

With eighty years of life behind him, and doubting whether the curtainof death concealed a secret, Godwin tranquilly faced extinction inApril, 1836. 

 * * * * *

"To do my part to free the human mind from slavery, " that in his ownwords was the main object of Godwin's life. The task was not fullydischarged with the writing of _Political Justice_. He could neverforget the terror and gloom of his own early years, and, like all thethinkers of the revolution, he coupled superstition with despotism andpriests with kings as the arch-enemies of human liberty. The terrors ofeternal punishment, the firmly riveted chains of Calvinistic logic, hadfettered his own growing mind in youth; and to the end he thought oftraditional religion as the chief of those factitious things whichprevent mankind from reaching the full stature to which nature destinedit. Paine had attempted this work from a similar standpoint, but Godwin, with his trained speculative mind, and his ideal of courtesy andpersuasiveness in argument, thought meanly (as a private letter shows)of his friend's polemics. It was an unlucky timidity which caused Mrs. Shelley to suppress her father's religious essays when the manuscriptwas bequeathed to her for publication on his death. When, at length, they appeared in 1873 (_Essays never before Published_), the work whichthey sought to accomplish had been done by other pens. They possess nonethe less an historical interest; some fine pages will always be worthreading for their humane impulse and their manly eloquence; they help usto understand the influence which Godwin's ideas, conveyed in personalintercourse, exerted on the author of _Prometheus Unbound_. There islittle in them which a candid believer would resent to-day. Most of thedogmas which Godwin assailed have long since crumbled away through thesapping of a humaner morality and a more historical interpretation ofthe Bible. 

The book opens with a protest against the theory and practice ofsalutary delusions; and Godwin once more pours his scorn upon those whowould cherish their own private freedom, while preserving popularsuperstitions, "that the lower ranks may be kept in order. " Thefoundation of all improvement is that "the whole community should runthe generous race for intellectual and moral superiority. " Godwin wouldpreserve some portion of the religious sense, for we can reach sobrietyand humility only by realising "how frail and insignificant a part weconstitute of the great whole. " But the fundamental tenets of dogmaticChristianity are far, he argues, from being salutary delusions. At thebasis alike of Protestantism and Catholicism, he sees the doctrine ofeternal punishment; and with an iteration that was not superfluous inhis own day, he denounces its cruel and demoralising effects. It sapsthe character where it is really believed, and renders the mind whichreceives it servile and pusillanimous. The case is no better when it isneither sincerely believed nor boldly rejected. Such an attitude, whichis, he thinks, that of most professing believers, makes forinsincerity, and for an indifference to all honest thought andspeculation. The man who dare neither believe nor disbelieve is debarredfrom thinking at all. 

Worst of all, this doctrine of endless torment and arbitrary electioninvolves a blasphemous denial of the goodness of God. "To say all, then, in a word, since it must finally be told, the God of the Christians is atyrant. " He quotes the delightfully naïve reflection of Plutarch, whoheld that it was better to deny God than to calumniate Him, "for I hadrather it should be said of me, that there was never such a man asPlutarch, than that it should be said that Plutarch was ill-natured, arbitrary, capricious, cruel, and inexorable. " A survey of ChurchHistory brings out what Godwin calls "the mixed character ofChristianity, its horrors and its graces. " In much of what has come downto us from the Old Testament he sees the inevitable effects ofanthropomorphism, when the religion of a barbarous age is reduced towriting, and handed down as the effect of inspiration. He cannotsufficiently admire the beauty of Christ's teaching of a perfectdisinterestedness and self-denial--a doctrine in his own terminology of"universal benevolence. " But the disciples lived in a preternaturalatmosphere, continually busied with the four Last Things, death, judgment, heaven, and hell; and they distorted the beauty of theChristian morality by introducing an other-worldliness, to which theancients had been strangers. From this came the despotism of the Churchbased on the everlasting burnings and the keys, and something of thespirit of St. Dominic and the Inquisition can be traced, he thinks, evento the earliest period of Christianity. The Gospel sermons do not alwaysrealise the Godwinian ideal of rational persuasion. 

Godwin's own view is in the main what we should call agnostic: "I do notconsider my faculties adequate to pronouncing upon the cause of allthings. I am contented to take the phenomena as I behold them, withoutpretending to erect an hypothesis under the idea of making all thingseasy. I do not rest my globe of earth upon an elephant [a reference tothe Indian myth], and the elephant upon a tortoise. I am content to takemy globe of earth simply, in other words to observe the objects whichpresent themselves to my senses, without undertaking to find out a causewhy they are what they are. "

With cautious steps, he will, however, go a little further than this. He regards with reverence and awe "that principle, whatever it is, whichacts everywhere around me. " But he will not slide into anthropomorphism, nor give to this Supreme Thing, which recalls Shelley's Demogorgon, theshape of a man. "The principle is not intellect; its ways are not ourways. " If there is no particular Providence, there is none the less atendency in nature which seconds our strivings, guarantees the work ofreason, and "in the vast sum of instances, works for good, and operatesbeneficially for us. " The position reminds us of Matthew Arnold'sdefinition of God as "the stream of tendency by which all things striveto fulfil the law of their being. " "We have here, " writes Godwin, "asecure alliance, a friend that so far as the system of things extendswill never desert us, unhearing, inaccessible to importunity, uncapricious, without passions, without favour, affection, orpartiality, that maketh its sun to rise on the evil and the good, andits rain to descend on the just and the unjust. "

Amid the dim but rosy mist of this vague faith the old man went out toexplore the unknown. A bolder and more rebellious thought was his reallegacy to his age. It is the central impulse of the whole revolutionaryschool: "We know what we are: we know not what we might have been. Butsurely we should have been greater than we are but for this disadvantage[dogmatic religion, and particularly the doctrine of eternalpunishment]. It is as if we took some minute poison with everything thatwas intended to nourish us. It is, we will suppose, of so mitigated aquality as never to have had the power to kill. But it may neverthelessstunt our growth, infuse a palsy into every one of our articulations, and insensibly change us from giants of mind which we might have beeninto a people of dwarfs. "

Let us write Godwin's epitaph in his own Roman language. He stood erectand independent. He spoke what he deemed to be truth. He did his part topurge the veins of men of the subtle poisons which dwarf them. 

CHAPTER VII

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

When women, standing at length beyond the last of the gates and wallsthat have barred their road to freedom, measure their debt to history, there will be little to claim their gratitude before the close of theeighteenth century. The Protestant Reformation on the whole depressedtheir status, and even among its more speculative sects the Quakersstood alone in preaching the equality of the sexes. The English Whigsignored the existence of women. It was left for the French thinkers wholaid the foundations of the Revolution to formulate a view of societyand human nature which, as it were, insisted on its own application towomen. The idea of women's emancipation was alive among theirprinciples. One can name its parents, and one marvels not at all that itseized this mind and the other, but that any mind among the professorsof the "new philosophy" contrived to escape it. The central thought, which inspired the gospel of perfectibility has a meaning for men whichan enlightened mind can grasp, but it tells the plain obvious fact aboutwomen. 

When Holcroft compares the influence of laws and institutions upon mento the action of beggars who mutilate their children, when Godwin talksof the subtle poisons of dogma and custom, which cause mankind to growup a race of dwarfs when they should be giants, they seem to be usingmetaphors which describe nothing so well as the effect of an artificialeducation and a tradition of subjection upon women. One by one thethinkers of this generation were unconsciously laying down the premiseswhich the women's movement needed. At the end of all their arguments forliberty and perfectibility, we seem to hear to-day a chorus of women'svoices which points the application to themselves. There was little hopefor women while the opinion prevailed that minds come into the worldwith their qualities innate and their limitations fixed by nature. Ifthat were the case, then the undeniable fact that women wereintellectually and morally dependent and inferior must be accepted astheir inevitable destiny. Helvétius, all unconscious of what he did, wasthe hope-bringer, when he insisted that mind is the creation ofeducation and experience. When he urged that the very inequality ofmen's talents is itself factitious and the result of more or less goodfortune in the occasions which provoke a mind to activity, who couldfail to enquire whether the accepted inferiority of women were sonatural and so necessary as the whole world assumed?

This school of thought revelled in social psychology. It studied in turnthe soldier, the priest and the courtier, and shewed how each of thesehas a secondary character, a professional mind, a class moralityimpressed and imposed upon him by his education and employment. Lookingdown from the vantage ground of their philosophic salon upon theircontemporaries in French society who owed their fortunes and reputationsto the favour of an absolute court, Helvétius and his friends framedtheir general theory of the demoralisation which despotism brings aboutin the human character. They studied the natural history of the humanparasite who flourished under the Bourbons. They need not have travelledto Versailles to find him. The domestic subjection of wives to husbands, the education of girls in a specialised morality, the fetters of customand fashion, the experience of economic dependence, the denial of everynoble stimulus to thought and action--these causes, more potent and moreuniversal than any which work at Court, were making a sex condemned toan artificial inferiority, an induced parasitism. Thinkers who haddiscarded the notion that human minds come into the world with an innatecharacter and with their limitations already predestined, were ripe todraw the conclusion. The Revolution believed that men by taking thoughtmight add many cubits to their mental stature. To think in these termswas to prepare oneself to see that the "lovely follies" the "amiableweaknesses" of the "fair sex" were in their turn nothing innate, but thefostered characteristics of a class bred in subjection, the tradinghabits of a profession which had bent all its faculties to the art ofpleasing. Reformers who sought to raise the peasant, the negro, and eventhe courtier to his full stature as a man, were inevitably led toconsider the case of their own wives and daughters. They were not themen to be arrested by the distinction which has been recently invented. Democracy, we are told, is concerned with the removal not of natural, but of artificial inequalities. Their bias was to regard allinequalities as artificial. Looking forward to the goal of humanperfection, they were prompt to realise that every advance would beinsecure, and the final hope a delusion, if on their road they shouldleave half mankind behind them. 

It requires a vigorous exercise of the historical imagination to realisethe conditions which society imposed upon women in the eighteenthcentury. If Godwin and Paine had reflected closely on the position ofwomen, they might have been led to modify their exaggerated antithesisbetween society and government. Government, indeed, imposed a barbarouscode of laws upon women. It was a trifle that they were excluded frompolitical power. The law treated a wife as the chattel of her husband, denied her the disposal of her own property, even when it was theproduce of her own labour, sanctioned his use of violence to her person, and refused (as indeed it still in part does) to recognise her rights asa parent. But the state of the law reflected only too faithfully theopinions of society, and these opinions in their turn formed the mindsof women. Civilised people amuse themselves to-day by detecting how muchof the old prejudices still lurk in a shamefaced half-consciousness inthe minds of modern men. There was no need in the eighteenth century forany fine analysis to detect the naïve belief that women exist only asauxiliary beings to contribute to the comfort and to flatter theself-esteem of men. The belief was avowed and accepted as theunquestioned basis of human society. Good men proclaimed it, and thecleverest women dared not question it. 

For the crudest statement of it we need not go to men who defendeddespotism and convention in other departments of life. The mostrepulsive of all definitions of the principle of sex-subjection is to befound in Rousseau:--"The education of women should always be relative tothat of men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteemthem, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, toadvise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable; these arethe duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught intheir infancy. " When the men of the eighteenth century said this, theymeant it, and they accepted not only its plain meaning, but its remotestlogical consequences. It was a denial of the humanity and personality ofwomen. A slave is a human being, whom the law deprives of his right tosell his labour. A woman had to learn that her subjection affected notonly her relations to men, but her attitude to nature and to God. Thesubtle poison ran in her veins when she prayed and when she studied. Subject in her body, she was enslaved in mind and soul as well. Miltonsaw the husband as a priest intervening between a woman and her God:--

 He for God only, she for God in him. 

Even on her knees a woman did not escape the consciousness of sex, and amanual of morality written by a learned divine (Dr. Fordyce) assured herthat a "fine woman" never "strikes so deeply" as when a man sees herbent in prayer. She was encouraged to pray that she might be seen ofmen--men who scrutinised her with the eyes of desire. It is a woman, herself something of a "blue-stocking, " who has left us the mostpathetic statement of the intellectual fetters which her sex accepted. Women, says Mrs. Barbauld, "must often be content to know that a thingis so, without understanding the proof. " They "cannot investigate; theymay remember. " She warns the girls whom she is addressing that if theywill steal knowledge, they must learn, like the Spartan youths, to hidetheir furtive gains. "The thefts of knowledge in our sex are onlyconnived at while carefully concealed, and if displayed punished withdisgrace. "

Religion was sullied; knowledge was closed; but above all the sentimentof the day perverted morals. Here, too, everything was relative to men, and men demanded a sensitive weakness, a shrinking timidity. Courage, honour, truth, sincerity, independence--these were items in a maleideal. They were to a woman as unnecessary, nay, as harmful in themarriage market as a sturdy frame and well-knit muscles. Dean Swift, asharp satirist, but a good friend of women, comments on the prevailingview. "There is one infirmity, " he writes in his illuminating _Letter toa very young lady on her marriage_, "which is generally allowed you, Imean that of cowardice, " and he goes on to express what was in his daythe wholly unorthodox view that "the same virtues equally become bothsexes. " There he was singular. The business of a woman was to cultivatethose virtues most conducive to her prosperity in the one avocation opento her. That avocation was marriage, and the virtues were those whichher prospective employer, the average over-sexed male, anxious at allpoints to feel his superiority, would desire in a subject wife. Submission was the first of them, and submission became the foundationof female virtue. Lord Kames, a forgotten but once popular Scottishphilosopher, put the point quite fairly (the quotation, together withthat from Mrs. Barbauld, is to be found in Mr. Lyon Blease's valuablebook on _The Emancipation of Englishwomen_): "Women, destined by natureto be obedient, ought to be disciplined early to bear wrongs withoutmurmuring.... This is essential to the female sex, for ever subjected tothe authority of a single person. "

The rest of morality was summed up in the precepts of the art ofpleasing. Chastity had, of course, its incidental place; it enhances thepride of possession. The art of pleasing was in practice a kind offurtive conquest by stratagems and wiles, by tears and blushes, in whichthe woman, by an assumed passivity, learned to excite the passions ofthe male. Rousseau owed much of his popularity to his artistic statementof this position:--"If woman be formed to please and to be subjected toman, it is her place, doubtless, to render herself agreeable to him.... The violence of his desires depends on her charms; it is by means ofthese that she should urge him to the exertion of those powers whichnature hath given him. The most successful method of exciting them is torender such exertion necessary by resistance; as in that case self-loveis added to desire, and the one triumphs in the victory which the otheris obliged to acquire. Hence arise the various modes of attack anddefence between the sexes; the boldness of one sex and the timidity ofthe other; and in a word, that bashfulness and modesty, with whichnature hath armed the weak in order to subdue the strong. "

The "soft, " the "fair, " the "gentle sex" learned its lesson with onlytoo much docility. It grew up stunted to meet the prevailing demand. Itacquired weakness, feigned ignorance, and emulated folly as sedulouslyas men will labour to make at least a show of strength, good sense, andknowledge. It adapted itself only too successfully to the economicconditions in which it found itself. Men accepted its flatteries andreturned them with contempt. "Women, " wrote that dictator of morals andmanners, Lord Chesterfield, "are only children of a larger growth.... Aman of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours andflatters them, as he does a sprightly, forward child. " The men of thatcentury valued women only as playthings. They forgot that he is thechild who wants the toy. 

The first protests against this morality of degradation came, as onewould expect, from men. Demoralising as it was for men, it did at leastleave them the free use of their minds. Enquiry, reflection, scepticism, unsuitable if not immodest in a woman, were the rights of a manlyintellect. Defoe and Swift uttered an unheeded protest in England, butneither of them carried the subject far. There are some good criticalremarks in Helvétius about women's education; but the first man in thatcentury who seemed to realise the importance and scope of what severaldimly felt, was Baron Holbach, whose materialism was so peculiarlyshocking to our forefathers. A chapter "On Women" in his _SystèmeSocial_ (1774) opens thus: "In all the countries of the world the lot ofwomen is to submit to tyranny. The savage makes a slave of his mate, andcarries his contempt for her to the point of cruelty. For the jealousand voluptuous Asiatic, women are but the sensual instruments of hissecret pleasures.... Does the European, in spite of the apparentdeference which he affects towards women, really treat them with morerespect? While we refuse them a sensible education, while we feed theirminds with tedium and trifles, while we allow them to busy themselvesonly with playthings and fashions and adornments, while we seek toinspire them only with the taste for frivolous accomplishments, do wenot show our real contempt, while we mask it with a show of deferenceand respect?"

Holbach was a rash and rather superficial metaphysician, but thewarm-hearted and honest pages which follow this opening inspire a deeprespect for the man. He talks of the absurdities of women's education;draws a bitter picture of a woman's fate in a loveless marriage ofconvenience; remarks that esteem is necessary for a happy marriage, butasks sadly how one is to esteem a mind which has emerged from aschooling in folly; assails the practice of gallantry, and thefashionable conjugal infidelities of his day; writes with realindignation of the dangers to which working-class girls are exposed;proposes to punish seduction as a crime no less cruel than murder, andconcludes by confessing that he would like to adopt Plato's opinion thatwomen should share with men in the tasks of government, but dreads theeffects which would flow from the admission of the corrupt ladies of hisday to power. 

Twenty years later this promising beginning bore fruit in the mature andreasoned pleading of Condorcet for the reform of women's education. There was no subject on which this noble constructive mind insisted withsuch continual emphasis. His feminism (to use an ugly modern word), wasan integral part of his thinking. He remembered women when he wrote ofpublic affairs as naturally as most men forget them. He deserves in thegratitude of women a place at least as distinguished as John StuartMill's. The best and fullest statement of his position is to be found inthe report and draft Bill on national education (Sur l'InstructionPublique), which he prepared for the Revolutionary Convention in 1792(see also p. 109). He maintains boldly that the system of nationaleducation should be the same for women as for men. He specially insiststhat they should be admitted to the study of the natural sciences (thesewere days when it was held that a woman would lose her modesty if shestudied botany), and thinks that they would render useful services toscience, even if they did not attain the first rank. They ought to beeducated for many reasons. They must be able to teach their children. Ifthey remain ignorant, the curse of inequality will be introduced intothe family, and mothers will be regarded by their sons with contempt. Nor will men retain their intellectual interests, unless they can sharethem with women. Lastly, women have the same natural right to knowledgeand enlightenment as men. The education should be given in common, andthis will powerfully further the interests of morality. The separationof the sexes in youth really proceeds from the fear of unequalmarriages, in other words, from avarice and pride. It would be dangerousfor a democratic community to allow the spirit of social inequality tosurvive among women, with the consequence that it could never beextirpated among men. Condorcet was not a brilliant writer, but thehumanity and generosity of his thought finds a powerful and reasonedexpression in his sober and somewhat laboured sentences. 

So far a good and enlightened man might go. The substance of all thatneed be said against the harem with the door ajar, in which theeighteenth century had confined the mind if not the body, of women, isto be found in Holbach and Condorcet. But they wrote from outside. Theywere the wise spectators who saw the consequences of the degradation ofwomen, but did not intimately know its cause. Mary Wollstonecraft's_Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ (1792) is perhaps the most originalbook of its century, not because its daring ideas were altogether new, but because in its pages for the first time a woman was attempting touse her own mind. Her ideas, as we have seen, were not absolutely new. They were latent in all the thinking of the revolutionary period. Theyhad been foreshadowed by Holbach (whom she may have read), by Paine(whom she had occasionally met), and by Condorcet (whose chiefcontribution to the question, written in the same year as her_Vindication_, she obviously had not read). What was absolutely new inthe world's history was that for the first time a woman dared to sitdown to write a book which was not an echo of men's thinking, nor anattempt to do rather well what some man had done a little better, but afirst exploration of the problems of society and morals from astandpoint which recognised humanity without ignoring sex. She showedher genius not so much in writing the book, which is, indeed, a faultythough an intensely vital performance, as in thinking out its positionfor herself. 

She had her predecessors, but she owed to them little, if anything. There was not enough in them to have formed her mind, if she had come totheir pages unemancipated. She freed herself from mental slavery, andthe utmost which she can have derived from the two or three men whoprofessed the same generous opinions, was the satisfaction ofencouragement or confirmation. She owed to others only the powerfulstimulus which the Revolution gave to all bold and progressive thought. The vitality of her ideas sprang from her own experience. She hadreceived rather less than was customary of the slipshod superficialeducation permitted to girls of the middle classes in her day. With thisnearly useless equipment, she had found herself compelled to strugglewith the world not merely to gain a living, but to rescue a lucklessfamily from a load of embarrassments and misfortunes. Her father was adrunkard, idle, improvident, moody and brutal, and as a girl she hadoften protected her mother from his violence. A sister had married aprofligate husband, and Mary rescued her from a miserable home, in whichshe had been driven to temporary insanity. The sisters had attempted tolive by conducting a suburban school for girls; a brief experience as agoverness in a fashionable family had been even more formative. 

When at length she took to writing and translating educational books, with the encouragement of a kindly publisher, she was practising underthe stimulus of necessity the doctrine of economic independence, whichbecame one of the foundations of her teaching. It is the pressure ofeconomic necessity which in this generation and the last has forcedwomen into a campaign for freedom and opportunity. What the growth ofthe industrial system has done for women in the mass, a hard experiencedid for Mary Wollstonecraft. In her own person or through her sistersshe had felt in an aggravated form most of the wrongs to which womenwere peculiarly exposed. She had seen the reverse of the shield ofchivalry, and known the domestic tyrannies of a sheltered home. 

The miracle was that Mary Wollstonecraft's mind was never distorted bybitterness, nor her faith in mankind destroyed by cynicism. Herpersonality lives for us still in her own books and in the records ofher friends. Opie's vivid painting hangs in the National PortraitGallery to confirm what Godwin tells us of her beauty in his pathetic_Memoir_ and to remind us of Southey's admiration for her eyes. Godwinwrites of "that smile of bewitching tenderness ... Which won, both heartand soul, the affection of almost every one that beheld it. " She was, hetells us, "in the best and most engaging sense, feminine in hermanners"; and indeed her letters and her books present her to us as awoman who had courage and independence precisely because she was sonormal, so healthy in mind and body, so richly endowed with a generousvitality. If she won the hearts of all who knew her, it was because herown affections were warm and true. She was a good sister, a gooddaughter, a passionate lover, an affectionate friend, a devoted andtender mother. 

She was too real a human being to be misled by the impartialities ofuniversal benevolence. "Few, " she wrote, "have had much affection formankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes whom they first played with. " That eloquenttrait, her love of animals and her hatred of cruelty, helps to defineher character. She was, says Godwin, "a worshipper of domestic life, "and, for all her proud independence, in love with love. In Godwin's primphraseology, she "set a great value on a mutual affection betweenpersons of an opposite sex, and regarded it as the principal solace ofhuman life. " Indeed, in the _Letters to Imlay_, which appeared after herdeath, it is not so much the strength and independence of her finalattitude which impresses us, as her readiness to forgive, herreluctance to resent his neglect, her affection which could survive somany proofs of the man's unworthiness. The strongest passion in hergenerous nature was maternal tenderness. It won her the enduring love ofthe children whom she taught as a governess. It caused her mind to bebusied with the problem of education as its chief preoccupation. Itinforms her whole view of the rights and duties of women in her_Vindication_. It inspired the charming fragment entitled _Lessons forLittle Fanny_, which is one of the most graceful expressions in Englishprose of the physical tenderness of a mother's love. If she despised theartificial sensibility which in her day was admired and cultivated bywomen, it was because her own emotions were natural and strong. Herintellect, which no regular discipline had formed, impressed thelaborious and studious Godwin by its quickness and its flashes of suddeninsight--its "intuitive perception of intellectual beauty. "

The _Vindication_ is certainly among the most remarkable books that havecome down to us from that opulent age. It has in abundance most of thefaults that a book can have. It was hastily written in six weeks. It isill-arranged, full of repetitions, full of digressions, and almostwithout a regular plan. Its style is unformed, sometimes rhetorical, sometimes familiar. But with all these faults, it teems with aptphrases, telling passages, vigorous sentences which sum up in a fewconvincing lines the substance of its message. It lacks the neatness, the athletic movement of Paine's English. It has nothing of thelearning, the formidable argumentative compulsion of Godwin's writing. But it is sold to-day in cheap editions, while Godwin survives only onthe dustier shelves of old libraries. Its passion and sincerity havekept it alive. It is the cry of an experience too real, too authentic, to allow of any meandering down the by-ways of fanciful speculation. Itsaid with its solitary voice the thing which the main army of thinkingwomen is saying to-day. There is scarcely a passage of its centraldoctrine which the modern leaders of the women's movement wouldrepudiate or qualify; and there is little if anything which they wouldwish to add to it. Writers like Olive Schreiner, Miss Cicely Hamilton, and Mrs. Gilman have, indeed, a background of historical knowledge, anevolutionary view of society, a sense of the working of economic causeswhich Mary Wollstonecraft did not possess and could not in her age haveacquired, even if she had been what she was not, a woman of learning. But she has anticipated all their main positions, and formulated theideal which the modern movement is struggling to complete. Her book isdated in every chapter. It is as much a page torn from the journals ofthe French Revolution as Paine's _Rights of Man_ or Condorcet's_Sketch_. And yet it seems, as they do not, a modern book. 

The chief merit of the _Vindication_ is its clear perception thateverything in the future of women depends on the revision of theattitude of men towards women and of women towards themselves. The raremen who saw this, from Holbach and Condorcet to Mill, were philosophers. Mary Wollstonecraft had no pretensions to philosophy. A brilliantcourage gave her in its stead her range and breadth of vision. It wouldhave been so much easier to write a treatise on education, a plea forthe reform of marriage, or even an argument for the admission of womento political rights. To the last of these themes she alludes only in asingle sentence: "I may excite laughter, by dropping a hint, which Imean to pursue, some future time, for I really think that women oughtto have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed withouthaving any direct share allowed them in the deliberations ofgovernment. " She had the insight to perceive that the first task of thepioneer was to raise the whole broad issue of the subjection of her sex. She begins by linking her argument with a splendid imprudence to therevolutionary movement. It had proclaimed the supremacy of reason, andbased freedom on natural right. Why was it that the new Constitutionignored women? With a fresh simplicity, she appeals to the FrenchConvention in the name of its own abstract principles, as modern womenappeal (with more experience of the limitations of male logic) toEnglish Liberalism. But she knew very well what was the enormousdespotism of interest and prejudice that she was attacking. Thesensualist and the tyrant were for her interchangeable terms, and withgreat skill she enlists on her side the new passion for liberty. "Alltyrants want to crush reason, from the weak king to the weak father. "She demands the enlightenment of women, as the reformers demanded thatof the masses: "Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and therewill be an end to blind obedience; but as blind obedience is eversought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when theyendeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only wantslaves, and the latter a plaything. "

With a shrewd if instinctive insight into social psychology, she tracesto the unenlightened self-interest of the dominant sex the code ofmorals which has been imposed upon women. Rousseau supplies her with theperfect and finished statement of all that she opposed. He and his likehad given a sex to virtue. She takes her stand on a broad humanmorality. "Freedom must strengthen the reason of woman until shecomprehend her duty. " Against the perverted sex-morality which treatedwoman in religion, in ethics, in manners as a being relative only tomen, she directs the whole of her argument. It is "vain to expect virtuefrom women, till they are in some degree independent of men. "

"Females have been insulated, as it were, and while they have beenstripped of the virtue that should clothe humanity, they have beendecked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-livedtyranny.... Their sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion insteadof inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility inabsolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is themother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, theymust ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws innature.... Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but theyare human duties.... If marriage be the cement of society, mankindshould all be educated after the same model, or the intercourse of thesexes will never deserve the name of fellowship, nor will women everfulfil the peculiar duties of their sex, till they become enlightenedcitizens, till they become free by being enabled to earn their ownsubsistence, independent of men; in the same manner, I mean, to preventmisconstruction, as one man is independent of another. Nay, marriagewill never be held sacred till women, by being brought up with men, areprepared to be their companions rather than their mistresses. "

It is a brave but singularly balanced view of human life and society. There is in it no trace of the dogmatic individualism that distorts thespeculations of Godwin and clogs the more practical thinking of Paine. It is, indeed, a protest against the exaggeration of sex, whichinstilled in women "the desire of being always women. " It flouts thatexternal morality of reputation, which would have a woman always "seemto be this and that, " because her whole status in the world depended onthe opinion which men held of her. It demands in words which anticipateIbsen's _Doll's House_, that a woman shall be herself and lead her ownlife. But "her own life" was for Mary Wollstonecraft a social life. Theideal is the perfect companionship of men and women, and the preparationof men and women, by an equal practice of modesty and chastity, and anequal advance in education, to be the parents of their children. She isready indeed to rest her whole case for the education of women upon theduties of maternity. "Whatever tends to incapacitate the maternalcharacter takes woman out of her sphere. " The education which shedemanded was the co-education of men and women in common schools. Sheattacked the dual standard of sexual morality with a brave plainness ofspeech. She demanded the opening of suitable trades and professions towomen. She exposed the whole system which compels women to "live bytheir charm. " But a less destructive reformer never set out tooverthrow conventions. For her the duty always underlies the right, andthe development of the self-reliant individual is a preparation for thelife of fellowship. 

CHAPTER VIII

SHELLEY

If it were possible to blot out from our mind its memory of the Bibleand of Protestant theology, and with that mind of artificial vacancy toread _Paradise Lost_ and _Samson Agonistes_, how strange and great andmad would the genius of Milton appear. We should wonder at his creativemythological imagination, but we should marvel past all comprehending athis conceptions of the divine order, and the destiny of man. To attemptto understand Shelley without the aid of Godwin is a task hardly morepromising than it would be to read Milton without the Bible. 

The parallel is so close that one is tempted to pursue it further, forthere is between these two poets a close sympathy amid glaringcontrasts. Each admitted in spite of his passion for an ideal world anabsorbing concern in human affairs, and a vehement interest in thecontemporary struggle for liberty. If the one was a Republican Puritanand the other an anarchical atheist, the dress which their passion forliberty assumed was the uniform of the day. Neither was an originalthinker. Each steeped himself in the classics. But more important eventhan the classics in the influences which moulded their minds, were thedogmatic systems to which they attached themselves. It is not the powerof novel and pioneer thought which distinguishes a philosophical from apurely sensuous mind. Shelley no more innovated or created inmetaphysics or politics than did Milton. But each had, with his gift ofimagery, and his power of musical speech, an intellectual view of theuniverse. The name of Milton suggests to us eloquent rhythms and imageswhich pose like Grecian sculpture. But Milton's world was the world asthe grave, gowned men saw it who composed the Westminster Confession. The name of Shelley rings like the dying fall of a song, or floatsbefore our eyes amid the faery shapes of wind-tossed clouds. ButShelley's world was the world of the utilitarian Godwin and themathematical Condorcet. The supremacy of an intellectual vision is not acommon characteristic among poets, but it raises Milton and Shelley tothe choir in which Dante and Goethe are leaders. For Keats beauty wastruth, and that was all he cared to know. Coleridge, indeed, was ametaphysician of some pretensions, but the "honey dew" on which he fedwhen he wrote _Christabel_ and _Kubla Khan_ was not the _Critique ofPure Reason_. But to Shelley _Political Justice_ was the veritable "milkof paradise. " We must drink of it ourselves if we would share hisbanquet. Godwin in short explains Shelley, and it is equally true thatShelley is the indispensable commentary to Godwin. For all that wasliving and human in the philosopher he finds imaginative expression. Hismind was a selective soil, in which only good seed could germinate. Theflowers wear the colour of life and emotion. In the clear light of hisverse, gleaming in their passionate hues, they display for us theirvalues. Some of them, the bees of a working hive will consent tofertilise; from others they will turn decidedly away. Shelley isGodwin's fertile garden. From another standpoint he is the desert whichGodwin laid waste. 

It is, indeed, the commonplace of criticism to insist on the realitywhich the ideal world possessed for Shelley. Other poets haveillustrated thought by sensuous imagery. To Shelley, thought alone wasthe essential thing. A good impulse, a dream, an idea, were for himwhat a Centaur or a Pegasus were for common fancy. He sees in_Prometheus Unbound_ a spirit who

 Speeded hither on the sigh Of one who gave an enemy His plank, then plunged aside to die. 

Another spirit rides on a sage's "dream with plumes of flame"; and athird tells how a poet

 Will watch from dawn to gloom The lake-reflected sun illume, The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom, Nor heed, nor see, what things they be; But from these create he can Forms more real than living man, Nurslings of immortality. 

How naturally from Shelley's imagination flowed the lines about Keats:--

 All he had loved and moulded into thought From shape and hue and odour and sweet sound Lamented Adonais. 

This was no rhetoric, no affectation of fancy. Shelley saw the immortalshapes of "Desires and Adorations" lamenting over the bier of the mortalKeats, because for him an idea or a passion was incomparably more realand more comprehensible than the things of flesh and earth, of whoseexistence the senses persuade us. To such a mind philosophy was not adistant world to be entered with diffident and halting feet, ever readyto retreat at the first alarm of commonsense. It was his dailyhabitation. He lived in it, and guided himself by its intellectualcompass among the perils and wonders of life, as naturally as other menfeel their way by touch. This ardent, sensitive, emotional nature, withall its gift of lyrical speech and passionate feeling, was in fact theideal man of the Godwinian conception, who lives by reason and obeysprinciples. Three men in modern times have achieved a certain fame bytheir rigid obedience to "rational" conceptions of conduct--Thomas Day, who wrote _Sandford and Merton_, Bentham, and Herbert Spencer. But theerratic, fanciful Shelley was as much the enthusiastic slave of reason, as any of these three; and he seemed erratic only because to beperfectly rational is in this world the wildest form of eccentricity. Hecame upon _Political Justice_ while he was still a school-boy at Eton;and his diaries show that there hardly passed a year of his life inwhich he omitted to re-read it. Its phraseology colours his prose; hismind was built upon it, as Milton's was upon the Bible. We hardlyrequire his own confession to assure us of the debt. "The name ofGodwin, " he wrote in 1812, "has been used to excite in me feelings ofreverence and admiration. I have been accustomed to consider him aluminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him. From theearliest period of my knowledge of his principles, I have ardentlydesired to share on the footing of intimacy that intellect which I havedelighted to contemplate in its emanations. Considering then, thesefeelings, you will not be surprised at the inconceivable emotions withwhich I learnt your existence and your dwelling. I had enrolled yourname in the list of the honourable dead. I had felt regret that theglory of your being had passed from this earth of ours. It is not so. You still live, and I firmly believe are still planning the welfare ofhuman kind. "

The enthusiastic youth was to learn that his master's preoccupation waswith concerns more sordid and more pressing than the welfare of humankind; but if close personal intercourse brought some disillusionmentregarding Godwin's private character, it only deepened his intellectualinfluence, and confirmed Shelley's lifelong adhesion to his system. Nocontemporary thinker ever contested Godwin's empire over Shelley'smind; and if in later years Plato claimed an ever-growing share in histhoughts, we must remember that in several of his fundamental tenetsGodwin was a Platonist without knowing it. It is only in his purelypersonal utterances, in the lyrics which rendered a mood or animpression, or in such fancies as the _Witch of Atlas_, that Shelley canescape from the obsession of _Political Justice_. The voice of Godwindoes not disturb us in _The Skylark_, and it is silenced by the violentpassions of _The Cenci_. But in all the more formal and graverutterances of Shelley's genius, from _Queen Mab_ to _Hellas_, itsupplies the theme and Shelley writes the variations. _Queen Mab_, indeed, is nothing but a fervent lad's attempt to state in verse theburden of Godwin's prose. Some passages in it (notably the lines aboutcommerce) are a mere paraphrase or summary of pages from _The Enquirer_or _Political Justice_. In the _Revolt of Islam_, and still more in_Prometheus Unbound_, Shelley's imagination is becoming its own master. The variations are more important, more subtle, more beautiful than thetheme; but still the theme is there, a precise and definite dogma forfancy to embroider. It is only in _Hellas_ that Shelley's power ofnarrative (in Hassan's story), his irrepressible lyrical gift, and hispassion which at length could speak in its own idiom, combine to make amasterpiece which owes to Godwin only some general ideas. If thetranscript became less literal, it was not that the influence had waned. It was rather that Shelley was gaining the full mastery of his ownnative powers of expression. In these poems he assumes or preaches allGodwin's characteristic doctrines, perfectibility, non-resistance, anarchism, communism, the power of reason and the superiority ofpersuasion over force, universal benevolence, and the ascription ofmoral evil to the desolating influence of "positive institution. "

The general agreement is so obvious that one need hardly illustrate it. What is more curious is the habit which Shelley acquired of reproducingeven the minor opinions or illustrations which had struck him in hiscontinual reading of Godwin. When Mammon advises Swellfoot the Tyrant torefresh himself with

 A simple kickshaw by your Persian cook Such as is served at the Great King's second table. The price and pains which its ingredients cost Might have maintained some dozen families A winter or two--not more. 

he is simply making an ironical paraphrase from Godwin. The fine scenein Canto XI. Of the _Revolt of Islam_, in which Laon, confronting thetyrant on his throne, quells by a look and a word a henchman who wasabout to stab him, is a too brief rendering of Godwin's reflections onthe story of Marius and the Executioner (see p. 128). 

 And one more daring, raised his steel anew To pierce the stranger: "What hast thou to do With me, poor wretch?"--calm, solemn and severe That voice unstrung his sinews, and he threw His dagger on the ground, and pale with fear, Sate silently. 

The pages of Shelley are littered with such reminiscences. 

Matthew Arnold said of Shelley that he was "a beautiful and ineffectualangel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain. " One is tempted toretort that to be beautiful is in itself to escape futility, and topeople a void with angels is to be far from ineffectual. But themetaphor is more striking as phrase-making than as criticism. The worldinto which the angel fell, wide-eyed, indignant, and surprised, was nota void. It was a nightmare composed of all the things which to commonmortals are usual, normal, inevitable--oppressions and wars, follies andcrimes, kings and priests, hangmen and inquisitors, poverty and luxury. If he beat his wings in this cage of horrors, it was with the rage andterror of a bird which belongs to the free air. Shelley, Matthew Arnoldheld, was not quite sane. Sanity is a capacity for becoming accustomedto the monstrous. Not time nor grey hairs could bring that kind ofsanity to Shelley's clear-sighted madness. If he must be compared to anangel, Mr. Wells has drawn him for us. He was the angel whom a countryclergyman shot in mistake for a buzzard, in that graceful satire, _TheWonderful Visit_. Brought to earth by this mischance, he saw our folliesand our crimes without the dulling influence of custom. Satirists haveloved to imagine such a being. Voltaire drew him with as much wit asinsight in _L'Ingénu_--the American savage who landed in France, andmade the amazing discovery of civilisation. Shelley had not dropped fromthe clouds nor voyaged from the backwoods, but he seems always to bediscovering civilisation with a fresh wonder and an insatiableindignation. 

One may doubt whether a saint has ever lived more selfless, more devotedto the beauty of virtue; but one quality Shelley lacked which iscommonly counted a virtue. He had none of that imaginative sympathywhich can make its own the motives and desires of other men. Self-interest, intolerance and greed he understood as little as commonmen understand heroism and devotion. He had no mean powers ofobservation. He saw the world as it was, and perhaps he ratherexaggerated than minimised its ugliness. But it never struck him thatits follies and crimes were human failings and the outcome of anythingthat is natural in the species. The doctrines of perfectibility anduniversal benevolence clothed themselves for him in the Godwinianphraseology, but they were the instinctive beliefs of his temperament. So sure was he of his own goodness, so natural was it with him to loveand to be brave, that he unhesitatingly ascribed all the evil of theworld to the working of some force which was unnatural, accidental, anti-human. If he had grown up a mediæval Christian, he would have foundno difficulty in blaming the Devil. The belief was in his heart; theformula was Godwin's. For the wonder, the miracle of all this unnatural, incomprehensible evil in the world, he found a complete explanation inthe doctrine that "positive institutions" have poisoned and distortedthe natural good in man. After a gloomy picture in _Queen Mab_ of allthe oppressions which are done under the sun, he suddenly breaks away toabsolve nature:

 Nature!--No! Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower Even in its tender bud; their influence darts Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins Of desolate society.... Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man Inherits vice and misery, when force And falsehood hang even o'er the cradled babe Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good. 

It is a stimulating doctrine, for if humanity had only to rid itself ofkings and priests, the journey to perfection would be at once brief andeventful. As a sociological theory it is unluckily unsatisfying. Thereis, after all, nothing more natural than a king. He is a zoologicalfact, with his parallel in every herd of prairie dogs. Nor is thereanything much more human than the tendency to convention which gives toinstitutions their rigidity. If force and imposture have had a share inthe making of kings and priests, it is equally true that they are thecreation of the servility and superstition of the mass of men. Theeighteenth century chose to forget that man is a gregarious animal. Oppression and priestcraft are the transitory forms in which the flockhas sought to cement its union. But the modern world is steeped in thelore of anthropology; there is little need to bring its heavy guns tobear upon the slender fabric of Shelley's dream. _Queen Mab_ was aboy's precocious effort, and in later verses Shelley put the case forhis view of evil in a more persuasive form. He is now less concerned todeclare that it is unnatural, than to insist that it flows from defectsin men which are not inherent or irremovable. The view is stated withpessimistic malice by a Fury in _Prometheus Unbound_ after a vision ofslaughter. 

 FURY. 

 Blood thou can'st see, and fire; and can'st hear groans. Worse things unheard, unseen, remain behind. 

 PROMETHEUS. 

 Worse?

 FURY. 

 In each human heart terror survives The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear, All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man's estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare. The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want--worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom. And all best things are thus confused to ill. Many are strong and rich, and would be just, But live among their suffering fellow-men As if none felt; they know not what they do. 

Shelley so separated the good and evil in the world, that he waspresently vexed as acutely as any theist with the problem of accountingfor evil. Paine felt no difficulty in his sharp, positive mind. Hetraced all the wrongs of society to the egoism of priests and kings;and, since he did not assume the fundamental goodness of human nature, it troubled none of his theories to accept the crude primitive fact ofself-interest. What Shelley would really have said in answer to aquestion about the origin of evil, if we had found him in a prosaicmood, it is hard to guess, and the speculation does not interest us. Shelley's prose opinions were of no importance. What we do trace in hispoetry is a tendency, half conscious, uttering itself only in figuresand parables, to read the riddle of the universe as a struggle betweentwo hostile principles. In the world of prose he called himself anatheist. He rejoiced in the name, and used it primarily as a challengeto intolerance. "It is a good word of abuse to stop discussion, " he saidonce to his friend Trelawny, "a painted devil to frighten the foolish, athreat to intimidate the wise and good. I used it to express myabhorrence of superstition. I took up the word as a knight takes up agauntlet in defiance of injustice. "

Shelley was an atheist because Christians used the name of God tosanctify persecution. That was really his ultimate emotional reason. Hismythology, when he came to paint the world in myths, was Manichean. Hiscreed was an ardent dualism, in which a God and an anti-God contend andmake history. But in his mood of revolt it suited him to confuse thenames and the symbols. The snake is everywhere in his poems theincarnation of good, and if we ask why, there is probably no otherreason than that the Hebrew mythology against which he revolted, hadtaken it as the symbol of evil. The legitimate Gods in his Pantheon arealways in the wrong. He belongs to the cosmic party of opposition, andthe Jupiter of his _Prometheus_ is morally a temporarily omnipotentdevil. Like Godwin he felt that the God of orthodoxy was a "tyrant, " andhe revolted against Him, because he condemned the world which He hadmade. 

The whole point of view, as it concerns Christian theology, is statedwith a bitter clearness, in the speech of Ahasuerus in _Queen Mab_. Thefirst Canto of the _Revolt of Islam_ puts the position of dualismwithout reserve:

 Know, then, that from the depths of ages old Two Powers o'er mortal things dominion hold, Ruling the world with a divided lot, Immortal, all-pervading, manifold, Twin Genii, equal Gods--when life and thought Sprang forth, they burst the womb of inessential Nought. 

The good principle was the Morning Star (as though to remind us ofLucifer) until his enemy changed him to the form of a snake. Theanti-God, whom men worship blindly as God, holds sway over our world. Terror, madness, crime, and pain are his creation, and Asia in_Prometheus_ cries aloud--

 Utter his name: a world pining in pain Asks but his name: curses shall drag him down. 

In the sublime mythology of _Prometheus_ the war of God and anti-God isseen visibly, making the horrors of history. As Jupiter's Furies rendthe heart of the merciful Titan chained to his rock on Caucasus, murdersand crucifixions are enacted in the world below. The mythical crueltiesin the clouds are the shadows of man's sufferings below; and they arealso the cause. A mystical parallelism links the drama in Heaven withthe tragedy on earth; we suffer from the malignity of the World's Ruler, and triumph by the endurance of Man's Saviour. 

Nothing could be more absurd than to call Shelley a Pantheist. Pantheismis the creed of conservatism and resignation. Shelley felt the world asstruggle and revolt, and like all the poets, he used Heaven as the vastcanvas on which to paint with a demonic brush an heroic idealisation ofwhat he saw below. It would be interesting to know whether any humanheart, however stout and rebellious, when once it saw the cosmic processas struggle, has ever been able to think of the issue as uncertain. Certainly for Shelley there was never a doubt about the final triumph ofgood. Godwin qualified his agnosticism by supposing that there was atendency in things (he would not call it spiritual, or endow it withmind) which somehow cooperates with us and assures the victory of life(see p. 184). One seems to meet this vague principle, this reverendThing, in Shelley's Demogorgon, the shapeless, awful negation whichoverthrows the maleficent Jupiter, and with his fall inaugurates thegolden age. The strange name of Demogorgon has probably its origin inthe clerical error of some mediæval copyist, fumbling with the scholiaof an anonymous grammarian. One can conceive that it appealed toShelley's wayward fancy because it suggested none of the traditionaltheologies; and certainly it has a mysterious and venerable sound. Shelley can describe It only as Godwin describes his principle by aseries of negatives. 

 I see a mighty darkness Filling the seat of power, and rays of gloom Dart round, as light from the meridian sun, Ungazed upon and shapeless; neither limb, Nor form, nor outline; yet we feel it is A living spirit. 

It is the eternal =X= which the human spirit always assumes when it is ata loss to balance its equations. Demogorgon is, because if It were not, our strivings would be a battle in the mist, with no clear trumpet-notethat promised triumph. Shelley, turning amid his singing to thesupremest of all creative work, the making of a mythology, invents hisGod very much as those detested impostors, the primitive priests, haddone. He gives Humanity a friendly Power as they had endowed their tribewith a god of battles. Humanity at grips with chaos is curiously like anigger clan in the bush. It needs a fetish of victory. But a poet'smythology is to be judged by its fruits. A faith is worth the cathedralit builds. A myth is worth the poem it inspires. 

If Shelley's ultimate view of reality is vague, a thing to be shadowedin myths and hinted in symbols, there is nothing indefinite in his viewof the destinies of mankind. Here he marched behind Godwin, and Godwinhated vagueness. His intellect had assimilated all the steps in theargument for perfectibility. It emerges in places in its most dogmaticform. Institutions make us what we are, and to free us from theirshackles is to liberate virtue and unleash genius. He pauses midway inthe preface to _Prometheus_ to assure us that, if England were dividedinto forty republics, each would produce philosophers and poets as greatand numerous as those of Athens. The road to perfection, however, is notthrough revolution, but by the gradual extirpation of error. When hewrites in prose, he expresses himself with all the rather affectedintellectualism of the Godwinian psychology. "Revenge and retaliation, "he remarks in the preface to _The Cenci_ "are pernicious _mistakes_. "But temperament counts for something even in a disciple so devout asShelley. He had an intellectual view of the world; but, when once therhythm of his musical verse had excited his mind to be itself, the forceand simplicity of his emotion transfuse and transform theseabstractions. Godwin's "universal benevolence" was with him an ardentaffectionate love for his kind. Godwin's cold precept that it was theduty of an illuminated understanding to contribute towards the progressof enquiry, by arguing about perfection and the powers of the mind inselect circles of friends who meet for debate, but never (virtueforbids) for action, became for him a zealous missionary call. 

One smiles, with his irreverent yet admiring biographers, at the earlyescapades of the married boy--the visit to Dublin at the height of theagitation for Catholic emancipation, the printing of his Address to theIrish Nation, and his trick of scattering it by flinging copies from hisbalcony at passers-by, his quaint attempts to persuade grave Catholicnoblemen that what they ought really to desire was a total and rapidtransformation of the whole fabric of society, his efforts to found anassociation for the moral regeneration of mankind, and his elfishamusement of launching the truth upon the waters in the form ofpamphlets sealed up in bottles. Shelley at this age perpetrated "rags"upon the universe, much as commonplace youths make hay of their fellows'rooms. It is amusing to read the solemn letters in which Godwin, complacently accepting the post of mentor, tells Shelley that he ismuch too young to reform the world, urges him to acquire a vicariousmaturity by reading history, and refers him to _Political Justicepassim_ for the arguments which demonstrate the error of any attempt toimprove mankind by forming political associations. 

It is questionable how far the world has to thank Godwin for dissuadingardent young men from any practical effort to realise their ideals. Itis just conceivable that, if the generation which hailed him as prophethad been stimulated by him to do something more than fold its hands inan almost superstitious veneration for the Slow Approach of Truth, theremight have arisen under educated leaders some movement less class-boundthan Whig Reform, less limited than the Corn Law agitation, and moreintelligent than Chartism. But, if politics lost by Godwin's quietism, literature gained. It was Godwin's mission in life to save poets fromBotany Bay; he rescued Shelley, as he had rescued Southey and Coleridge. It was by scattering his pity and his sympathy on every living creaturearound him, and squandering his fortune and his expectations in charity, while he dodged the duns and lived on bread and tea, that Shelleyfollowed in action the principles of universal benevolence. Godwinomitted the beasts; but Shelley, practising vegetarianism and buyingcrayfish in order to return them to the river, realised the "boast" ofthe poet in _Alastor_:--

 If no bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And cherished these my kindred--

We hear of his gifts of blankets to the poor lace-makers at Marlow, andmeet him stumbling home barefoot in mid-winter because he had given hisboots to a poor woman. 

Perhaps the most characteristic picture of this aspect of Shelley isLeigh Hunt's anecdote of a scene on Hampstead Heath. Finding a poorwoman in a fit on the top of the Heath, Shelley carries her in his armsto the lighted door of the nearest house, and begs for shelter. Thehouseholder slams it in his face, with an "impostors swarm everywhere, "and a "Sir, your conduct is extraordinary. "

"Sir, " cried Shelley, "I am sorry to say that _your_ conduct is notextraordinary.... It is such men as you who madden the spirits and thepatience of the poor and wretched; and if ever a convulsion comes inthis country (which is very probable), recollect what I tell you. Youwill have your house, that you refuse to put this miserable woman into, burnt over your head. "

It must have been about this very time that the law of England (quitecontent to regard the owner of the closed door as a virtuous citizen)decided that the Shelley who carried this poor stranger into shelter, fetched a doctor, and out of his own poverty relieved her direr need, was unfit to bring up his own children. 

If Shelley allowed himself to be persuaded by Godwin to abandon hismissionary adventures, he pursued the ideal in his poems. Whether byPlatonic influence, or by the instinct of his own temperament, he moveshalf-consciously from the Godwinian notion that mankind are to bereasoned into perfection. The contemplation of beauty is with him thefirst stage in the progress towards reasoned virtue. "My purpose, " hewrites in the preface to _Prometheus_, "has been ... To familiarise ... Poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence; awarethat, until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, andendure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon thehighway of life, which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust, although they would bear the harvest of his happiness. " It was for wantof virtue, as Mary Wollstonecraft reflected, writing sadly after theTerror, that the French Revolution had failed. The lesson of all thehorrors of oppression and reaction which Shelley described, the comfortof all the listening spirits who watch from their mental eyries the slowprogress of mankind to perfection, the example of martyredpatriots--these tend always to the moral which Demogorgon sums up at theend of the unflagging, unearthly beauties of the last triumphant act of_Prometheus Unbound_:

 To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or night; To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates; Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent; This like thy glory, Titan! is to be Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory. 

To suffer, to forgive, to love, but above all, to defy--that was forShelley the whole duty of man. 

In two peculiarities, which he constantly emphasised, Shelley's view ofprogress differed at once from Godwin's conception, and from the notionof a slow evolutionary growth which the men of to-day considerhistorical he traced the impulse which is to lead mankind to perfection, to the magnetic leading of chosen and consecrated spirits. He saw theprocess of change not as a slow evolution (as moderns do), nor yet asthe deliberate discarding of error at the bidding of rational argument(as Godwin did), but rather as a sudden emotional conversion. Themissionary is always the light-bringer. "Some eminent in virtue shallstart up, " he prophesies in _Queen Mab_. The _Revolt of Islam_, sopuzzling to the uninitiated reader by the wilful inversions of itsmythology, and its history which seems to belong to no conceivable raceof men, becomes, when one grasps its underlying ideas, a luminous epicof revolutionary faith, precious if only because it is told in thatelaborately musical Spenserian stanza which no poet before or afterShelley has handled with such easy mastery. Their mission to free theircountrymen comes to Laon and Cythna while they are still children, brooding over the slavery of modern Greece amid the ruins of a freepast. They dream neither of teaching nor of fighting. They are thewinged children of Justice and Truth, whose mere words can scatter thethrones of the oppressor, and trample the last altar in the dust. It isenough to speak the name of Liberty in a ship at sea, and all the coastsaround it will thrill with the rumour of her name. In one moving, eloquent harangue, Cythna converts the sailors of the ship, laden withslaves and the gains of commerce, into the pioneers of her army. Shepaints to them the misery of their own lot, and then appeals to thecentral article of revolutionary faith:

 This need not be; ye might arise and will That gold should lose its power and thrones their glory. That love which none may bind be free to fill The world like light; and evil faith, grown hoary With crime, be quenched and die. 

"Ye might arise and will"--it was the inevitable corollary of the facileanalysis which traced all the woes of mankind not to "nature, " but tokings, priests, and institutions. Shelley's missionaries of libertypreach to a nation of slaves, as the apostles of the Salvation Armypreach in the slums to creatures reared in degradation, the samemesmeric appeal. Conversion is a psychological possibility, and thehistory of revolutions teaches its limitations and its power asinstructively as the history of religion. It breaks down not because menare incapable of the sudden effort that can "arise and will, " butrather because to render its effects permanent, it must proceed toregiment the converts in organised associations, which speedily developall the evils that have ruined the despotism it set out to overthrow. 

The interest of this revolutionary epic lies largely in the marriage ofGodwin's ideas with Mary Wollstonecraft's, which in the secondgeneration bears its full imaginative fruit. The most eloquent versesare those which describe Cythna's leadership of the women in thenational revolt, and enforce the theme "Can man be free, if woman be aslave?" Not less characteristic is the Godwinian abhorrence of violence, and the Godwinian trust in the magic of courageous passivity. Laon findsthe revolutionary hosts about to slaughter their vanquished oppressors, and persuades them to mercy and fraternity with the appeal. 

 O wherefore should ill ever flow from ill And pain still keener pain for ever breed. 

He pardons and spares the tyrant himself; and Cythna shames the slaveswho are sent to bind her, until they weep in a sudden perception of thebeauty of virtue and courage. When the reaction breaks at length uponthe victorious liberators, they stand passive to be hewn down, asShelley, in the _Masque of Anarchy_, written after Peterloo, advisedthe English reformers to do. 

 With folded arms and steady eyes, And little fear and less surprise, Look upon them as they slay, Till their rage has died away. 

 Then they will return with shame To the place from which they came, And the blood thus shed will speak In hot blushes on their cheek. 

The simple stanzas might have been written by Blake. There is somethingin the primitive Christianity of this aggressive Atheist which breathesthe childlike innocence of the Kingdom of Heaven. Shelley dreamed of "anation made free by love. " With a strange mystical insight, he steppedbeyond the range of the Godwinian ethics, when he conceived of hishumane missionaries as victims who offer themselves a living sacrificefor the redemption of mankind. Prometheus chained to his rock, becausehe loved and defied, by some inscrutable magic of destiny, brings atlast by his calm endurance the consummation of the Golden Age. Laonwalks voluntarily on to the pile which the Spanish inquisitor had heapedfor him; and Cythna flings herself upon the flames in a lastaffirmation of the power of self-sacrifice and the beauty ofcomradeship. 

Thrice Shelley essayed to paint the state of perfection which mankindmight attain, when once it should "arise and will. " The first of thethree pictures is the most literally Godwinian. It is the boyish sketchof _Queen Mab_, with pantisocracy faithfully touched in, and Godwin'sspeculations on the improvement of the human frame suggested in a fewpregnant lines. One does not feel that Shelley's mind is even yet itsown master in the firmer and maturer picture which concludes the thirdact of _Prometheus Unbound_. He is still repeating a lesson, and itcalls forth less than the full powers of his imagination. The picture ofperfection itself is cold, negative, and mediocre. The real genius ofthe poet breaks forth only when he allows himself in the fourth act tosing the rapture of the happy spirits who "bear Time to his tomb ineternity, " while they circle in lyrical joy around the liberated earth. There sings Shelley. The picture itself is a faithful illustrationetched with a skilful needle to adorn the last chapter of _PoliticalJustice_. Evil is once more and always something factitious andunessential. The Spirit of the Earth sees the "ugly human shapes andvisages" which men had worn in the old bad days float away through theair like chaff on the wind. They were no more than masks. Thrones arekingless, and forthwith men walk in upright equality, neither fawningnor trembling. Republican sincerity informs their speech:

 None talked that common false cold hollow talk Which makes the heart deny the yes it breathes. 

Women are "changed to all they dared not be, " and "speak the wisdom oncethey could not think. " "Thrones, altars, judgment-seats and prisons, "and all the "tomes of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance" cumber theground like the unnoticed ruins of a barbaric past. 

 The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king Over himself; just, gentle, wise: but man Passionless. 

The story ends there, and if we do not so much as wait for the assurancethat man passionless, tribeless, and nationless lived happily everafterwards, it is because we are unable to feel even this faint interestin his destiny. There is something amiss with an ideal which isconstrained to express itself in negatives. What should be the climax ofa triumphant argument becomes its refutation. To reduce ourselves tothis abstract quintessential man might be euthanasia. It would not beparadise. 

The third of Shelley's visions of perfection is the climax of _Hellas_. One feels in attempting to make about _Hellas_ any statement in baldprose, the same sense of baffled incompetence that a modest mindexperiences in attempting to describe music. One reads what the criticshave written about Beethoven's Heroic Symphony, to close the pagewondering that men with ears should have dared to write it. Theinsistent rhythm beats in your blood, the absorbing melodies obsess yourbrain, and you turn away realising that emotion, when it can find achannel of sense, has a power which defies the analytic understanding. _Hellas_, in a sense, is absolute poetry, as the "Eroica" is absolutemusic. Ponder a few lines in one of the choruses which seem to convey adefinite idea, and against your will the elaborate rhythms and rhymeswill carry you along, until thought ceases and only the music and thepicture hold your imagination. 

And yet Shelley meant something as certainly as Beethoven did. Nowhereis his genius so realistic, so closely in touch with contemporary fact, yet nowhere does he soar so easily into his own ideal world. Heconceived it while Mavrocordato, about to start to fight for theliberation of Greece, was paying daily visits to Shelley's circle atPisa. The events in Turkey, now awful, now hopeful, were before him ascrude facts in the newspaper. The historians of classical Greece werehis continual study. As he steeped himself in Plato, a world of idealforms opened before him in a timeless heaven as real as history, asactual as the newspapers. _Hellas_ is the vision of a mind which touchesfact through sense, but makes of sense the gate and avenue into animmortal world of thought. Past and present and future are fused in oneglowing symphony. The Sultan is no more real than Xerxes, and the goldenconsummation glitters with a splendour as dazzling and as present as theAge of Pericles. For Shelley, this denial of time had become a consciousdoctrine. Berkeley and Plato had become for him in his later yearsinfluences as intimate as Godwin. Again and again in his later poems, heturns from the cruelties and disappointments of the world, from deathand decay and failure, no longer with revolt and anger, but with aserene contempt. Thought is the only reality; time with its appearanceof mortality is the dream and the illusion. Says Ahasuerus in _Hellas_:

 The future and the past are idle shadows Of thought's eternal flight. 

The moral rings out at the end of "The Sensitive Plant" with an almostconversational simplicity;

 Death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery. 

Most eloquent of all are the familiar lines in _Adonais_:

 'Tis we who lost in stormy visions keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, and again:

 The One remains, the many change and pass. Heaven's light for ever shines, earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity. 

In all the musical and visionary glory of _Hellas_ we seem to hear asubtle dialogue. It never reaches a conclusion. It never issues in adogma. The oracle is dumb, and the end of it all is rather like aprayer. At one moment Shelley toys with the dreary sublimity of theStoic notion of world-cycles. The world in the Stoic cosmogony followedits destined course, until at last the elemental fire consumed it in thesecular blaze, which became for mediæval Christianity the _Dies irae_. And then once more it rose from the conflagration to repeat its ownhistory again, and yet again, and for ever with an ineluctable fidelity. That nightmare haunts Shelley in _Hellas_:

 Worlds on worlds are rolling ever From creation to decay, Like the bubbles on a river, Sparkling, bursting, borne away. 

The thought returns to him in the final chorus like the "motto" of asymphony; and he sings it in a triumphant major key:

 The world's great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn. Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream. 

He is filled with the afflatus of prophecy, and there flow from hislips, as if in improvisation, surely the most limpid, the mostspontaneous stanzas in our language:

 A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far. 

He sings happily and, as it were, incautiously of Tempe and Argo, ofOrpheus and Ulysses, and then the jarring note of fear is heard:

 O write no more the tale of Troy If earth Death's scroll must be, Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free. 

He has turned from the empty abstraction of the Godwinian vision ofperfection. He dissolves empires and faiths, it is true. But hisimagination calls for action and movement. The New Philosophy had drivenhistory out of the picture. This lyrical vision restores it, whole, complete, and literal. The wealth of the concrete takes its revenge uponthe victim of abstraction. The men of his golden age are no longertribeless and nationless. They are Greeks. He has peopled his future;but, as the picture hardens into detail, he seems to shrink from it. That other earlier theme of his symphony recurs. His chorus had sung:

 Revenge and wrong bring forth their kind. The foul cubs like their parents are, Their den is in their guilty mind, And conscience feeds them with despair. 

Some end there must be to the _perpetuum mobile_ of wrong and revenge. And yet it seems to be in human affairs the very principle of motion. He ends with a cry and a prayer, and a clouded vision. The infinity ofevil must be stayed, but what if its cessation means extinction?

 O cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! Drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past O might it die, or rest at last. 

Never were there simpler verses in a great song. But he were a bold manwho would pretend to know quite certainly what they mean. Shelley is notsure whether his vision of perfection will be embodied in the earth. Fora moment he seems to hope that Greece will renew her glories. For onefleeting instant--how ironical the vision seems to us--he conceives thatshe may be re-incarnated in America. But there is a deeper doubt thanthis in the prophet's mind. He is not sure that he wants to see theGolden Age founded anew in the perilous world of fact. There is apattern of the perfect society laid up in Heaven, or if that phrase byfamiliarity has lost its meaning, let us say rather that the Republicexists firmly founded in the human mind itself:

 But Greece and her foundations are Built below the tide of war, Based on the crystalline sea Of thought and its eternity. 

Again, and yet again, he tells us that the heavenly city, the NewAthens, "the kingless continents, sinless as Eden" shine in no commonday, beside no earthly sea:

 If Greece must be A wreck, yet shall its fragments reassemble, And build themselves impregnably In a diviner clime, To Amphionic music on some cape sublime Which frowns above the idle foam of Time. 

Is it only an eloquent phrase, which satisfies us, by its beautifulwords, we know not why, as the chords that make the "full close" inmusic content us? Or shall we re-interpret it in our own prose? Whereany mind strives after justice, where any soul suffers and loves anddefies, there is the ideal Republic. 

 * * * * *

We have moved from Dr. Price's sermon to Shelley's chorus. The eloquentold man, preaching in the first flush of hope that came with the newtime, conceived that his eyes had seen the great salvation. The day oftyrants and priests was already over, and before the earth closed on hisgrave, a free Europe would be linked in a confederacy that had abolishedwar. A generation passed, and the winged victory is now a strugglinghope, her pinions singed with the heat of battle, her song mingled withthe rumour of massacre, speeding, a fugitive from fact, to the divinerclimes of an ideal world. The logic of the revolution has worked to itspredestined conclusion. It dreamed too eagerly of the end. It thought inindictments. It packed the present on its tumbrils, and cleared away thepast with its dialectical guillotine. When the present was condemned andthe past buried, the future had somehow eluded it. It executed themother, and marvelled that the child should die. 

The human mind can never be satisfied with the mere assurance thatsooner or later the golden years will come. The mere lapse of time is initself intolerable. If our waking life and our years of action are toregain a meaning, we must perceive that the process of evolution isitself significant and interesting. We are to-day so penetrated withthat thought, that the notion of a state of perfection in the futureseems to us as inconceivable and as little interesting as Rousseau'smyth of a state of innocence in the past. We know very well that ourideal, whether we see it in the colours of Plato or Godwin or WilliamMorris, does but measure the present development of our faculties. Longbefore the dream is realised in fact, a new horizon will have beenunfolded before the imagination of mankind. 

What is of value in this endless process is precisely the unfolding ofideals which record themselves, however imperfectly, in institutions, and still more the developing sense of comradeship and sympathy whichlinks us in relations of justice and love with every creature thatfeels. We are old enough to pass lightly over the enthusiastic paradoxesthat intoxicated the youth of the progressive idea. It is a truth thatoutworn institutions fetter and dwarf the mind of man. It is also atruth that institutions have moulded and formed that mind. To condemnthe past is in the same breath to blast the future. The true basis forthat piety towards our venerable inheritance which Burke preached, isthat it has made for us the possibility of advance. 

But our strivings would be languid, our march would be slow, were it notfor the revolutionary leaven which Godwin's generation set fermenting. They taught how malleable and plastic is the human mind. They saw thatby a resolute effort to change the environment of institutions andcustoms which educate us, we can change ourselves. They liberated us notso much from "priests and kings" as from the deadlier tyranny of thebelief that human nature, with all its imperfections, is an innatecharacter which it were vain to hope to reform. Their teaching is atonic to the will, a reminder still eloquent, still bracing, that amongthe forces which make history the chief is the persuasion of theunderstanding, the conscious following of a rational ideal. From muchthat is iconoclastic and destructive in their ideal we may turn awayunconvinced. There remain its ardent statement of the duty of humanity, which shames our practice after a century of progress, and its faith inthe efficacy of unregimented opinion to supersede brute force. Theytaught a lesson which posterity has but half learned. We shall be thericher for returning to them, as much by what we reject as by what weembrace. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL

LECKY. _History of England in the 18th Century. _

LESLIE STEPHEN. --_History of English Thought in the 18th Century. _

OLIVER ELTON.. --_A Survey of English Literature. _

EDWARD DOWDEN--_The French Revolution and English Literature. _

The most vivid impression of the period from the standpoint of Godwin'sCircle is conveyed in the _Memoirs_ of Thomas Holcroft edited byHazlitt, and in Hazlitt's portraits of Godwin, Malthus and Mackintosh in_The Spirit of the Age_ (Everyman's Library). 

Of the opposite way of thinking the one immortal record is Burke's_Reflections on the French Revolution_. Lord Morley's _Burke_ (EnglishMen of Letters) should be read, and the eloquent exposition by Lord HughCecil (_Conservatism_) in this (H. U. L. ) series. 

The main works of the French revolutionary thinkers have been issued inDent's series of French classics. For study and pleasure consult LordMorley's books on Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. 

The details given in the first chapter concerning the LondonCorresponding Society are based on its pamphlets in the British Museum. 

THOMAS PAINE

Paine's writings are published in cheap editions by the RationalistPress, and may be had bound in one volume. The same press issues a cheapedition of the admirable _Life_ by Dr. Moncure D. Conway. 

WILLIAM GODWIN

Godwin's works are now procurable only in old libraries, with theexception of _Caleb Williams_. _Political Justice_ should be read in thesecond edition (1796), which is maturer than the first and more livelythan the third. A modern summary of it by Mr. Salt, with the full textof the last section "On Property, " was published by Swan, Sonnenschein &Co. This selection emphasises his communism, but hardly does fulljustice to the novelty of his anarchist opinions. Full biographical dataare to be found in _William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries_, byMr. Kegan Paul, which contains a readable collection of letters. Thereis a painstaking and elaborate study in French by Raymond Gourg (FélixAlcan, 1908) and a stimulating little essay in German from the anarchiststandpoint (_William Godwin, der Theoretiker des KommunistischenAnarchismus. _ Von Pierre Ramus. Leipzig. Dietrich). 

For a modern statement of Anarchist Communism read Kropotkin's _TheConquest of Bread_ (Chapman and Hall). 

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

_The Rights of Woman_ has been reissued in Everyman's Library. Thevolume of _Selections_ in the Regent Library (Herbert and Daniel) waswell edited by Miss Jebb, and may be recommended, for MaryWollstonecraft rather gains than loses by compression. For her life Mr. Kegan Paul's _William Godwin_ should be consulted. The edition of the_Rights_, published by T. Fisher Unwin, contains an admirable criticalstudy of Mrs. Fawcett. There is no general history of the so-called"feminist" movement, and in English books the French pioneers areignored. Mr. Lyon Blease has some good historical chapters in _TheEmancipation of English Women_. 

SHELLEY

Shelley literature is a library in itself. The standard edition isForman's; the standard biography is the tolerant, human, gossipy _Life_by Professor Dowden. The general reader can use no better edition thanMrs. Shelley's. Of critical essays the most notable are Matthew Arnold'soddly unsympathetic essay, and Sir Leslie Stephen's informing buthostile study on _Godwin and Shelley_ ("Hours in a Library"). ProfessorSantayana may be mentioned among the few critics who have realised thatShelley thought before he sang (_Winds of Doctrine_). Incomparably thebest of all the critical essays is the little monograph by FrancisThompson (Burns and Oates). 

_POSTSCRIPT_, 1942

Since this book was written two indispensable aids to the study ofGodwin and his Circle have been published. (1) An adequate modern lifeof Godwin is now available: _The Life of William Godwin_ by Ford K. Brown (J. M. Dent & Sons). The work could hardly have been better done. (2) Mr. Elbridge Colby has given us in two volumes a modern edition of_The Life of Thomas Holcroft_ (Constable & Co. ) by himself withHazlitt's continuation. Mr. Colby's scholarly notes and introduction addgreatly to its value. 

A modern edition of Godwin's _Political Justice_ (Knopf, PoliticalScience Classics) is now available, but cannot be recommended. Theeditor has abbreviated it by capricious omissions. 

_The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers_ by Carl L. Becker (Oxford University Press, also Yale) is a most readable study ofthe political thought of the period. See also Professor H. J. Laski's_The Rise of European Liberalism_ (Allen & Unwin) and _Voltaire_ by H. N. Brailsford in this series. 

INDEX

 _Age of Reason_, 75

 Arnold, Matthew, 184, 220

 Arnot, 174

 Baldwin, Edward, 172

 Barbauld, Mrs. , 192

 Blake, Wm. , 35, 66

 Bright, John, 115

 Burke, 15-26, 63

 Burney, Fanny, 18

 _Caleb Williams_, 143

 Calvinism, 79

 Chesterfield, Lord, 195

 Clairmont, Mrs. (afterwards Godwin), 169-70

 Clairmont, Jane, 169

 Coleridge, S. T. , 51-55, 86, 156, 173

 Condorcet, 22, 23, 27, 92, 109, 110, 197

 Convention, English, 44 ---- Scottish, 41-43

 Cooper, Thomas, 83, 84

 Corresponding Society (see London)

 Dundas, 40, 44

 _Enquirer, The_, 145

 _Essays_ (on Religion) by Wm. Godwin, 180

 Fénelon, 130

 _Fleetwood_, 176

 Gatton, Borough of, 25

 Gerrald, Joseph, 43, 88, 89

 Gillray, 155

 Godwin, William: as historian 22; letter on trial of twelve Reformers, 46; experience during Revolution, 49-51; influence on Coleridge and Southey, 51-55; relation to Paine, 64, 65, 71; relation to Holcroft, 84-88; early life, 78; _Political Justice_, 89-141; Marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft, 149; _Caleb Williams_, 143; controversies, 155; estimate of his work, 163; second marriage and later life, 163; later works, 172; relations with Shelley, 174; death, 178; religious views, 179; intellectual influence on Shelley, 216 _seq. _

 Godwin, William (junior), 170

 Godwin, Mrs. (_see_ Wollstonecraft and Clairmont)

 Hardy, Thomas, 33, 37, 39, 41, 44

 Hazlitt, 9, 78, 152, 159, 168, 173

 Helvétius, 31, 39, 96, 99, 100, 102, 105, 120, 166, 171, 179, 187

 Hervé, 119

 Holbach, Baron d', 31, 196

 Holcroft, Thomas, quoted, 31; early life of, 35, 36; trial of, 44, 45, 48; association with Paine, 65; Influence on Godwin, 84-88

 Imlay, Fanny, 148, 169

 Imlay, Gilbert, 148

 Jones, Sir Wm. , 37

 Kames, Lord, 193

 Kant, 11

 Lafayette, 62, 64

 Lamb, Charles, 173

 Leibnitz, 11, 95

 London Corresponding Society, 33-48, 66

 Lovell, R. , 53

 Lytton, Bulwer, 174

 Mably, 87

 Mackintosh, Sir James, 16, 157

 Malthus, 29, 158

 Margarot, 42

 Marius, 128, 220

 Milton, 192, 212

 Montesquieu, 31, 90, 97

 Muir, 42

 Napoleon, 154

 Paine, Thomas, 16, 34, 39, 56; biographical sketch, 57-68; political views 69-75; religious views, 75-77

 Palmer, 42

 Pantisocracy, 51-55

 Parr, Rev. Dr. , 157

 Patrickson, 174

 Pitt, 40, 44, 66, 91

 Plato, Platonism, 102, 104, 126, 131, 197, 218, 234, 243

 Plutarch, 182

 _Political Justice_, 89-141

 Price, Rev. Dr. , 10-15, 248

 Priestley, 11, 39, 81, 171

 _Rights of Man_, Paine's, 63, 69

 _Rights of Woman--a Vindication of the_, 148 _seq. _

 Ritson, 35, 170

 Roosevelt, Theodore, 75

 Rousseau, 21, 101, 191, 194

 Sandemanians, 79

 _Sepulchres, Godwin's Essay on_, 22

 Shelley, 9, 104, 168; personal relations with Godwin, 174; intellectual outlook, 212; debt to Godwin, 216; his mythology, 225; his view of human perfectibility, 230

 Shelley, Mary, née Godwin, 144, 153, 169, 176, 180

 Sheridan, 82

 Sinclair, 42

 Skirving, 42

 Socrates, Socratic (_see_ Plato)

 Southey, 51-55, 151

 _St. Leon_, 160, 172

 Stanhope, Earl, 12

 Swift, 131, 193

 Tolstoy, 120, 138

 Tooke, Horne, 34, 43, 44, 46

 Turgot, 28

 _Vindication of the Rights of Women_ (_see Rights_)

 Voltaire, 95, 221

 Wedgwood, 170

 Weissmann, 98

 Wells, H. G. , 221

 Westbrook, Harriet, 175

 Windham, 48

 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 16; early life, 147; marriage and death, 149-154; her personality, 202; her originality, 199; summary of "Rights, " 204; relation to French Revolution, 186-199; reflection in Shelley, 238

 Wordsworth, 8, 51, 157

Transcriber's Note:

Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_. 

Passages in bold font are indicated by =bold=. 

The following misprint has been corrected: "magnaminity" corrected to "magnanimity" (page 124) "subjecttion" corrected to "subjection" (page 187) "Gilray" corrected to "Gillray" (page 255)

All other spelling and punctuation is presented as in the original. 

Additional spacing after some of the quotes is intentional to indicateboth the end of a quotation and the beginning of a new paragraph aspresented in the original text.