Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle Part 4

The picture of this easy-going Utopia, in which something will always turn up for n.o.body's child, concludes with two sections which exhibit in nice juxtaposition the extravagance and the prudence of G.o.dwin. We may look forward to great physical changes. We shall acquire an empire over our bodies, and may succeed in making even our reflex notions conscious.

We must get rid of sleep, one of the most conspicuous infirmities of the human frame. Life can be prolonged by intellect. We are sick and we die because in a certain sense we consent to suffer these accidents. When the limit of population is reached, men will refuse to propagate themselves further. Society will be a people of men, and not of children, adult, veteran, experienced; and truth will no longer have to recommence her career at the end of thirty years. Meanwhile let the friends of justice avoid violence, eschew ma.s.sacres, and remember that prudent handling will win even rich men for the cause of human perfection.

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

CHAPTER V

G.o.dWIN AND THE REACTION

_Political Justice_ brought its author instant fame. Society was for a moment intimidated by the boldness of the attack. The world was in a generous mood, and men did not yet resent G.o.dwin's flattering suggestion that they were demiG.o.ds who disguised their own greatness. He had a.s.sailed all the accepted dogmas and venerable inst.i.tutions of contemporary civilisation, from monarchy to marriage, but it was only after several years that society recovered its breath, and turned to rend him. He became an oracle in an ever-widening circle of friends, and was navely pleased to find, when he went into the country, that even in remote villages his name was known. He was everywhere received as a sage, and some years pa.s.sed before he discovered how much of this deference was a polite disguise for the vulgar curiosity that attends a sudden celebrity. Prosperity was a wholesome stimulus. He was "exalted in spirits," and became for a time (he tells us) "more of a talker than I was before, or have been since."

In this mood he wrote the one book which has lived as a popular possession, and held its place among the cla.s.sics which are frequently reprinted. _Caleb Williams_ (published in 1794) is incomparably the best of his novels, and the one great work of fiction in our language which owes its existence to the fruitful union of the revolutionary and romantic movements. It spoke to its own day as Hugo's _Les Miserables_ and Tolstoy's _Resurrection_ spoke to later generations. It is as its preface tells us, "a general review of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man." It conveys in the form of an eventful personal history the essence of the criticism against society, which had inspired _Political Justice_.

G.o.dwin's imagination was haunted by a persistent nightmare, in which a lonely individual finds arrayed against him all the prejudices of society, all the forms of convention, all the forces of law. They hurl themselves upon him in a pitiless pursuit, and wherever he flees, the pervading corruptions, the ingrained cowardices of over-governed mankind beset his feet like gins and pitfalls. It was a hereditary nightmare, and with a less pedestrian imagination, his daughter, Mary Sh.e.l.ley, used the same theme of a remorseless pursuit in _Frankenstein_.

Caleb Williams, a promising lad of humble birth but good parts, is broken at the outset of his career, in the tremendous clash between two formidable characters, who represent, each in his own way, the corruptions of aristocracy. Mr. Tyrrel is a brutal English squire, a coa.r.s.e and domineering bully, whom birth and wealth arm with the power to crush his dependents. Mr. Falkland personifies the spirit of chivalry at its best and its worst. All his native humanity and acquired polish is in the end turned to cruelty by the influence of a worship of honour and reputation which make him "the fool of fame." As the absorbing story unfolds itself, we realise (if indeed we are not too much enthralled by the plot to notice the moral) that all the inst.i.tutions of society and law are nicely adjusted to give the moral errors of the great their utmost scope. Society is a vast sounding-board which echoes the first whispers of their private folly, until it swells into a deafening chorus of cruelty and wrong. There are vivid scenes in a prison which give life to G.o.dwin's reasoned criticisms of our penal methods. There is a band of outlaws whose rude natural virtues remind us, by contrast with the corruption of all the officers of the law, how much less demoralising it is to revolt against a crazy system of coercion than to become its tool.

To describe the book in greater detail would be to destroy the pleasure of the reader. It is a forensic novel. It sets out to frame an indictment of society, and a novelist who imposes this task on himself must in the end create an impression of improbability by the partiality with which he selects his material. But there is fire enough in the telling, and interest enough in the plot to silence our criticisms while we read. _Caleb Williams_ is a capital story; it is also a living and humane book, which conveys with rare power and reasoned emotion the revolt of a generous mind against the oppressions of feudalism and the stupidities of the criminal law.

Three years later (1797) G.o.dwin once more restated the main positions of _Political Justice_. _The Enquirer_ is a volume of essays, which range easily over a great variety of subjects from education to English style.

His opinions have neither advanced nor receded, and the mood is still one of a.s.surance, enthusiasm, and hope. The only noteworthy change is in the style. _Political Justice_ belongs to the generation of Gibbon, eloquent, elaborate and periodic at its best; heavy and slightly verbose at its worst. With _The Enquirer_ we are just entering the generation of Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt. The language is simpler and more flexible, the construction of the sentences more varied, the mood more vivacious, and the tone more conversational. The best things in the book belong to that social psychology, the observation of men in cla.s.ses and professions, in which this age excelled. There is an outspoken attack on the clergy, as a cla.s.s of men who have vowed themselves to study without enquiry, who must reason for ever towards a conclusion fixed by authority, whose very survival depends on the perennial stationariness of their understanding.

Another essay attempts a vivacious criticism of "common honesty," the moral standard of the average decent citizen, a code of negative virtues and moral mediocrity which is content to avoid the obvious unsocial sins and concerns itself but little to enforce positive benevolence. The reader who would meet G.o.dwin at his best should turn to the essay _On Servants_. Starting from the universal reluctance of the upper and middle cla.s.ses to allow their children to a.s.sociate closely with servants, he enlarges the confession of the systematic degradation of a cla.s.s which this separation involves, into a condemnation of our whole social structure.

The year 1797 marks the culmination of G.o.dwin's career, and it would have been well for his fame if it had been its end. He had just pa.s.sed his fortieth year; he had made the most notable contribution to English political thought since the appearance of the _Wealth of Nations_; he had won the grat.i.tude and respect of his friends by his intervention in the trial of the Twelve Reformers. He was famous, prosperous, popular, and his good fortune brought to his calm temperament the stimulus of excitement and high spirits which it needed. There came to him in this year the crown of a n.o.ble love. It was in the winter of 1791 that he first met Mary Wollstonecraft, the one woman of genius who belonged to the English revolutionary circle. He was not impressed, thought that she talked too much, and in his diary spelled her name incorrectly.

In the interval between 1791 and 1797 Mary Wollstonecraft was to write one of the books which belong to the spiritual foundations of the next century, to taste fame and detraction, to know the joys of love and maternity, and to experience a misery and wrong which made life itself an unendurable shame. A later chapter will attempt an estimate of the ideas and personality of this brilliant and courageous woman. A few sentences must suffice here to recall the bare facts of her life history. Born in 1759, the child of a drunken and disreputable father, she had struggled with indomitable energy, first as a teacher and then as a translator and literary "hack," to keep herself and help her still more unfortunate sisters. In 1792 she published _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_, a plea for the human dignity of her s.e.x and for its claim to education. At the end of this year she went to Paris as much to see the Revolution as to perfect herself in French. She there met a clever and interesting American, one Gilbert Imlay, a traveller of some little note, a soldier in the War of Independence, and now a speculative merchant. He lived with her, and in doc.u.ments acknowledged her as his wife, though neither felt the need of a binding ceremony. A baby, f.a.n.n.y, was born, but Imlay's business imposed long separations. He gradually tired of the woman who had honoured him too highly, and entered on more than one intrigue. Mary Wollstonecraft attempted in despair to drown herself in the Thames, was saved and nursed back to life and courage by devoted friends. She again took up her pen to gain a livelihood, and for the sake of her child's future, gradually returned to the literary circle which valued her, not merely for her genius and originality, but also for her beauty, her vivacity, and her charm, for her daring and independence, and her warm, impulsive, affectionate heart.

G.o.dwin met her again while she was bruised and lonely and disillusionised with mankind. Her charming volume of travel sketches (_Letters from Norway, 1796_) had made, as it well might, a deep impression on his taste. He was, what Imlay was not, her intellectual equal, and his character deserved her respect. He has left in the little book which he published to vindicate her memory, a delicate sketch of their mutual love: "The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined style of love. It grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before and who was after. One s.e.x did not take the priority which long-established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either party can a.s.sume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil spreader or the prey in the affair. When in the course of things, the disclosure came, there was nothing in a manner for either party to disclose to the other.... There was no period of throes and resolute explanation attendant on the tale. It was friendship melting into love."

The two lovers, in strict obedience to the principles of _Political Justice_, made their home, at first with no legal union, in a little house in the Polygon, Somers Town, then the extreme limit of London, separated from the suburban village of Camden Town by open fields and green pastures. A few doors away G.o.dwin had his study, where he spent most of his industrious day, often breakfasted and sometimes slept. Both partners of this daringly unconventional union had their own particular friends and retained their separate places in society. Some quaint notes have survived, which pa.s.sed between them, borrowing books or making appointments. "Did I not see you, friend G.o.dwin," runs one of these, "at the theatre last night? I thought I met a smile, but you went out without looking round. We expect you at half-past four." It was the coming of a child which induced them to waive their theories and face for its sake a repugnant compliance with custom. They were married in Old St. Pancras Church on March 29, 1797, and the insignificant fact was communicated only gradually, and with laboured apologies for the inconsistency, to their friends.

Southey, who met them in this month, has left a lively portrait: "Of all the lions or literati I have seen here, Mary Imlay's countenance is the best, infinitely the best: the only fault in it is an expression somewhat similar to what the prints of Horne Tooke display--an expression indicating superiority; not haughtiness, not sarcasm in Mary Imlay, but still it is unpleasant. Her eyes are light brown, and ...

they are the most meaning I ever saw.... As for G.o.dwin himself he has large n.o.ble eyes and a _nose_--oh, most abominable nose. Language is not vituperatious enough to describe the effect of its downward elongation."

G.o.dwin, if one may trust the portrait by Northcote, had impressive if not exactly handsome features. The head is shapely, the brow ample, the nose decidedly too long, the shaven lips and chin finely chiselled. The whole suggestion is of a character self-absorbed and contemplative. He was short and st.u.r.dy in build, and in his sober dress and grave deportments, suggested rather the dissenting preacher than the prophet of philosophic anarchism. He was not a ready debater or a fluent talker.

His genius was not spontaneous or intuitive. It was rather an elaborate effort of the will, which deliberately used the fruits of his acc.u.mulative study and incessant activity of mind. He resembled, says Hazlitt, who admired and liked him, "an eight-day clock that must be wound up long before it can strike. He is ready only on reflection: dangerous only at the rebound. He gathers himself up, and strains every nerve and faculty with deliberate aim to some heroic and dazzling achievement of intellect; but he must make a career before he flings himself armed upon the enemy, or he is sure to be unhorsed."

No two minds could have presented a greater contrast. Had Mary Wollstonecraft lived they must have moulded each other into something finer than Nature had made of either. The year of married life was ideally happy, and the strange experiment in reconciling individualism with love apparently succeeded. Mrs. G.o.dwin, for all her revolutionary independence, leaned affectionately on her husband, and he, in spite of his rather overgrown self-esteem, regarded her with reverence and pride.

She was quick in her affections and resentments, but looking back many years later G.o.dwin declares that they were "as happy as is permitted to human beings." "It must be remembered, however, that I honoured her intellectual powers and the n.o.bleness and generosity of her propensities; mere tenderness would not have been adequate to produce the happiness we experienced."

G.o.dwin's novels suggest that, on the whole, he shared her views about women, though in a later essay (on "Friendship," in _Thoughts on Man_), there are some pa.s.sages which suggest a less perfect understanding. But he never used his pen to carry on her work, and the emanc.i.p.ation of women had to await its philosopher in John Stuart Mill. The happy marriage ended abruptly and tragically. On August 30, 1797, was born the child Mary, who was to become Sh.e.l.ley's wife, and carry on in a second generation her parents' tradition of fearless love and revolutionary hope. Ten days after the birth, the mother died in spite of all that the devotion of her husband and the skill of his medical friends could do to save her. A few broken-hearted letters are left to record G.o.dwin's agony of mind.

With the death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, ended all that was happy and stimulating in G.o.dwin's career. It was for him the year of private disaster, and from it he dated also the triumph of the reaction in England. The stimulus of the revolutionary period was withdrawn. He lived no longer among ardent spirits who would brave everything and do anything for human perfectibility. Some were in Botany Bay, and others, like the indomitable Holcroft, were absorbed in the struggle to live, with the handicap of political persecution against them. G.o.dwin, indeed, never fell into despair over the ruin of his political hopes. Like Beethoven he revered Napoleon, at all events until he a.s.sumed the t.i.tle of Emperor, and would console himself with the conviction that this "auspicious and beneficent genius" had "without violence to the principles of the French Revolution ... suspended their morbid activity," while preserving "all the great points" of its doctrine. But while all England hung on the event of the t.i.tanic struggle against this "beneficent genius," what was a philanthropist to do? The world was rattling back into barbarism, and the generation which emerged from the long nightmare of war, famine, and repression, was incomparably less advanced in its thinking, narrower and timider in its whole habit of mind than the men who were young in 1789. There was nothing to do, and a philosopher whose only weapon was argument, kept silence when none would listen. Of what use to talk of "peace and the powers of the human mind,"

while all England was gloating over the brutal cartoons of Gillray, and trying on the volunteer uniforms, in which it hoped to repel Napoleon's invasion? We need not wonder that G.o.dwin's output of philosophic writing practically ceased with the eighteenth century. He was henceforth a man without a purpose, who wrote for bread and renounced the exercise of his greater powers.

The end of G.o.dwin's active apostolic life is clearly marked in a pamphlet which he issued in 1801 ("Thoughts occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon, preached at Christ Church, April 15, 1800, being a reply to the attacks of Dr. Parr, Mr. Mackintosh, the author [Malthus] of the _Essay on Population_ and others"). It is a masterly piece of writing. Coleridge scribbled in the copy that now lies on the shelves of the British Museum this tribute to its author: "I remember few pa.s.sages in ancient or modern authors that contain more just philosophy in appropriate, chaste or beautiful diction than the fine following pages. They reflect equal honour on G.o.dwin's head and heart.

Though I did it in the zenith of his reputation, yet I feel remorse even to have only spoken unkindly of such a man.--S. T. C."

G.o.dwin tells how the reaction burst over him, and he dates it from 1797: "After having for four years heard little else than the voice of commendation, I was at length attacked from every side, and in a style which defied all moderation and decency.... The cry spread like a general infection, and I have been told that not even a petty novel for boarding-school misses now ventures to aspire to favour unless it contains some expression of dislike or abhorrence to the new philosophy." Some of the attacks were scurrilous and all of them proceeded on the common a.s.sumption of the defenders of authority in all ages and nations, that the man who would innovate in morals is himself immoral.

He goes on to sketch the present case of the revolutionary party: "The societies have perished, or where they have not, have shrunk to a skeleton; the days of democratical declamation are no more; even the starving labourer in the alehouse is become the champion of aristocracy.... Jacobinism was destroyed; its party as a party was extinguished; its tenets were involved in almost universal unpopularity and odium; they were deserted by almost every man high or low in the island of Great Britain." Even the young Pantisocrats had gone over to the enemy, and Wordsworth, grave and disillusionised, tried to forget that he had ever exhorted his fellow-students to burn their books and "read G.o.dwin on Necessity." The defection of Dr. Parr and Mackintosh was symptomatic. Both had been G.o.dwin's personal friends, and both of them had hailed the new philosophy. No one remembers them to-day, but they were in their time intellectual oracles. The scholar Parr was called by flatterers the Whig Johnson, and Mackintosh enjoyed in Whig society a reputation as a brilliant talker, and an encyclopaedic mind which reminds us of Macaulay's later fame. They had both to make their peace with the world and to bury their compromised past; the easiest way was to fall upon G.o.dwin.

Malthus was a more worthy antagonist, though G.o.dwin did not yet perceive how formidable his attack in reality was. To the picture of human perfection he opposed the nightmare of an over-populated planet, and combated universal benevolence by teaching that even charity is an economic sin. English society cares little either for Utopias or for science. But it welcomes science with rapture when it destroys Utopias.

If G.o.dwin had p.r.i.c.ked men's consciences, Malthus brought the balm.

Altruism was exposed at length for the thing it was, an error in the last degree unscientific and uneconomic. The rickety arithmetic of Malthusianism was used against the revolutionary hope, exactly as a travestied version of Darwinianism was used in our own day against Socialism. G.o.dwin preserved his dignity in this controversy and made concessions to his critics with a rare candour. But while he abandons none of his fundamental doctrines, one feels that he will never fight again.

Only once in later years did G.o.dwin the philosopher break his silence, and then it was to attempt in 1820 an elaborate but far from impressive answer to Malthus. The history of that controversy has been brilliantly told by Hazlitt. It seems to-day too distant to be worth reviving. Our modern pessimists write their jeremiads not about the future over-population of the planet, but about the declining birth-rate. That elaborate civilisations shows a decline in fertility is a fact now so well recognised, that we feel no difficulty in conceding to G.o.dwin that the reasonable beings of his ideal community might be trusted to show some degree of self-control.

G.o.dwin possessed two of the cardinal virtues of a thinker, courage and candour. No fear of ridicule deterred him from pushing his premises to their last conclusion; no false shame restrained him in a controversy from recanting an error. He discarded the wilder developments of his theory of "universal benevolence," and gave it in the end a form which has ceased to be paradoxical. When he wrote _Political Justice_ he was a celibate student who had escaped much of the formative experience of a normal life. As a husband and a father he revised his creed, and devoted no small part of his later literary activity to the work of preaching the claims of those "private affections" which he had scouted as an elderly youth of forty. The re-adjustment in his theory was so simple, that only a great philosopher could have failed to make it sooner.

Justice requires me to use all my powers to contribute to the sum of human benefit. But as regards opportunity, I am not equally situated towards all my fellows. By devoting myself more particularly to wife or child with an exclusive affection which is not in the abstract altogether reasonable, I may do more for the general good than I could achieve by a severely impartial benevolence.

He developed this view first in his _Memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft_, then in the preface to _St. Leon_, and finally in the pamphlet which answered Mackintosh and Dr. Parr. The man who would be "the best moral economist of his time" will use much of it to seek "the advantage and content of those with whom he has most frequent intercourse," and this not merely from calculation, but from affection. "I ought not only in ordinary cases to provide for my wife and children, my brothers and relations before I provide for strangers, but it would be well that my doing so should arise from the operation of those private and domestic affections by which through all ages of the world the conduct of mankind has been excited and directed."

The recantation is sufficiently frank. The family, dissipated in _Political Justice_ by the explosive charities of "universal benevolence," is now happily re-united. G.o.dwin maintains, however, that his moral theory and his political superstructure stands intact, and the claim is not unreasonable. He retains his criterion of justice and utility, though he has seen better how to apply it. The duty of universal benevolence is still paramount; the end of contributing to the general good still sovereign, and a reasoned virtue is still to be recommended in preference to instinctive goodness, even where their results are commonly the same. "The crown of a virtuous character consists in a very frequent and very energetic recollection of the criterion by which all his actions are to be tried.... The person who has been well instructed and accomplished in the great schools of human experience has pa.s.sions and affections like other men. But he is aware that all these affections tend to excess, and must be taught each to know its order and its sphere. He therefore continually holds in mind the principles by which their boundaries are fixed."

What G.o.dwin means is something elementary, and for that reason of the first importance. Let a man love his wife above other women, but "universal benevolence" will forbid him to exploit other women in order to surround her with luxury. Let him love his sons, but virtue will forbid him to acc.u.mulate a fortune for them by the sweated labour of poor men's children. Let him love his fellow-countrymen, but reason forbids him to seek their good by enslaving other races and waging aggressive wars. G.o.dwin, in short, no longer denies the beauty and duty (to use Burke's phrase) of loving "the little platoon to which I belong," but he urges that these domestic affections are in little danger of neglect. Men learned to love kith and kin, neighbours and comrades, while still in the savage state. The characteristic of a civilised morality, the necessary accompaniment of all the varied and extended relationships which modern existence has brought with it, must be a new and emphatic stress on my duty to the stranger, to the unknown producer with whom I stand in an economic relationship, and to the foreigner beyond my sh.o.r.es. "Let us endeavour to elevate philanthropy into a pa.s.sion, secure that occasions enough will arise to drag us down from an enthusiastic eminence. A virtuous man will teach himself to recollect the principle of universal benevolence as often as pious men repeat their prayers."

If the central tendencies of G.o.dwin's teaching survive these later modifications, it is none the less true that some of his theoretic foundations have been shaken in the work of reconstruction. The isolated individual shut up in his own animal skin and communicating with his fellows through the antennae of his logical processes, has vanished away.

Allow him to extend his personality through the private affections, and he has ceased to be the abstract unit of individualism. G.o.dwin should have revised not only his doctrine of the family, but his hatred of co-operation. There is still something to be learned from the view of his school that the human mind, as it begins to absorb the collective experience of the race, is an infinitely variable spiritual stuff, an intellectual protoplasm. They stated the view with a rash emphasis, until one is forced to ask whether a mind which is originally nothing at all, can absorb, or as psychologists say, "apperceive" anything whatever. Nothing comes out of nothing, and nothing can be added to nothing.

G.o.dwin and his school set out to show that the human mind is not necessarily fettered for all time by the prejudices and inst.i.tutions in which it has clothed itself. When he had done stripping us, it was a nice question whether even our nakedness remained. He treated our prejudices and our effete inst.i.tutions as though they were something external to us, which had come out of nowhere and could be flung into the void from whence they came. When you have called opinion a prejudice, or traced an inst.i.tution to false reasoning, you have, after all, only exhibited an interesting zoological fact about human beings.

We are exactly the sort of creature which evolves such prejudices.

G.o.dwin in unwary moments would talk as though aristocracy and positive law had come to us from without, by a sort of diabolic revelation. This, however, is not a criticism which destroys the value of his thinking.

His positions required restatement in terms of the idea of development.

If he did not antic.i.p.ate the notion of evolution, he was the apostle of the idea of progress. We may still retain from his reasonings the hopeful conclusion that the human mind is a raw material capable of almost unlimited variation, and, therefore, of some advance towards "perfection." We owe an inestimable debt to the school which proclaimed this belief in enthusiastic paradoxes.

G.o.dwin's influence as a thinker permeated the older generation of "philosophic radicals" in England. The oddest fact about it is that it had apparently no part in founding the later philosophic anarchism of the Continent. None of its leaders seem to have read him; and _Political Justice_ was not translated into German until long after it had ceased to be read in England. Its really astonishing blindness to the importance of the economic factor in social changes must have hastened its decline. G.o.dwin writes as though he had never seen a factory nor heard of capital. In all his writing about crime and punishment, full as it is of insight, sympathy and good sense, it is odd that a mind so fertile nowhere antic.i.p.ated the modern doctrine of the connection between moral and physical degeneracy. He saw in crime only error, where we see anaemia: he would have cured it with syllogisms, where we should administer proteids. His entire psychology, both social and individual, is vitiated by a nave and headstrong intellectualism. Life is rather a battle between narrow interests and the social affections than a debate between sound and fallacious reasoning. He saw among mankind only sophists and philosophers, where we see predatory egoists and their starved and stunted victims. But we have advanced far enough on our own lines of thinking to derive a new stimulus from G.o.dwin's one-sided intellectualism. Our danger to-day is that we may succ.u.mb to an economic and physiological determinism. We are obsessed by financiers and bacilli; it is salutary that our attention should be directed from time to time to the older bogeys of the revolution, to kings and priests, authority and superst.i.tion, to prejudice and political subjection. "The greatest part of the people of Europe," wrote Helvetius, "honour virtue in speculation; this is an effect of their education. They despise it in practice; that is an effect of the form of their governments." We think that we have got beyond that epigram to-day. But have we quite exhausted its meaning?

Precisely because of its revolutionary _navete_, its unscientific innocence, there is in G.o.dwin's democratic anarchism a stimulus peculiarly tonic to the modern mind. No man has developed more firmly the ideal of universal enlightenment, which has escaped feudalism, only to be threatened by the sociological expert. No writer is better fitted to remind us that society and government are not the same thing, and that the State must not be confounded with the social organism. No moralist has written a more eloquent page on the evil of coercion and the unreason of force. _Political Justice_ is often an imposing system.

It is sometimes an instructive fallacy. It is always an inspiring sermon. G.o.dwin hoped to "make it a work from the perusal of which no man should rise without being strengthened in habits of sincerity, fort.i.tude and justice." There he succeeded.

CHAPTER VI

G.o.dWIN AND Sh.e.l.lEY

In a letter written in 1811 Sh.e.l.ley records how he suddenly heard with "inconceivable emotion" that G.o.dwin was still alive. He "had enrolled his name on the list of the honourable dead." G.o.dwin, to quote Hazlitt's rather cruel phrase, had "sunk below the horizon," in his later years, and enjoyed "the serene twilight of a doubtful immortality." Serene unfortunately it was not. With a lonely home and two little girls to care for, G.o.dwin thought once more of marriage. Twice his wooing was unsuccessful, and the philosopher who believed that reason was omnipotent, tried in vain in long, elaborate letters to argue two ladies into love. His second wife came unsought. As he sat one day at his window in the Polygon, a handsome widow spoke to him from the neighbouring balcony, with these arresting words, "Is it possible that I behold the immortal G.o.dwin?" They were married before the close of the year (1801).

Mrs. Clairmont was a strange successor to Mary Wollstonecraft. She was a vulgar and worldly woman, thoroughly feminine, and rather inclined to boast of her total ignorance of philosophy. A kindly and loyal wife she may have been, but she was jealous of G.o.dwin's friends, and would tell petty lies to keep them apart from him. She brought with her two children of a former marriage--Charles (who was unhappy in this strange home and went early abroad) and Jane. On this clever, pretty and mercurial daughter all her partiality was lavished; and the unhappy girl, pampered by a philistine mother in a revolutionary atmosphere, was at the age of seventeen seduced by Byron, and became the mother of the fairy child, Allegra. The second Mrs. G.o.dwin was the stepmother of convention, and treated both f.a.n.n.y Imlay and Mary G.o.dwin with consistent unkindness. It was the fate of the gentle, melancholy and lovable f.a.n.n.y to take her own life at the age of twenty-two (1816). The destiny of these children, all gifted with what the age called sensibility, has served as the text of many a sermon against "the new philosophy." No one, however, can read the doc.u.ments which this strange household left behind, without feeling that the parent of the disaster in their lives was not their philosophic father, but this commonplace "womanly woman,"

who flattered, intrigued, and lied. In 1803, there was born of this second marriage, a son, William, who inherited something of his father's ability. He became a journalist, and died at the early age of twenty-nine, after publishing a novel of some promise, _Transfusion_, steeped in the same romantic fancies which colour Mary Sh.e.l.ley's more famous _Frankenstein_.