Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle Part 2

Condorcet, in hiding and awaiting death, wrote in these months his _Sketch_ of human progress. Paine, meditating on the end that seemed near, composed the first part of his _Age of Reason_. Paine was, like Franklin, Jefferson and Was.h.i.+ngton, a deist; and he differed from them only in the courage which prompted him to declare his belief. He came from gaol a broken man, hardly able to stand, while the Convention, returned to its sound senses, welcomed him back to his place of honour on its benches. The record of his last years in America, whither he returned in 1802, belongs rather to the history of persecution than to the biography of a soldier of liberty. His work was done; and, though his pen was still active and influential, slave-owners, ex-royalists, and the fanatics of orthodoxy combined to embitter the end of the man who had dared to deny the inspiration of the Bible. His book was burned in England by the hangman. Bishops in their answers mingled grudging concessions with personal abuse. An agent of Pitt's was hired to write a scurrilous biography of the Government's most dreaded foe. In America, the grandsons of the Puritan colonists who had flogged Quaker women as witches, denied him a place on the stage-coach, lest an offended G.o.d should strike it with lightning.

Paine died, a lonely old man, in 1809. His personal character stands written in his career; and it is unnecessary to-day even to mention the libels which his biographer has finally refuted. In a generation of brave men he was the boldest. He could rouse the pa.s.sions of men, and he could brave them. If the Royalist Burke was eloquent for a Queen, Republican Paine risked his life for a King. No wrong found him indifferent; and he used his pen not only for the democracy which might reward 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 nave vanity was his only fault as a man. It was his fate to escape the gallows in England and the guillotine in France. He deserved them both; in that age there was no higher praise. A better democrat never wore the armour of the knight-errant; a better Christian never a.s.sailed Orthodoxy.

Neither by training nor by temperament was Paine a speculative thinker; but his political writing has none the less an immense significance.

G.o.dwin was a writer removed by his profoundly individual genius from the average thought of his day. Paine agreed more nearly with the advanced minds of his generation, and he taught the rest to agree with him. No one since him or before him has stated the plain democratic case against monarchy and aristocracy with half his spirit and force. Earlier writers on these themes were timid; the moderns are bored. Paine is writing of what he understands, and feels to be of the first importance. He cares as much about abolis.h.i.+ng t.i.tles as a modern reformer may feel about nationalising land. His main theory in politics has a lucid simplicity.

Men are born as G.o.d created them, free and equal; that is the a.s.sumption alike of natural and revealed religion. Burke, who "fears G.o.d," looks with "awe to kings," with "duty to magistrates," and with "respect to n.o.bility," is but erecting a wilderness of turnpike gates between man and his Maker. Natural rights inhere in man by reason of his existence; civil rights are founded in natural rights and are designed to secure and guarantee them. He gives an individual twist to the doctrine of the social compact. Some governments arise out of the people, others over the people. The latter are based on conquest or priestcraft, and the former on reason. Government will be firmly based on the social compact only when nations deliberately sit down as the Americans have done, and the French are doing, to frame a const.i.tution on the basis of the Rights of Man.

As for the English Government, it clearly arose in conquest; and to speak of a British Const.i.tution is playing with words. Parliament, imperfectly and capriciously elected, is supposed to hold the common purse in trust; but the men who vote the supplies are also those who receive them. The national purse is the common hack on which each party mounts in turn, in the countryman's fas.h.i.+on of "ride and tie." They order these things better in France. As for our system of conducting wars, it is all done over the heads of the people. War is with us the art of conquering at home. Taxes are not raised to carry on wars, but wars raised to carry on taxes. The shrewd hard-hitting blows range over the whole surface of existing inst.i.tutions. G.o.dwin from his intellectual eminence saw in all the follies and crimes of mankind nothing worse than the effects of "prejudice" and the consequences of fallacious reasoning.

Paine saw more self-interest in the world than prejudice. When he came to preach the abolition of war, first through an alliance of Britain, America and France, and then through "a confederation of nations" and a European Congress, he saw the obstacle in the egoism of courts and courtiers which appear to quarrel but agree to plunder. Another seven years, he wrote in 1792, would see the end of monarchy and aristocracy in Europe. While they continue, with war as their trade, peace has not the security of a day.

Paine's writing gains rather than loses in theoretic interest, because the warmth of his sympathies melts, as he proceeds, the icy logic of his eighteenth century individualism. He starts where all his school started, with a sharp ant.i.thesis between society and government.

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

That was the familiar pessimism which led in practical politics to _laissez faire_, and in speculation to G.o.dwin's philosophic anarchism.

Paine himself seems for a moment to take that road. He enjoys telling us how well the American colonies managed in the early stages of the war without any regular form of government. He a.s.sures us that "the more perfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government." But he had served an apprentices.h.i.+p to life; looking around him at the streets filled with beggars and the jails crowded with poor men, he suddenly forgets that the whole purpose of government is to secure the individual against the invasion of his rights, and straightway bursts into a new definition:--"Civil government does not consist in executions; but in making such provision for the instruction of youth and the support of age as to exclude as much as possible profligacy from the one and despair from the other. Instead of this the resources of a country are lavished upon kings ... and the poor themselves are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them."

It is amazing how much good Paine can extract from a necessary evil. He has suddenly conceived of government as the instrument of the social conscience. He means to use it as a means of securing a better organisation of society. Paine was a man of action, and no mere logic could hold him. He proceeds in a breathless chapter to evolve a programme of social reform which, after the slumbers of a century, his Radical successors have just begun to realise. Some hints came to him from Condorcet, but most of these daringly novel ideas sprang from Paine's own inventive brain, and all of them are presented by the whilom exciseman, with a wealth of financial detail, as if he were a Chancellor of the Exchequer addressing the first Republican Parliament in the year One of Liberty. He would break up the poor laws, "these instruments of civil torture." He has saved the major part of the cost of defence by a naval alliance with the other Sea Powers, and the abolition of capture at sea. Instead of poor relief he would give a subsidy to the children of the very poor, and pensions to the aged. Four pounds a year for every child under fourteen in every necessitous family will ensure the health and instruction of the next generation. It will cost two millions and a half, but it will banish ignorance. He would pay the costs of compulsory education. Pensions are to be granted not of grace but of right, as an aid to the infirm after fifty years, and a subsidy to the aged after sixty. Maternity benefit is antic.i.p.ated in a donation of twenty s.h.i.+llings to every poor mother at the birth of a child. Casual labour is to be cared for in some sort of workhouse-factories in London. These reforms are to be financed partly by economies and partly by a graduated income-tax, for which Paine presents an elaborate schedule. When the poor are happy and the jails empty, then at last may a nation boast of its const.i.tution. In this pregnant chapter Paine not only sketched the work of the future; he exploded his own premises.

The odium that still clings to Paine's theological writings comes mainly from those who have not read them. When Mr. Roosevelt the other day called him "a dirty little Atheist," he exposed nothing but his own ignorance. Paine was a deist, and he wrote _The Age of Reason_ on the threshold of a French prison, primarily to counteract the atheism which he thought he saw at work among the Jacobins--an odd diagnosis, for Robespierre was at least as ardent in his deism as Paine himself. He believed in a G.o.d, Whose bounty he saw in nature; he taught the doctrine of conditional immortality, and his quarrel with revealed religion was chiefly that it set up for wors.h.i.+p a G.o.d of cruelty and injustice. From the stories of the Jewish ma.s.sacres ordained by divine command, down to the orthodox doctrine of the scheme of redemption, he saw nothing but a history derogatory to the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty. To believe the Old Testament we must unbelieve our faith in the moral justice of G.o.d. It might "hurt the stubbornness of a priest" to destroy this fiction, but it would tranquilise the consciences of millions. From this starting-point he proceeds in the later second and third parts to a detailed criticism designed to show that the books of the Bible were not written by their reputed authors, that the miracles are incredible, that the pa.s.sages claimed as prophecy have been wrested from their contexts, and that many inconsistencies are to be found in the narrative portions of the Gospels.

Acute and fearless though it is, this detailed argument has only an historical interest to-day. When the violence of his persecutors had goaded Paine into anger, he lost all sense of tact in controversy, and lapsed occasionally into harsh vulgarities. But the anger was just, and the zeal for mental honesty has had its reward. Paine had no sense for the mystery and poetry of traditional religion. But what he attacked was not presented to him as poetry. He was a.s.sailing a dogmatic orthodoxy which had itself converted poetry into literal fact. As literal fact it was incredible; and Paine, taking it all at the valuation of its own professors, a.s.sailed it with a disbelief as prosaic as their belief, but intellectually more honest. His interpretation of the Bible is unscientific, if you will, but it is nearer to the truth of history than the conventional belief of his day. If his polemics seem rough and superfluous to us, it is only because his direct frontal attacks forced on the work of Biblical criticism, and long ago compelled the abandonment of most of the positions which he a.s.sailed. In spite of its grave faults of taste and temper and manner, _The Age of Reason_ performed an indispensable service to honesty and morals. It was the bravest thing he did, for it threatened his name with an immortality of libel. His place in history is secure at last. The neglected pioneer of one revolution, the honoured victim of another, brave to the point of folly, and as humane as he was brave, no man in his generation preached republican virtue in better English, nor lived it with a finer disregard of self.

CHAPTER III

WILLIAM G.o.dWIN AND THE REVOLUTION

Tom Paine is still reviled and still admired. The name of Mary Wollstonecraft is honoured by the growing army of free women. Both may be read in cheap editions. William G.o.dwin, a more powerful intellect, and in his day a greater influence than either, is now forgotten, or remembered only because he was the father of Sh.e.l.ley's wife. Yet he blazed in the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Hazlitt has told us, "as a sun in the firmament of reputation." "No one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off.... No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated _Enquiry Concerning Political Justice_. Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old woman; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist."

William G.o.dwin came into the world in 1756, at Wisbech, in the Fen country, with the moral atmosphere of a dissenting home for inheritance.

His father and grandfather were Independent ministers, who taught the metaphysical dissent of the extreme Calvinistic tradition. The quaint ill-spelled letters of his mother reveal a strong character, a meagre education and rigid beliefs. William was unwholesomely precocious as a boy, pious, studious and greedy for distinction and praise. He was brought up on the _Account of the Pious Deaths of Many G.o.dly Children_, and would move his school-fellows to tears by his early sermons on the Last Judgment. At seventeen we find him, destined for the hereditary profession, a student in the Theological College at Hoxton. His mental development was by no means headlong, but he was a laborious reader and an eager disputant, endowed with all the virtues save modesty.

He emerged from College as he had entered it, a Tory in politics and a Sandemanian in religion. The Sandemanians were super-Calvinists, and their tenets may be summarily defined. A Calvinist held that of ten souls nine will be d.a.m.ned. A Sandemanian hoped that of ten Calvinists one may with difficulty be saved. In the Calvinist mould G.o.dwin's mind was formed, and if the doctrine was soon discarded, the habit of thought characteristic of Calvinism remained with him to the end. It is a French and not a British creed, Latin in its systematic completeness, Latin in the logical courage with which it pursues its a.s.sumptions to their last conclusion, Latin in its faith in deductive reasoning and its disdain alike of experience and of sentiment. Had G.o.dwin been bred a Methodist or a Churchman, he could not have written _Political Justice_.

To him in these early years religion presented itself as a supernatural despotism based on terror and coercion. Its central doctrine was eternal punishment, and when in mature life, G.o.dwin became a free-thinker, his revolt was not so much the readjustment of a speculative thinker who has reconsidered untenable dogmas, as the rebellion of a humane and liberal mind against a system of terrorism. To some agnostics G.o.d is an unnecessary hypothesis. To G.o.dwin He was rather a tyrant to be deposed.

It was a view which Sh.e.l.ley with less provocation adopted with even greater heat.

G.o.dwin's firm dogmatic creed began to crumble away during his early experiences as a dissenting minister in country towns. He published a forgotten volume of sermons, and his development both in politics and theology was evidently slow. At twenty-seven, as a young pastor at Beaconsfield, we find him a Whig and a Unitarian, who looked up to Dr.

Priestley as his master. He had now begun to study the French philosophers, whom Hoxton had doubtless refuted, but did not read. He was not a successful pastor, and it was as much his relative failure in the pulpit as his slowly broadening beliefs which caused him to take to letters for a livelihood. His long literary career begins in 1783 with some years of prentice work in Grub Street. He wrote a successful pamphlet in defence of the Coalition, which brought him to the notice of the Whig chiefs, worked with enthusiasm at a _Life of Chatham_ which has the merit of a rather heavy eloquence, contributed for seven years to the _Annual Register_ and wrote three novels which evidently enjoyed an ephemeral success. He lived the usual nomadic life of the young man of letters, and differed from most of his kind chiefly by his industry, his abstinence, and his methodical habits of study, which he never relaxed even when he was writing busily for bread.

We find him rising early, and reading some portion of a Greek or Latin cla.s.sic before breakfast. He acquired by this practice a literary knowledge of the cla.s.sics and used it in his later essays with an ease and intimacy which many a scholar would envy. He wrote for three or four hours in the morning, composing slowly and frequently recasting his drafts. The afternoon and evening were devoted to eager converse and hot debate with friends, and to the reading of modern books in English, French and Italian, with not infrequent visits to the theatre. A brief diary carefully kept with a system of signs and abbreviations in a queer mixed jargon of English, French and Latin records his anxious use of his time, and shows to the end of his eighty years few wasted days. If industry was his most conspicuous virtue, he gave proof at the outset of his life of an independence rare among poor men who have their career to make. Sheridan, who acted as the literary agent of the Whigs, wished to engage him as a professional pamphleteer and offered him a regular salary. He refused to tie himself to a party, though his views at this time were those of an orthodox and enthusiastic admirer of Fox.

G.o.dwin was to become the apostle of Universal Benevolence. It was a virtue for which in later life he gave many an opportunity to his richer friends, but if he stimulated it in others he never refused to practise it himself. While he was still a struggling and underpaid journeyman author, wandering from one cheap lodging to another, he burdened himself with the care and maintenance of a distant relative, an orphaned second-cousin, named Thomas Cooper. Cooper came to him at the age of twelve and remained with him till he became an actor at seventeen.

G.o.dwin had read Rousseau's _Emile_, not seldom with dissent, and all through his life was deeply interested in the problems of education.

They furnished him with the themes of some of the best essays in his _Enquirer_ and his _Thoughts on Man_, and young Cooper was evidently the subject on whom he experimented. He was a difficult, proud, high-spirited lad, and the process of tuition was clearly not as smooth as it was conscientious. G.o.dwin's leading thought was that the utmost reverence is due to boys. He cared little how much he imparted of scholastic knowledge. He aimed at arousing the intellectual curiosity of his charge and fostering independence and self-respect. Sincerity and plain-speaking were to govern the relation of tutor and pupil. Corporal punishment was of course a prohibited barbarity, but it must be admitted that in G.o.dwin's case a violent tongue and an impatient temper more than supplied its place. The diary shows how pathetically the tutor exhorted himself to avoid sternness, "which can only embitter the temper," and not to impute dulness, stupidity or intentional error. Some letters show how he failed. Cooper complains that G.o.dwin had called him "a foolish wretch," "a viper" and a "tiger." G.o.dwin replies by complimenting him on his "sensibility," and his "independence," asks for his "confidence" in return, and a.s.sures him that he does not expect "grat.i.tude" (a virtue banned in the G.o.dwinian ethics). This essay in education can have been only relatively successful, for Cooper seems to have felt a quite commonplace grat.i.tude to G.o.dwin, and for many a year afterwards sent him vivacious letters, which testify to the real friends.h.i.+p which united them.

Imperious and hot-tempered though he was, G.o.dwin made friends and kept them. Thomas Holcroft came into G.o.dwin's life in 1786. Thanks to Hazlitt's spirited memoir, based as it was on ample autobiographical notes, no personality of this group stands before us so clearly limned, and there is none more attractive. Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley describes him as a "man of stern and irascible character," but he was also lovable and affectionate. There was in his mind and will some powerful initial force of resolve and mental independence. He thought for himself, and yet he could a.s.similate the ideas of other men. He was a reasoner and a doctrinaire; and yet he must have had in himself those untamed volcanic emotions which we a.s.sociate with the heroes of the romantic novels of the age. He believed in the almost unlimited powers of the human mind, and his own career, which saw his rise from stable-boy and cobbler to dramatist, was itself a monument to the human will. Looking in their mirrors, the progressives of that generation were tempted to think that perfection might have been within their reach had not their youth been stunted by the influence of Calvin and the British Const.i.tution.

Rect.i.tude, courage and unflinching truth were Holcroft's ideal. He firmly believed (an idea which lay in germ in Condorcet and was for a time adopted by G.o.dwin) that the will guided by reason might transform not only the human mind but the human body. Like the Christian Scientists of to-day he a.s.serted, as Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley tells us, that "death and disease existed only through the feebleness of man's mind, that pain also had no reality."

He was a man of fifty when he met G.o.dwin at thirty, and he had packed into his half century a more various experience of men and things than the studious and sedentary G.o.dwin could have acquired if he had lived the life of the Wandering Jew. Theirs was a friends.h.i.+p of mutual stimulation and intimate exchange which is commoner between a man and a woman than between two men. They met almost daily, and in spite of some violent lovers' quarrels, their affection lasted till Holcroft's death in 1809. It is not hard to understand their quarrels. Neither of them had natural tact, and G.o.dwin's sensibility was morbid. Unflinching truthfulness, even in literary criticism, must have tried their tempers, and the single word "demele," best translated "row," occurs often in G.o.dwin's diary as his note on one of their meetings. It is not easy to decide which influenced the other more. G.o.dwin's was the trained, systematic, academical mind, but Holcroft added to a rich and curious experience of life and a vein of native originality, wide reading and something more than a mere amateur's taste for music and art. It was Holcroft who drove G.o.dwin out of his compromising Unitarianism into a view which for some years he boldly described as Atheism. His religious opinions were afterwards modified (or so he supposed) by S. T.

Coleridge; but that influence is not conspicuous in his posthumous essay on religion, and the best label for his att.i.tude is perhaps Huxley's word, "Agnostic."

As the French Revolution approached, the two friends fell under the prevailing excitement. G.o.dwin attended the Revolution Society's dinners, and Holcroft was, as we have seen, a leading member of the Corresponding Society. There is no difficulty in accounting for most of the opinions which the two friends held in common, and which G.o.dwin was soon to embody in _Political Justice_. Some were common to all the group; others lie in germ at least in the writings of the Encyclopaedists. Even communism was antic.i.p.ated by Mably, and was held in some tentative form by many of the leading men of the Revolution. (See Kropotkin: _The Great French Revolution_.) The puzzle is rather to account for the anarchist tendency which seems to be wholly original in G.o.dwin. It was a revolt not merely against all coercive action by the State, but also against collective action by the citizens. The root of it was probably the extreme individualism which felt that a man surrendered too much of himself, too much of truth and manhood in any political a.s.sociation. The beginnings of this line of thought may be detected in a vivid contemptuous account of the riotous Westminster election of 1788, in which Holcroft had worked with the Foxites: "Scandal, pitiful, mean, mutual scandal, never was more plentifully dispersed. Electioneering is a trade so despicably degrading, so eternally incompatible with moral and mental dignity that I can scarcely believe a truly great mind capable of the dirty drudgery of such vice. I am at least certain no mind is great while thus employed. It is the periodical reign of the evil nature or demon."

This, to be sure, is no more than a hint of a tendency, but it shows that experience was already fermenting in the brain of one member at least of the pair, and it took these alchemists no great while to distil from it their theoretic spirit. The doings of the Corresponding Society were destined to enlarge and confirm this experience. In the hopes, the indignations, and the perils of the years of revolutionary excitement G.o.dwin had his intimate share. He was one of a small committee which undertook the publication of Paine's _Rights of Man_, and when the repression began, those who were struck down were his a.s.sociates and in some cases his intimates. Holcroft, as we have seen, was tried for high treason, and Joseph Gerrald, who was sent to Botany Bay, was a friend for whom he felt both admiration and affection. If the fate of these men was a haunting pain to their friends, their high courage and idealistic faith was a n.o.ble stimulus. "Human Perfectibility" had its martyrs, and the words of Gerrald as he stood in the dock awaiting the sentence that was to send him to his death among thieves and forgers, deserve a respectful record: "Moral light is as irresistible by the mind as physical by the eye. All attempts to impede its progress are vain. It will roll rapidly along, and as well may tyrants imagine that by placing their feet upon the earth they can stop its diurnal motion, as that they shall be able by efforts the most virulent and pertinacious to extinguish the light of reason and philosophy, which happily for mankind is everywhere spreading around us." It was in this atmosphere of enthusiasm and devotion that _Political Justice_ was written.

The main work of G.o.dwin's life was begun in July, 1791. He was fortunate in securing a contract from the publisher Robinson, on generous terms which ultimately brought him in one thousand guineas. _Political Justice_ has been generally cla.s.sed among the answers to Burke, but G.o.dwin's aim was in fact something more ambitious. A note in his diary deserves to be quoted: "My original conception proceeded on a feeling of the imperfections and errors of Montesquieu, and a desire of supplying a less faulty work. In the just fervour of my enthusiasm I entertained the vain imagination of "hewing a stone from the rock," which by its inherent energy and weight, should overbear and annihilate all opposition and place the principles of politics on an immoveable basis."

When he came to answer his critics, he apologised for extravagances on the plea of haste and excitement; but in fact the work was slowly and deliberately written, and was not completed until January, 1793. Its doctrines, since the book is not now readily accessible, will be summarised fully and in G.o.dwin's own phraseology in the next chapter, but it seems proper to draw attention here to the cool yet unprovocative courage of its writer. It is filled with "hanging matters." Pitt was, perhaps, no more disposed to punish a man for expounding the fundamental principles of philosophic anarchism than was the Russian autocracy in our own day when it tolerated Tolstoy. It was not for writing _Utopia_ that Sir Thomas More lost his head. But the book is quite unflinching in its application of principle, and its attacks on monarchy are as uncompromising as those for which Paine was outlawed. The preface calmly discusses the possibility of prosecution, issues what is in effect a quiet challenge, and concludes with the consolation that "it is the property of truth to be fearless and to prove victorious over every adversary." The fact was that G.o.dwin watched the dangers of his friends "almost with envy" (letter to Gerrald). But he held that a man who deliberately provokes martyrdom acts immorally, since he confuses the progress of reason by exciting destructive pa.s.sions, and drives his adversaries into evil courses.

"For myself," he wrote, "I will never adopt any conduct for the express purpose of being put upon my trial, but if I be ever so put, I will consider that day as a day of triumph." G.o.dwin escaped punishment for his activity on behalf of Holcroft and the twelve reformers, because his activity was successful. He escaped prosecution for _Political Justice_ because it was a learned book, addressed to educated readers, and issued at the astonis.h.i.+ng price of three guineas. The propriety of prosecuting him was considered by the Privy Council; and Pitt is said to have dismissed the suggestion with the remark that "a three guinea book could never do much harm among those who had not three s.h.i.+llings to spare."

That this three-guinea book was bought and read to the extent of no less than four thousand copies is a tribute not merely to its vitality, but to the eagerness of the middle-cla.s.ses during the revolutionary ferment to drink in the last words of the new philosophy.

A new edition was soon called for, and was issued early in 1796. Much of the book was recast and many chapters entirely rewritten, as the consequence not so much of any material change in G.o.dwin's views, as of the profit he had derived from private controversies. Condorcet (though he is never mentioned) is, if one may make a guess, the chief of the new influences apparent in the second edition. It is more cautious, more visibly the product of a varied experience than the first draft, but it abandons none of his leading ideas. A third edition appeared in 1799, toned down still further by a growing caution. These revisions undoubtedly made the book less interesting, less vivid, less readable.

No modern edition has ever appeared, and its direct influence had become negligible even before G.o.dwin's death. It is harder to account for the oblivion into which the book has fallen, than to explain its early popularity. It is not a difficult book to read. "The young and the fair," G.o.dwin tells us, "did not feel deterred from consulting my pages." His style is always clear and often eloquent. His vocabulary seems to a modern taste overloaded with Latin words, but the architecture of his sentences is skilful in the cla.s.sical manner. He can vary his elaborate periods with a terse, strong statement which comes with the force of an unexpected blow. He has a knack of happy ill.u.s.tration, and a way of enforcing his points by putting problems in casuistry which have an alluring human interest. The book moved his own generation profoundly, and even to-day his more enthusiastic pa.s.sages convey an irresistible impression of sincerity and conviction.

CHAPTER IV

"POLITICAL JUSTICE"

The controversy which produced _Political Justice_ was a dialogue between the future and the past. The task of speculation in England had been, through a stagnant century, to define the conditions of political stability, and to admire the elaborate checks and balances of the British Const.i.tution as though change were the only evil that threatened mankind. For Burke, change itself was but an incident in the triumph of continuity and conservation. For G.o.dwin the whole life of mankind is a race through innovation to perfection, and his main concern is to exhort the athlete to fling aside the garments of prejudice, tradition, and constraint, until one asks at the end how much of flesh and blood has been torn away with the garments. If one were to attempt in a phrase to sum up his work, the best t.i.tle which one could invent for it would be Prolegomena to all Future Progress. What in a word are the conditions of progress?

His att.i.tude to mankind is by turns a pedagogue's disapprobation and a patron's encouragement. The worst enemy of progress was the systematic optimism of Leibnitz and Pope, which Voltaire had overthrown. There is indeed enough of progress in the past to fire our courage and our hopes.

In moments of depression, he would admire the beautiful invention of writing and the power of mind displayed in human speech. But the general panorama of history exhorts us to fundamental change. In bold sweeping rhetoric he a.s.sures us that history is little else than the record of crime. War has diminished neither its horror nor its frequency, and man is still the most formidable enemy to man. Despotism is still the fate of the greatest part of mankind. Penal laws by the terror of punishment hold a numerous cla.s.s in abject penury. Robbery and fraud are none the less continual, and the poor are tempted for ever to violence against the more fortunate. One person in seven comes in England on the poor rates. Can the poor conceive of society as a combination to protect every man in his rights and secure him the means of existence? Is it not rather for them a conspiracy to engross its advantages for the favoured few? Luxury insults them; admiration is the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lacquey of poverty. Nowhere is a man valued for what he is. Legislation aggravates the natural inequality of man. A house of landlords sets to work to deprive the poor of the little commonage of nature which remained to them, and its bias stands revealed when we recollect that in England (as Paine had pointed out) while taxes on land produce half a million less than they did a century ago, taxes on 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. G.o.dwin was often an incautious rhetorician. He painted the present in colours of such unrelieved gloom, that it is hard to see in it the possibility of a brighter future. Mankind seems hopeless, and he has to prove it perfectible.

Are these evils then the necessary condition of society? G.o.dwin answers that question as the French school, and in particular Helvetius, had done, by a preliminary a.s.sault on the a.s.sumptions of a reactionary philosophy. He proposes to exhort the human will to embark with a conscious and social resolve on the adventure of perfection. He must first demonstrate that the will is sovereign. Man is the creature of necessity, and the nexus of cause and effect governs the moral world like the physical. We are the product of our conditions. But among conditions some are within the power of the will to change and others are not. Montesquieu had insisted that it is climate which ultimately differentiates the races of mankind. Climate is clearly a despotism which we can never hope to reform away. Another school has taught that men come into the world with innate ideas and a predetermined character.

Others again would dispute that man is in his actions a reasonable being, and would represent him as the toy of pa.s.sion, a creature to whom it is useless to present an argument drawn from his own advantage. The first task of the progressive philosopher is to clear away these preliminary obstacles. Man is the creature of conditions, but primarily of those conditions which he may hope to modify--education, religion, social prejudice and above all government. He is also in the last resort a being whose conduct is governed by his opinions. Admit these premises and the way is clear towards perfection. It is a problem which in some form and in some dialect confronts every generation of reformers. We are the creatures of our own environment, but in some degree we are ourselves a force which can modify that environment. We inherit a past which weighs upon us and obsesses us, but in some degree each generation is born anew. G.o.dwin used the new psychology against the old superst.i.tion of innate ideas. A modern thinker in his place would advance Weissmann's biological theory that the acquired modifications of an organism are not inherited, as an answer to the pessimism which bases itself upon heredity.

G.o.dwin starts boldly with the thesis that "the characters of men originate in their external circ.u.mstances." He brushes aside innate ideas or instincts or even ante-natal impressions. Accidents in the womb may have a certain effect, and every man has a certain disposition at birth. But the multiplicity of later experiences wears out these early impressions. G.o.dwin, in all this, reproduces the current fallacy of his generation. Impressions and experiences were for them something external, flung upon the surface of the mind. They were just beginning to realise that the mind works when it perceives. Change a n.o.bleman's child at birth with a ploughman's, and each will grow up quite naturally in his new circ.u.mstances. Exercise makes the muscles; education, argument, and the exchange of opinion the mind. "It is impression that makes the man, and compared with the empire of impression, the mere differences of animal structure are inexpressibly unimportant and powerless." Change continues through life; everything mental and physical is in flux; why suppose that only in the propensities of the new-born infant is there something permanent and inflexible? Helvetius had been G.o.dwin's chief precursor in this opinion. He had gone so far as to declare that men are at birth equal, some raw human stuff which "education," in the broad sense of the word, proceeds to modify in the long schooling from the cradle to the grave. Men differ in genius, he would a.s.sert, by education and experience, not by natural organisation.

The original acuteness of the senses has little to do with the development of talent. The new psychology had swept "faculties" away.

Interest is the main factor in the development of perception and attention. The scarcity of attention is the true cause of the scarcity of genius, and the chief means of promoting it are emulation and the love of glory.

G.o.dwin is too cautious to accept this ultra-revolutionary statement of the potential equality of men without some reserves. But the idea inspires him as it inspired all the vital thought of his day. It set humane physicians at the height of the Terror to work on discovering a method by which even defective and idiot children might be raised by "education" to the normal stature of the human mind. It fired G.o.dwin himself with a zeal for education. "Folly," said Helvetius, "is fact.i.tious." "Nature," said G.o.dwin, "never made a dunce." The failures of education are due primarily to the teacher's error in subst.i.tuting compulsion for persuasion and despotism for encouragement. The excellences and defects of the human character are not due to occult causes beyond the reach of ingenuity to modify or correct, nor are false views the offspring of an irresistible destiny. Our conventional schools are the slaughterhouses of mind; but of all the external influences which build up character and opinion, the chief are political. It is G.o.dwin's favourite theme, and he carries it even further than Holbach and Helvetius had done. From this influence there is no escape, for it infects the teacher no less than the taught. Equality will make men frank, ingenuous and intrepid, but a great disparity of ranks renders men cold, irresolute, timid and cautious. However lofty the morality of the teacher, the mind of the child is continually corrupted by seeing, in the society around him, wealth honoured, poverty contemned, intrepid virtue proscribed and servility encouraged. From the influence of social and political inst.i.tutions there is no escape: "They poison our minds before we can resist or so much as suspect their malignity. Like the barbarous directors of Eastern seraglios they deprive us of our virility, and fit us for their despicable employment from the cradle. So false is the opinion that has too generally prevailed that politics is an affair with which ordinary men have little concern."

Here G.o.dwin is introducing into English thinking an idea originally French. English writers from Locke to Paine had spoken of government as something purely negative, so little important that only when a man saw his property threatened or his sh.o.r.es invaded, was he forced to recollect that he had a country. G.o.dwin saw its influence everywhere, insinuating itself into our personal dispositions and insensibly communicating its spirit to our private transactions. The idea in his hands made for hope. Reform, or better still, abolish governments, and to what heights of virtue might not men aspire? We need not say with Rousseau that men are naturally virtuous. The child, as Helvetius delighted to point out, will do that for a coral or a doll which he will do at a mature age for a t.i.tle or a sceptre. Men are rather the infinitely malleable, variable stuff on which education and persuasion can play.

The first essential dogma of perfectibility, the first presupposition of progress is, then, that men's characters depend on external circ.u.mstances. The second dogma, the second condition of hope is that the voluntary actions of men originate in their opinions. It is an orthodox Socratic position, but G.o.dwin was not a student of Plato. He laid 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 are voluntary, the doctrine is self-evident. A voluntary action is accompanied by foresight, and the idea of certain consequences is its motive. A judgment "this is good" or "this is desirable," has preceded the action, and it originates therefore in an opinion however fugitive.

In moments of pa.s.sion my attention is so engrossed by a particular view of the subject that I forget considerations by which I am commonly guided. Even in battles between reason and sense, he holds, the contending forces a.s.sume a rational form. It is opinion contending with opinion and judgment with judgment. At this point the modern reader will become sceptical. These internal struggles a.s.sume a rational form only when self-consciousness reviews them--that is to say when they are over.