No two minds could have presented a greater contrast. Had Mary Wollstonecraft lived they must have moulded each other into something finer than Nature had made of either. The year of married life was ideally happy, and the strange experiment in reconciling individualism with love apparently succeeded. Mrs. Godwin, for all her revolutionary independence, leaned affectionately on her husband, and he, in spite of his rather overgrown self-esteem, regarded her with reverence and pride. She was quick in her affections and resentments, but looking back many years later Godwin declares that they were "as happy as is permitted to human beings." "It must be remembered, however, that I honoured her intellectual powers and the nobleness and generosity of her propensities; mere tenderness would not have been adequate to produce the happiness we experienced."

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

* * * * *

With the death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797, ended all that was happy and stimulating in Godwin's career. It was for him the year of private disaster, and from it he dated also the triumph of the reaction in England. The stimulus of the revolutionary period was withdrawn. He lived no longer among ardent spirits who would brave everything and do anything for human perfectibility. Some were in Botany Bay, and others, like the indomitable Holcroft, were absorbed in the struggle to live, with the handicap of political persecution against them. Godwin, indeed, never fell into despair over the ruin of his political hopes. Like Beethoven he revered Napoleon, at all events until he assumed the title of Emperor, and would console himself with the conviction that this "auspicious and beneficent genius" had "without violence to the principles of the French Revolution ... suspended their morbid activity," while preserving "all the great points" of its doctrine. But while all England hung on the event of the titanic struggle against this "beneficent genius," what was a philanthropist to do? The world was rattling back into barbarism, and the generation which emerged from the long nightmare of war, famine, and repression, was incomparably less advanced in its thinking, narrower and timider in its whole habit of mind than the men who were young in 1789. There was nothing to do, and a philosopher whose only weapon was argument, kept silence when none would listen. Of what use to talk of "peace and the powers of the human mind," while all England was gloating over the brutal cartoons of Gillray, and trying on the volunteer uniforms, in which it hoped to repel Napoleon's invasion? We need not wonder that Godwin's output of philosophic writing practically ceased with the eighteenth century. He was henceforth a man without a purpose, who wrote for bread and renounced the exercise of his greater powers.

The end of Godwin's active apostolic life is clearly marked in a pamphlet which he issued in 1801 ("Thoughts occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr's Spital Sermon, preached at Christ Church, April 15, 1800, being a reply to the attacks of Dr. Parr, Mr. Mackintosh, the author [Malthus] of the Essay on Population and others"). It is a masterly piece of writing. Coleridge scribbled in the copy that now lies on the shelves of the British Museum this tribute to its author: "I remember few passages in ancient or modern authors that contain more just philosophy in appropriate, chaste or beautiful diction than the fine following pages. They reflect equal honour on Godwin's head and heart. Though I did it in the zenith of his reputation, yet I feel remorse even to have only spoken unkindly of such a man.—S. T. C."

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

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

Malthus was a more worthy antagonist, though Godwin did not yet perceive how formidable his attack in reality was. To the picture of human perfection he opposed the nightmare of an over-populated planet, and combated universal benevolence by teaching that even charity is an economic sin. English society cares little either for Utopias or for science. But it welcomes science with rapture when it destroys Utopias. If Godwin had pricked men's consciences, Malthus brought the balm. Altruism was exposed at length for the thing it was, an error in the last degree unscientific and uneconomic. The rickety arithmetic of Malthusianism was used against the revolutionary hope, exactly as a travestied version of Darwinianism was used in our own day against Socialism. Godwin preserved his dignity in this controversy and made concessions to his critics with a rare candour. But while he abandons none of his fundamental doctrines, one feels that he will never fight again.

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

Godwin possessed two of the cardinal virtues of a thinker, courage and candour. No fear of ridicule deterred him from pushing his premises to their last conclusion; no false shame restrained him in a controversy from recanting an error. He discarded the wilder developments of his theory of "universal benevolence," and gave it in the end a form which has ceased to be paradoxical. When he wrote Political Justice he was a celibate student who had escaped much of the formative experience of a normal life. As a husband and a father he revised his creed, and devoted no small part of his later literary activity to the work of preaching the claims of those "private affections" which he had scouted as an elderly youth of forty. The re-adjustment in his theory was so simple, that only a great philosopher could have failed to make it sooner. Justice requires me to use all my powers to contribute to the sum of human benefit. But as regards opportunity, I am not equally situated towards all my fellows. By devoting myself more particularly to wife or child with an exclusive affection which is not in the abstract altogether reasonable, I may do more for the general good than I could achieve by a severely impartial benevolence.

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

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

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

If the central tendencies of Godwin's teaching survive these later modifications, it is none the less true that some of his theoretic foundations have been shaken in the work of reconstruction. The isolated individual shut up in his own animal skin and communicating with his fellows through the antennae of his logical processes, has vanished away. Allow him to extend his personality through the private affections, and he has ceased to be the abstract unit of individualism. Godwin should have revised not only his doctrine of the family, but his hatred of co-operation. There is still something to be learned from the view of his school that the human mind, as it begins to absorb the collective experience of the race, is an infinitely variable spiritual stuff, an intellectual protoplasm. They stated the view with a rash emphasis, until one is forced to ask whether a mind which is originally nothing at all, can absorb, or as psychologists say, "apperceive" anything whatever. Nothing comes out of nothing, and nothing can be added to nothing.

Godwin and his school set out to show that the human mind is not necessarily fettered for all time by the prejudices and institutions in which it has clothed itself. When he had done stripping us, it was a nice question whether even our nakedness remained. He treated our prejudices and our effete institutions as though they were something external to us, which had come out of nowhere and could be flung into the void from whence they came. When you have called opinion a prejudice, or traced an institution to false reasoning, you have, after all, only exhibited an interesting zoological fact about human beings. We are exactly the sort of creature which evolves such prejudices. Godwin in unwary moments would talk as though aristocracy and positive law had come to us from without, by a sort of diabolic revelation. This, however, is not a criticism which destroys the value of his thinking. His positions required restatement in terms of the idea of development. If he did not anticipate the notion of evolution, he was the apostle of the idea of progress. We may still retain from his reasonings the hopeful conclusion that the human mind is a raw material capable of almost unlimited variation, and, therefore, of some advance towards "perfection." We owe an inestimable debt to the school which proclaimed this belief in enthusiastic paradoxes.

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

Precisely because of its revolutionary naivete, its unscientific innocence, there is in Godwin's democratic anarchism a stimulus peculiarly tonic to the modern mind. No man has developed more firmly the ideal of universal enlightenment, which has escaped feudalism, only to be threatened by the sociological expert. No writer is better fitted to remind us that society and government are not the same thing, and that the State must not be confounded with the social organism. No moralist has written a more eloquent page on the evil of coercion and the unreason of force. Political Justice is often an imposing system. It is sometimes an instructive fallacy. It is always an inspiring sermon. Godwin hoped to "make it a work from the perusal of which no man should rise without being strengthened in habits of sincerity, fortitude and justice." There he succeeded.



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 enrolled his name on the list of the honourable dead." Godwin, 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, Godwin 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 Godwin?" 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 Godwin'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. Godwin was the stepmother of convention, and treated both Fanny Imlay and Mary Godwin with consistent unkindness. It was the fate of the gentle, melancholy and lovable Fanny 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 documents 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 Shelley's more famous Frankenstein.

With the cares of this family on his shoulders Godwin began to form the habit of applying to his wealthy friends for aid. In judging this part of his conduct, one must bear in mind both his own doctrine about property, 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 in later years to Shelley for money, he was simply giving virtue its occasion, and assisting property to find its level. He practised what he preached, and he would himself give with a generosity which seemed prodigal, to his own relatives, to promising young men, and even to total strangers. He supported one disciple at Cambridge, as he had educated Cooper in his younger days. It was the prevailing theory of the age that men of genius have the right to call on society in the persons of its wealthier members for support. Helvetius, himself a rich man, 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 congregation and aristocratic patrons. To Godwin, profoundly individualistic as he was, a post in the civil service, or even a professorship, would have seemed a more degrading form of charity than this private benevolence.

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

These years were crowded with literary work, for neither "Baldwin" nor Godwin allowed their common pen to idle. Two elaborate historical works enjoyed and deserved a great reputation in their day, though subsequent research has rendered them obsolete—a Life of Geoffrey Chaucer (1803) and a History of the Commonwealth of England from its Commencement to the Restoration of Charles II. (1824-8). It is not easy for modern taste to do justice to Godwin's novels; but on them his contemporary fame chiefly rested, and publishers paid for them high though diminishing prices. They all belong to the romantic movement; some have a supernatural basis, and most of them discover a too obvious didactic purpose. St. Leon (1799), almost as popular in its day as Caleb Williams, mingles a romance of the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone with an ardent recommendation of those family affections which Political Justice had depreciated. Fleetwood (1805) makes war on debauchery with sincere and impressive dulness. Mandeville (1817), Cloudesley (1830) and Deloraine (1833) are dead beyond the reach of curiosity, yet the Radical critics of his day, including Hazlitt, tried hard to convince themselves that Godwin was a greater novelist than the Tory, Scott. It remains to mention Godwin's two attempts to conquer the theatre with Antonio (1800) and Faulkener (1807). Neither play lived, and Antonio, written in a sort of journalese, cut up into blank verse lines, was too frigid to survive the first night. Godwin's disappointment would be comical if it were not painful. He regarded these deplorable tragedies as the flower of his genius.

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

One of these relationships has become historical, and has coloured the whole modern judgment of Godwin. It would be no exaggeration to say that Godwin 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 cheques and post-obits. The intellectual relationship will be discussed in a later chapter; the bare facts of the personal connection must be told here. Political Justice took Shelley's mind captive while he was still at Eton, much as it had obsessed Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. The influence with him was permanent; and Queen Mab is nothing but Godwin in verse, with prose notes which quote or summarise him. A correspondence began in 1811, and the pupil met the master late in 1812, and again in 1813. They talked as usual of virtue and human perfectibility; and as the intimacy grew, Shelley, whose chief employment at this time was to discover and relieve genius in distress, began to place his present resources and future prospects at Godwin's disposal. It was not an unnatural relationship to arise between a grateful 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 meanwhile entered on the period of misery and disillusion. She had lost her early love of books and ideas, had taken to hats and ostentation, and had become so harsh to him that he welcomed absence. It is certain that he believed her to be also in the vulgar sense of the word unfaithful. At this crisis, when the separation seemed already morally complete, he met Mary Godwin, who had been absent from home during most of his earlier visits. She was a young girl of seventeen, eager for knowledge and experience, and as her father described her, "singularly bold, somewhat imperious and active of mind," and "very pretty." They rapidly fell in love. Godwin's conduct was all that the most conventional morality could have required of him. His theoretical views of marriage were still unorthodox; he held at least that "the institution might with advantage admit of certain modifications." But nine years before in the preface to Fleetwood he had protested that he was "the last man to recommend a pitiful attempt by scattered examples to renovate the face of society." He seems, indeed, to have forgotten his own happy experiment with Mary Wollstonecraft, and protests with a vigour hardly to be expected from so stout an individualist against the idea, that "each man for himself should supersede and trample upon the institutions of the country in which he lives. A thousand things might be found excellent and salutary if brought into general practice, which would in some cases appear ridiculous and in others attended with tragical consequences if prematurely acted upon by a solitary individual."

On this view he acted. He forbade Shelley his house, and tried to make a reconciliation between him and Harriet. On July 28, 1814, Mary secretly left her father's house, joined her lover, and began with him her life of ideal intimacy and devotion. Godwin felt and expressed the utmost disapproval, and for two years refused to meet Shelley, until at the close of 1816, after the suicide of the unhappy Harriet, he stood at his daughter's side as a witness to her marriage. His public conduct was correct. In private he continued to accept money from the erring disciple whom he refused to meet, and salved his elderly conscience by insisting that the cheques should be drawn in another name. There Godwin touched the lowest depths of his moral degeneration. Let us remember, however, that even Shelley, who saw the worst of Godwin, would never speak of him with total condemnation. "Added years," he wrote near the end of his life, "only add to my admiration of his intellectual powers, and even the moral resources of his character." In the poetical epistle to 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. He accepted a sinecure from the Whigs, and became a Yeoman Usher of the Exchequer, with a small stipend and chambers in New Palace Yard. It was a tribute as much to his harmlessness as to his merit. The work of his last years shows little decay in his intellectual powers. His Thoughts on Man (1831) collects his fugitive essays. They are varied in subject, suave, easy and conversational in manner, more polished in style than those of the Enquirer, if a good deal thinner in matter. They avoid political themes, but the idea of human perfectibility none the less pervades the book with an unaggressive presence, a cold and wintry sun. One curious trait of his more cautious and conservative later mind is worth noting. When he wrote Political Justice, the horizons of science were unlimited, the vistas of discovery endless. Now he questions even the mathematical data of astronomy, talks of the limitations of our faculties, and applauds a positive attitude that refrains from conjecture. His last years were spent in writing a book in which he ventured at length to state his views upon religion. Like Helvetius he perceived the advantages which an unpopular philosopher may derive from posthumous publication. Freed at last from the vulgar worries of debt and the tragical burden of personal ties, the fighting ended which had never brought him the joy of combat, the material struggle over which had issued in defeat, he became again the thing that was himself, a luminous intelligence, a humane thinker.

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

* * * * *

"To do my part to free the human mind from slavery," that in his own words was the main object of Godwin's life. The task was not fully discharged with the writing of Political Justice. He could never forget the terror and gloom of his own early years, and, like all the thinkers of the revolution, he coupled superstition with despotism and priests with kings as the arch-enemies of human liberty. The terrors of eternal punishment, the firmly riveted chains of Calvinistic logic, had fettered his own growing mind in youth; and to the end he thought of traditional religion as the chief of those factitious things which prevent mankind from reaching the full stature to which nature destined it. Paine had attempted this work from a similar standpoint, but Godwin, with his trained speculative mind, and his ideal of courtesy and persuasiveness 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 manuscript was bequeathed to her for publication on his death. When, at length, they appeared in 1873 (Essays never before Published), the work which they sought to accomplish had been done by other pens. They possess none the less an historical interest; some fine pages will always be worth reading for their humane impulse and their manly eloquence; they help us to understand the influence which Godwin's ideas, conveyed in personal intercourse, exerted on the author of Prometheus Unbound. There is little in them which a candid believer would resent to-day. Most of the dogmas which Godwin assailed have long since crumbled away through the sapping of a humaner morality and a more historical interpretation of the Bible.

The book opens with a protest against the theory and practice of salutary delusions; and Godwin once more pours his scorn upon those who would cherish their own private freedom, while preserving popular superstitions, "that the lower ranks may be kept in order." The foundation of all improvement is that "the whole community should run the generous race for intellectual and moral superiority." Godwin would preserve some portion of the religious sense, for we can reach sobriety and humility only by realising "how frail and insignificant a part we constitute of the great whole." But the fundamental tenets of dogmatic Christianity are far, he argues, from being salutary delusions. At the basis alike of Protestantism and Catholicism, he sees the doctrine of eternal punishment; and with an iteration that was not superfluous in his own day, he denounces its cruel and demoralising effects. It saps the character where it is really believed, and renders the mind which receives it servile and pusillanimous. The case is no better when it is neither sincerely believed nor boldly rejected. Such an attitude, which is, he thinks, that of most professing believers, makes for insincerity, and for an indifference to all honest thought and speculation. The man who dare neither believe nor disbelieve is debarred from thinking at all.

Worst of all, this doctrine of endless torment and arbitrary election involves 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 a tyrant." He quotes the delightfully naive reflection of Plutarch, who held that it was better to deny God than to calumniate Him, "for I had rather it should be said of me, that there was never such a man as Plutarch, than that it should be said that Plutarch was ill-natured, arbitrary, capricious, cruel, and inexorable." A survey of Church History brings out what Godwin calls "the mixed character of Christianity, its horrors and its graces." In much of what has come down to us from the Old Testament he sees the inevitable effects of anthropomorphism, when the religion of a barbarous age is reduced to writing, and handed down as the effect of inspiration. He cannot sufficiently admire the beauty of Christ's teaching of a perfect disinterestedness and self-denial—a doctrine in his own terminology of "universal benevolence." But the disciples lived in a preternatural atmosphere, continually busied with the four Last Things, death, judgment, heaven, and hell; and they distorted the beauty of the Christian morality by introducing an other-worldliness, to which the ancients had been strangers. From this came the despotism of the Church based on the everlasting burnings and the keys, and something of the spirit of St. Dominic and the Inquisition can be traced, he thinks, even to the earliest period of Christianity. The Gospel sermons do not always realise the Godwinian ideal of rational persuasion.

Godwin's own view is in the main what we should call agnostic: "I do not consider my faculties adequate to pronouncing upon the cause of all things. I am contented to take the phenomena as I behold them, without pretending to erect an hypothesis under the idea of making all things easy. I do not rest my globe of earth upon an elephant [a reference to the Indian myth], and the elephant upon a tortoise. I am content to take my globe of earth simply, in other words to observe the objects which present themselves to my senses, without undertaking to find out a cause why 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, which acts everywhere around me." But he will not slide into anthropomorphism, nor give to this Supreme Thing, which recalls Shelley's Demogorgon, the shape of a man. "The principle is not intellect; its ways are not our ways." If there is no particular Providence, there is none the less a tendency in nature which seconds our strivings, guarantees the work of reason, and "in the vast sum of instances, works for good, and operates beneficially for us." The position reminds us of Matthew Arnold's definition of God as "the stream of tendency by which all things strive to fulfil the law of their being." "We have here," writes Godwin, "a secure alliance, a friend that so far as the system of things extends will never desert us, unhearing, inaccessible to importunity, uncapricious, without passions, without favour, affection, or partiality, that maketh its sun to rise on the evil and the good, and its rain to descend on the just and the unjust."

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

Let us write Godwin's epitaph in his own Roman language. He stood erect and independent. He spoke what he deemed to be truth. He did his part to purge 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 walls that have barred their road to freedom, measure their debt to history, there will be little to claim their gratitude before the close of the eighteenth century. The Protestant Reformation on the whole depressed their status, and even among its more speculative sects the Quakers stood alone in preaching the equality of the sexes. The English Whigs ignored the existence of women. It was left for the French thinkers who laid the foundations of the Revolution to formulate a view of society and human nature which, as it were, insisted on its own application to women. The idea of women's emancipation was alive among their principles. One can name its parents, and one marvels not at all that it seized this mind and the other, but that any mind among the professors of the "new philosophy" contrived to escape it. The central thought, which inspired the gospel of perfectibility has a meaning for men which an enlightened mind can grasp, but it tells the plain obvious fact about women.

When Holcroft compares the influence of laws and institutions upon men to the action of beggars who mutilate their children, when Godwin talks of the subtle poisons of dogma and custom, which cause mankind to grow up a race of dwarfs when they should be giants, they seem to be using metaphors which describe nothing so well as the effect of an artificial education and a tradition of subjection upon women. One by one the thinkers of this generation were unconsciously laying down the premises which the women's movement needed. At the end of all their arguments for liberty and perfectibility, we seem to hear to-day a chorus of women's voices which points the application to themselves. There was little hope for women while the opinion prevailed that minds come into the world with their qualities innate and their limitations fixed by nature. If that were the case, then the undeniable fact that women were intellectually and morally dependent and inferior must be accepted as their inevitable destiny. Helvetius, all unconscious of what he did, was the hope-bringer, when he insisted that mind is the creation of education and experience. When he urged that the very inequality of men's talents is itself factitious and the result of more or less good fortune in the occasions which provoke a mind to activity, who could fail to enquire whether the accepted inferiority of women were so natural and so necessary as the whole world assumed?

This school of thought revelled in social psychology. It studied in turn the soldier, the priest and the courtier, and shewed how each of these has a secondary character, a professional mind, a class morality impressed and imposed upon him by his education and employment. Looking down from the vantage ground of their philosophic salon upon their contemporaries in French society who owed their fortunes and reputations to the favour of an absolute court, Helvetius and his friends framed their general theory of the demoralisation which despotism brings about in the human character. They studied the natural history of the human parasite who flourished under the Bourbons. They need not have travelled to Versailles to find him. The domestic subjection of wives to husbands, the education of girls in a specialised morality, the fetters of custom and fashion, the experience of economic dependence, the denial of every noble stimulus to thought and action—these causes, more potent and more universal than any which work at Court, were making a sex condemned to an artificial inferiority, an induced parasitism. Thinkers who had discarded the notion that human minds come into the world with an innate character and with their limitations already predestined, were ripe to draw the conclusion. The Revolution believed that men by taking thought might add many cubits to their mental stature. To think in these terms was to prepare oneself to see that the "lovely follies" the "amiable weaknesses" of the "fair sex" were in their turn nothing innate, but the fostered characteristics of a class bred in subjection, the trading habits of a profession which had bent all its faculties to the art of pleasing. Reformers who sought to raise the peasant, the negro, and even the courtier to his full stature as a man, were inevitably led to consider the case of their own wives and daughters. They were not the men 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 all inequalities as artificial. Looking forward to the goal of human perfection, they were prompt to realise that every advance would be insecure, and the final hope a delusion, if on their road they should leave half mankind behind them.

It requires a vigorous exercise of the historical imagination to realise the conditions which society imposed upon women in the eighteenth century. If Godwin and Paine had reflected closely on the position of women, they might have been led to modify their exaggerated antithesis between society and government. Government, indeed, imposed a barbarous code of laws upon women. It was a trifle that they were excluded from political power. The law treated a wife as the chattel of her husband, denied her the disposal of her own property, even when it was the produce 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 as a parent. But the state of the law reflected only too faithfully the opinions of society, and these opinions in their turn formed the minds of women. Civilised people amuse themselves to-day by detecting how much of the old prejudices still lurk in a shamefaced half-consciousness in the minds of modern men. There was no need in the eighteenth century for any fine analysis to detect the naive belief that women exist only as auxiliary beings to contribute to the comfort and to flatter the self-esteem of men. The belief was avowed and accepted as the unquestioned basis of human society. Good men proclaimed it, and the cleverest women dared not question it.

For the crudest statement of it we need not go to men who defended despotism and convention in other departments of life. The most repulsive of all definitions of the principle of sex-subjection is to be found in Rousseau:—"The education of women should always be relative to that of men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable; these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy." When the men of the eighteenth century said this, they meant it, and they accepted not only its plain meaning, but its remotest logical consequences. It was a denial of the humanity and personality of women. A slave is a human being, whom the law deprives of his right to sell his labour. A woman had to learn that her subjection affected not only her relations to men, but her attitude to nature and to God. The subtle 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. Milton saw 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 a manual of morality written by a learned divine (Dr. Fordyce) assured her that a "fine woman" never "strikes so deeply" as when a man sees her bent in prayer. She was encouraged to pray that she might be seen of men—men who scrutinised her with the eyes of desire. It is a woman, herself something of a "blue-stocking," who has left us the most pathetic statement of the intellectual fetters which her sex accepted. Women, says Mrs. Barbauld, "must often be content to know that a thing is so, without understanding the proof." They "cannot investigate; they may remember." She warns the girls whom she is addressing that if they will steal knowledge, they must learn, like the Spartan youths, to hide their furtive gains. "The thefts of knowledge in our sex are only connived at while carefully concealed, and if displayed punished with disgrace."

Religion was sullied; knowledge was closed; but above all the sentiment of 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 male ideal. They were to a woman as unnecessary, nay, as harmful in the marriage market as a sturdy frame and well-knit muscles. Dean Swift, a sharp satirist, but a good friend of women, comments on the prevailing view. "There is one infirmity," he writes in his illuminating Letter to a very young lady on her marriage, "which is generally allowed you, I mean that of cowardice," and he goes on to express what was in his day the wholly unorthodox view that "the same virtues equally become both sexes." There he was singular. The business of a woman was to cultivate those virtues most conducive to her prosperity in the one avocation open to her. That avocation was marriage, and the virtues were those which her prospective employer, the average over-sexed male, anxious at all points to feel his superiority, would desire in a subject wife. Submission was the first of them, and submission became the foundation of female virtue. Lord Kames, a forgotten but once popular Scottish philosopher, put the point quite fairly (the quotation, together with that from Mrs. Barbauld, is to be found in Mr. Lyon Blease's valuable book on The Emancipation of Englishwomen): "Women, destined by nature to be obedient, ought to be disciplined early to bear wrongs without murmuring.... This is essential to the female sex, for ever subjected to the authority of a single person."

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

The "soft," the "fair," the "gentle sex" learned its lesson with only too much docility. It grew up stunted to meet the prevailing demand. It acquired weakness, feigned ignorance, and emulated folly as sedulously as men will labour to make at least a show of strength, good sense, and knowledge. It adapted itself only too successfully to the economic conditions in which it found itself. Men accepted its flatteries and returned them with contempt. "Women," wrote that dictator of morals and manners, Lord Chesterfield, "are only children of a larger growth.... A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humours and flatters them, as he does a sprightly, forward child." The men of that century valued women only as playthings. They forgot that he is the child who wants the toy.

The first protests against this morality of degradation came, as one would expect, from men. Demoralising as it was for men, it did at least leave them the free use of their minds. Enquiry, reflection, scepticism, unsuitable if not immodest in a woman, were the rights of a manly intellect. Defoe and Swift uttered an unheeded protest in England, but neither of them carried the subject far. There are some good critical remarks in Helvetius about women's education; but the first man in that century who seemed to realise the importance and scope of what several dimly felt, was Baron Holbach, whose materialism was so peculiarly shocking to our forefathers. A chapter "On Women" in his Systeme Social (1774) opens thus: "In all the countries of the world the lot of women is to submit to tyranny. The savage makes a slave of his mate, and carries his contempt for her to the point of cruelty. For the jealous and voluptuous Asiatic, women are but the sensual instruments of his secret pleasures.... Does the European, in spite of the apparent deference which he affects towards women, really treat them with more respect? While we refuse them a sensible education, while we feed their minds with tedium and trifles, while we allow them to busy themselves only with playthings and fashions and adornments, while we seek to inspire them only with the taste for frivolous accomplishments, do we not show our real contempt, while we mask it with a show of deference and respect?"

Holbach was a rash and rather superficial metaphysician, but the warm-hearted and honest pages which follow this opening inspire a deep respect 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 of convenience; remarks that esteem is necessary for a happy marriage, but asks sadly how one is to esteem a mind which has emerged from a schooling in folly; assails the practice of gallantry, and the fashionable conjugal infidelities of his day; writes with real indignation of the dangers to which working-class girls are exposed; proposes to punish seduction as a crime no less cruel than murder, and concludes by confessing that he would like to adopt Plato's opinion that women should share with men in the tasks of government, but dreads the effects which would flow from the admission of the corrupt ladies of his day to power.

Twenty years later this promising beginning bore fruit in the mature and reasoned pleading of Condorcet for the reform of women's education. There was no subject on which this noble constructive mind insisted with such continual emphasis. His feminism (to use an ugly modern word), was an integral part of his thinking. He remembered women when he wrote of public affairs as naturally as most men forget them. He deserves in the gratitude of women a place at least as distinguished as John Stuart Mill's. The best and fullest statement of his position is to be found in the report and draft Bill on national education (Sur l'Instruction Publique), which he prepared for the Revolutionary Convention in 1792 (see also p. 109). He maintains boldly that the system of national education should be the same for women as for men. He specially insists that they should be admitted to the study of the natural sciences (these were days when it was held that a woman would lose her modesty if she studied botany), and thinks that they would render useful services to science, even if they did not attain the first rank. They ought to be educated for many reasons. They must be able to teach their children. If they remain ignorant, the curse of inequality will be introduced into the family, and mothers will be regarded by their sons with contempt. Nor will men retain their intellectual interests, unless they can share them with women. Lastly, women have the same natural right to knowledge and enlightenment as men. The education should be given in common, and this will powerfully further the interests of morality. The separation of the sexes in youth really proceeds from the fear of unequal marriages, in other words, from avarice and pride. It would be dangerous for a democratic community to allow the spirit of social inequality to survive among women, with the consequence that it could never be extirpated among men. Condorcet was not a brilliant writer, but the humanity and generosity of his thought finds a powerful and reasoned expression in his sober and somewhat laboured sentences.

So far a good and enlightened man might go. The substance of all that need be said against the harem with the door ajar, in which the eighteenth century had confined the mind if not the body, of women, is to be found in Holbach and Condorcet. But they wrote from outside. They were the wise spectators who saw the consequences of the degradation of women, but did not intimately know its cause. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is perhaps the most original book of its century, not because its daring ideas were altogether new, but because in its pages for the first time a woman was attempting to use her own mind. Her ideas, as we have seen, were not absolutely new. They were latent in all the thinking of the revolutionary period. They had been foreshadowed by Holbach (whom she may have read), by Paine (whom she had occasionally met), and by Condorcet (whose chief contribution to the question, written in the same year as her Vindication, she obviously had not read). What was absolutely new in the world's history was that for the first time a woman dared to sit down to write a book which was not an echo of men's thinking, nor an attempt to do rather well what some man had done a little better, but a first exploration of the problems of society and morals from a standpoint which recognised humanity without ignoring sex. She showed her genius not so much in writing the book, which is, indeed, a faulty though an intensely vital performance, as in thinking out its position for 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 to their pages unemancipated. She freed herself from mental slavery, and the utmost which she can have derived from the two or three men who professed the same generous opinions, was the satisfaction of encouragement or confirmation. She owed to others only the powerful stimulus which the Revolution gave to all bold and progressive thought. The vitality of her ideas sprang from her own experience. She had received rather less than was customary of the slipshod superficial education permitted to girls of the middle classes in her day. With this nearly useless equipment, she had found herself compelled to struggle with the world not merely to gain a living, but to rescue a luckless family from a load of embarrassments and misfortunes. Her father was a drunkard, idle, improvident, moody and brutal, and as a girl she had often protected her mother from his violence. A sister had married a profligate husband, and Mary rescued her from a miserable home, in which she had been driven to temporary insanity. The sisters had attempted to live by conducting a suburban school for girls; a brief experience as a governess 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 under the stimulus of necessity the doctrine of economic independence, which became one of the foundations of her teaching. It is the pressure of economic necessity which in this generation and the last has forced women into a campaign for freedom and opportunity. What the growth of the industrial system has done for women in the mass, a hard experience did for Mary Wollstonecraft. In her own person or through her sisters she had felt in an aggravated form most of the wrongs to which women were peculiarly exposed. She had seen the reverse of the shield of chivalry, and known the domestic tyrannies of a sheltered home.

The miracle was that Mary Wollstonecraft's mind was never distorted by bitterness, nor her faith in mankind destroyed by cynicism. Her personality lives for us still in her own books and in the records of her friends. Opie's vivid painting hangs in the National Portrait Gallery to confirm what Godwin tells us of her beauty in his pathetic Memoir and to remind us of Southey's admiration for her eyes. Godwin writes of "that smile of bewitching tenderness ... which won, both heart and soul, the affection of almost every one that beheld it." She was, he tells us, "in the best and most engaging sense, feminine in her manners"; and indeed her letters and her books present her to us as a woman who had courage and independence precisely because she was so normal, so healthy in mind and body, so richly endowed with a generous vitality. If she won the hearts of all who knew her, it was because her own affections were warm and true. She was a good sister, a good daughter, a passionate lover, an affectionate friend, a devoted and tender mother.

She was too real a human being to be misled by the impartialities of universal benevolence. "Few," she wrote, "have had much affection for mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes whom they first played with." That eloquent trait, her love of animals and her hatred of cruelty, helps to define her character. She was, says Godwin, "a worshipper of domestic life," and, for all her proud independence, in love with love. In Godwin's prim phraseology, she "set a great value on a mutual affection between persons of an opposite sex, and regarded it as the principal solace of human life." Indeed, in the Letters to Imlay, which appeared after her death, it is not so much the strength and independence of her final attitude which impresses us, as her readiness to forgive, her reluctance to resent his neglect, her affection which could survive so many proofs of the man's unworthiness. The strongest passion in her generous nature was maternal tenderness. It won her the enduring love of the children whom she taught as a governess. It caused her mind to be busied with the problem of education as its chief preoccupation. It informs her whole view of the rights and duties of women in her Vindication. It inspired the charming fragment entitled Lessons for Little Fanny, which is one of the most graceful expressions in English prose of the physical tenderness of a mother's love. If she despised the artificial sensibility which in her day was admired and cultivated by women, it was because her own emotions were natural and strong. Her intellect, which no regular discipline had formed, impressed the laborious and studious Godwin by its quickness and its flashes of sudden insight—its "intuitive perception of intellectual beauty."

The Vindication is certainly among the most remarkable books that have come down to us from that opulent age. It has in abundance most of the faults that a book can have. It was hastily written in six weeks. It is ill-arranged, full of repetitions, full of digressions, and almost without a regular plan. Its style is unformed, sometimes rhetorical, sometimes familiar. But with all these faults, it teems with apt phrases, telling passages, vigorous sentences which sum up in a few convincing lines the substance of its message. It lacks the neatness, the athletic movement of Paine's English. It has nothing of the learning, the formidable argumentative compulsion of Godwin's writing. But it is sold to-day in cheap editions, while Godwin survives only on the dustier shelves of old libraries. Its passion and sincerity have kept 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. It said with its solitary voice the thing which the main army of thinking women is saying to-day. There is scarcely a passage of its central doctrine which the modern leaders of the women's movement would repudiate or qualify; and there is little if anything which they would wish to add to it. Writers like Olive Schreiner, Miss Cicely Hamilton, and Mrs. Gilman have, indeed, a background of historical knowledge, an evolutionary view of society, a sense of the working of economic causes which Mary Wollstonecraft did not possess and could not in her age have acquired, even if she had been what she was not, a woman of learning. But she has anticipated all their main positions, and formulated the ideal which the modern movement is struggling to complete. Her book is dated in every chapter. It is as much a page torn from the journals of the 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 that everything in the future of women depends on the revision of the attitude of men towards women and of women towards themselves. The rare men who saw this, from Holbach and Condorcet to Mill, were philosophers. Mary Wollstonecraft had no pretensions to philosophy. A brilliant courage gave her in its stead her range and breadth of vision. It would have been so much easier to write a treatise on education, a plea for the reform of marriage, or even an argument for the admission of women to political rights. To the last of these themes she alludes only in a single sentence: "I may excite laughter, by dropping a hint, which I mean to pursue, some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government." She had the insight to perceive that the first task of the pioneer was to raise the whole broad issue of the subjection of her sex. She begins by linking her argument with a splendid imprudence to the revolutionary movement. It had proclaimed the supremacy of reason, and based freedom on natural right. Why was it that the new Constitution ignored women? With a fresh simplicity, she appeals to the French Convention in the name of its own abstract principles, as modern women appeal (with more experience of the limitations of male logic) to English Liberalism. But she knew very well what was the enormous despotism of interest and prejudice that she was attacking. The sensualist and the tyrant were for her interchangeable terms, and with great skill she enlists on her side the new passion for liberty. "All tyrants want to crush reason, from the weak king to the weak father." She demands the enlightenment of women, as the reformers demanded that of the masses: "Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a plaything."

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

"Females have been insulated, as it were, and while they have been stripped of the virtue that should clothe humanity, they have been decked with artificial graces that enable them to exercise a short-lived tyranny.... Their sole ambition is to be fair, to raise emotion instead of inspiring respect; and this ignoble desire, like the servility in absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.... Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties.... If marriage be the cement of society, mankind should all be educated after the same model, or the intercourse of the sexes will never deserve the name of fellowship, nor will women ever fulfil the peculiar duties of their sex, till they become enlightened citizens, till they become free by being enabled to earn their own subsistence, independent of men; in the same manner, I mean, to prevent misconstruction, as one man is independent of another. Nay, marriage will never be held sacred till women, by being brought up with men, are prepared 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 the speculations of Godwin and clogs the more practical thinking of Paine. It is, indeed, a protest against the exaggeration of sex, which instilled in women "the desire of being always women." It flouts that external morality of reputation, which would have a woman always "seem to be this and that," because her whole status in the world depended on the opinion which men held of her. It demands in words which anticipate Ibsen's Doll's House, that a woman shall be herself and lead her own life. But "her own life" was for Mary Wollstonecraft a social life. The ideal is the perfect companionship of men and women, and the preparation of men and women, by an equal practice of modesty and chastity, and an equal advance in education, to be the parents of their children. She is ready indeed to rest her whole case for the education of women upon the duties of maternity. "Whatever tends to incapacitate the maternal character takes woman out of her sphere." The education which she demanded was the co-education of men and women in common schools. She attacked the dual standard of sexual morality with a brave plainness of speech. She demanded the opening of suitable trades and professions to women. She exposed the whole system which compels women to "live by their charm." But a less destructive reformer never set out to overthrow conventions. For her the duty always underlies the right, and the development of the self-reliant individual is a preparation for the life of fellowship.



CHAPTER VIII

SHELLEY

If it were possible to blot out from our mind its memory of the Bible and of Protestant theology, and with that mind of artificial vacancy to read Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, how strange and great and mad would the genius of Milton appear. We should wonder at his creative mythological imagination, but we should marvel past all comprehending at his conceptions of the divine order, and the destiny of man. To attempt to understand Shelley without the aid of Godwin is a task hardly more promising than it would be to read Milton without the Bible.

The parallel is so close that one is tempted to pursue it further, for there is between these two poets a close sympathy amid glaring contrasts. Each admitted in spite of his passion for an ideal world an absorbing concern in human affairs, and a vehement interest in the contemporary struggle for liberty. If the one was a Republican Puritan and the other an anarchical atheist, the dress which their passion for liberty assumed was the uniform of the day. Neither was an original thinker. Each steeped himself in the classics. But more important even than the classics in the influences which moulded their minds, were the dogmatic systems to which they attached themselves. It is not the power of novel and pioneer thought which distinguishes a philosophical from a purely sensuous mind. Shelley no more innovated or created in metaphysics or politics than did Milton. But each had, with his gift of imagery, and his power of musical speech, an intellectual view of the universe. The name of Milton suggests to us eloquent rhythms and images which pose like Grecian sculpture. But Milton's world was the world as the grave, gowned men saw it who composed the Westminster Confession. The name of Shelley rings like the dying fall of a song, or floats before our eyes amid the faery shapes of wind-tossed clouds. But Shelley's world was the world of the utilitarian Godwin and the mathematical Condorcet. The supremacy of an intellectual vision is not a common characteristic among poets, but it raises Milton and Shelley to the choir in which Dante and Goethe are leaders. For Keats beauty was truth, and that was all he cared to know. Coleridge, indeed, was a metaphysician of some pretensions, but the "honey dew" on which he fed when he wrote Christabel and Kubla Khan was not the Critique of Pure Reason. But to Shelley Political Justice was the veritable "milk of paradise." We must drink of it ourselves if we would share his banquet. Godwin in short explains Shelley, and it is equally true that Shelley is the indispensable commentary to Godwin. For all that was living and human in the philosopher he finds imaginative expression. His mind was a selective soil, in which only good seed could germinate. The flowers wear the colour of life and emotion. In the clear light of his verse, gleaming in their passionate hues, they display for us their values. Some of them, the bees of a working hive will consent to fertilise; from others they will turn decidedly away. Shelley is Godwin's fertile garden. From another standpoint he is the desert which Godwin laid waste.

It is, indeed, the commonplace of criticism to insist on the reality which the ideal world possessed for Shelley. Other poets have illustrated thought by sensuous imagery. To Shelley, thought alone was the essential thing. A good impulse, a dream, an idea, were for him what 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 a third 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 immortal shapes of "Desires and Adorations" lamenting over the bier of the mortal Keats, because for him an idea or a passion was incomparably more real and more comprehensible than the things of flesh and earth, of whose existence the senses persuade us. To such a mind philosophy was not a distant world to be entered with diffident and halting feet, ever ready to retreat at the first alarm of commonsense. It was his daily habitation. He lived in it, and guided himself by its intellectual compass among the perils and wonders of life, as naturally as other men feel their way by touch. This ardent, sensitive, emotional nature, with all its gift of lyrical speech and passionate feeling, was in fact the ideal man of the Godwinian conception, who lives by reason and obeys principles. Three men in modern times have achieved a certain fame by their rigid obedience to "rational" conceptions of conduct—Thomas Day, who wrote Sandford and Merton, Bentham, and Herbert Spencer. But the erratic, fanciful Shelley was as much the enthusiastic slave of reason, as any of these three; and he seemed erratic only because to be perfectly rational is in this world the wildest form of eccentricity. He came 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 in which he omitted to re-read it. Its phraseology colours his prose; his mind was built upon it, as Milton's was upon the Bible. We hardly require his own confession to assure us of the debt. "The name of Godwin," he wrote in 1812, "has been used to excite in me feelings of reverence and admiration. I have been accustomed to consider him a luminary too dazzling for the darkness which surrounds him. From the earliest period of my knowledge of his principles, I have ardently desired to share on the footing of intimacy that intellect which I have delighted to contemplate in its emanations. Considering then, these feelings, you will not be surprised at the inconceivable emotions with which I learnt your existence and your dwelling. I had enrolled your name in the list of the honourable dead. I had felt regret that the glory 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 of human kind."

The enthusiastic youth was to learn that his master's preoccupation was with concerns more sordid and more pressing than the welfare of human kind; but if close personal intercourse brought some disillusionment regarding Godwin's private character, it only deepened his intellectual influence, and confirmed Shelley's lifelong adhesion to his system. No contemporary thinker ever contested Godwin's empire over Shelley's mind; and if in later years Plato claimed an ever-growing share in his thoughts, we must remember that in several of his fundamental tenets Godwin was a Platonist without knowing it. It is only in his purely personal utterances, in the lyrics which rendered a mood or an impression, or in such fancies as the Witch of Atlas, that Shelley can escape from the obsession of Political Justice. The voice of Godwin does not disturb us in The Skylark, and it is silenced by the violent passions of The Cenci. But in all the more formal and graver utterances of Shelley's genius, from Queen Mab to Hellas, it supplies the theme and Shelley writes the variations. Queen Mab, indeed, is nothing but a fervent lad's attempt to state in verse the burden of Godwin's prose. Some passages in it (notably the lines about commerce) 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 the theme; but still the theme is there, a precise and definite dogma for fancy to embroider. It is only in Hellas that Shelley's power of narrative (in Hassan's story), his irrepressible lyrical gift, and his passion which at length could speak in its own idiom, combine to make a masterpiece which owes to Godwin only some general ideas. If the transcript became less literal, it was not that the influence had waned. It was rather that Shelley was gaining the full mastery of his own native powers of expression. In these poems he assumes or preaches all Godwin's characteristic doctrines, perfectibility, non-resistance, anarchism, communism, the power of reason and the superiority of persuasion over force, universal benevolence, and the ascription of moral 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 reproducing even the minor opinions or illustrations which had struck him in his continual reading of Godwin. When Mammon advises Swellfoot the Tyrant to refresh 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 scene in Canto XI. of the Revolt of Islam, in which Laon, confronting the tyrant on his throne, quells by a look and a word a henchman who was about to stab him, is a too brief rendering of Godwin's reflections on the 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 ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain." One is tempted to retort that to be beautiful is in itself to escape futility, and to people a void with angels is to be far from ineffectual. But the metaphor is more striking as phrase-making than as criticism. The world into which the angel fell, wide-eyed, indignant, and surprised, was not a void. It was a nightmare composed of all the things which to common mortals are usual, normal, inevitable—oppressions and wars, follies and crimes, kings and priests, hangmen and inquisitors, poverty and luxury. If he beat his wings in this cage of horrors, it was with the rage and terror of a bird which belongs to the free air. Shelley, Matthew Arnold held, was not quite sane. Sanity is a capacity for becoming accustomed to the monstrous. Not time nor grey hairs could bring that kind of sanity to Shelley's clear-sighted madness. If he must be compared to an angel, Mr. Wells has drawn him for us. He was the angel whom a country clergyman shot in mistake for a buzzard, in that graceful satire, The Wonderful Visit. Brought to earth by this mischance, he saw our follies and our crimes without the dulling influence of custom. Satirists have loved to imagine such a being. Voltaire drew him with as much wit as insight in L'Ingenu—the American savage who landed in France, and made the amazing discovery of civilisation. Shelley had not dropped from the clouds nor voyaged from the backwoods, but he seems always to be discovering civilisation with a fresh wonder and an insatiable indignation.

One may doubt whether a saint has ever lived more selfless, more devoted to the beauty of virtue; but one quality Shelley lacked which is commonly counted a virtue. He had none of that imaginative sympathy which can make its own the motives and desires of other men. Self-interest, intolerance and greed he understood as little as common men understand heroism and devotion. He had no mean powers of observation. He saw the world as it was, and perhaps he rather exaggerated than minimised its ugliness. But it never struck him that its follies and crimes were human failings and the outcome of anything that is natural in the species. The doctrines of perfectibility and universal benevolence clothed themselves for him in the Godwinian phraseology, but they were the instinctive beliefs of his temperament. So sure was he of his own goodness, so natural was it with him to love and to be brave, that he unhesitatingly ascribed all the evil of the world to the working of some force which was unnatural, accidental, anti-human. If he had grown up a mediaeval Christian, he would have found no difficulty in blaming the Devil. The belief was in his heart; the formula was Godwin's. For the wonder, the miracle of all this unnatural, incomprehensible evil in the world, he found a complete explanation in the doctrine that "positive institutions" have poisoned and distorted the natural good in man. After a gloomy picture in Queen Mab of all the oppressions which are done under the sun, he suddenly breaks away to absolve 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 of kings and priests, the journey to perfection would be at once brief and eventful. As a sociological theory it is unluckily unsatisfying. There is, after all, nothing more natural than a king. He is a zoological fact, with his parallel in every herd of prairie dogs. Nor is there anything much more human than the tendency to convention which gives to institutions their rigidity. If force and imposture have had a share in the making of kings and priests, it is equally true that they are the creation of the servility and superstition of the mass of men. The eighteenth century chose to forget that man is a gregarious animal. Oppression and priestcraft are the transitory forms in which the flock has sought to cement its union. But the modern world is steeped in the lore of anthropology; there is little need to bring its heavy guns to bear upon the slender fabric of Shelley's dream. Queen Mab was a boy's precocious effort, and in later verses Shelley put the case for his view of evil in a more persuasive form. He is now less concerned to declare that it is unnatural, than to insist that it flows from defects in men which are not inherent or irremovable. The view is stated with pessimistic malice by a Fury in Prometheus Unbound after a vision of slaughter.

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 was presently vexed as acutely as any theist with the problem of accounting for evil. Paine felt no difficulty in his sharp, positive mind. He traced 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 of self-interest. What Shelley would really have said in answer to a question about the origin of evil, if we had found him in a prosaic mood, 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 his poetry is a tendency, half conscious, uttering itself only in figures and parables, to read the riddle of the universe as a struggle between two hostile principles. In the world of prose he called himself an atheist. He rejoiced in the name, and used it primarily as a challenge to intolerance. "It is a good word of abuse to stop discussion," he said once to his friend Trelawny, "a painted devil to frighten the foolish, a threat to intimidate the wise and good. I used it to express my abhorrence of superstition. I took up the word as a knight takes up a gauntlet in defiance of injustice."

Shelley was an atheist because Christians used the name of God to sanctify persecution. That was really his ultimate emotional reason. His mythology, when he came to paint the world in myths, was Manichean. His creed was an ardent dualism, in which a God and an anti-God contend and make history. But in his mood of revolt it suited him to confuse the names and the symbols. The snake is everywhere in his poems the incarnation of good, and if we ask why, there is probably no other reason than that the Hebrew mythology against which he revolted, had taken it as the symbol of evil. The legitimate Gods in his Pantheon are always in the wrong. He belongs to the cosmic party of opposition, and the Jupiter of his Prometheus is morally a temporarily omnipotent devil. Like Godwin he felt that the God of orthodoxy was a "tyrant," and he revolted against Him, because he condemned the world which He had made.

The whole point of view, as it concerns Christian theology, is stated with a bitter clearness, in the speech of Ahasuerus in Queen Mab. The first Canto of the Revolt of Islam puts the position of dualism without 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 of Lucifer) until his enemy changed him to the form of a snake. The anti-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 is seen visibly, making the horrors of history. As Jupiter's Furies rend the heart of the merciful Titan chained to his rock on Caucasus, murders and crucifixions are enacted in the world below. The mythical cruelties in the clouds are the shadows of man's sufferings below; and they are also the cause. A mystical parallelism links the drama in Heaven with the 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. Pantheism is the creed of conservatism and resignation. Shelley felt the world as struggle and revolt, and like all the poets, he used Heaven as the vast canvas on which to paint with a demonic brush an heroic idealisation of what he saw below. It would be interesting to know whether any human heart, however stout and rebellious, when once it saw the cosmic process as struggle, has ever been able to think of the issue as uncertain. Certainly for Shelley there was never a doubt about the final triumph of good. Godwin qualified his agnosticism by supposing that there was a tendency in things (he would not call it spiritual, or endow it with mind) which somehow cooperates with us and assures the victory of life (see p. 184). One seems to meet this vague principle, this reverend Thing, in Shelley's Demogorgon, the shapeless, awful negation which overthrows the maleficent Jupiter, and with his fall inaugurates the golden age. The strange name of Demogorgon has probably its origin in the clerical error of some mediaeval copyist, fumbling with the scholia of an anonymous grammarian. One can conceive that it appealed to Shelley's wayward fancy because it suggested none of the traditional theologies; and certainly it has a mysterious and venerable sound. Shelley can describe It only as Godwin describes his principle by a series 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 at a 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-note that promised triumph. Shelley, turning amid his singing to the supremest of all creative work, the making of a mythology, invents his God very much as those detested impostors, the primitive priests, had done. He gives Humanity a friendly Power as they had endowed their tribe with a god of battles. Humanity at grips with chaos is curiously like a nigger clan in the bush. It needs a fetish of victory. But a poet's mythology is to be judged by its fruits. A faith is worth the cathedral it builds. A myth is worth the poem it inspires.

If Shelley's ultimate view of reality is vague, a thing to be shadowed in myths and hinted in symbols, there is nothing indefinite in his view of the destinies of mankind. Here he marched behind Godwin, and Godwin hated vagueness. His intellect had assimilated all the steps in the argument for perfectibility. It emerges in places in its most dogmatic form. Institutions make us what we are, and to free us from their shackles is to liberate virtue and unleash genius. He pauses midway in the preface to Prometheus to assure us that, if England were divided into forty republics, each would produce philosophers and poets as great and numerous as those of Athens. The road to perfection, however, is not through revolution, but by the gradual extirpation of error. When he writes in prose, he expresses himself with all the rather affected intellectualism 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 as Shelley. He had an intellectual view of the world; but, when once the rhythm of his musical verse had excited his mind to be itself, the force and simplicity of his emotion transfuse and transform these abstractions. Godwin's "universal benevolence" was with him an ardent affectionate love for his kind. Godwin's cold precept that it was the duty of an illuminated understanding to contribute towards the progress of enquiry, by arguing about perfection and the powers of the mind in select circles of friends who meet for debate, but never (virtue forbids) for action, became for him a zealous missionary call.

One smiles, with his irreverent yet admiring biographers, at the early escapades of the married boy—the visit to Dublin at the height of the agitation for Catholic emancipation, the printing of his Address to the Irish Nation, and his trick of scattering it by flinging copies from his balcony at passers-by, his quaint attempts to persuade grave Catholic noblemen that what they ought really to desire was a total and rapid transformation of the whole fabric of society, his efforts to found an association for the moral regeneration of mankind, and his elfish amusement of launching the truth upon the waters in the form of pamphlets 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 is much too young to reform the world, urges him to acquire a vicarious maturity by reading history, and refers him to Political Justice passim for the arguments which demonstrate the error of any attempt to improve mankind by forming political associations.