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. Thehistory 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 wrotePolitical Justicehe 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 onlya 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 hisMemoir of Mary Wollstonecraft, then in the preface toSt. 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. Thefamily, dissipated inPolitical Justiceby 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 antennæ 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 haddone 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; andPolitical Justicewas 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 anæmia: he would have cured it with syllogisms, where we should administer proteids. His entire psychology, both social and individual, is vitiated by a naïve 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 thinkingto 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 Helvétius, "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 revolutionarynaïveté, 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 offorce.Political Justiceis 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.
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 parentof 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 famousFrankenstein.
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 educatedCooper 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. Helvétius, 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—aLife of Geoffrey Chaucer(1803) and aHistory 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 asCaleb Williams, mingles a romance of the elixir of life and the philosopher's stone with an ardent recommendation of those family affections whichPolitical Justicehad depreciated.Fleetwood(1805) makes war on debauchery with sincere and impressive dulness.Mandeville(1817),Cloudesley(1830) andDeloraine(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 withAntonio(1800) andFaulkener(1807). Neither play lived, andAntonio, 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 tothese 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 thatPrometheus UnboundandHellaswere 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 andpost-obits. The intellectual relationshipwill be discussed in a later chapter; the bare facts of the personal connection must be told here.Political Justicetook 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; andQueen Mabis 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 wordunfaithful. 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 toFleetwoodhe 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 othersattended 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 heThough fallen, and fallen on evil times, to standAmong the spirits of our age and landBefore the dread tribunal of To-comeThe 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 theEnquirer, 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 wrotePolitical 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 attitudethat 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 Helvétius 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 ofPolitical 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 ofhuman 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 ofPrometheus Unbound. There is little in them which a candid believer would resent to-day. Most of the dogmas which Godwin assailed have longsince 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 mostprofessing 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 naïve 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." Butthe 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 alittle 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 isthe 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.
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 ofsubjectionupon 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. Helvétius, all unconscious of what he did, was the hope-bringer, when he insistedthat 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, Helvétius 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 ofevery 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, theywere 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 todetect the naïve 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 natureand 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 illuminatingLetter 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 popularScottish 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 onThe 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 inthat 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 moralityof 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 Helvétius 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 hisSystème 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'seducation. 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 alsop. 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'sVindication of the Rights of Woman(1792) is perhaps the most original book of its century, not becauseits 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 herVindication, 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 theutmost 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 waspractising 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 patheticMemoirand 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 theLetters to Imlay, which appeared after her death, it is not so much the strength and independence of her final attitude whichimpresses 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 herVindication. It inspired the charming fragment entitledLessons 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."
TheVindicationis 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 MaryWollstonecraft 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'sRights of Manor Condorcet'sSketch. And yet it seems, as they do not, a modern book.
The chief merit of theVindicationis 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 thatwomen 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 asblind 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'sDoll'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.
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 readParadise LostandSamson 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 theone 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 wroteChristabelandKubla Khanwas not theCritique of Pure Reason. But to ShelleyPolitical Justicewas 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 essentialthing. A good impulse, a dream, an idea, were for him what a Centaur or a Pegasus were for common fancy. He sees inPrometheus Unbounda spirit who