MR. GODWIN

‘See where on high stands unabash’d Defoe!’

Pope’s imagination had too much effeminacy to stomach, under any circumstances, this kind of petty, squalid martyrdom; nor had he strength of public principle enough to form to himself the practical antithesis of ‘dishonour honourable!’ The amiable in private life, the exalted in rank and station, alone fixed his sympathy, and engrossed his admiration. The exquisite compliments with which he has embalmed the memory of some of his illustrious friends, who stand ‘condemned to everlasting fame,’ are a discredit to his own. His apostrophe to Harley, beginning,

‘Oh soul supreme, in each hard instance tried,Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,’

‘Oh soul supreme, in each hard instance tried,

Above all pain, all passion, and all pride,’

contrasts strangely with the time-serving, vain, versatile, and unprincipled character of that minister; and Mr. Wilson ought to have written a good book, for he has spoiled the effect of some of the finest lines in the English language. It was a bold step in Pope to put the author ofRobinson Crusoeinto theDunciadat all; Swift also has a fling at him as ‘the fellow that was pilloried;’ and Gay is equally sceptical and pedantic, as to his possessing more than ‘the superficial parts of learning.’ We know of no excuse for the illiberality of the literary junto with regard to a man like Defoe, but that he returned the compliment to them; and in fact, if we were to take the character of men of genius from their judgment of each other, we must sometimes come to a very different conclusion from what the world have formed.

That Defoe should have incurred the hatred, and been consigned to the vengeance, of the High-Church party for thus honestly exposing their designs against the Dissenters, is but natural; the wonderful part is, that he equally excited the indignation and reproaches of the Dissenters themselves; who disclaimed his work as a scandalous and inflammatory performance, and called loudly (in concert with their bitterest foes,) for the condign punishment of the author. They almost with one voice, and as if seized with a contagion of folly, criedshame upon it, as an underhand and designing attempt to make a premature breach between them and the established church; to sow the seeds of groundless jealousy and ill-will; and to make them indirectly participators in, and the sufferers by, a scurrilous attack on the reverence due to religion and authority. Defoe was made the scapegoat of this paltry and cowardly policy, and was given up to the tender mercies of the opposite party without succour or sympathy. This extreme blindness to their own interests can only be explained by the consideration that the Dissenters, as a body, were at this time in a constant state of probation and suffering; they had enough to do with the evils they actually endured, without ‘flying to others that they knew not of;’ they stood in habitual awe and apprehension of their spiritual lords and masters;—would not be brought to suspect their further designs lest it should provoke them to realise their fears; and as they had not strength nor spirit to avert the blow, did not wish to see till they felt it. The alacrity and prowess of Defoe was a reproach to their backwardness; the truth of his appeal implied a challenge to meet it; and they answered, with the old excuse, ‘why troublest thou us before our time?’ The Dissenters too, at this period, were men of a formal and limited scope of mind, not much versed in the general march of human affairs; they required literal and positive proof for every thing, as well as for the points of faith on which they held out so manfully; and their obstinacy in maintaining these, and suffering for them, was matched by their timid circumspection and sluggish impracticability with respect to every thing else. Their deserting Defoe, who marched on at the head of the battle,—pushed forward by his keen foresight and natural impatience of wrong,—is not out of character; though equally repugnant to sound policy or true spirit. They fixed a stigma on him, therefore, as a breeder of strife, a false prophet, and a dangerous member of the community; and, what is certainly inexcusable, when, afterwards, his jest was turned to melancholy earnest;—when every thing he had foretold was verified to the very letter, when the whole force of the government was arrayed against them, and Sacheverell in person unfurled ‘his bloody flag,’ and paraded the streets with a mob at his heels, pulling down their meeting-houses, burning their private dwellings, and making it unsafe for a Dissenter to walk the streets,—they did not take off the stigma they had affixed to the author ofThe Shortest Way with the Dissenters; did not allow that he was right and they were wrong, but kept up their unjust and illiberal prejudices, and even aggravated them in some instances, as if to prove that they were well-founded. Bodies of men seldom retract or atone for the injuries they have done to individuals. It will hardly seem credible to themodern reader, that in pursuance of this old sectarian grudge, and in conformity with the same narrow spirit, some years after this, when Queen Anne, who, from the death of her son, Prince George, had no hope of leaving an heir to the crown, turned her thoughts to the restoration of the Pretender, and when Defoe, in the general alarm and agitation which this uncertainty of the designs of the Court occasioned, endeavoured to ridicule and defeat the project, by pointing out, in his powerful and inimitable way, the incalculable benefits that would ensue from setting aside the Hanoverian succession, and bringing in the right line, one William Benson, (a Dissenter, a stanch friend to the House of Hanover, and the same who had a monument erected to Milton,) in his absurd prejudice against Defoe,—in his conviction that he was a renegado and a Marplot, and in his utter incapacity to conceive the meaning of irony,—actually set on foot a prosecution against the author as in league with the Pretender; wanted to have him accused of high treason, and obstinately persisted in, and returned to the charge; and that it was only through the friendly zeal and interest of Harley, and his representations to the queen, that he was pardoned and released from Newgate, whither he had been committed on the judges’ warrant, for writing something in defence of his pamphlet, after its presentation by the Grand Jury, and his being compelled to give bail to appear for trial! ‘The force ofdulnesscould no farther go.’

Defoe had before this given violent offence to the Dissenters, bydissentingfrom and ‘disobliging’ them on a number of technical and doubtful points—a difference of which they seemed more tenacious than of the greatest affronts or deadliest injuries. Among others, he had opposed the principles ofoccasional conformity; that is, the liberty practised by some Dissenters, of going to church during their appointment to any public office, as they were prohibited from attending their own places of worship in their official costume. Nothing could be clearer, than that, if it was a point of conscience with these persons not to conform to the service of the established church, their being chosen mayor, sheriff, or alderman, did not give them a dispensation to that purpose. But many of the demure and purse-proud citizens of London, (among whom Mr. William Benson was a leader and a shining light,) resented their not being supposed at liberty to appear at church in their gold chains and robes of office, though contrary to their usual principles of nonconformity;—as children think they have a right to visit fine places in their new clothes on holidays. Their rage against Defoe was at its height, when he had nothing to say against Harley’s Tory administration, for bringing inThe Occasional Conformity Bill, to debar Dissenters of this puerile and contradictoryprivilege. It was to the kindness and generosity of Harley, on this as well as on former occasions, in affording our author pecuniary aid, of which he was in the utmost need, (being without means, friends, and in prison,) and in rescuing him from the grasp of his own party, that we owe his silence on political and public questions during the last years of Queen Anne; and a line of conduct that, in the present day, seems wavering and equivocal. His gratitude for private benefits hardly condemned him to withhold his opinions on public matters; but at that time, personal and private ties bore greater sway over general and public duties than is the case at present. We entirely acquit Defoe of dishonest or unworthy motives. He might easily have gone quite over to the other side, if he had been inclined to make a market of himself: but of this he never betrayed the remotest intention, and merely refused to join in the hue and cry against a man who had twice saved him from starving in a dungeon. Be this as it may, Defoe never recovered from the slur thus cast upon his political integrity, and was under a cloud, and discountenanced during the following reign; though the establishment of this very Protestant succession had been the object of the labours of his whole life, and was the wish that lay nearest his heart to his latest breath.

Defoe had, in the former reign, been at various times employed at her majesty’s desire, and in her service, particularly in accomplishing the Union with Scotland in 1707. He displayed great activity and zeal in accommodating the differences of all parties; and hisHistoryof that event has been pronounced by good judges to be a masterpiece. But as to the numerous transactions in which he was concerned, and his various publications and controversies, we must refer the reader to Mr. Wilson, who has furnished ample details and instructive comments. For ourselves, we must ‘hold our hands and check our pride,’ or we should never have done. Of all Defoe’s multifarious effusions, the only one in which there is a want of candour and good faith, or in which he has wilfully blunted and deadened hismoral sense, is his Defence, or (which is the same thing) his Apology for the Massacre of Glencoe. But King William was his idol, and he could no more see any faults in him than spots in the sun. Our old friend Daniel also tries us hard, when he rails at the poor servants, or ‘fine madams,’ as he calls them, who get a little better clothes and higher wages when they come up to London, than they had in the country; when heruns a-muckat stage-plays, and the triumphs of the mimic scene;—confounding ‘Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, with Lucifer, Prince of Darkness.’ But these were the follies and prejudices of the time, aided by a little tincture of vulgarity, and the sourness of sectarian bigotry.

We pass on to his Novels, and are sorry that we must hasten over them. We owe them to the ill odour into which he had fallen as a politician. His fate with his party reminds one a little of the reception which the heroine of theHeart of Mid-Lothianmet with from her sister, because she would not tell a lie for her; yet both were faithful and true to their cause. Being laid aside by the Whigs, as a suspected person, and not choosing to go over to the other side, he retired to Stoke-Newington, where, as already mentioned, he had an attack of apoplexy, which had nearly proved fatal to him. Recovering, however, and his activity of mind not suffering him to be idle, he turned his thoughts into a new channel, and, as if to change the scene entirely, set about writing Romances. The first work that could come under this title wasThe Family Instructor;—a sort of controversial narrative, in which an argument is held through three volumes, and a feverish interest is worked up to the most tragic height, on ‘the abomination’ (as it was at that time thought by many people, and among others by Defoe) of letting young people go to the play. The implied horror of dramatic exhibitions, in connexion with the dramatic effect of the work itself, leaves a curious impression. Defoe’s polemical talents are brought to bear to very good purpose in this performance, which was in the form of Letters; and it is curious to mark the eagerness with which his pen, after having been taken up for so many years with dry debates and doctrinal points, flies for relief to the details and incidents of private life. His mind was equally tenacious of facts and arguments, and fastened on each, in its turn, with the same strong and unremitting grasp.Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, was the first of his performances in the acknowledged shape of a romance; and from this time he brought out one or two every year to the end of his life. As it was the first, it was decidedly the best; it gave full scope to his genius; and the subject mastered his prevailing bias to religious controversy, and the depravity of social life, by confining him to the unsophisticated views of nature and the human heart. His other works of fiction have not been read, (in comparison)—and one reason is, that many of them, at least, are hardly fit to be read, whatever may be said to the contrary. We shall go a little into the theory of this.

We do not think a person brought up and trammelled all his life in the strictest notions of religion and morality, and looking at the world, and all that was ordinarily passing in it, as little better than a contamination, is,a priori, the properest person to write novels: it is going out of his way—it is ‘meddling with the unclean thing.’ Extremes meet, and all extremes are bad. According to our author’s overstrained Puritanical notions, there were but two choices, God or the Devil—Sinnersand Saints—the Methodist meeting or the Brothel—the school of the press-yard of Newgate, or attendance on the refreshing ministry of some learned and pious dissenting Divine. As the smallest falling off from faith, or grace, or the most trifling peccadillo, was to be reprobated and punished with the utmost severity, no wonder that the worst turn was given to every thing; and that the imagination having once overstepped the formidable line, gave a loose to its habitual nervous dread, by indulging in the blackest and most frightful pictures of the corruptions incident to human nature. It was as well (in the cant phrase) ‘to be in for a sheep as a lamb,’ as it cost nothing more—the sin might at least be startling and uncommon; and hence we find, in this style of writing, nothing but an alternation of religious horrors and raptures, (though these are generally rare, as being a less tempting bait,) and the grossest scenes of vice and debauchery: we have either saintly, spotless purity, or all is rotten to the core. How else can we account for it, that all Defoe’s characters (with one or two exceptions for form’s sake) are of the worst and lowest description—the refuse of the prisons and the stews—thieves, prostitutes, vagabonds, and pirates—as if he wanted to make himself amends for the restraint under which he had laboured ‘all the fore-end of his time’ as a moral and religious character, by acting over every excess of grossness and profligacy by proxy! How else can we comprehend that he should really think there was a salutary moral lesson couched under the history ofMoll Flanders; or that his romance ofRoxana, or the Fortunate Mistress, who rolls in wealth and pleasure from one end of the book to the other, and is quit for a little death-bed repentance and a few lip-deep professions of the vanity of worldly joys, showed, in a striking point of view, the advantages of virtue, and the disadvantages of vice? It cannot be said, however, that these works have animmoraltendency. The author has contrived to neutralise the question; and (as far as in him lay) made vice and virtue equally contemptible or revolting. In going through his pages, we are inclined to vary Mr. Burke’s well-known paradox, that ‘vice, by losing all its grossness, loses half its evil,’ and say that vice, by losing all its refinement, loses all its attraction. We have in them only the pleasure of sinning, and the dread of punishment here or hereafter;—gross sensuality, and whining repentance. The morality is that of the inmates of a house of correction; the piety, that of malefactors in the condemned hole. There is no sentiment, no atmosphere of imagination, no ‘purple light’ thrown round virtue or vice;—all is either the physical gratification on the one hand, or a selfish calculation of consequences on the other. This is the necessary effect of allowing nothing to the frailty of human nature;—of never strewingthe flowers of fancy in the path of pleasure, but always looking that way with a sort of terror as to forbidden ground: nothing is left of the common and mixed enjoyments and pursuits of human life but the coarsest and criminal part; and we have either a sour, cynical, sordid sell-denial, or (in the despair of attaining this) a reckless and unqualified abandonment of all decency and character alike:—it is hard to say which is the most repulsive. Defoe runs equally into extremes in his male characters as in his heroines.Captain Singletonis a hardened, brutal desperado, without one redeeming trait, or almost human feeling; and, in spite of what Mr. Lamb says of his lonely musings and agonies of a conscience-stricken repentance, we find nothing of this in the text: the captain is always merry and well if there is any mischief going on; and his only qualm is, after he has retired from his trade of plunder and murder on the high seas, and is afraid of being assassinated for his ill-gotten wealth, and does not know how to dispose of it. Defoe (whatever his intentions may be) is led, by the force of truth and circumstances, to give the Devil his due—he puts no gratuitous remorse into his adventurer’s mouth, nor spoils thekeepingby expressing one relenting pang, any more than his hero would have done in reality. This is, indeed, the excellence of Defoe’s representations, that they are perfectfac-similesof the characters he chooses to pourtray; but then they are too often the worst specimens he can collect out of the dregs and sink of human nature.Colonel Jackis another instance, with more pleasantry, and a common vein of humanity; but still the author is flung into the same walk of flagrant vice and immorality;—as if his mind was haunted by the entire opposition between grace and nature—and as if, out of the sphere of spiritual exercise and devout contemplation, the whole actual world was a necessary tissue of what was worthless and detestable.

We have, we hope, furnished a clue to this seeming contradiction between the character of the author and his works; and must proceed to a conclusion. Of these novels we may, nevertheless, add, for the satisfaction of the inquisitive reader, thatMoll Flandersis utterly vile and detestable: Mrs. Flanders was evidently born in sin. The best parts are the account of her childhood, which is pretty and affecting; the fluctuation of her feelings between remorse and hardened impenitence in Newgate; and the incident of her leading off the horse from the inn door, though she had no place to put it in after she had stolen it. This was carrying the love of thieving to anidealpitch, and making it perfectly disinterested and mechanical.Roxanais better—soaring a higher flight, instead of grovelling always in the mire of poverty and distress; but she has neither refinement nor a heart; weare only dazzled with the outward ostentation of jewels, finery, and wealth. The scene where she dances in her Turkish dress before the king, and obtains the name of Roxana, is of the true romantic cast. The best parts ofColonel Jackare the early scenes, where there is a spirit of mirth and good fellowship thrown over the homely features of low and vicious life;—as where the hero and his companion are sitting at the three-halfpenny ordinary, and are delighted, even more than with their savoury fare, to hear the waiter cry, ‘Coming, gentlemen, coming,’ when they call for a cup of small-beer; and we rejoice when we are told as a notable event, that ‘about this time the Colonel took upon him to wear a shirt.’ TheMemoirs of a Cavalierare an agreeable mixture of the style of history and fiction. These Memoirs, as is well known, imposed upon Lord Chatham as a true history. In hisHistory of Apparitions, Defoe discovers a strong bias to a belief in the marvellous and preternatural; nor is this extraordinary, for, to say nothing of the general superstition of the times, his own impressions of whatever he chose to conceive are so vivid and literal, as almost to confound the distinction between reality and imagination. He could ‘call spirits from the vasty deep,’ and they ‘would come when he did call for them.’ We have not room for an enumeration of even half his works of fiction. We give the bust, and must refer to Mr. Wilson for the whole length. AfterRobinson Crusoe, hisHistory of the Plagueis the finest of all his works. It has an epic grandeur, as well as heart-breaking familiarity, in its style and matter.

Notwithstanding the number and success of his publications, Defoe, we lament to add, had to struggle with pecuniary difficulties, heightened by domestic afflictions. To the last, when on the brink of death, he was on the verge of a jail; and the ingratitude and ill-behaviour of his son in embezzling some property which Defoe had made over for the benefit of his sisters and mother, completed his distress. He was supported in these painful circumstances by the assistance and advice of Mr. Baker, who had married his youngest daughter, Sophia. The subjoined letter gives a melancholy but very striking picture of the state of his feelings at this sad juncture:—

‘Dear Mr. Baker,—I have yorvery kind and affecc’onate Letter of the 1st: But not come to my hand till ye10th; where it had been delay’d I kno’ not. As your kind manner, and kinder Thought, from wchit flows, (for I take all you say to be as I always believed you to be, sincere and Nathaniel like, without Guile) was a particular satisfacc’on to me; so the stop of a Letter, however it happened, deprived me of that cordial too many days, considering how much I stood in need of it, to support a mind sinking under the weight of anafflicc’on too heavy for my strength, and looking on myself as abandoned of every Comfort, every Friend, and every Relative, except such only as are able to give me no assistance.

‘I was sorry you should say at yebeginning of your Letter, you were debarred seeing me. Depend upon my sincerity for this, I am far from debarring you. On yecontrary, it would be a greater comfort to me than any I now enjoy, that I could have yoragreeable visits wthsafety, and could see both you and my dearest Sophia, could it be without giving her yegrief of seeing her fatherin tenebris, and under yeload of insupportable sorrows. I am sorry I must open my griefs so far as to tell her, it is not yeblow I recdfrom a wicked, perjur’d, and contemptible enemy, that has broken in upon my spirit, wchas she well knows, has carryed me on thro’ greater disasters than these. But it has been the injustice, unkindness, and, I must say, inhuman dealing of my own son, wchhas both ruined my family, and, in a word, has broken my heart; and as I am at this time under a weight of very heavy illness, wchI think will be a fever, I take this occasion to vent my grief in yebreasts who I know will make a prudent use of it, and tell you, that nothing but this has conquered, or could conquer me.Et tu! Brute!I depended upon him, I trusted him, I gave up my two dear unprovided children into his hands; but he has no compassion, and suffers them and their poor dying mother to beg their bread at his door, and to crave, as if it were an alms, what he is bound under hand and seal, besides the most sacred promises, to supply them with; himself, at yesame time, living in a profusion of plenty. It is too much for me. Excuse my infirmity, I can say no more; my heart is too full. I only ask one thing of you as a dying request. Stand by them when I am gone, and let them not be wrong’d, while he is able to do them right. Stand by them as a brother; and if you have any thing within you owing to my memory, who have bestow’d on you the best gift I had to give, let ymnot be injured and trampled on by false pretences, and unnatural reflections. I hope they will want no help but that of comfort and council; but that they will indeed want, being too easie to be manag’d by words and promises.

‘It adds to my grief that it is so difficult to me to see you. I am at a distance from Londnin Kent; nor have I a lodging in London, nor have I been at that place in the Old Bailey, since I wrote you I was removed from it. At present I am weak, having had some fits of a fever that have left me low. But those things much more.

‘I have not seen son or daughter, wife or child, many weeks, and kno’ not which way to see them. They dare not come by water, and by land here is no coach, and I kno’ not what to do.

‘It is not possible for me to come to Enfield, unless you could find a retired lodging for me, where I might not be known, and might have the comfort of seeing you both now and then; upon such a circumstance, I could gladly give the days to solitude, to have the comfort of half an hour now and then, with you both, for two or three weeks. But just to come and look at you, and retire immediately, tis a burden too heavy. The parting will be a price beyond the enjoyment.

‘I would say, (I hope) with comfort, that ’tis yet well. I am so near my journey’s end, and am hastening to the place where yeweary are at rest, and where the wicked cease to trouble; be it that the passage is rough, and the day stormy, by what way soever He please to bring me to the end of it, I desire to finish life with this temper of soul in all cases:Te Deum Laudamus.

‘I congratulate you on yeoccasion of yorhappy advance in yremployment. May all you do be prosperous, and all you meet with pleasant, and may you both escape the tortures and troubles of uneasie life. May you sail yedangerous voyage of life witha forcing wind, and make the port of heavenwithout a storm.

‘It adds to my grief that I must never see the pledge of your mutual love, my little grandson. Give him my blessing, and may he be to you both your joy in youth, and your comfort in age, and never add a sigh to your sorrow. But, alas! that is not to be expected. Kiss my dear Sophy once more for me; and if I must see her no more, tell her this is from a father that loved her above all his comforts, to his last breath.—Yorunhappy, D. F.

‘About two miles from Greenwich, Kent,Tuesday, August 12, 1730.’

‘About two miles from Greenwich, Kent,

Tuesday, August 12, 1730.’

‘From this scene of sorrow,’ says Mr. Wilson, ‘we must now hasten to an event, that dropped before it the dark curtain of time. Having received a wound that was incurable, there is too much reason to fear that the anguish arising from it sunk deep in his spirits, and hastened the crisis that, in a few months, brought his troubles to a final close. The time of his death has been variously stated; but it took place upon the 24th of April, 1731, when he was about seventy years of age, having been born in the year 1661. Cibber and others state that he died at his house at Islington; but this is incorrect. The parish of St. Giles, Cripplegate, in which he drew his first breath, was also destined to receive his last. This we learn from the parish register, which has been searched for the purpose; and farther informs us, that he went off in a lethargy. He was buried from thence, upon the 26th of April, in Tindall’s Burying-ground, nowmost known by the name of Bunhill-Fields. The entry in the register, written probably by some ignorant person, who made a strange blunder of his name, is as follows: “1731, April 26. Mr. Dubow. Cripplegate.” His wife did not long survive him.’

Vol. li.] [April 1830.

We find little of the author of Caleb Williams in the present work, except the name in the title-page. Either we are changed, or Mr. Godwin is changed, since he wrote that masterly performance. We remember the first time of reading it well, though now long ago. In addition to the singularity and surprise occasioned by seeing a romance written by a philosopher and politician, what a quickening of the pulse,—what an interest in the progress of the story,—what an eager curiosity in divining the future,—what an individuality and contrast in the characters,—what an elevation and what a fall was that of Falkland;—how we felt for his blighted hopes, his remorse, and despair, and took part with Caleb Williams as his ordinary and unformed sentiments are brought out, and rendered more and more acute by the force of circumstances, till hurried on by an increasing and incontrollable impulse, he turns upon his proud benefactor and unrelenting persecutor, and in a mortal struggle, overthrows him on the vantage-ground of humanity and justice! There is not a moment’s pause in the action or sentiments: the breath is suspended, the faculties wound up to the highest pitch, as we read. Page after page is greedily devoured. There is no laying down the book till we come to the end; and even then the words still ring in our ears, nor do the mental apparitions ever pass away from the eye of memory. Few books have made a greater impression than Caleb Williams on its first appearance. It was read, admired, parodied, dramatised. All parties joined in its praise. Those (not a few) who at the time favoured Mr. Godwin’s political principles, hailed it as a new triumph of his powers, and as a proof that the stoicism of the doctrines he inculcated did not arise from any defect of warmth or enthusiasm of feeling, and that his abstract speculations were grounded in, and sanctioned by, an intimate knowledge of, and rare felicity in, developing the actual vicissitudes of human life. On the other hand, his enemies, or those who looked with a mixture of dislike and fear at the system of ethics advanced in theEnquiry concerning Political Justice, were disposed to forgive the author’s paradoxes for the truth of imitation with which he had depicted prevailing passions, and were glad tohave something in which they could sympathize with a man of no mean capacity or attainments. At any rate, it was a new and startling event in literary history for a metaphysician to write a popular romance. The thing took, as all displays of unforeseen talent do with the public. Mr. Godwin was thought a man of very powerful and versatile genius; and in him the understanding and the imagination reflected a mutual and dazzling light upon each other. His St. Leon did not lessen the wonder, nor the public admiration of him, or rather ‘seemed like another morn risen on mid-noon.’ But from that time he has done nothing of superlative merit. He has imitated himself, and not well. He has changed the glittering spear, which always detected truth or novelty, for a leaden foil. We cannot say of his last work (Cloudesley),—‘Even in his ashes live his wonted fires.’ The story is cast indeed something in the same moulds as Caleb Williams; but they are not filled and running over with molten passion, or with scalding tears. The situations and characters, though forced and extreme, are without effect from the want of juxtaposition and collision. Cloudesley (the elder) is like Caleb Williams, a person of low origin, and rebels against his patron and employer; but he remains a characterless, passive, inefficient agent to the last,—forming his plans and resolutions at a distance,—not whirled from expedient to expedient, nor driven from one sleepless hiding-place to another; and his lordly and conscience-stricken accomplice (Danvers) keeps his state in like manner, brooding over his guilt and remorse in solitude, with scarce an object or effort to vary the round of his reflections,—a lengthened paraphrase of grief. The only dramatic incidents in the course of the narrative are, the sudden metamorphosis of the Florentine Count Camaldoli into the robber St. Elmo, and the unexpected and opportune arrival of Lord Danvers in person, with a coach and four and liveries, at Naples, just in time to save his ill-treated nephew from a violent death. The rest is a well-written essay, or theme, composed as an exercise to gain a mastery of style and topics.

There is, indeed, no falling off in point of style or command of language in the work before us. Cloudesley is better written than Caleb Williams. The expression is everywhere terse, vigorous, elegant:—a polished mirror without a wrinkle. But the spirit of the execution is lost in the inertness of the subject-matter. There is a dearth of invention, a want of character and grouping. There are clouds of reflections without any new occasion to call them forth;—an expanded flow of words without a single pointed remark. A want of acuteness and originality is not a fault that is generally chargeable upon our author’s writings. Nor do we lay the blame upon himnow, but upon circumstances. Had Mr. Godwin been bred a monk, and lived in the good old times, he would assuredly either have been burnt as a free-thinker, or have been rewarded with a mitre, for a tenth part of the learning and talent he has displayed. He might have reposed on a rich benefice, and the reputation he had earned, enjoying theotium cum dignitate, or at most relieving his official cares by revising successive editions of his former productions, and enshrining them in cases of sandal-wood and crimson velvet in some cloistered hall or princely library. He might then have courted

——‘retired leisure,That in trim gardens takes its pleasure,’—

——‘retired leisure,

That in trim gardens takes its pleasure,’—

have seen his peaches ripen in the sun; and, smiling secure on fortune and on fame, have repeated with complacency the motto—Horas non numero nisi serenas!But an author by profession knows nothing of all this. He is only ‘the iron rod, the torturing hour.’ He lies ‘stretched upon the rack of restless ecstasy:’ he runs the everlasting gauntlet of public opinion. He must write on, and if he had the strength of Hercules and the wit of Mercury, he must in the end write himself down:

‘And like a gallant horse, fallen in first rank,Lies there for pavement to the abject rear,O’er-run and trampled on.’

‘And like a gallant horse, fallen in first rank,

Lies there for pavement to the abject rear,

O’er-run and trampled on.’

He cannot let well done alone. He cannot take his stand on what he has already achieved, and say, Let it be a durable monument to me and mine, and a covenant between me and the world for ever! He is called upon for perpetual new exertions, and urged forward by ever-craving necessities. Thewolfmust be kept from the door: theprinter’s devilmust not go empty-handed away. He makes a second attempt, and though equal perhaps to the first, because it does not excite the same surprise, it falls tame and flat on the public mind. If he pursues the real bent of his genius, he is thought to grow dull and monotonous; or if he varies his style, and tries to cater for the capricious appetite of the town, he either escapes by miracle or breaks down that way, amidst the shout of the multitude and the condolence of friends, to see the idol of the moment pushed from its pedestal, and reduced to its proper level. There is only one living writer who can pass through this ordeal; and if he had barely written half what he has done, his reputation would have been none the less. His inexhaustible facility makes the willing world believe there is not much in it. Still, there is no alternative. Popularity, like one of the Danaides, imposes impossible tasks on her votary,—to pour waterinto sieves, to reap the wind. If he does nothing, he is forgotten; if he attempts more than he can perform, he gets laughed at for his pains. He is impelled by circumstances to fresh sacrifices of time, of labour, and of self-respect; parts with well-earned fame for a newspaper puff, and sells his birth-right for a mess of pottage. In the meanwhile, the public wonder why an author writes so badly and so much. With all his efforts, he builds no house, leaves no inheritance, lives from hand to mouth, and, though condemned to daily drudgery for a precarious subsistence, is expected to produce none but works of first-rate genius. No; learning unconsecrated, unincorporated, unendowed, is no match for the importunate demands and thoughtless ingratitude of the reading public.

——‘O, let not virtue seekRemuneration for the thing it was!To have done, is to hang,Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mailIn monumental mockery;—That all, with one consent, praise new-born gaudes,Though they are made and moulded of things past;And give to dust, that is a little gilt,More laud than gilt o’er-dusted.’

——‘O, let not virtue seek

Remuneration for the thing it was!

To have done, is to hang,

Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail

In monumental mockery;—

That all, with one consent, praise new-born gaudes,

Though they are made and moulded of things past;

And give to dust, that is a little gilt,

More laud than gilt o’er-dusted.’

If we wished to please Mr. Godwin, we should say that his last work was his best; but we cannot do this in justice to him or to ourselves. Its greatest fault is, that (as Mr. Bayes would have declared) there is nothing ‘to elevate and surprise’ in it. There is a story, to be sure, but you know it all beforehand, just as well as after having read the book. It is like those long straight roads that travellers complain of on the Continent, where you see from one end of your day’s journey to the other, and carry the same prospect with you, like a map in your hand, the whole way. Mr. Godwin has laid no ambuscade for the unwary reader—no picturesque group greets the eye as you pass on—no sudden turn at an angle places you on the giddy verge of a precipice. Nevertheless, our author’s courage never flags. Mr. Godwin is an eminent rhetorician; and he shows it in this, that he expatiates, discusses, amplifies, with equal fervour, and unabated ingenuity, on the merest accidents of the way-side, or common-places of human life. Thus, for instance, if a youth of eleven or twelve years of age is introduced upon the carpet, the author sets himself to show, with a laudable candour and communicativeness, what the peculiar features of that period of life are, and ‘takes an inventory’ of all the particulars,—such as sparkling eyes, roses in the cheeks, a smooth forehead, flaxen locks, elasticity of limb, lively animal spirits, and all the flush of hope,—as if he were describing anovelty, or someterra incognita, to the reader. In like manner, when a young man of twenty is confined to a dungeon as belonging to a gang of banditti, and going to be hanged, great pains are taken through three or four pages to convince us, that at that period of life this is no very agreeable prospect; that the feelings of youth are more acute and sanguine than those of age; that, therefore, we are to take a due and proportionate interest in the tender years and blighted hopes of the younger Cloudesley; and that if any means could be found to rescue him from his present perilous situation, it would be a great relief, not only to him, but to all humane and compassionate persons. Every man’s strength is his weakness, and turns in some way or other against himself. Mr. Godwin has been so long accustomed to trust to his own powers, and to draw upon his own resources, that he comes at length to imagine that he can build a palace of words upon nothing. When he lavished the colours of style, and the exuberant strength of his fancy, on descriptions like those of the character of Margaret, the wife of St. Leon, or of his musings in the dungeon of Bethlem Gabor, or of his enthusiasm on discovering the philosopher’s stone, and being restored to youth and the plenitude of joy by drinking theElixir Vitæ;—or when he recounts the long and lasting despair which succeeded that utter separation from his kind, and that deep solitude which followed him into crowds and cities,—deeper and more appalling than the dungeon of Bethlem Gabor,—we were never weary of being borne along by the golden tide of eloquence, supplied from the true sources of passion and feeling. But when he bestows the same elaboration of phrases, and artificial arrangement of sentences, to set off the most trite and obvious truisms, we confess it has to us a striking effect of thebathos. Lest, however, we should be thought to have overcharged or given a false turn to this description, we will enable our readers to judge for themselves, by giving the passage to which we have just alluded, as a specimen of this overstrained and supererogatory style.

—‘The condition in which he was now placed could not fail to have a memorable effect on the mind of Julian. Shut up in a solitary dungeon, without exercise or amusement, he had nothing upon which to occupy his thoughts but the image of his own situation. He had hitherto lived, particularly during the last twelve months, in a dream. He grieved most bitterly, most persistingly, for the death of Cloudesley (the elder). He had been instigated by his grief to seek the society of the companions he had left in the Apennines. He did not desire any new connexions; he would have shrunk from the encounter of new faces.

‘All this was well. But the case was different, when he understoodfrom the language and manner of those who had him in custody, the only persons he saw, that he would probably barely be taken out of prison to be led to the scaffold. This was a kind of shock, greatly calculated to awaken a man out of a dream. Julian was young, and had seen little of the diversified scenes of human life. Existence is a thing that is regarded in a very different light by the young and the old. The springs of human nature are of a limited sort, and lie in a narrow compass; and when we grow old, our desires are declining, our faculties have lost their sharpness, and we are reasonably contented “to close our eyes and shut out daylight.” But to the young it is a very different thing, particularly perhaps at twenty years of age. We are just come into the possession of all our faculties, and begin fully to be aware of our own independence. Every thing is new to us; and the larger half at least of what is new, is also agreeable. Pleasure spreads before us all its allurements; knowledge unrolls its ample page. We have every thing to learn, and every thing to enjoy. Ambition proffers its variegated visions; and we are at a loss on which side to fix our choice. It is easy to dally with death. The young man is like the coquette of the other sex: She has little objection to trifling with a displeasing and superannuated lover, so long as she is satisfied she is not within his clutches.

‘But all these considerations sink into nothing when contrasted with the horrible death that was prepared for him. Julian had hitherto been a stranger to adversity and pain. The path of his juvenile years had been smoothed to him by the exemplary cares of Cloudesley and Eudocia. To his own apprehension he was the favourite of fortune. All that he had read of tragic and disastrous in the annals of mankind seemed like a drama, prepared to make him wise by the sorrows of others, without costing him a particle of the bitter price of experience. All that he had encountered of displeasing was when he was the inmate of Borromeo; and this, though felt by him as intolerable, he was aware had been planned in a spirit of kindness. How terrible, therefore, was the reverse that had now fallen upon him! That he, who had never contemplated the slightest mischief to a human creature, whose life had been all kindness, and beneficence, and good humour, should suddenly be treated as the vilest of criminals, shut up in a dungeon, and destined to the scaffold, was a thought that overturned all his previous conceptions of human society and life. It filled him with wildness and horror; it drove him to frenzy. From time to time he was ready to burst into paroxysm, and dash out his desperate brains against the bars of his prison. To exchange the most beautiful scene that Paradise ever exhibited, for utter desolation and tremendous hurricane, that shouldtear up rocks from their foundations, and overwhelm the produce of the earth with rushing and uncontrollable waves, would feebly express the revolution that took place in his mind. He repented that he had ever again sought the society of these alluring but pernicious friends.’—Vol.III.p. 288.

Was so much circumlocution necessary to prove that it is a disagreeable thing to be shut up in a prison, and led out to the gallows? This is the style of theorator, where the whole object is to turn a plain moral adage in as many different ways as possible, and not that of the romance-writer, who has, or ought to have, too many rare and surprising adventures on his hands, to stoop to this trifling, snail-paced method. According to the foregoing studied description, it should seem, that for a man to feel shocked at being immured in a gaol, or broke on the wheel, is ‘a pass of wit.’ When the author has conjured up all the aggravations of the particular case, and compared it to the nicest shade of difference with his former or his future possible history, he then feels satisfied that his hero would like it little better than he does, and inflicts a tardy horror and repentance on him. With submission, this may be the scholastic or rational process for exciting pity and terror; nature takes a shortercut, and jumps at a conclusion without all this formality and cool calculation of grains and scruples in the scale of misfortune.

We have a graver charge yet to bring against Mr. Godwin on the score of style, than that it leads him into useless amplification: from his desire to load and give effect to his descriptions, he runs different characters and feelings into one another. By not stopping short of excess and hyperbole, he loses the line of distinction, and ‘o’ersteps the modesty of nature.’ All his characters are patterns of vice or virtue. They are carried to extremes,—they are abstractions of woe, miracles of wit and gaiety,—gifted with every grace and accomplishment that can be enumerated in the same page; and they are not only prodigies in themselves, but destined to immortal renown, though we have never heard of their names before. This is not like a veteran in the art, but like the raptures of some boarding-school girl in love with every new face or dress she sees. It is difficult to say which is the most extraordinary genius,—the improvisatori Bernardino Perfetti, or his nephew, Francesco, or young Julian. Mr. Godwin still sees with ‘eyes of youth.’ Irene is a Greek, the model of beauty and of conjugal faith. Eudocia, her maid, who marries the elder Cloudesley, is a Greek too, and nearly as handsome and as exemplary in her conduct. Again, on the same principle, the account of Irene’s devotion to her father and her husband, is by no means clearly discriminated. The spiritual feeling is exaggerated till it is confoundedwith the passionate; and the passionate is spiritualized in the same incontinence of tropes and figures, till it loses its distinctive character. Each sentiment, by being overdone, is neutralized into a sort of platonics. It is obvious to remark, that the novel of Cloudesley has no hero, no principal figure. The attention is divided, and wavers between Meadows, who is a candidate for the reader’s sympathy through the first half volume, and whose affairs and love adventures at St. Petersburg are huddled up in haste, and broke off in the middle; Lord Danvers, who is the guilty sufferer; Cloudesley, his sullen, dilatory Mentor; and Julian, (the supposed offspring of Cloudesley, but real son of Lord Alton, and nephew of Lord Danvers,) who turns out the fortunate youth of the piece. The story is awkwardly told. Meadows begins it with an account of himself, and a topographical description of the Russian empire, which has nothing to do with the subject; and nearly through the remainder of the work, listens to a speech of Lord Danvers, recounting his own history and that of Julian, which lasts for six hundred pages without interruption or stop. It is the longest parenthesis in a narrative that ever was known. Meadows then emerges from hisincognitoonce more, as if he had been hid behind a curtain, and gives thecoup-de-graceto his own auto-biography, and the lingering sufferings of his patron. The plot is borrowed from a real event that took place concerning a disputed succession in the middle of the last century, and which gave birth not long after to a novel with the title ofAnnesley. We should like to meet with a copy of this work, in order to see how a writer of less genius would get to the end of his task, and carry the reader along with him without the aid of those subtle researches and lofty declamations with which Mr. Godwin has supplied the place of facts and circumstances. The published trial, we will hazard a conjecture, has more ‘mark and likelihood’ in it. This is the beauty of Sir Walter Scott: he takes a legend or an actual character as he finds it, while other writers think they have not performed their engagements and acquitted themselves with applause, till they have slobbered over the plain face of nature with paint and varnish of their own. They conceive that truth is a plagiarism, andthe thing as it happeneda forgery and imposition on the public. They stand right before their subject, and say, ‘Nay, but hear me first!’ We know no other merit in the Author of Waverley than that he is never this opaque, obtrusive body, getting in the way and eclipsing the sun of truth and nature, which shines with broad universal light through his different works. If we were to describe the secret of this author’s success in three words, we should say, that it consists in theabsence of egotism.

Mr. Godwin, in his preface, remarks, that as Caleb Williams was intended as a paraphrase of ‘Blue Beard,’ the present work may be regarded as a paraphrase of the story of the ‘Children in the Wood.’Multeum abludit imago.He has at least contrived to take the sting of simplicity out of it. It is a very adult, self-conscious set of substitutes he has given us for the two children, wandering hand-in-hand, the robin-redbreast, and their leafy bed. The grand eloquence, the epic march of Cloudesley, is beyond the ballad-style. In a word, the fault of this and some other of the author’s productions is, that the critical and didactic part overlays the narrative and dramatic part; as we see in some editions of the poets, where there are two lines of original text, and the rest of the page is heavy with the lumber and pedantry of the commentators. The writer does not call characters from the dead, or conjure them from the regions of fancy, to paint their peculiar physiognomy, or tell us their story, so much as (like the anatomist) to dissect and demonstrate on the insertion of the bones, the springs of the muscles, and those understood principles of life and motion which are common to the species. Now, in a novel, we want the individual, and not thegenus. The tale of Cloudesley is a dissertation on remorse. Besides, this truth of science is often a different thing from the truth of nature, which is modified by a thousand accidents, ‘subject to all the skyey influences;’—not a mechanical principle, brooding over and working every thing out of itself. Nothing, therefore, gives so little appearance of a resemblance to reality as this abstract identity and violent continuity of purpose. Not to say that this cutting up and probing of the internal feelings and motives, without a reference to external objects, tends, like the operations of the anatomist, to give a morbid and unwholesome taint to the surrounding atmosphere.

Mr. Godwin’s mind is, we conceive, essentially active, and therefore may naturally be expected to wear itself out sooner than those that are passive to external impressions, and receive continual new accessions to their stock of knowledge and acquirement:—

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