SHELLEY'S DEBT TO GODWIN.

AT RANDOM BY ZADIG.

The "Home University Library" series contains many very excellent books, by none more excellent than the one I have just laid down—"Shelley, Godwin, and Their Circle." The work is profoundly interesting and exceedingly readable. The author, H. N. Brailsford, M.A., has a pleasant style, and his treatment of a great subject is marked by knowledge, judgment, enthusiasm, and courage. He admires Shelley as a man and as a poet, but he is no blind worshipper at the Shelleyan shrine. He appreciates thoroughly the vast influence Godwin had on the mind of Shelley. Shelley was not profoundly original. Like most poets, his gift of expression was much greater than his gift of original thinking. At an early and impressionable age he came under the influence of Godwin, and it is not going too far to say that had there been no Godwin there would have been no Shelley as we know him. For Shelley's poetry is literally steeped in his philosophy of life and society, and that philosophy is to be found in the works of Godwin, and particularly in the work which made Godwin famous at the latter part of the eighteenth century—"Political Justice."

Dr. Braithford contends that to attempt to understand Shelley without the aid of Godwin is a task hardly less promising than to attempt to understand Milton without the Bible; and his book is a triumphant demonstration of his contention. Pursuing the parallel, Dr. Brailsford says:—"Neither was an original thinker. Each steeped himself in the classics. But more important even that 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." The question here naturally presents itself : What sort of man was Godwin? To-day he is little known, and his works are only read by the curious. Yet in his day he was regarded as a great and original, and a courageous thinker. At the end of the eighteenth century, after the issue of his "Political Justice," he was held in esteem and even in veneration by such men as Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth. Southey confessed that he "read and studied and all but worshipped Godwin." Coleridge wrote a sonnet in which he blesses his "holy guidance " But it was on Shelley's sensitive and assimilative soul that he produced the deepest and most enduring impression.
In 1812 Shelley, in a letter to Godwin, declares:—"From the earliest period of my knowledge of his principles, I have ardently desired to share on the footing of intimacy that intellect which I have delighted to contemplate in its emanations. ... I had felt with regret that the glory of your being had passed from this earth of ours. It is not so. You still live, and I firmly believe are still planning the welfare of mankind." Hazlitt said of him that he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation, and adds: "No one was more talked of more looked up to, more sought after. No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated "Inquiry Concerning Political Justice." Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Raley an old woman ; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist." Godwin was originally a dissenting minister of the extreme Calvinistic type. He was also a Tory of Tories. But he gradually changed until in the end he became an agnostic in religion and something suspiciously like an anarchist, a philosophic anarchist, of course, in politics. His "Political Justice" was published in the last decade of the eighteenth century. It was a very bold and innovating book, and assailed the old conventions in a very uncompromising way. But it was a learned work, and it was issued at the amazing price of three guineas. That was perhaps the reason why it was never prosecuted. The wisdom of suppressing the book and punishing the author actually came before Cabinet, but Pitt is reported to have calmed his colleagues with the observation that "a three guinea book could never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare Four thousand copies of the book were rapidly sold. Godwin paints the existing society in the blackest colours. And yet he is an optimist of optimists. Everything is wrong. Yet he believes that everything can be put right. It does not appear to have occurred to him that the blackness of the present is the strongest possible argument against the promised brightness of the future. For if men and women are ignorant enough, or wicked enough, to permit the world to go so hopelessly wrong, what evidence is there that they are wise enough or good enough to set it right? of course, Godwin contended that the root of all the world's miseries was ignorance. "The characters of men," he said, "originate in their external circumstances." He held therefore, that all that was necessary in order to reach individual and collective perfection was to change the circumstances. He did not hold, like Rousseau, that man is naturally virtuous. His theory was that man was infinitely malleable, and that by a proper system of education he could be transformed into a perfect creature. That doctrine will not bear investigation. Man is not a blank sheet of paper on which the educationist can write anything he likes. He is a bundle of potentialities. And the potentialities of races and of individuals differ. All the education in the world can not make the fool a genius. And not even the serious lack of educational opportunities can prevent a genius like Shakespeare from towering above countless millions of educated blockheads. There is something more than nurture; there is nature. And it is the fundamental imperfection of average human nature that stands in the way of the realisation of Godwin's dream of human perfectibility.

Godwin preached the doctrine of universal benevolence. He placed the love of mankind in general above the domestic affections. He held that these tended to narrow the heart, just as the love of our own nation as against other nations tended to do the same. He longed for a universal love that would include in its vast embrace all the children of men. Alas, that was an impossible dream. The human heart is not big enough to love all the race. It takes most men all their time to love the few human beings with whom they live in intimacy. Love, like charity, begins at home —and, it must be confessed, frequently ends there. Still, it is better that there should be love at home than that there should be no love at all. In other words, universal benevolence is a psychological impossibility. All real affection, all vital affection, rests on personal contact and association. And no man can come into personal contact with the whole of mankind. Universal benevolence may come in some far day, but it will only come as the gradual extension of the love that originates at the fireside. Slowly but surely the love of the home grows into the love of the tribe, and the love of the tribe into the love of the nation, and, no doubt even now the love of the nation is, among the higher races, growing into the love of our common humanity. But these things —in fact, all great things—come slowly. The Great Love will come, not by despising the Little Love, but by nursing it into a wider life.
Of course, Godwin's doctrine of universal benevolence could never have produced the wonderful effect it produced in Shelley if it had not fallen on suitable soil. Shelley was by nature a humanitarian. His heart went out to all the race. He was the least selfish of men. The love, the devotion, the veneration, and the faith other men had given to God, Shelley gave, or strove to give, to humanity. It was said of Spinoza that he was a God-intoxicated man. It might have been said, with greater truth, of Shelley that he was a love-intoxicated man. Love was his religion, and faith in the omnipotent power of love to redeem mankind was the inspiration of his life, and the fire that gave beauty and glory to his poetic visions. His love had no limitations; it was to be given to all, even to the tyrants against whom he fulminated with a hatred which was but a sort of inverted affection. He believed that love, if bravely trusted, could triumph over wrong. In "Political Justice" Godwin tells how Marius overawed the soldier who was sent to take his life by saying. "Wretch, have you the temerity to kill Marius?" In the "Masque of Anarchy," written after the massacre of Peterloo, Shelley advises oppressed mankind to simply arise and stand with folded arms and let the hate of the oppressor vent itself :

With folded arms and steady eyes
And little fear and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay
Till their rage has died away.

Then they will return with shame
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek.

Such was the faith of this moral fanatic, this divine zealot, in the power of love to subdue the baser spirit in man that he seriously advises the oppressed millions to face bullets with smiles and cannons with folded arms, in the unfaltering conviction that by such means the tyrants and oppressors of mankind would be shamed into goodness. It is a beautiful faith, as beautiful as it is baseless. Yet we have no justification for sneering at it. We must remember that Shelley lived before the days of popular education and popular franchise, when men hoped great things from these reforms. Shelley was no intellectual weakling. On the contrary, his was a vigorous if not an original mind. His wild utopianism was due, not to the weakness of his head, but to the greatness of his heart. He saw in the world the reflection of himself. He could not believe in the reality of a baseness that had no place in his own soul. Just as Helvetius held that "folly is fictitious," and Godwin that "Nature never made a dunce," so Shelley regarded the oppressions and wrongs of the world as temporary aberrations due to ignorance, which enlightenment and love would ultimately sweep for ever away. Shelley was a Christian without a Christ. He rejected everything in Christianity except its love, just as some men leave that out and greedily devour all the rest. In "Prometheus Unbound," his faith finds expression in words almost as majestic as itself:

To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite;

To forgive wrongs darker than death and night;

To defy power, which seems omnipotent ;

To love and bear; to hope till Hope creates

From its own wreck the thing it contemplates ;

Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;

This like thy glory, Titan, is to be

Good, great, and joyous, beautiful and free;

This alone is Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.

Who will dare to say that this sublime vision was altogether in vain! It may have been a mistake. But it was so splendid, so noble, so magnanimous a mistake, that most of us feel in our hearts that we would rather be wrong with Shelley than right with Burke. The mistaken philosophy of Godwin has been exploded long ago, and it may never again deceive the minds of men. Still, it has not been altogether a vain thing, for it has given us in the poetry of Shelley, imperishable visions of moral beauty that cannot fail to call into more vigorous being the slumbering love in our hearts, to quicken within us a deeper sense of life's sublimer issues, and therefore to help us in some dim yet real way to translate into the very fibre of our lives the glory of the poet's song—to shape the earth in which we live into some rude resemblance to the heaven of which we dream.

 Western Mail 19 December 1913,