ABSTRACT
129Mr Godwin, of whom the reader will perhaps wish to hear more than of Sir H. Davy, was one of those eminent persons whom, unfortunately, I saw less of than perhaps any other lion of the times. He was in person a little man, with manners peculiarly tranquil, philosophic, and dignified—so at least I thought. I was greatly interested in all that related to this gentleman; not so much, not at all indeed, for his novels—which I do not profess to admire: and I am of opinion that, if Mr Godwin himself had been asked the question searchingly, he would have acknowledged that I had seen a little into his constitution of mind, when I pronounce that of all men who can ever have lived, he, by preference, must have found the labour most irksome of creating incidents, and making the narrative continue to move. Cocytus is not so stagnant or so sluggish in motion as the “Caleb Williams” in parts, and a later novel, whose name I forget, (but turning upon the case of kidnapping an heir to an English estate, and carrying him to the Continent;) and I would have consented to abide by an appeal to MrGodwin himself, whether, to the last extremity a soil parched up and arid, he had not felt the condition of his own mind when summoned to produce incidents. Is there anything disgraceful in this dearth of incident—this palsy of the fable-creating * faculty? Far from it; so far from it, that the powerful minds I have happened to know were certainly those who had least of it. The most powerful mind I have ever known had none of it—positively none. Shakspeare, whom few men would disagree in making first of human intellects, though double difficulties would arise as to who should be second, and threefold difficulties as to who should be third, and fourfold as to who should be fourth: —well, Shakspeare had, perhaps, as little of this power as most men, who have had (like him) something of universal minds. Not, therefore, by any possibility, can it be supposed that I mean to disparage Mr Godwin, in charging him with this defect. And yet, in a newspaper, some months ago, I saw the novel of “Caleb Williams” called “magnificent”—a word which, as I have remarked elsewhere, is more than any other abused, from the hotbed excitement of the age; and, previously by some years, I saw a paper which, in other circum-stances, might have moved laughter—a paper which compared and equalised Mr Godwin, as a novelist, with Sir Walter Scott; but which, because I fancied that I saw in it the filial hand of a gifted writer, whom the whole world, from the east to the west, admires, was fitted, by its very extravagance, to draw tears on account of its piety. Involuntarily I thought of a paper which a German wife had written about her ugly husband, (Herder,) whom all others had admired, but whom she only thought proper to find handsome. But enough of what Mr Godwin was not. I felt the nearest interest in this famous man on three separate accounts: first, as the husband of Mrs Wolstonecraft.—What a woman! the sole rival in this country of the noblest of her sex—Madame Roland—the rival, I mean, in constitution and of mind:—would that she had glorified her life and end by the same self-sacrifices which, under favouring circumstances, she was equally able to have done!—Next, I felt a profound interest in Mr Godwin, as the great norma set up to terrify all England, some forty years ago, by two separate classes of enemies—by the “panic-of property men,” as Coleridge christened the party who arose in England under the terrors of the French “war against the palace—peace to the cottage;” and, secondly, by the antagonists of what was then called French Philosophy, or Modern Philosophy; or the philosophy of the Illuminati. In two works, of great circulation at that time, “Pilgrim Good Intent,” and Miss Hamilton’s novel, “Modern Philosophers,” the two great moving agents are Dr Priestley and Mr Godwin. His connexion with Mrs Wolstonecraft had completed what the first or to edition of his “Political Justice” had begun: the first edition, I say; for, in the second, the hypothesis which alarmed the “men of property,” (as Mr Hood has it,) had been emasculated. Such was the awe inspired at that time by these shocks to public opinion, that most people felt of Mr Godwin with the same alienation and horror as of a goul, or a bloodless vampire, or the monster created by Frankenstein. It may be supposed that I had not shared in these thoughtless impressions; and yet, from the audacity of his speculations, I looked to see a loud clamorous, and, perhaps, self-sufficient dogmatist; whereas the qualities most apparent on the surface of his manners were a gently dignity of self-restraint and a tranquil benignity. I saw him, however, always under a cloud—that is, under the dust and confusion, to the intellect, of a large party, composed of what (by analogy to its slang use) might be termed a mob of literary swells. Once only, I saw him in a smaller party at the Courier Office—present Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Charles Lamb, Mr Stewart a proprietor of the Corium, and some four or five others. But, on this occasion, it happened, which, perhaps, had not often happened before, that neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth talked; Coleridge being more than usually out of spirits; Wordsworth fatigued by attending a dull debate in the House of Commons; Southey naturally indisposed to the exertions connected with colloquial duties; myself and others repressed by youth and reverence for our company. Thus it fell by accident to Charles Lamb to entertain the company, which he did in his happiest style, as a Diogenes with the heart of a Saint John; but nothing, as it happened, arose to call out the powers of Mr Godwin. Though balked, therefore, of all fair occasion for measuring his colloquial calibre, I was not sorry to have gone off with an amended impression of the demeanour and general bearing to be naturally expected from revolutionary minds, and a personal redress given to the common partisan portrait circulated of one who bad filled the mouth of declaimers for many a year, and become a by-word or a commonplace of rhetoric for the schools.
