(Reprinted from The Pilot, 20th April 1901. With added postscript.)

Dr. Émile Legouis, in his singularly interesting book, La Jeunesse de William Wordsworth, well translated into English by Mr. T. W. Matthews (Dent and Co., 1897), calls attention to the influence on Wordsworth in his early years of Godwin’s Political Justice. On reading Political Justice now, it is difficult to understand why Wordsworth should have been so much affected by it. Its philosophy, if philosophy it can be called, is simply the denial of any rule of conduct or of any belief which the understanding cannot prove, and the inclusion of man in the necessity which controls inanimate nature. ‘All vice is nothing more than error and mistake’ (i. 31). [205] ‘We differ from the inferior animals in the greater facility with which we arrange our sensations, and compare, prefer, and judge’ (i. 57). ‘Justice . . . is coincident with utility’ (i. 121). ‘If my mother were in a house on fire, and I had a ladder outside with which I could save her, she would not, because she was my mother, have any greater claim than the other inmates on my exertions’ (i. 83). ‘But,’ says an objector, ‘your mother nourished you in the helplessness of infancy.’ ‘When she first subjected herself,’ replies Godwin, ‘to the necessity of these cares, she was probably influenced by no particular motives of benevolence to her future offspring. . . . It is the disposition of the mind . . . that entitles to respect,’ and consequently justice demands that I should rescue the most meritorious person first.’ All moral science may be reduced to this one head, calculation of the future’ (ii. 468), and consequently a promise is not an obligation. The statement that it is essential that we should be able to depend on engagements ‘would be somewhat more accurate if we said “that it was essential to various circumstances of human intercourse, that we should be known to bestow a steady attention upon the quantities of convenience or inconvenience, of good or evil, that might arise to others from our conduct”’ (i. 156). The understanding is supreme in us, and ‘depravity would have gained little ground in the world, if every man had been in the exercise of his independent judgment’ (i. 174). Reason (the Godwinian Reason) is sufficient to control or even extinguish the strongest of all passions. Marriage having been denounced as ‘the most odious of all monopolies’ (ii. 850), Godwin is reminded that half a dozen men perhaps might feel for a woman ‘the same preference that I do.’ ‘This,’ says he, ‘will create no difficulty. We may all enjoy her conversation; and we shall be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse as a very trivial object.’ It was impossible not to acknowledge that the understanding often finds the problem rather abstruse of deciding whether an action will or will not secure ultimately the largest balance of happiness. Calvin was no fool, and yet he deliberately came to the conclusion that in burning Servetus he was promoting the welfare of mankind; but ‘Calvin was unacquainted with the principles of justice, and therefore could not practise them. The duty of no man can exceed his capacity’ (i. 102). As to Godwin’s necessarianism, it is perhaps hardly worth while to cite passages in order to explain it. It is of the usual type, incontrovertible if the question is to be settled by common logic. ‘Volition is that state of an intellectual being in which, the mind being affected in a certain manner by the apprehension of an end to be accomplished, a certain motion of the organs and members of the animal frame is found to be produced’ (i. 297). ‘A knife has a capacity of cutting. In the same manner a human being has a capacity of walking, though it may be no more true of him than of the inanimate substance, that he has the power of exercising or not exercising that capacity’ (i. 308). ‘A knife is as capable as a man of being employed in the purposes of virtue, and the one is no more free than the other as to its employment. The mode in which a knife is made subservient to these purposes is by material impulse. The mode in which a man is made subservient is by inducement and persuasion. But both are equally the affair of necessity. The man differs from the knife, just as the iron candlestick differs from the brass one; he has one more way of being acted upon. This additional way in man is motive, in the candlestick is magnetism’ (i. 309).

At first sight it is, as I have said, a wonder that Wordsworth should have been much impressed by such doctrines as these, but the evidence is strong that for a time they lay upon him like a nightmare. I will not quote the Borderers for a reason which will be seen presently, but the testimony of Hazlitt, Coleridge, the Prelude, and the Excursion is decisive. “Throw aside your books of chemistry,” said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, “and read Godwin on Necessity”’ (Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age, p. 49, 3rd edition). Now it is a question, important historically, but more important to ourselves privately, whether Wordsworth’s temporary subjugation by Political Justice was due to pure intellectual conviction. I think not. Coleridge noticed that Wordsworth suffered much from hypochondria. He complains that during the Scotch tour in 1803 ‘Wordsworth’s hypochondriacal feelings keep him silent and self-centred.’ He again says to Richard Sharp, in 1804, that Wordsworth has ‘occasional fits of hypochondriacal uncomfortableness, from which, more or less, and at longer or shorter intervals, he has never been wholly free from his very childhood,’ and that he has a ‘hypochondriacal graft in his nature.’ Wordsworth himself speaks of times when—

‘ . . . fears and fancies thick upon me came;
Dim sadness—and blind thoughts, I knew not nor could name.’

He is haunted with

‘ . . . the fear that kills,’

and he thinks of Chatterton and his end.

During 1793, 1794, and part of 1795, this tendency to hypochondria must have been greatly encouraged. His hopes in the Revolution had begun to fail, but the declaration of war against France made him wretched. He wandered about from place to place, unable to conjecture what his future would be. ‘I have been doing nothing,’ he tells Matthews, ‘and still continue to do nothing. What is to become of me I know not.’ He proposed to start a Republican magazine to be called the Philanthropist, and we find him inquiring whether he could get work on the London newspapers. Hypochondriacal misery is apt to take an intellectual shape. The most hopeless metaphysics or theology which we happen to encounter fastens on us, and we mistake for an unbiased conviction the form which the disease assumes. The Political Justice found in Wordsworth the aptest soil for germination; it rooted and grew rapidly.

‘So I fared,
Dragging all precepts, judgments, maxims, creeds
Like culprits to the bar; calling the mind,
Suspiciously, to establish in plain day
Her titles and her honours; now believing,
Now disbelieving; endlessly perplexed
With impulse, motive, right and wrong, the ground
Of obligation, what the rule and whence
The sanction; till, demanding formal proof,
And seeking it in everything, I lost
All feeling of conviction, and, in fine,
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties,
Yielded up moral questions in despair.
This was the crisis of that strong disease,
This the soul’s last and lowest ebb; I drooped,
Deeming our blessed reason of least use
Where wanted most: “The lordly attributes
Of will and choice,” I bitterly exclaimed,
“What are they but a mockery of a Being
Who hath in no concerns of his a test
Of good and evil; knows not what to fear
Or hope for, what to covet or to shun:
And who, if those could be discerned, would yet
Be little profited, would see, and ask,
Where is the obligation to enforce?”’

In the autumn of 1795, Wordsworth, helped by the modest legacy of Raisley Calvert, was able to move with Dorothy to Racedown, and he immediately set to work on the Borderers, which I take to be the beginning of recovery. It was obviously written to exhibit the character of Oswald, the villain. He is one of a band of outlaws, and is jealous of the appointment of Marmaduke as chief. His revenge is a determination to make Marmaduke as guilty as himself. Marmaduke is in love with Idonea, and Oswald, partly by inventing lies about her blind father, Herbert, and partly by dexterous sophistry derived from Political Justice, endeavours to persuade Marmaduke to kill him. Marmaduke hesitates, but is finally overpowered. Although he cannot himself murder Herbert, he draws him to a desolate moor and leaves him to perish. Oswald then recounts his own story. When he was on a voyage to Syria he had believed on false evidence, that some wrong had been done to him by his captain, and accordingly contrived that he should be left to die in agony on a barren island. Oswald discovered that he had been deceived, but he declares exultantly to Marmaduke that, after being somewhat stunned, he found himself emancipated:—

‘Life stretched before me smooth as some broad way
Cleared for a monarch’s progress. Priests might spin
Their veil, but not for me—’twas in fit place
Among its kindred cobwebs.’

He concludes by avowing impudently that Herbert is innocent and that the impulse which prompted the monstrous perfidy of procuring his death was—

‘I would have made us equal once again.’

This is the commentary by Wordsworth on Godwin’s parable by which he illustrates the simplicity of action in what we call the soul. ‘When a ball upon a billiard-board is struck,’ etc. etc. ‘Exactly similar to this . . . are the actions of the human mind’ (i. 306–7). Lacy, one of the freebooters asks Wallace:—

‘But for the motive?’

and Wallace replies:—

‘Natures such as his
Spin motives out of their own bowels, Lacy!’

The Borderers is stuffed full with Godwinism. ‘Remorse,’ exclaims Oswald,

‘It cannot live with thought; think on, think on,
And it will die. What! In this universe,
Where the least things control the greatest, where
The faintest breath that breathes can move a world;
What! feel remorse, where, if a cat had sneezed,
A leaf had fallen, the thing had never been
Whose very shadow gnaws us to the vitals.’

So Godwin: ‘We shall, therefore, no more be disposed to repent of our own faults than of the faults of others’ (i. 315). The noxious thing is now, however, with Wordsworth no longer subject but object, and when a man can cast loose the enemy and survey him, victory is three parts achieved.

There is no evidence that Wordsworth attempted any reasoned confutation of Political Justice. It was falsified in him by Racedown, by better health, by the society of his beloved sister, and finally by the friendship with Coleridge, although there was but little intimacy with him till the summer of 1797, and the Borderers was finished in 1796. This, then, is the moral—to repeat what has been said before—that certain beliefs, at any rate with men of Wordsworth’s stamp, are sickness, and that with the restoration of vitality and the influx of joy they disappear.

One other observation. Wordsworth never afterwards vexed himself with free will, necessity, and the like. He knew such matters were not for him. Many problems may appear to be of great consequence, but it is our duty to avoid them if our protecting genius warns us away.

POSTSCRIPT

The most singular portion of Political Justice is that which deals with Population, and some notice of it, by way of postscript, may be pardoned, for it cannot be neglected in our estimate of Godwin, and it is a curious instance of the futility of attempting to comprehend character without searching into corners and examination of facts which, judged by external bulk, are small. These small facts may contain principles which are constituent of the man. The chapter on Population occupies a few pages at the end of the second volume of the Political Justice.

Godwin would like to see property equalised, or common, and he tries to answer the argument that excessive population would ensue. He quotes (ii. 862) a reported conjecture of Franklin’s that ‘mind will one day become omnipotent over matter.’ If over matter, which is outside us, thinks Godwin, why not over our own bodies, ‘in a word, why may not man be one day immortal’ (ii. 862). He points out that the mind already has great power over the body, that it can conquer pain, assist in the cure of disease, and successfully resist old age.

‘Why is it that a mature man soon loses that elasticity of limb which characterises the heedless gaiety of youth? Because he desists from youthful habits. He assumes an air of dignity incompatible with the lightness of childish sallies. He is visited and vexed with all the cares that rise out of our mistaken institutions, and his heart is no longer satisfied and gay. Hence his limbs become stiff and unwieldy. This is the forerunner of old age and death’ (ii. 863–64). ‘Medicine may reasonably be stated to consist of two branches, the animal and intellectual. The latter of these has been infinitely too much neglected’ (ii. 869). We may look forward to a time when we shall be ‘indifferent to the gratifications of sense. They please at present by their novelty, that is because we know not how to estimate them. They decay in the decline of life indirectly because the system refuses them, but directly and principally because they no longer excite the ardour and passion of mind . . . The gratifications of sense please at present by their imposture. We soon learn to despise the mere animal function, which, apart from the delusions of intellect, would be nearly the same in all cases; and to value it, only as it happens to be relieved by personal charms or mental excellence. We absurdly imagine that no better road can be found to the sympathy and intercourse of minds. But a very slight degree of attention might convince us that this is a false road, full of danger and deception. Why should I esteem another, or by another be esteemed? For this reason only, because esteem is due, and only so far as it is due.

‘The men therefore who exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population will cease to propagate, for they will no longer have any motive, either of error or duty, to induce them. In addition to this they will perhaps be immortal. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence her career at the end of every thirty years. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government. These latter articles are at no great distance; and it is not impossible that some of the present race of men may live to see them in part accomplished. But, besides this, there will be no disease, no anguish, no melancholy, and no resentment. Every man will seek with ineffable ardour the good of all’ (ii. 870–72).

A very curious vein, not golden indeed but copper, let us say, is hidden away in the earthy mass of Godwin. The dull, heavy-featured creature sees an apocalyptic vision and becomes poetical. It is partly absurd, but not because it is ideal, and there are lineaments in it of the true Utopia. Godwin probably would have denounced the Revelation of St. John the Divine as superstitious nonsense, but he saw before him a kind of misty, distorted reflection of the New Jerusalem, in which there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, where there shall be no more curse, no night, no candle, no light of the sun. It might have been thought that it was impossible to establish a connection between Patmos and Skinner Street, but the first postulate of Euclid’s elements holds good universally, ‘that a straight line may be drawn from any one point to any other point.’