Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle

by Henry Noel Brailsford

Paine felt that he had made one Republic with a pamphlet, why not another? He had the unlimited faith of his generation in the efficacy of argument, and experience had proved his power. As Carlyle, in his whimsical dramatic fashion, said of him, "He can and will free all this world; perhaps even the other." Godwin, as became the philosopher of the movement, set his hopes on the slower working of education: to make men wise was to make them free. Paine was the pamphleteer of the human camp. He saw mankind as an embattled legion and believed, true man of action that he was, that freedom could be won like victory by the impetus of a resolute charge. He quotes the epigram of his fellow-soldier, Lafayette, "For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and to be free it is sufficient that she wills it." Godwin would have sent men to school to liberty; Paine called them to her unfurled standard. It is easy to understand the success of Paine's book, which appeared in March, 1791. It was theory and practice in one; it was the armed logic which had driven King George's regiments from America, the edged argument which had razed the Bastille. It was bold reasoning, and it was also inspired writing. Holcroft and Godwin helped to bring out The Rights of Man, threatened with suppression or mutilation by the publishers, and a panting incoherent shout of joy in a note from Holcroft to Godwin is typical of the excitement which it caused:—

"I have got it—if this do not cure my cough it is a damned perverse mule of a cough. The pamphlet—from the row—But mum—we don't sell it—oh, no—ears and eggs—verbatim, except the addition of a short preface, which as you have not seen, I send you my copy.—Not a single castration (Laud be unto God and J. S. Jordan!) can I discover—Hey, for the new Jerusalem! The Millennium! And peace and eternal beatitude be unto the soul of Thomas Paine."

The usual prosecutions of booksellers followed; but everywhere the new societies of reform were circulating the book, and if it helped to send some good men to Botany Bay, copies enough were sold to earn a sum of a thousand pounds for the author, which, with his usual disinterestedness, he promptly gave to the Corresponding Society. A second part appeared in 1792; and at length Pitt adopted Burke's opinion that criminal justice was the proper argument with which to refute Tom Paine. Acting on a hint from William Blake, who, in a vision more prosaic and veridical than was usual with him, had seen the constables searching for his friend, Paine escaped to France, and was convicted in his absence of high treason.

Paine landed at Calais an outlaw, to find himself already elected its deputy to the Convention. As in America, so in France, his was the first voice to urge the uncompromising solution. He advocated the abolition of the monarchy; but his was a courage that always served humanity. The work which he did as a member, with Sieyès, Danton, Condorcet, and five others, of the little committee named to draft the constitution, was ephemeral. His brave pleading for the King's life was a deed that deserves to live. He loved to think of himself as a woodman swinging an axe against rotten institutions and dying beliefs; but he weighted no guillotines. Paine argued against the command that we should "love our enemies," but he would not persecute them. This knight-errant would fling his shield over the very spies who tracked his steps. In Paris he saved the life of one of Pitt's agents who had vilified him, and procured the liberation of a bullying English officer who had struck him in public. The Terror made mercy a traitor, and Paine found himself overwhelmed in the vengeance which overtook all that was noblest in the Revolution. He spent ten months in prison, racked with fever, and an anecdote which seems to be authentic, tells how he escaped death by the negligence of a jailor. This overworked official hastily chalked the sign which meant that a prisoner was marked for next batch of the guillotine's victims, on the inside instead of the outside of Paine's cell-door.

Condorcet, in hiding and awaiting death, wrote in these months his Sketch of human progress. Paine, meditating on the end that seemed near, composed the first part of his Age of Reason. Paine was, like Franklin, Jefferson and Washington, a deist; and he differed from them only in the courage which prompted him to declare his belief. He came from gaol a broken man, hardly able to stand, while the Convention, returned to its sound senses, welcomed him back to his place of honour on its benches. The record of his last years in America, whither he returned in 1802, belongs rather to the history of persecution than to the biography of a soldier of liberty. His work was done; and, though his pen was still active and influential, slave-owners, ex-royalists, and the fanatics of orthodoxy combined to embitter the end of the man who had dared to deny the inspiration of the Bible. His book was burned in England by the hangman. Bishops in their answers mingled grudging concessions with personal abuse. An agent of Pitt's was hired to write a scurrilous biography of the Government's most dreaded foe. In America, the grandsons of the Puritan colonists who had flogged Quaker women as witches, denied him a place on the stage-coach, lest an offended God should strike it with lightning.

Paine died, a lonely old man, in 1809. His personal character stands written in his career; and it is unnecessary to-day even to mention the libels which his biographer has finally refuted. In a generation of brave men he was the boldest. He could rouse the passions of men, and he could brave them. If the Royalist Burke was eloquent for a Queen, Republican Paine risked his life for a King. No wrong found him indifferent; and he used his pen not only for the democracy which might reward him, but for animals, slaves and women. Poverty never left him, yet he made fortunes with his pen, and gave them to the cause he served. A naïve vanity was his only fault as a man. It was his fate to escape the gallows in England and the guillotine in France. He deserved them both; in that age there was no higher praise. A better democrat never wore the armour of the knight-errant; a better Christian never assailed Orthodoxy.

Neither by training nor by temperament was Paine a speculative thinker; but his political writing has none the less an immense significance. Godwin was a writer removed by his profoundly individual genius from the average thought of his day. Paine agreed more nearly with the advanced minds of his generation, and he taught the rest to agree with him. No one since him or before him has stated the plain democratic case against monarchy and aristocracy with half his spirit and force. Earlier writers on these themes were timid; the moderns are bored. Paine is writing of what he understands, and feels to be of the first importance. He cares as much about abolishing titles as a modern reformer may feel about nationalising land. His main theory in politics has a lucid simplicity. Men are born as God created them, free and equal; that is the assumption alike of natural and revealed religion. Burke, who "fears God," looks with "awe to kings," with "duty to magistrates," and with "respect to nobility," is but erecting a wilderness of turnpike gates between man and his Maker. Natural rights inhere in man by reason of his existence; civil rights are founded in natural rights and are designed to secure and guarantee them. He gives an individual twist to the doctrine of the social compact. Some governments arise out of the people, others over the people. The latter are based on conquest or priestcraft, and the former on reason. Government will be firmly based on the social compact only when nations deliberately sit down as the Americans have done, and the French are doing, to frame a constitution on the basis of the Rights of Man.

As for the English Government, it clearly arose in conquest; and to speak of a British Constitution is playing with words. Parliament, imperfectly and capriciously elected, is supposed to hold the common purse in trust; but the men who vote the supplies are also those who receive them. The national purse is the common hack on which each party mounts in turn, in the countryman's fashion of "ride and tie." They order these things better in France. As for our system of conducting wars, it is all done over the heads of the people. War is with us the art of conquering at home. Taxes are not raised to carry on wars, but wars raised to carry on taxes. The shrewd hard-hitting blows range over the whole surface of existing institutions. Godwin from his intellectual eminence saw in all the follies and crimes of mankind nothing worse than the effects of "prejudice" and the consequences of fallacious reasoning. Paine saw more self-interest in the world than prejudice. When he came to preach the abolition of war, first through an alliance of Britain, America and France, and then through "a confederation of nations" and a European Congress, he saw the obstacle in the egoism of courts and courtiers which appear to quarrel but agree to plunder. Another seven years, he wrote in 1792, would see the end of monarchy and aristocracy in Europe. While they continue, with war as their trade, peace has not the security of a day.

Paine's writing gains rather than loses in theoretic interest, because the warmth of his sympathies melts, as he proceeds, the icy logic of his eighteenth century individualism. He starts where all his school started, with a sharp antithesis between society and government.

"Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections; the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing; but government even in its best state is a necessary evil.... Government, like dress, is the badge of our lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise."