Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle

by Henry Noel Brailsford

With some hesitation Godwin allows the use of force to restrain a man found in actual violence. We may not have time to reason with him. But even for self-defence there are other resources. "The powers of the mind are yet unfathomed." He tells the story of Marius, who overawed the soldier sent into his cell to execute him, with the words, "Wretch, have you the temerity to kill Marius?" Were we all accustomed to place an intrepid confidence in the unaided energy of the intellect, to despise force in others and to refuse to employ it ourselves, who shall say how far the species might be improved? But punitive coercion deals only with a man whose violence is over. The only rational excuse for it is to restrain a man from further violence which he will presumably commit. Godwin condemns capital punishment as excessive, since restraint can be attained without it, and corporal chastisement as an offence against the dignity of the human mind. Let there be nothing in the state of transition worse than simple imprisonment. Godwin, however, dissents vehemently from Howard's invention of solitary confinement, designed to shield the prisoner from the contamination of his fellow criminals. Man is a social animal and virtue depends on social relations. As a preliminary to acquiring it is he to be shut out from the society of his fellows? How shall he exercise benevolence or justice in his cell? Will his heart become softened or expand who breathes the atmosphere of a dungeon? Solitary confinement is the bitterest torment that human ingenuity can inflict. The least objectionable method of depriving a criminal of the power to harm society is banishment or transportation. Expose him to the stimulus of necessity in an unsettled country. New conditions make new minds. But the whole attempt to apply law breaks down. You must heap edict on edict, and to make your laws fit your cases, must either for ever wrest them or make new ones. Law does not end uncertainty, and it debilitates the mind. So long as men are habituated to look to foreign guidance and external rules for direction, so long the vigour of their minds will sleep.

If Fénelon, saint and philosopher, with an incompleted masterpiece in his pocket, and Fénelon's chambermaid, were both in danger of burning to death in the archiepiscopal palace at Cambrai, and if I could save only one of them, which ought I to save? It is a fascinating problem in casuistry, and Godwin with his usual decision of mind, has no doubt about the solution. He would save Fénelon as the more valuable life, and above all Fénelon's manuscript, and the maid, he is quite sure, would wish to give her life for his. Something (the modern reader will object) might be urged on the other side. Just because he was a saint, it might be argued that he was the fitter of the two to face the great adventure, and one may be sure that he himself would have thought so. A philosopher who gives his life for a kitten will have advanced the Kingdom of Heaven. The chambermaid, moreover, may have in her a potentiality of love and happiness which are worth many a masterpiece of French prose. But Godwin has not yet exhausted his moral problem. How, if the maid were my mother, wife or benefactress? Once more he gives his unflinching answer. Justice still requires of me in the interests of mankind to save the more valuable life. "What magic is there in the pronoun 'my' to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?" My mother may be a fool, a liar, or a thief. Of what consequence then, is it that she is "mine"? Gratitude ought not to blind me to my duty, though she have suckled me and nursed me. The benevolence of a benefactor ought indeed to be esteemed, but not because it benefited me. A benefactor ought to be esteemed as much by another as by me, solely because he benefited a human being. Gratitude, in short, has no place in justice or virtue, and reason declines to recognise the private affections.

Such, crudely stated, is Godwin's famous doctrine of "universal benevolence." The virtuous man is like Swift's Houyhnhnms, noble quadrupeds, wholly governed by reason, who cared for strangers as well as for the nearest neighbour, and showed the same affection for their neighbour's offspring as for their own. The centre of Godwin's moral teaching was yet another Socratic thought. Politics are "the proper vehicle of a liberal morality," and morals concern our relation to the whole body of mankind. To realise justice is our prime concern as rational beings, and society is nothing but embodied justice. Justice deals with beings capable of pleasure and pain. Here we are partakers of a common nature with like faculties for suffering or enjoyment. "Justice," then, "is that impartial treatment of every man in matters that relate to his happiness, which is measured solely by a consideration of the properties of the receiver and the capacity of him who gives." Every man with whom I am in contact is a sentient being, and one should be as much to me as another, save indeed where equity corrects equality, by suggesting to me that one individual may be of more value than another, because of his greater power to benefit mankind. Justice exacts from us the application of our talents, time, and resources with the single object of producing the greatest sum of benefit to sentient beings. There is no limit to what I am bound to do for the general weal. I hold my person and property both in trust on behalf of mankind. A man who needs £10 has an absolute claim on me, if I have it, unless it can be shown that the money could be more beneficially applied. Every shilling I possess is irrevocably assigned by some claim of eternal justice. Every article of property, it follows, should belong to him in whose hands it will be of most benefit, and the instrument of the greatest happiness.

It is the love of distinction which attends wealth in corrupt societies that explains the desire for luxury. We desire not the direct pleasure to be derived from excessive possessions, but the consideration which is attached to it. Our very clothes are an appeal to the goodwill of our neighbours, and a refuge from their contempt. Society would be transformed if the distinction were reversed, if admiration were no longer rendered to the luxurious and avaricious and were accorded only to talent and virtue. Let not the necessity of rewarding virtue be suggested as a justification for the inequalities of fortune. Shall we say, to a virtuous man: "If you show yourself deserving, you shall have the essence of a hundred times more food than you can eat, and a hundred times more clothes than you can wear. You shall have a patent for taking away from others the means of a happy and respectable existence, and for consuming them in riotous and unmeaning extravagance." Is this the reward that ought to be offered to virtue, or that virtue should stoop to take? Godwin is at his best on this theme of luxury: "Every man may calculate in every glass of wine he drinks, and every ornament he annexes to his person, how many individuals have been condemned to slavery and sweat, incessant drudgery, unwholesome food, continual hardships, deplorable ignorance and brutal insensibility, that he may be supplied with these luxuries. It is a gross imposition that men are accustomed to put upon themselves, when they talk of the property bequeathed to them by their ancestors. The property is produced by the daily labour of men who are now in existence. All that the ancestors bequeathed to them was a mouldy patent which they show as a title to extort from their neighbours what the labour of those neighbours has produced."

It is a flagrant immorality that one man should have the power to dispose of the produce of another man's toil, yet to maintain this power is the main concern of police and legislation. Morality recognises two degrees of property, (1) things which will produce the greatest benefit, if attributed to me, in brief the necessities of life, my food, clothes, furniture and apartment; (2) the empire which every man may claim over the produce of his own industry, even over that part of it which ought not to be used and appropriated by himself. Every man is a steward. But subject to censure and remonstrance, he must be free to dispose of his property as his own understanding shall dictate. The ideal is equality, and all society should be what Coleridge called a Pantisocracy. It is wrong for any one to enjoy anything, unless something similar is accessible to all, and wrong to produce luxuries until the elementary wants of all are satisfied. But it would be futile and wrong to attempt to equalise property by positive enactment. It would be useless until men are virtuous, and unnecessary when they are so. The moment accumulation and monopoly are regarded by any society as dishonourable and mischievous, the revolution in opinion will ensure that comforts shall tend to a level.

Godwin objects to the plans put forward in France during the Revolution for interfering with bequests and inheritance. He would, however, check the incentives to accumulation by abolishing the feudal system, primogeniture, titles and entail. Property is sacred—that good men may be free to give it away. Reform public opinion, and a man engaged in amassing wealth would soon hide his treasures as carefully as he now displays them. The first step is to rob wealth of its distinction. Wealth is acquired to-day in over-reaching our neighbours, and spent in insulting them. Establish equality on a firm basis of rational opinion, and you cut off for ever the great occasion of crime, remove the constant spectacle of injustice with all its attendant demoralisation, and liberate genius now immersed in sordid cares.

"In a state of society where men lived in the midst of plenty, and where all shared alike the bounties of nature, the sentiments of oppression, servility and fraud would inevitably expire. The narrow principle of selfishness would vanish. No man being obliged to guard his little store, or provide with anxiety and pain for his restless wants, each would lose his individual existence in the thought of the general good. No man would be an enemy to his neighbour, for they would have no subject of contention, and of consequence philanthropy would resume the empire which reason assigns her. Mind would be delivered from her perpetual anxiety about corporal support, and freed to expatiate in the field of thought, which is congenial to her. Each would assist the enquiries of all."

Unnecessary tasks absorb most of our labour to-day. In the ideal community, Godwin reckons that half an hour's toil from every man daily will suffice to produce the necessities of life. He modified this sanguine estimate in a later essay (The Enquirer) to two hours. He dismisses all objections based on the sloth or selfishness of human nature, by the simple answer that this happy state of things will not be realised until human nature has been reformed. Need individuality suffer? It need fear only the restraint imposed by candid public opinion. That will not be irksome, because it will be frank. We shrink from it to-day, only because it takes the form of clandestine scandal and backbiting. Godwin contemplates no Spartan plan of common labour or common meals. "Everything understood by the term co-operation is in some sense an evil." To be sure, it may be indispensable in order to cut a canal or navigate a ship. But mechanical invention will gradually make it unnecessary. The Spartans used slaves. We shall make machines our helots. Indeed, so odious is co-operation to a free mind, that Godwin marvels that men can consent to play music in concert, or can demean themselves to execute another man's compositions, while to act a part in a play amounts almost to an offence against sincerity. Such extravagances as this passage are amongst the most precious things in Political Justice. Godwin was a fanatic of logic who warns us against his individualist premises by pressing them to a fantastic conclusion.

The sketch of the ideal community concludes with a demolition of the family. Cohabitation, he argued, is in itself an evil. It melts opinions to a common mould, and destroys the fortitude of the individual. The wishes of two people who live together can never wholly coincide. Hence follow thwartings of the will, bickering and misery. No man is always cheerful and kind. We manage to correct a stranger with urbanity and good humour. Only when the intercourse is too close and unremitted do we degenerate into surliness and invective. In an earlier chapter Godwin had formulated a general objection to all promises, which reminds us of Tolstoy's sermons from the same individualistic standpoint on the text, "Swear not at all." Every conceivable mode of action has its tendency to benefit or injure mankind. I am bound in duty to one course of action in every emergency—the course most conducive to the general welfare. Why, then, should I bind myself by a promise? If my promise contradicts my duty it is immoral, if it agrees with it, it teaches me to do that from a precarious and temporary motive which ought to be done from its intrinsic recommendations. By promising we bind ourselves to learn nothing from time, to make no use of knowledge to be acquired. Promises depose us from a full use of our understanding, and are to be tolerated only in the trivial engagements of our day-to-day existence. It follows that marriage is an evil, for it is at once the closest form of cohabitation, and the rashest of all promises. Two thoughtless and romantic people, met in youth under circumstances full of delusion, have bound themselves, not by reason but by contract, to make the best, when they discover their deception, of an irretrievable mistake. Its maxim is, "If you have made a mistake, cherish it." So long as this institution survives, "philanthropy will be crossed in a thousand ways, and the still augmenting stream of abuse continue to flow."

Godwin has little fear of lust or license. Men will, on the whole, continue to prefer one partner, and friendship will refine the grossness of sense. There are worse evils than open and avowed inconstancy—the loathsome combination of deceitful intrigue with the selfish monopoly of property. That a child should know its father is no great matter, for I ought not in reason to prefer one human being to another because he is "mine." The mother will care for the child with the spontaneous help of her neighbours. As to the business of supplying children with food and clothing, "these would easily find their true level and spontaneously flow from the quarter in which they abounded to the quarter that was deficient." There must be no barter or exchange, but only giving from pure benevolence without the prospect of reciprocal advantage.