Note (return) — Chapter IV · THE MINOR AND LATER EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL7

I have sometimes thought that the greatest testimony to Godwin's power in this respect is the idea (which even Hazlitt, though he did not share it, does not seem to have thought preposterous, and which seems to have been held by others who were not fools) that Godwin might be the author of Waverley. To us, looking back, the notion seems as absurd as that Bacon could be the author of Shakespeare or Steele of the Tale of a Tub: but if, instead of looking back, we throw ourselves back, the absurdity does not quite persist as it does in the other two instances. There are some who, of course, would say, "Why take this fanciful test of Godwin's ability when you have a real one in Caleb Williams?" The reasons are double: for, historically, such an estimate by contemporaries is of the very first value, and to the present writer Caleb Williams (1794) has never seemed a very interesting book. It is impossible to sympathise with a hero who is actuated by the very lowest of human motives, sheer inquisitiveness: and my sense of natural justice (which is different from Godwin's) demands not that he shall escape, but that he shall be broken on the wheel, or burnt at a slow fire, or made to read Political Justice after the novelty of its colossal want of humour has palled on him. One could sympathise with Falkland, but is not allowed to do so: because he is not human, except in his crime. But, as has been said, to those whose sporting interests are excited by the pleasures and hazards of the chase, these things no doubt do not occur. After all Caleb is, in a sense, the first "detective novel": and detective novels have always been popular, though they bore some people to extinction. Far, however, be it from me to deny that this popularity, especially when, as in the present case, it has been continued for four whole generations, is a real and a very considerable asset. Even if it were now to cease, it is actually funded and vested to Godwin's credit in the grand livre of literary history: and it can never be written off. Perhaps Caleb is the one book of the later English eighteenth century in novel for which there must always be a public as soon as it is presented to that public. And when this is said and endorsed by those who do not personally much care for the book, it is at once a sufficient testimony to the position of the author, and a vindication of the not absolutely imbecile position of those who thought that he might have written Waverley and its successors. The way in which Godwin in his later novels came down from the mountain-tops of theory and paradox just as he came down from those of Political Justice itself is interesting and amusing, but not for us. As novels they are certainly inferior. The best parts of St. Leon (1799) and Fleetwood (1805) are perhaps better than anything in Caleb: Mandeville (1817) and Deloraine (1833) are senilia.15 The graceful figure of the heroine Marguerite in St. Leon is said to be modelled on Mary Wollstonecraft, and there are some fresh pictures of youth and childhood in Fleetwood. But St. Leon, besides its historical shortcomings (which, once more, we may postpone), is full of faults, from the badly managed supernatural to an only too natural dullness and languor of general story: nor has Fleetwood anything like the absorbing power which Caleb Williams exercises, in its own way and on its own people. Yet again we may perhaps say that the chief interest of Godwin, from our point of view, is his repeated and further weighted testimony to the importance of the novel as an appeal to public attention. In this respect it was in fact displacing, not only the drama on one side, but the sermon on the other. Not so very long before these two had almost engrossed the domain of popular literature, the graver and more precise folk habitually reading sermons as well as hearing them, and the looser and lighter folk reading drama much oftener than (in then-existing circumstances) they had the opportunity of seeing it. With the novel the "address to the reader" became direct and stood by itself. The novelist could emulate Burke with his right barrel and Lydia Languish with his left. He certainly did not always endeavour to profit as well as to delight: but the double power was, from this time forward, shared by him with his brother in the higher and older Dichtung.