Old Godwin greatly preferred a quiet game of whist in a cosy corner, to conversation. In his manner he was a quiet, retiring, unpretentious old gentleman. At first I was rather surprised to discover how much he had modified many of his political opinions, and how completely he had changed others. Some of his books had been dogmatical and positive enough; but now he never dogmatized, and to his very utmost shunned argument and discussion. A flippant young man asked him one evening, “What are your fixed opinions?” “Sir,” said Godwin, “I have none; I left off my fixed opinions with my youth.”
During the season of the great combustion about the Reform Bill, little
Martin, the painter, took violently to politics.
He would insist upon pledges from every candidate, or from every member about to be
returned to the House of Commons; he would have no man give his vote without being sure of
the pledge that the honourable gentleman would vote in Parliament as his constituents
required, or vacate his seat. Martin had, on the whole, a consentient
audience, for the party (with a supper afterwards) was in his own house, and the listeners
were either artists or second or third rate authors, a class about as radical as the
artists. But Alaric Watts stood stoutly up in
opposition. “How!” said Martin, “all that I have
said is in Godwin’s ‘Political
Justice,’ and here is Godwin, who will bear me
out.” Godwin, who was just sitting down to his
parti carré, said that he might forget,
but he did not think he had written anything of the sort; that if he had done so he must
have committed a great mistake, and that
| CHAP. IX] | A GAME OF WHIST | 99 |
“If ever I said so,” said Godwin, “I must have been under a mistake.” “Mr. Godwin,” rejoined the artist, now getting rather vexed, “I am afraid that you do not stick to your principles!” The old reformed revolutionist, who was taking up his cards and arranging his suit, said mildly and even meekly: “Principles and opinions! opinions and principles! perplexing things! When I really know what or which I am to stick to, I will think about making up my mind. It is very easy to stick when, like a mussel, one sticks to the side of a rock, or a copper-bottomed ship; when one doesn’t think.”
“But,” said Martin, “we have had march of intellect, progress of education, intellectual development, throwing off of prejudices; and now the Nation, the People, thinks!” Old Godwin, beginning to lead in trumps, and transparently annoyed at the interruption, yet still as calm and cool as a cucumber, said: “I don’t think that a whole People can think.” “Then,” said Martin, “you throw up the democratic principle?” “Perhaps I do,” said Godwin, making a trick.
I liked little Martin, not for his
vapid politics, nor even very much for his phantasmagoric pictures; but I liked him very
much for his kindliness of heart and other good qualities that were in him. I also liked
old Godwin, and all the more for his tranquil mood,
and for the ease and honesty with which he made confession of past errors. For two or three
London seasons I met him rather frequently, and always found him the same quiet, composed,
retiring
| 100 | WILLIAM GODWIN | [CHAP. IX |
Lord Dudley and Ward, who had been, more than once, a Quarterly Reviewer, was in the habit of calling rather frequently at Albemarle Street, for a gossip in King John’s drawing-room. One afternoon His Majesty told him that old William Godwin was in great difficulties and absolute distress. “I am sorry for that,” said Lord Ward, “very sorry. He wrote some wild, perilous political trash in his young days; but the author of ‘Caleb Williams’ is a man of genius, and ought not to know want. It is a shame! and in his old age too!” He went into an inner room, as if to look for something, and on his return put a cheque for £100, quite slily, into John’s hand, whispering him to get the cheque cashed, to send the money to Godwin, and to say nothing about it to anyone. And if King John had not babbled over his cups, and if his head clerk and “Fidus Achates,” Mr. Dundas, had not tattled, Godwin would never have known whence the money came, nor would the world have known anything about it.
Such acts of generosity, and acts still more munificent, were by no means uncommon with his lordship. Miss M. R., cousin and confidante to Lady Lyndhurst, told me of a good many which had come to her knowledge, either accidentally or through Lady L.’s revelations; and no doubt there were many that neither Lady L. nor her cousin had ever heard of.
This admiration for “Caleb
Williams” was not peculiar to Lord Dudley and
Ward. Mr. Canning told his cousin
Stratford (not Lord Stratford de
Redcliffe) that the first time he took up that book he was thrilled and
riveted by it; and that, though much occupied at the time, he could scarcely lay the book
| CHAP. IX] | CALEB WILLIAMS | 101 |
Nearly two years after this, I read it again at Naples, and was almost equally struck with it; yet, when I came to reperuse it last year (1855), I must confess that for me nearly all the charm was gone, that it hung heavily on hand, and that I could not imagine how it had ever so thrilled and excited me. I could no longer detect that life and very essence of reality for which it has been so long and universally applauded. How is this? It cannot be that my personal acquaintance with the author had anything to do with the matter; for, on the whole, I liked old Godwin, and much admired his old age gentleness. I can only say that so it is. Other works of fiction that amused me in 1815 divert and please me still, and among these are included Mrs. Radcliffe’s Romances, which, nowadays, nobody seems to care about—except Mountstuart Elphinstone, who can still read them with pleasure. Quite lately, I took up Godwin’s “Essay on Sepulchres,” and was quite as much delighted with it as ever I had been. It is a very choice bit of English writing, and has a reverential and even a devotional feeling about it, which leads me to hope and almost believe, without a knowledge of the fact, that Godwin after all his vacillations and changes in matters of faith or unbelief, must at last have died a Christian.
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