e of men, and not of
children, adult, veteran, experienced; and truth will no longer have to
recommence her career at the end of thirty years. Meanwhile let the
friends of justice avoid violence, eschew massacres, and remember that
prudent handling will win even rich men for the cause of human
perfection.

So ends _Political Justice_, the strangest amalgam in our literature of
caution with enthusiasm, of visions with experience, of French logic
with English tactlessness, a book which only genius could have made so
foolish and so wise.

CHAPTER V

GODWIN AND THE REACTION

_Political Justice_ brought its author instant fame. Society was for a
moment intimidated by the boldness of the attack. The world was in a
generous mood, and men did not yet resent Godwin's flattering suggestion
that they were demigods who disguised their own greatness. He had
assailed all the accepted dogmas and venerable institutions of
contemporary civilisation, from monarchy to marriage, but it was only
after several years that society recovered its breath, and turned to
rend him. He became an oracle in an ever-widening circle of friends, and
was naively pleased to find, when he went into the country, that even in
remote villages his name was known. He was everywhere received as a
sage, and some years passed before he discovered how much of this
deference was a polite disguise for the vulgar curiosity that attends a
sudden celebrity. Prosperity was a wholesome stimulus. He was "exalted
in spirits," and became for a time (he tells us) "more of a talker than
I was before, or have been since."

In this mood he wrote the one book which has lived as a popular
possession, and held its place among the classics which are frequently
reprinted. _Caleb Williams_ (published in 1794) is incomparably the best
of his novels, and the one great work of fiction in our language which
owes its existence to the fruitful union of the revolutionary and
romantic movements. It spoke to its own day as Hugo's _Les Miserables_
and Tolstoy's _Resurrection_ spoke to later generations. It is as its
preface tells us, "a general review of the modes of domestic and
unrecorded despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man." It
conveys in the form of an eventful personal history the essence of the
criticism against society, which had inspired _Political Justice_.
Godwin's imagination was haunted by a persistent nightmare, in which a
lonely individual finds arraye