system that awards to Tyrrel and Falkland their
immense preponderance in society, and enables them to use the power of
the law for the most nefarious ends. Tyrrel does his cousin to death and
ruins his tenant, a man of integrity, by means of the law. This is the
occasion of Falkland's original crime. His more heinous offence, the
abandonment of the innocent Hawkinses to the gallows, is the consequence
of what Godwin expressly denounces, punishment for murder. "I conceived
it to be in the highest degree absurd and iniquitous, to cut off a man
qualified for the most essential and extensive utility, merely out of
retrospect to an act which, whatever were its merits, could not be
retrieved." Then a new element is imported into the train of causation,
Caleb's insatiable curiosity, and the strife begins between these
well-matched antagonists, the man of wealth and station utilizing all
the advantages granted him by the state of society to crush his enemy.
Godwin, then, was justified in declaring that his book comprehended "a
general view of the modes of domestic and unrecorded despotism by which
man becomes the destroyer of man." Such were the words of the original
preface, which was suppressed for a short time owing to the fears caused
by the trial of Horne Tooke, Thomas Holcroft and other revolutionists,
with whom Godwin was in profound sympathy. Had he intended "Caleb
Williams," however, from its first inception, to be an imaginative
version of the "Political Justice," he would have had to invent a
different plan and different characters. The arguments of a sociological
novel lack cogency unless the characters are fairly representative of
average mankind. Godwin's principal actors are both, to say the least,
exceptional. They are lofty idealizations of certain virtues and powers
of mind. Falkland is like Jean Valjean, a superhuman creature; and,
indeed, "Caleb Williams" may well be compared on one side with "Les
Miserables," for Victor Hugo's avowed purpose, likewise, was the
denunciation of social tyranny. But the characteristics that would have
weakened the implied theorem, had such been the main object, are the
very things that make the novel more powerful as drama of a grandiose,
spiritual kind. The high and concentrated imagination that created such
a being as Falkland, and the intensity of passion with which Caleb's
fatal energy of mind is sustained through that long, despairing
struggle, are of greater artistic value