uld 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 o