Delphi Complete Works of William Godwin 1st ed. (2022), page 185
part #1 of Delphi Classics Series
‘But does nature require all these things? No: a wholesome crust of bread, and water from the spring, give the freest health, and the most elastic mind. He is the truly independent man, that has the fewest wants. He fears no change of fortune, has no anxieties about the sufficiency of his income, the honesty of his dependents, the strength of his locks and chests, the security of goldsmiths, the uncertainty of the elements, or the revolution of empires. Every state and clime will supply him with what he needs. Nor is he the slave of any habits or indulgencies. What he had to-day, he can dispense with to-morrow. He can wake when others sleep, and eat at whatever hour that the occasion offers to him. He can rest as well in a cabin as a palace, and as soundly, covered with his cloke on the naked earth, as on beds of sattin, and under canopies of velvet.
‘This man is the only free man. He starts from his flinty couch, and dresses himself. No ceremony more; and he is ready to perform whatever his mind impels him to do. He does not wait, till the train is ready that is to accompany his march. He is not subservient to any man’s humour and caprice, and is not obliged to calculate the ability or convenience of his dependents, two conditions, from neither of which the lordliest despot is exempt. His legs are his footmen; and his arms are ever ready and prompt to perform all he wishes. His eyes are his avant couriers, and make plain the road for him wherever he desires to go. Fancy is his charioteer; and health, the best physician, maintains the evenness of his spirits through every stage of his journey. Appetite is his cook; and thirst his butler. Of this miscellaneous household he is thoroughly master, and has all his passions under subjection.
‘What a state is that of mortal man in every civilized climate! The earth supplies us freely with her productions, and industry multiplies them. These productions are then divided among the inhabitants of the earth. But how divided? One man gets the share of ten thousand, which he wastes and dissipates in thoughtless profusion, as far as he can, and then gives away the remainder with niggard hand, to the pining and anxious wretches to whom the whole was indebted for existence. I have heard it said, If the rich man could but know the miseries, the agonies of pain, the anguish of heart, and the dreadful paroxysms of despair, that are going on, perhaps in the next poor street to that which his lordly palace occupies, he would find but little relish in his dainties. But I wish that were the worst of it. He is not only the neighbour of misery; but he is the author of innumerable instances of it. Every costly morsel that he eats, is mixed with the tears and the curses of the poor by whose labours it was procured. What right have you to the share of ten thousand? Would I could muster up and marshal the legion, by whose oppression you are so delicately fed!
If every just man, that now pines with want,
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pampered luxury
Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,
Nature’s full blessings would be well dispensed
In unsuperfluous, even proportion,
And she no whit incumbered with her store.
For my part I am determined always to live so, that
No widow’s curse cater a dish of mine;
I’ll drink no tears of orphans in my wine.
‘And do you think my enjoyments will be the fewer for that? How senseless a distinction is that which the world has agreed to express by the word, property! When we go to an inn, do we enjoy ourselves the less, because the walls were not raised by our ancestors, and we are no one of us the landlords of the house? On the contrary, we regard the landlord as a laborious drudge, overwhelmed with business and fatigue, that we may enjoy ourselves at our ease. The landlord it is true he is; but I, his guest, am the master of the house. Can any truth be more self-evident, than that he that most perfectly enjoys a thing, is the real possessor? Well then; if I am the guest of some noble lord, the proprietor, as it is called, of a magnificent mansion, who is the true possessor of the luxuries that offer themselves to my acceptance? Why I, the occupier, or the consumer. His lordship is no more to me, than the landlord of an inn, the patentee of a play-house, or the tenant on lease of a set of apartments for concerts, balls, and masquerades. His is the labouring oar; his business it is to provide whatever may give me pleasure; his is all the care, the anxiety and foresight; that I may enjoy the whole without troubling myself about the matter.
‘But I do not chuse to be his guest. I like simple pleasures, better than luxurious ones; and I know that the landlord who does not make me out a bill, may put an end to my visit, not when I please, but when he pleases. My lord’s house is completely decorated with costly furniture, and the galleries are adorned with landscapes, history-pieces and statues. I like a plainer furniture better, and feel more at my ease with it. My taste is so uninstructed, that I have more pleasure from a landscape of Nature’s painting, than even from those of Rubens or Claude. Fair weather is the joy of my soul; when the sun bursts out in all its splendour, and flings its radiance on the neighbouring hills, my mind is tuned to rapture; and my bosom is sweetly soothed, by the rosy dashes of light, which so beautifully streak the clouds in a summer’s evening. When I am lost in the leafy maze of trees in the New Forest, I do not envy a minister of state in the midst of his crowded levee. And my heart decisively prefers to all the brilliancy of a ball room, a serene ramble in a fine night, with thousands of stars sparkling over my head, that by my rule I look upon as part of my possessions, not without some indignation at the tastelessness of mankind, who run the race of life without once adverting to its real enjoyments.
‘Another cursed thing which rises from this inexhaustible source of evils, called wealth, is that every man thrives by the ruin of another, and that death, which sweeps away all of us in our turn, and is in contemplation one of the main stimulants to love, and in approach one of the greatest incitements to sympathy, is changed into an object of aspiration, and an occasion of joy. Thank God, I am not the son of a wealthy father! If I were, I believe I should abhor my own soul every morning that I rose. My father fell in the battles of his king; but my mother still lives; and long and peaceful may her days be upon earth! Filial affection is one of the purest of all sentiments; and my father was one of the noblest creatures, that God ever made to beautify his creation withal. But, if he were living, and possessed ten thousand a year, how am I sure, that, as I grew up, and became twenty, thirty, forty years of age, I should not wickedly think that he had enjoyed his property long enough, and that it was time my turn was come? For ten thousand worlds, I would not connect any source of joy, or find any balance of good, with the sacred sorrows of a father’s death-bed! Oh, how treacherous is the human soul, and how much selfishness insidiously mingles itself with our kindest and most generous feelings! And, if such were my lot once, I must expect thereafter, that the tables would be turned, and that, when stooping in the vale of years, the lingering of my decay would be looked on askance with an impatient eye! Though I am a boy, I can put myself forward in fancy into future time, and imagine that I have that solace of human vicissitudes, a child of my love. And shall I mix that solace, with believing that my child grudges me those added years that the bounty of nature gives, and that he is in heart and inclination the murderer of the parent that begot him? Oh, how sacred and how lovely are the charities of kindred and blood, to the humble sons of Nature!
‘But, of all the evils with which a human being can be afflicted, not being born to wealth, I will not involve myself in the guilt and meanness of pursuing it. What, shall I devote my life to trade, and barter away my honesty and my soul for the turning a penny? Shall I decry the thing I want to buy, and praise the thing I want to sell? Shall my whole soul be devoured with the anxieties of gain, and my precious hours of solitude be devoted to calculation and computing? And for what? That, when all the finer sensibilities of my nature have evaporated, and there is nothing left of heart within me, but what is as dry and impenetrable as an Egyptian mummy, then truly I may sit down, and enjoy myself.
‘But there is another and genteeler recipe, I have been told, for turning a poor man into a rich one; and that is, by worming himself into the affections of the wealthy and the great. Oh, this is admirable indeed! The supple expectant at the board of a great man, is the slave of a slave, and is even a much more wretched thing than his master. His eyes, and his very thoughts, are not his own, and are wholly devoted to a gilded, nauseous, ill-odoured idol. How his hopes and fears rise and fall with the insulting good and ill humour of the animal he worships! How omnipotently he must hate the being he affects to reverence and value!
‘For, what is this wealth and rank, that the world agrees so obsequiously to bow down to? Fortune distributes her favours blindly. Most estates have their beginnings in griping commerce, or, what is infinitely worse, in the confiscation and ruin of thousands, that their possessions, freighted with the curses of those who are stripped of them and turned out to beggary, may be conferred on some courtier, as worthless as he is servile. The king bestows nobility; he is the fountain of honour. And, I take it for granted, he means well: but his favours are dispensed here and there, not as he would choose, but by the breath of cabal and the basest intrigue. There is but one true nobility, and that is bestowed by the Almighty ruler of the universe. It has its seat in the soul. It is that inspiration, that makes the generous man, the inventor of arts, the legislator of the mind, the spirit formed to act greatly on the theatre of the world, and the poet who records the deeds of such spirits. Put one of God’s nobility by the side of one of the king’s: who does not laugh at the comparison? They are not of the same class of beings, scarcely belong to a common nature. Turn the former out naked to the world! His worth is intrinsic; his qualities are such as must excite reverence, wherever there is sense to perceive, or discernment to judge of such qualities. The king cannot bestow this: it cannot come down to a man by hereditary succession: it descends from Heaven alone.’
I feel, while I am putting down these discourses of my school-fellow, how much injustice I am doing him. I am aware that, as they stand upon paper, they will read vapid and tedious. I must observe here, as Aeschines did, when he recited to a circle of auditors the speech of Demosthenes that had procured his own banishment, ‘What a piece of work you would have thought it, if you had heard it from his own lips!’ So these discourses of Clifford, while he spoke them, appeared almost divine. He charmed, as it were, our very souls out of our bodies, and might have led us through the world. It was like what is fabled of Orpheus; mute things seemed to have ears; and you would have expected the very beasts of prey to lay down their savage natures, and obey him. There was something in the very nature of his sentiments, calculated to waken a responsive chord in every human bosom; and the melody of his voice, and the sportive gaiety with which he uttered them, made them altogether irresistible. Set down in cold lines and paragraphs, they may appear long-winded and pedantic; they may be judged beyond the feelings of his age; but, if ever there was a creature void of affection and the desire to shine, Clifford was that creature. He talked like one inspired. He spoke, because he could not help it, and to give vent to his full bosom. And his discourses were always so well timed, so aptly rose out of the occasion in hand, and were so animated and pithy, that every one longed for the occasion, and were delighted to listen to the magic of his tongue.
It was wonderful the effect that this system of thinking wrought upon the scholars of Winchester School. Wealth in their eyes became dross; and instead of considering it, as others do, as a ground for vanity and arrogance, those who had the greatest pretensions to it became ashamed of them. I have heard that in other schools wealth and rank are very much overlooked, and that a sort of golden age of levelling and equality prevails. But with us it went one step farther. The captain among us boasted of his poverty, and was proud that he was born to nothing. And, with that spirit of imitation so remarkable among human creatures, poverty accordingly became the fashion; and those among us who were born to other expectations, pined for this blessed inheritance, and held that they carried about them a brand of slavery. This extraordinary course of sentiment was the more easily introduced among schoolboys; for schoolboys have not yet learned the bitter evils which poverty sometimes introduces.
I, I alone, felt no pleasure, and refused to feel pleasure from the discourses of Clifford. In the first place, I was strongly impressed with the notion of their fallacy. How I came in my own mind to reason differently from my comrades I know not; but such was the fact. I looked upon Clifford as an enchanter, who hurled
His dazzling spells into the spungy air,
Of power to cheat the eye with blear illusion,
And give it false presentments.
I confessed to myself that wealth was pregnant with mischief, both to the possessor, and to society in general. But I did not look upon poverty with the same eyes that Clifford did. I saw that man was not formed like the animals, to whom uncultivated nature supplies every want. Man is not, like them, a stationary creature, as perfect in one generation as in all that are to succeed, but is capable of infinite improvements. He then, that is so adapted to receive and engender arts and sciences, to adorn the earth with the works of his skill, to scan the heavens, and penetrate into the abysses of his own nature, ought not to be exposed to unmitigable poverty. In the solitudes of Mandeville House, and in my propensity to reveries, I had thought more of the condition of human beings, than schoolboys usually do. I saw that in civilized society, the only state that appeared to me worthy of man, he could not subsist but upon the fruits of others’ industry or of his own, and that the very attempt to supply himself, subjected him in various ways to the caprice of his fellow-creatures, and was in various ways precarious. I saw that the poor man was strangely pent up and fettered in his exertions, whether their purpose might be to unfold the treasury of intellect in the solitude of his closet, or to collect facts and phenomena by wandering on the face of the earth. I saw that, when he suffered himself to contract the dearer ties of husband and father, poverty and an uncertain subsistence might depress his heart, and corrode his vitals. I saw that, if riches made a man a slave, entire poverty did the same, and perhaps more effectually. It is perhaps within the compass of possibility for a rich man to be free (though almost as hardly, as for ‘a camel to pass through the eye of a needle’); but the poor man must always wear the marks of his bolts about him, and drag at every step a heavier and more intolerable chain. I saw that poverty was environed on all sides with temptations, urging and impelling a man, to sell his soul, to sacrifice his integrity: to debase the clearness of his spirit, and to become the bond slave of a thousand vices.
All this I knew: but I was not like Clifford. I could not put my soul into my tongue, and witch all hearers with my eloquence. Envious nature had denied to me this privilege. But I felt my deficiency with fierce and burning impatience. Why should this youth steal away the souls of his companions with glozing words, and I have no tongue to check his mistakes, and expose his sophistries? Why should error thus intrepidly bolt forth its apophthegms, and I sit timidly in my corner, unable to utter the truths that were fermenting in my bosom? It appeared to me that the system of the universe was in fault, and that the sacred cause of truth was iniquitously and unfairly dealt by. Jealousy thus, day by day, established its empire in my bosom; and Clifford was the maleficent wizard by whom I was hag-ridden, and the night-mare, under whose weight I lay at the last gasp of existence.
Sure I was (no matter how erroneous my opinion), in the secret calculations and combinings of my own thoughts, that my merits fully balanced the merits of Clifford, and that, weighed with the beam of a just estimation, my scale would prove the heavier. He that spends his days in solitude, and is seldom corrected in his determinations by the collision of another, has almost always an overweening opinion of himself. Clifford and I were two luminaries that could never shine in the same sphere; but I could not bear the idea of being under a perpetual eclipse, and that they who admired my competitor, should never turn a glance of passing approbation upon me.
This was rendered inexpressibly worse to me by the mischief-making temper of Mallison. The greatest gratification, as I have said, of this seemingly unnatural being lay in giving pain to another. The coruscations of Clifford’s wit were a harmless lightning playing in an evening sky; but Mallison’s unremitted aim was to furnish the bolt, that should succeed as surely, as the report follows upon the flash. It fell to his office, to turn all Clifford’s innocent sallies into personal satire. With the acuteness that malice perhaps always gives, he saw that I was the most sensitive lad in the school, upon whom his spurts of ill humour would be least in danger to be wasted. It happened, that the estate to which I was heir, was perhaps larger than that which any other youth in the establishment was entitled to look to. God knows, I thought but little upon this. But there was a gravity in my carriage, a sort of inflexible sadness of gesture and tone, which Mallison wickedly perverted into the crime of being purse-proud. If my manner was somewhat cold, reserved and uncommunicative before, it certainly did not lose any of these defects under the smart of his lashes. There is something in the temper of the unreflecting and grosser crowd, that always leads them ambitiously to join in a hunting of this sort. Under the tutoring of Mallison, they voted me a prig, a frump, a fogram, and qualified me with all the disparaging epithets, that a familiar acquaintance with the vulgar tongue could supply to the glibness of their eager speech. Mallison barbed all these with the appellation of Presbyterian. To his malicious fancy, there was an odd discordance, between the multiplied manors that were to descend to me, the remnant of a thousand dazzling exploits and achievements of chivalry, and the melancholy and mournful carriage of the adherents of this celebrated sect. He would contrast, with impressive strokes of description, the advantageous air, and frank and commanding language of the preux chevaliers that had gone before me, on the one hand, with the ambitious plainness, the demure and nasal twang, the fixed eye, and the drawling yea and nay, of the persons to the inheritance of whose tenets I was bred.
