He goes on to describe in more detail the "dramatic and impressive"

situations and the "fearful events" that were to be evolved, making it

pretty clear that the purpose somewhat vaguely and cautiously outlined

in the earliest preface was rather of the nature of an afterthought.

Falkland is not intended to be a personification of the evils caused by

the social system, nor is he put forward as the inevitable product of

that system. The reader's attention is chiefly absorbed by the

extraordinary contest between Caleb Williams and Falkland, and in the

tragic situations that it involves. Compared with these the denunciation

of the social system is a matter of secondary interest; but it was

natural that the author of the "Political Justice," with his mind

preoccupied by the defects of the English social system, should make

those defects the, evil agencies of his plot. As the essential

conditions of the series of events, as the machinery by which everything

is brought about, these defects are of the utmost importance to the

story. It is the accused 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

Misérables," 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 than the mechanical symmetry by

which morals are illustrated.