[In the following essay, Miller examines Godwin's theory of language as set forth in his essay on political justice and his application of that theory in the novel Caleb Williams.]

Recent criticism of Caleb Williams generally concentrates on the theme of mastery and victimization, placing it in political, psychological, or theological contexts.¹ These studies provide useful perspectives, but Godwin himself extended this concept of authority and oppression to include the domain of language and aesthetics, and it is here that we can locate a crucial but largely ignored dimension of the novel. From the book emerges an idea of language that equates words and things, defining the self and the world as basically linguistic constructs which are shaped, manipulated and controlled by those who possess the most powerful and persuasive language.² In this paper I intend to examine the theory of language proposed in Godwin's essays, and then to explore the ways in which the principles of that theory inform the novel. For Caleb Williams is the “imperfect and mutilated story”³ of a man who cannot speak his own words and who thereby fails to “bring into being what he really is.”⁴ It is the history of a man whose problems with language defeat his attempts to impose his formulation of “things as they are”⁵ onto a world that has been organized by the principles of another man's rhetoric.

Caleb is writing his memoirs, and he does so for reasons that suggest not only that individual identity is realized in and through language, but also that in a world structured by language, the words that form the individual identity must, in order to survive, help shape a world which supports them. Caleb's motivations for constructing his narrative, as he frequently presents them, are two-fold. He wants to review his history to escape from the consciousness of his present condition, “to divert my mind from the deplorableness of my situation” (3). He also writes with the hope of “vindicating my character” to a world he assumes will be able to accommodate his story: “I conceived that my story faithfully digested would carry in it an impression of truth that few men would be able to resist” (303-04). The first reason suggests that Caleb is doing more than merely recording events; since his return to the past is motivated by a desire to avoid the present, his writing may be seen as an endeavor to recreate (rather than simply retrace) a history from which can emerge a new character in a new context. For as he repeatedly admits, Falkland has been the “author” of Caleb's life, and Caleb's own efforts to be the author of his own history and identity have been impotent. He has been so unlike his prison friend, the admirable Brightwell, in that he “cannot pretend to rival the originality and self-created vigour of his mind” (192). Caleb recognizes the self-creative power of language and of the artist that Tyrell often denies; he attempts in his memoirs to engage in the activity that Tyrell rejects when he says:

I am neither a philosopher nor a poet, to set out upon a wild-goose chase of making myself a different man from what you find me.

(30)

It is precisely in order to make himself “a different man from what you find me” that Caleb writes. His endeavor to create rather than report and record is suggested by the gradual change of his attitude towards his memoirs. When he has brought his story up to the present and finds himself in the same condition as when he began to construct his history, then “writing, which was at first a pleasure, is changed into a burthen” (304). The narrative apparently has not served its purpose.

Caleb's desire to vindicate his character indicates a similar attempt to create, control and possess his own identity through his narrative. Caleb must become his own artist and write his own story to replace the universally accepted “odious and atrocious falshood that had been invented against me, to follow me wherever I went, to strip me of character” (301). But this ambition also reveals that speech alone is not effective; words, even self-articulated ones, must be impressed upon a world that will both confirm and conform to them. Caleb at times blames his fate not on his inability to express himself, but, instead, on the world's response (resistance) to his expression:

I was destined to suffer an early and inexorable death from the hands of others, because none of them had penetration enough to distinguish from falshood what I uttered with the entire conviction of a full fraught heart! Strange, that men from age to age should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another. …

(210)

To successfully bring himself into being, to be the “creative poet of his own history,”⁶ Caleb's words must be uttered to a world which adapts to their formulations. Caleb learns that the vindication of his character cannot be achieved in isolation, and he understands that his words must be both given and returned, spoken and imposed upon a world which will hear, accept and reciprocate them:

I endeavoured to sustain myself by the sense of my integrity, but the voice of no man upon earth echoed to the voice of my conscience. ‘I called aloud; but there was none to answer; there was none that regarded.’ To me the whole world was as unhearing as the tempest. …

(308)

By the end of the novel, however, Caleb's sense of self and claims to authorship crumble, and he admits that “I have now no character that I wish to vindicate” (326). His endeavor to become and assert himself through the language of his narrative fails; the moment “pregnant with fate” when Caleb triumphantly decides “I will tell a tale—! The justice of the country shall hear me! The elements of nature in universal uproar shall not interrupt me!” (314) produces only a “half-told and mangled tale” (326) that denies the full and complete creation of its author.

I

A letter from Coleridge dated 22 September 1800, only six years after the publication of Caleb Williams, attests to and encourages Godwin's concern with the relationships among language, the individual and the world:

I wish you to write a book on the power of the words, and the processes by which the human feelings form affinities with them. … In something of this sort I would endeavour to destroy the old antithesis of Words and Things; elevating, as it were, Words into Things, and living things too.⁷

In writing to Godwin of “the power of the words,” Coleridge would have found a receptive audience; Godwin's interest in the politics of language is amply demonstrated both in his fiction and his non-fictional writing. As noted above, the dynamics of mastery and victimization that frequently form the basis of political, psychological or theological explications of Caleb Williams also provide Godwin with an appropriate context for examining and describing his theory of language. In his two books of essays, The Enquirer and Thoughts on Man,⁸ Godwin discusses the importance of studying the “art of language,” for without this knowledge and skill, man not only loses control of his words; he also loses command of himself and “will probably always remain in some degree the slave of language.”⁹ The man who has acquired ability in this “science of words” will be able to reverse the hierarchy: “Language is not his master, but he is the master of language.”¹⁰ Language, then, is a means of power, self-control and self-actualization. Skill or lack of skill in the science of words is a factor determining an individual's freedom or victimization, his self-possession and self-command, as well as his ability to effectively realize himself and his conceptions in the eyes of the world.

Godwin subscribes to the idea that language confers upon us our human identity: “that articulated air, which we denominate speech” is what “so eminently distinguishes us from the rest of animal creation.”¹¹ Words, however, do more than differentiate men from beasts; they also differentiate the individual from other men. Godwin explicitly connects the ability to articulate with the assertion of the independence, identity and dignity of the self:

Man can never appear in his genuine dignity, but so far as he is capable of standing alone. …

… He should begin to stand by himself, and respect his own dignity, as soon as he is able to utter an articulate sound.¹²

Words both proclaim and create individuality. For the true artist, language becomes inseparable from the self; to deprive him of his words is to destroy the man:

The very words that occurred to these men … are part of themselves; and you may as well attempt to preserve the man when you have deprived him of all his members, as think to preserve the poet when you have taken away the words that he spoke.¹³

Each man's language is a personal statement of his identity, an inherent and vital part of himself. Practice does not always conform to theory, though, and Godwin does, at some points, question man's capacity for the self-generated articulation which forms the self (“Yet what is human speech for the most part, but mere imitation? … a servile repetition”), and suggests instead that “our tempers are merely the work of the transcriber.” Ultimately, however, he rejects this proposal. Men may often tend merely to accept and pronounce the words of another, but they do have different options; they are not forced to participate in an unending series of repetitions thrust upon them by what others have spoken:

It is the mistake of dull minds only, to suppose … that we … have no alternative left, but either to be silent, or to say over and over again, what has been well said already.¹⁴

Godwin considers language to be not only inseparable from the self, but also intrinsic to perception and comprehension. Words shape, rather than simply reflect, man's understanding; they are the source, not the product, of human conceptions. Godwin repeats, in various essays, the maxim that

[a man] does not write because he understands the subject, but he understands the subject because he has written.¹⁵

Language is thus indispensable to thought and productive of meaning for each individual (“the science of thinking … is little else than the science of words”¹⁶). Godwin ventures even further to explain that one man's words can shape and form the understanding of others as well. Since words are “part and parcel of all our propositions and theories,” man can, through language, form his thoughts and principles “into a regular system” which can then be “communicated to others.”¹⁷ Through words, a man can impose meaning—that is, an individual interpretation—on his subject. The artist shapes the world; he

changes the nature of what he handles … The manufacture he delivers to us is so new, that the thing it previously was, is no longer recognizable. The impression that he makes upon the imagination and the heart, the impulses that he communicates to the understanding and the moral feeling, are all his own.¹⁸

The artist, then, or the person who controls words, can control our conception of “things as they are.” The man deficient in the “science of words” is thus truly the slave of language, capable only of a “servile repetition”; if his own speech is impotent and lacking the self-creative and world-creative energy potentially available in words, then he will be subject to the shaping principles of a more powerful rhetoric. This is, in part, the story of Caleb Williams—a man who never succeeds in becoming his own author.

II

Caleb's initial relationship to Falkland is one which is never truly dissolved. Caleb is Falkland's “secretary” (5), and his employment

consisted partly in the transcribing and arranging certain papers, and partly in writing from my master's dictation letters of business, as well as sketches of literary composition. Many of these latter consisted of an analytical survey of the plans of different authors, and conjectural speculations upon hints they afforded, tending either to the detection of their errors or the carrying forward their discoveries.

(6)

Thus Falkland, well studied in the art of authorship, will later be capable of having “forged the basest and most atrocious falshoods, and urged them with a seriousness and perseverance which produced universal belief” (287). Falkland's control over Caleb and his language, and Caleb's own impotence as author both begin and are prefigured here; by “dictation,” Falkland becomes the origin and source of the words that Caleb merely reproduces and copies. Throughout his story, all of Caleb's attempts at creation trap him into forms of repetition and impersonation. Later, for example, we learn of Caleb's “facility in the art of imitation” (238) and his “talent of mimicry” (254). When Caleb becomes a writer through the proxy of Mrs. Marney, we find him again confronted and complying with a “literary dictator” (259). His poems are rejected and he then resorts to copying the work of other authors: he “attempted a paper in the style of Addison's Spectators” and “translated or modelled [his] narratives upon a reading of some years before” (259). Ultimately the hopeful author discovers that he has become the subject in another man's literary production; “The Wonderful and Surprising History of Caleb Williams” becomes the final vehicle by which Caleb is stripped of his character and created anew.

In Volume One of the novel, Caleb relates Collins' story of Falkland's past; it is, in part, a catalogue of incidents illustrating verbal ascendency and dependency—a history of relationships and events formed and defined by hierarchies of eloquence, culminating with a final picture of Falkland as a man with superior abilities in the art of language. Control of language becomes synonymous with control of self and control of others; if that ability is lost or overcome, men become subjected to the authority of those who retain verbal prowess. Falkland's return to England as a refined squire begins his confrontation with Tyrell, a local, uneducated man whose “proficiency … in the arts of writing and reading was extremely slender,” but who was endowed with a “considerable copiousness of speech” (17-18) and a “boisterous and overbearing elocution” (20). This mode of articulation grants him power over his neighbors, for “the tyranny of Mr. Tyrell would not have been so patiently endured, had not his colloquial accomplishments perpetually come in aid of that authority which his rank and prowess originally obtained” (18). Falkland, however, obtains the admiration of the public through his “delicacy of sentiment and expression” (20) which creates such a contrast to the more vulgar Tyrell. Tyrell is cognizant of Falkland's verbal power, and even defines the politics of their dispute with reference to the techniques and efficacy of their personal rhetorics:

Time was when I was thought entitled to respect. But now, debauched by this Frenchified rascal, they call me rude, surly, a tyrant! It is true that I cannot talk in finical phrases, flatter people with hypocritical praise, or suppress the real feelings of my mind! The scoundrel knows his pitiful advantages, and insults me upon them without ceasing.

(54)

Although Tyrell recognizes Falkland's superiority in this realm of “talk,” he consoles himself by denying the value and power of words:

We knew well enough that [Falkland] had the gift of the gab. To be sure, if the world were to be governed by words, he would be in the right box. Oh, yes, he had it all hollow! But what signifies prating? Business must be done in an other-guess way than that.

(31)

Despite Tyrell's statement to the contrary, however, the world does indeed seem to be “governed by words.” The corrective to Tyrell's contention is supplied by the figure of Mr. Clare, the poet, who is the most admirable character in Collins' story: the true artist, it seems, is the ideal man. His use of language is exemplary both in his literary productions and his conversation; it always produces its desired effect and “never mangled what it was intended to heal” (24). By demonstrating—even embodying—the value and potency of the artist's language, Clare stands as a refutation of Tyrell's denial of the power of the word. And to Tyrell's dismay and frustration, Clare not only instinctively befriends Falkland, seeing in him “a mind in a certain degree congenial with his own” (25), but he also publicly praises Falkland's poetic talents and commends his skill with words.

Clare's appraisal is confirmed; repeatedly, Falkland's language becomes his instrument of power over Tyrell, whose consequent inability to manipulate words becomes the indication of his subservient position. The pattern of one man's eloquence rendering another man inarticulate and therefore impotent becomes a motif throughout the book; and an important instance of this ends the first volume. After the death of Tyrell's cousin Emily, whom he had ill-treated, Tyrell intrudes upon the rural assembly which has ostracized him, and his “well-timed interruptions and pertinent insinuations” make the townspeople lose their capacity to speak: “first to hesitate, and then to be silent” (94). When Falkland enters, his pre-eminence is established by the eloquence of his speech, which in turn forces Tyrell into silence (“and his tongue refused its office” [95]). A hierarchy of verbal ability is thus erected. Tyrell's silence signifies his defeat; he is confronted with this inescapable evidence of Falkland's verbal superiority and his own failure to compete with it, and then relinquishes language as a tool of power. Without uttering a word, he attempts a purely physical comeback and assaults Falkland. Falkland is no match for this attack and is soundly beaten, but later that evening Tyrell is found murdered, and Falkland is accused of the crime. The final commentary made by Collins is more true than he may realize. The proper response for Falkland would have been that of Themistocles: “Strike, but hear” (98); that is, a verbal assertion which would have been more effective and valuable than physical retaliation. And yet Collins' narrative concludes with Falkland's eloquent vindication of himself at his trial; he converts accusation into adoration as he once more, like the true artist of Godwin's essays, calls upon and displays the power of his language “to change the nature of what he handles.”

A new opposition of rhetorics is instituted as Caleb enters the “scene”¹⁹: while Volume One ends by presenting a picture of Falkland's ability to express his story and impose it on the world, Volume Two opens with Caleb reasserting his own voice as narrator. Caleb's story begins with his attempt to discover Falkland's entire story: the truth about the murder. He suspects that Falkland is guilty, despite the eloquent acquittal of himself that Collins has described, and he is immediately attracted to the secrecy which surrounds a trunk that Falkland keeps under careful surveillance. As the story progresses, the contents of that trunk become symbolically connected with narrative art. Caleb convinces himself that this trunk, which contains “all that [he] sought” (132), is the key to the mystery. But as Forester later tells Caleb, “where there is mystery, there is always something at bottom that will not bear the telling” (148; my emphasis). Mystery itself seems to be founded upon the suppression of language and speech, and it is this prohibition on expression that Caleb tries to expose and repeal in his attempts to “publish those astonishing secrets” (275; my emphasis). By the end of the novel, when Caleb considers the “contents of the fatal trunk from which all my misfortunes originated,” he imagines that it does not contain the weapons used to murder Tyrell, but rather “a faithful narrative of that and its concomitant transactions, written by Mr. Falkland” (315; my emphasis). With this conception of the linguistic origins of all that has occurred, Caleb proceeds to determine the most appropriate and effective weapon for defense and revenge: “No, I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale—!” (314). He decides that his own story, till now censored, shall be told and substituted for the one penned by Falkland; his tale is revealed as an attempt to replace Falkland as author.

The competition for verbal domination between the two men begins early, and Caleb at first seems to be an equal match for Falkland as he tries to uncover the “mystery.” As he learns to control both his and Falkland's remarks, Caleb's verbalization gains supremacy and he becomes adept at leading their conversations, “which by this time [he] well knew how to introduce, by insensible degrees to the point [he] desired” (116). Because Falkland is initially unwilling to suppress him by “a severe prohibition of speech” (109) or by “interrupting the freedom of [their] intercourse” (110), Caleb succeeds in manipulating his language and, through it, Falkland.

Yet as Caleb gradually extracts Falkland's story from him, he increasingly loses the ability to maintain control over his words and over himself. Falkland's language seems to annihilate and replace Caleb's; the ultimate consequence of Falkland's full narration of his history is the denial of the power and freedom of Caleb's speech. Falkland ends his confession by placing a prohibition on Caleb's language: “if ever an unguarded word escape from your lips … expect to pay for it by your death or worse” (136). And the final dissipation of Caleb's claim to articulation and self-assertion is pronounced: he will never be able to construct a history that will successfully proclaim his identity. The world, having accepted Falkland's persuasive words, will prove resistant to whatever words Caleb tries to impose on it:

Be still! If once you fall, call as loud as you will, no man on earth shall hear your cries; prepare a tale however plausible, or however true, the whole world shall execrate you for an impostor.

(154)

The only words with any currency are those sanctioned by Falkland. His language has defined a role for Caleb, and any attempt to tell a different story and create a different character is doomed to failure.

This begins for Caleb a life of forbidden intercourse, disjointed and incomplete expression, “imperfect and mutilated” storytelling. Deprived of his words, he cannot preserve his identity. He has become a prisoner—a slave—of Falkland's masterful language, and is thereby robbed of his own. It is a loss that constantly perplexes him:

Why was it that I was once more totally overcome by the imperious carriage of Mr. Falkland, and unable to utter a word?

(154)

Caleb realizes that his failure to assert his true character derives from his inability to articulate successfully, and while in prison he decides to develop the powers he has lost. He imagines all conceivable situations and teaches himself the verbal skills appropriate for each: “I cultivated the powers of oratory suited to these different states” (186). In thus resurrecting his powers of articulation, Caleb both becomes an artist and becomes himself, as evidenced in the curious but significant syntax of his statement, “I became myself a poet” (186). Caleb is aware that his silence has made him the victim of Falkland's art, and he declares that he will no longer surrender his verbal powers and succumb to an author other than himself:

I had hitherto been silent as to my principal topic of recrimination. But I was by no means certain that I should consent to go out of the world in silence, the victim of this man's obduracy and art.

(190)

But Caleb admits that he “improved more in eloquence in the solitude of my dungeon, than perhaps I should have done in the busiest and most crowded scenes” (186). He cultivates his power to speak in isolation, sustained and supported only by himself; he still lacks the ability to advance and impress his story onto his society. When he leaves prison he finds himself still at the mercy of another author's account; “The Wonderful and Surprising History of Caleb Williams” is widely circulated and accepted, and Caleb succumbs to this superior claim of originality and authorship that calls his own into question. It is here that his “talent of mimicry” is put to use. Rather than asserting himself, Caleb resorts to disguises; instead of performing an act of self-creation, he employs the “art of imitation” and engages “in the personating a fictitious character” (288). Ironically he reports that:

I persisted in this exertion of my faculties, through a sort of parental love that men are accustomed to entertain for their intellectual offspring.

(254)

The parental analogy is a poor fit; Caleb becomes the father not of himself, but instead of a “counterfeit character” (256) from which no one “could have traced out the person of Caleb Williams” (255). Eventually even the disguises fail, and Caleb retreats to a small rural town where he begins an “etymological analysis of the English language” (294). This apparently “accidental” choice of intellectual (and diversionary) exercise is not insignificant, for as Godwin elsewhere makes clear, this study can help to change man from the slave to the master of language.²⁰ But when Falkland's story infiltrates even this rural area, and Caleb decides to tell his own story to Laura, who has befriended him, his speech is stifled. Once again he is silenced and “walked away without uttering a word” (297).

When Caleb is utterly despairing of extricating himself from Falkland's authorial and authoritative reign, he reaches a moment of resolution and decides “I will tell a tale—!” (314). Language has imprisoned him, but it can also free him; his own words are the only instruments that can defeat Falkland's control: “With this engine, this little pen I defeat all his machinations …” (315). And he predicts that his words will not only be spoken; they will also be heard and received: “The justice of the country shall hear me! The elements of nature in universal uproar shall not interrupt me!” It is at this point that Caleb imagines that the mysterious trunk from which all his misfortunes originated contains not the dagger that killed Tyrell, but words:

a faithful narrative of that and its concomitant transactions, written by Mr. Falkland, and reserved in case of the worst, that, if by any unforeseen event his guilt should come to be fully disclosed, it might contribute to redeem the wreck of his reputation.

(315)

Caleb now triumphantly claims that his words shall substitute for Falkland's; he will rewrite Falkland's story, “supply its place” (316), and impose his narrative on the world.

In the concluding scene, Caleb initially presents himself in an authorial position, as “the author of this hateful scene” (320). But when he confronts Falkland, the man whose words have defined and governed his being, Caleb tries to reject his own words and to reject his authorship: “Would to God it were possible for me to retire from this scene without uttering another word!” (320). Caleb thus becomes an unwilling author; it is, in fact, Falkland who ultimately imposes this position on Caleb: “The situation and the demands of Mr. Falkland himself forbid me. He … would compel me to accuse” (320). Although Falkland is physically debilitated, his control, his dictatorship over his secretary, is not yet relinquished.

Under this compulsion, Caleb tells his story, and seems to perform the act of self-articulation and self-assertion that has always eluded him. But, in the end, the act betrays itself and presents Caleb as the person Falkland always proclaimed him to be; he finally can only portray himself as that character which Falkland has constructed:

I came to accuse, but am compelled to applaud. I proclaim to all the world that Mr. Falkland is a man worthy of affection and kindness, and that I am myself the basest and most odious of mankind!

(323)

In the act of speaking, Caleb actually rejects his own history and delivers a story that accords with the one created by Falkland. Consequently, Caleb loses his sense of self—“I have now no character that I wish to vindicate”—and also surrenders his claim to authorship. His narrative is no longer an assertion of self; his words no longer tell his own story:

I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate: but I will finish them that thy story may be fully understood; and that, if those errors of thy life be known which thou so ardently desiredst to conceal, the world may at least not hear and repeat a half-told and mangled tale.

(326; my emphasis)

Caleb is now determined to tell “thy story,” turning his memoirs into Falkland's narrative. He will no longer speak for himself, create his own history, or articulate himself into being. Instead, he decides merely to resurrect and reproduce, rather than replace, that “narrative … written by Mr. Falkland, and reserved in case of the worst, that, if … his guilt should come to be fully disclosed, it might contribute to redeem the wreck of his reputation” (315). Caleb's sense of his own character has become, to use the terms of Godwin's essays, “the work of the transcriber”; defeated by his own language as well as by Falkland's, he succumbs to a position of “servile repetition.”

Falkland's response in this last scene is, however, almost identical to Caleb's: he embraces the picture of himself that his opponent has all along been trying to publish. He claims that Caleb's tale “has carried conviction to every hearer” (324), but we have little evidence for this other than Falkland's word, since in this closing episode the response of the rest of the world is for the most part ignored. It is as if Falkland and Caleb are telling their stories only to impress them upon each other. During this confrontation, the two versions of “things as they are” cross, but since they represent and try to impose individual formulations of the world, they do not cohere. This development is not an isolated phenomenon; by the time Godwin published Caleb Williams, eighteenth-century fiction had felt the impact of Sterne's Shandean world, where, as one critic explains, “a man is his expression,” and “everyone … has his peculiar rhetoric that organizes his private world.”²¹ Earl Wasserman uses Tristram Shandy as a symbolic line of demarcation, signalling a new conception of the world and the need for a new type of artist; and his explanation is relevant to this scene in Godwin's novel where the characters cannot maintain their hold on their versions of “things as they are.” “By the end of the eighteenth century,” writes Wasserman, “… each man now rode his own hobby-horse.” He adds:

In Tristram's world, meaning had become a function of each person's private, subjective concerns, which alone remained as an interpretive organization. … What is more, in this completely individualistic world none of these private principles ever succeeds in organizing life, and chaos is forever breaking in.²²

In Caleb Williams, neither man is able to sustain his own account, his individual principles of definition and organization; and, furthermore, each “half-told” story denies and defies the complete creation of its author. For while Caleb accepts Falkland's tale, and presents himself as an “atrocious, execrable wretch” (325), Falkland in turn accepts Caleb's—he calls himself “the most execrable of all villains” (324) and labels Caleb a hero. The men simply exchange, rather than expand, the terminologies of their tales. Both storytellers succumb to the attitude exhibited earlier in the novel by Laura and Collins, who resist Caleb and his story because they fear it will introduce complexities that they are not willing to recognize; they do not want to surrender the reassuring clarity of their present conceptions for a more complicated construction.²³ Although Laura maintains that “virtue … consists in actions, and not in words,” her arguments belie this assertion: she wants to maintain distinctions (“the good man and the bad, are characters precisely opposite, not characters distinguished from each other by imperceptible shades”) that are supported by the “plain and unadorned” tale she has heard; and she thinks that Caleb's rhetoric will dissolve these (semantic) categories and thereby create a moral ambiguity she refuses to accept: “Eloquence may seek to confound it; but it shall be my care to avoid its deceptive influence” (299-300). Collins similarly (though in a more sophisticated manner) does not want to “part with all [his] interior consolation,” and would prefer not to hear Caleb's story only to learn “that there was no criterion by which vice might be prevented from being mistaken for virtue” (310). Neither wishes Caleb to introduce a rhetoric that might “confound” or “perplex” the principles of Falkland's tale which have organized their world.

But Caleb finally, like Laura, Collins, and Falkland as well, refuses to engage the complexities of his story or of his character²⁴—his story alienates him from himself because he alienates himself from his story. At the end of the novel Caleb and Falkland exchange restrictive, opposing character labels, but do not break away from them or extend their language beyond or between them. The world as it is in Caleb Williams is a world that resists new constructs when the old ones are no longer large enough to constitute and encompass a full portrait of man. Godwin's literary theory maintains that the poet (and his “fictitious history”) “is more to be depended upon, and comprises more of the science of man than whatever can be exhibited by the historian.”²⁵Caleb Williams is thus the story of unsuccessful artists—poets who are unable to express and realize the full nature of human identity, and whose words thereby betray themselves and the world which receives their stories.

Language [wrote Godwin] is in reality a vast labyrinth, a scene like the Hercinian Forest of old, which, we are told, could not be traversed in less than sixty days. If we do not possess the clue, we shall infallibly perish in the attempt. …²⁶

Notes

1. For the political viewpoint see, for example, Harvey Gross, “The Pursuer and the Pursued: A Study of Caleb Williams,” TSLL [Texas Studies in Literature and Language], 1 (1959), 401-11; D. Gilbert Dumas, “Things As They Were: The Original Ending of Caleb Williams,” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900], 6 (1966), 575-97. For examples of the psychological see Patrick Cruttwell, “On Caleb Williams,” Hudson Review, 11 (1958), 87-95; Rudolf Storch, “Metaphors of Private Guilt and Social Rebellion in Godwin's Caleb Williams,” ELH, 34 (1967), 188-207. For the theological, see Joel Porte, “In the Hands of an Angry God: Religious Terror in Gothic Fiction” in The Gothic Imagination: Essays in Dark Romanticism, ed. G. R. Thompson (Pullman, Washington: Washington State Univ. Press, 1974). Some critics have tried to merge several of these approaches under the heading of “moral philosophy”: see Eric Rothstein, “Allusion and Analogy in the Romance of Caleb Williams,” UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly], 37 (1967-68), 18-30; and Mitzi Myers' fine study, “Godwin's Changing Conception of Caleb Williams,” SEL, 12 (1972), 591-628. A recent essay which came to my attention after completion of this article, James Walton's “‘Mad Feary Father’: Caleb Williams and the Novel Form,” Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Romantic Reassessment Series, No. 47 (Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache, 1975), 1-61, confronts some of the issues I intend to explore. Concerned primarily with the connection between “individualism and the novel form” (11) and their social and cultural contingencies, Walton perceptively discusses the analogy of the hero/heroine as novelist (4, 35) and of the story as potent weapon of self-preservation (36, 42). However, Walton's point is that the pen does unsuccessful battle with (in an attempt to reject) the “external world” (44), with what Godwin considered “the principle of reality itself” (3), with “things as they are”; whereas I will argue that for Godwin, both in the novel and in his essays, “things as they are” are themselves linguistic constructs, governed by the true artist whose powerful rhetoric shapes not only the individual but the world he confronts as well.

2. This concept undoubtedly reflects the influence of contemporary views. See, for example, Gerald Bruns' Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), where he describes the “romantic” idea of language that emerged during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as one which insists upon the correspondence, almost the identity, of language, the “human interior,” and man's world as well, which is “fundamentally linguistic in character” (p. 66).

3. Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 306. All further references to this edition will be cited parenthetically within the text.

4. I borrow this phrase from Robert Kiely's discussion of the novel in The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), p. 96.

5. Things As They Are appeared alternately as title and as subtitle of the novel in different early editions.

6. Rothstein, “Allusion and Analogy,” 21.

7. Coleridge, quoted in William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, ed. Charles Kegan Paul (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1876), II, 10-11.

8. All quotations are from the following editions: The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (London, 1797), and Thoughts on Man: His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries (London, 1831).

9. Godwin, “Of the Study of the Classics” in The Enquirer, p. 43. Although Godwin makes these statements while speaking specifically of the need to learn more than one language, the essay places this in the more general context of its discussion of the importance of learning the “art of language.”

10. Ibid., p. 44.

11. Godwin, “Of Imitation and Invention” in Thoughts on Man, p. 183.

12. Godwin, “Of Choice in Reading” in The Enquirer, pp. 142-43.

13. Godwin, “Of Imitation and Invention,” p. 204.

14. Ibid., pp. 183-84, 196.

15. Godwin, “Of the Sources of Genius” in The Enquirer, p. 27; see also “Of Intellectual Abortion” in Thoughts on Man, p. 64.

16. Godwin, “Of the Study of the Classics,” p. 47.

17. Godwin, “Of Intellectual Abortion,” p. 65.

18. Godwin, “Of Imitation and Invention,” p. 201.

19. The theatrical metaphor, with its suggestions of impersonation and repetition, is pervasive throughout Caleb Williams. We should also note that in his essays, Godwin uses the stage as an analogy for the “servile repetition” to which men so often seem to succumb (see note 14).

20. Godwin, “Of the Study of the Classics,” p. 44.

21. John Traugott, Tristram Shandy's World: Sterne's Philosophic Rhetoric (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1954), p. 114; and his Introduction to Laurence Sterne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 2.

22. Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1959), p. 170.

23. In his discussion of Collins' attitude, Storch (“Metaphors of Private Guilt …,” pp. 201-02) nicely suggests that this view “sums up the superficiality of eighteenth century benevolence: its refusal to go deeply into the human condition, its reluctance to sacrifice its comforts. …”

24. Kiely (The Romantic Novel) makes a similar point: “Even in this apparent act of justice and plain speaking, he has been unable to be true to the full complexity of his nature” (p. 95).

25. Godwin, from the Introduction to Cloudesley (London, 1830), I. xi. Quoted by David McCracken, “Godwin's Literary Theory: The Alliance Between Fiction and Political Philosophy,” PQ [Philological Quarterly], 49 (1970), 124.

26. Godwin, “Of Intellectual Abortion,” p. 61.