SOURCE: Fludernik, Monika. “William Godwin's Caleb Williams: The Tarnishing of the Sublime.” ELH 68, no. 4 (winter 2001): 857-96.

[In the following essay, Fludernik discusses Caleb Williams in relation to Edmund Burke's concept of the sublime and Adam Smith's concept of sympathy.]

I. INTRODUCTION

Caleb Williams, Godwin's literary masterpiece of 1794, has recently come in for extensive interpretative analysis and wide critical acclaim.¹ The novel serves as a key text for studies of the radical novel (most recently by Schäffner in 1997) or “English Jacobin novel”; it has now acquired a firm position in the canon of the Romantic novel; it sometimes figures as the first detective or spy novel; and it is frequently discussed in its relation to the Gothic novel with which it seems to share a number of prominent features: the continual references to “horror” and “terror”; the prominence of dungeons, confinement, and persecution; and the motif of virtue in distress, which is present in its stereotypical form in Emily Melville's story, and less typically so in the male protagonist's ordeal.² Only twenty years ago it seemed unbelievable that Godwin “in his day” should have been considered “as equal to Scott,” and that “Shelley and Keats, Coleridge and Byron … Hazlitt and Lytton venerated him.”³ Since then, Godwin, and particularly Caleb Williams, has regained some of his former prominence in eighteenth-century studies.

Most readings of Caleb Williams tend to fall into two categories: they are either political interpretations which try to reveal the arguments of Political Justice (1793) in the novel—Handwerk's “Of Caleb's Guilt” and Graham's The Politics of Narrative (1990) are instances—or analyses that focus on Caleb's psychology, his narrative unreliability, and his relationship to Falkland.⁴ This second line of interpretation starts from the assumption that Caleb Williams is “one of the first fictional studies of abnormal psychology.”⁵

The most significant insights that have been proffered about Caleb's psyche concern his presumable unreliability: his narrative, despite (or perhaps because of) his asseverations that he is speaking nothing but the untarnished truth, is suspect for its inconsistencies.⁶ A second major perspective on Caleb's psyche has relied on psychoanalytic readings of the Caleb-Falkland relationship. The most radical of these proposals comes from Rudolf F. Storch, who suggests that Caleb's story consists in projections of his Calvinist guilt on the God-figure Falkland.⁷ In this reading Caleb turns into a dangerous neurotic. Although Storch's views may be too radical, other critics, too, have noted Caleb's pathological behavior, particularly his persecution-mania and paranoia, as does Alex Gold.⁸

Gold's essay, moreover, addresses a third valuable psychological insight about Caleb Williams, namely his latent or repressed homosexuality. The point has been elaborated by Sedgwick and Corber.⁹ While according to Gold, “[n]either Caleb Williams nor Godwin's philosophy nor the details of his own life make it clear that Godwin had any special interest in the exclusive sexual attraction of a man to other men,” this finding is, however, suspect in view of the many passages Gold cites from Caleb Williams and St. Leon, and even more so when he notes that Godwin had a “well-known habit of surrounding himself with young male admirers,” one of whom even committed suicide in 1814.¹⁰ Indeed, Corber's unquestioning depiction of Caleb's relationship with Falkland as a homosexual love affair now puts this issue back on the agenda with a vengeance.

Corber argues that Godwin presented Falkland as a “sodomite” in order to further incriminate the conservative camp (that is, the aristocracy is tyrannical and unnatural; their tyranny is as unnatural as their morality and sexual mores), and he reads this device as a lamentable aberration on the part of a liberal Godwin who—so he argues—tried to curry favor with an unenlightened homophobic public. However, the speculation that Gold has unwittingly set afoot might in fact tend towards a quite different interpretation of the homosocial element in the novel. If Falkland is a close counterpart of Edmund Burke—Boulton, Butler, McCracken and Storch have all suggested this—then Godwin is possibly alluding to rumors about Edmund Burke's homosexuality which were sparked by Burke's courageous intervention in the House against the pillorying of sodomites.¹¹ (In 1780, one of two men condemned to the pillory for sodomy had died a cruel death of asphyxiation because he was too short for the neck hole of the pillory.) In his account of this episode, Isaac Kramnick went on to argue that Burke might indeed have had homosexual leanings himself which were too dangerous for him to put into practice.¹² Indeed, as Susan Staves notes, Burke was forced to seek legal redress against the Annual Register for libellous allegations of sodomist sympathies.¹³ Godwin's infatuation with Burke, which, as has been noted frequently, is presented in terms uncannily similar to Caleb's adoration of Falkland, indeed raises the question of whether one does not actually here have a clue to a biographical secret that has so far eluded us.¹⁴ Burke's relevance to Caleb Williams, though not these biographical speculations, will in fact be central to this essay.

In contrast to the above issues prevalent in previous research, my own contribution turns to the question of the sublime in Caleb Williams and to its relevance for the calibration of sympathetic relationships in the novel. This focus will involve an analysis of the Burkean sublime and its connection to Adam Smith's concept of sympathy. Sympathy and the sublime, as will be demonstrated, are key terms in Caleb Williams. A second related aspect of my paper will elaborate on the mirroring relationships within the novel. Let me start with the latter of these two points.

The fact that Caleb Williams is Falkland's alter ego has been noted repeatedly in the criticism.¹⁵ Some scholars have observed additionally that Emily and Caleb share similar positions in relation to, respectively, their guardian and patron, or that Caleb and the Hawkinses both find themselves victims of Falkland's and Tyrrel's tyranny and oppression.¹⁶ Rothstein has even noted that Falkland's relationship to the poet Mr. Clare bears a great affinity to Caleb's relationship to Falkland.¹⁷ Mr. Raymond, the noble robber, is another focal character who shares a structural position with Falkland as object of Caleb's admiration, but he is also comparable to Caleb himself, since they are both outcasts and heroic fighters against the despotism of the powers that be. Moreover, there is the deliberate onomastic conjunction of Grimes and Gines (who originally was called Jones) which aligns the two tools of despotism homonymically.¹⁸

What has been documented less thoroughly, however, is the support that these structural patterns receive from the repetition of key phrases throughout the text. Not only do these key phrases allow one to detect even more extensive structural parallels in the novel's constellation of characters; they moreover problematize easy evaluations of the characters as oppressors or victims, and—as I will show—they neatly link up with key concepts of the aesthetics of the sublime. The prevailingly imaginary nature of character pairing in the novel—that is, the conceptualizing of the two figures as each other's alter egos—as I will demonstrate, relies on a combination of the rhetoric of the sublime with the rhetoric of sympathy or sensibility.¹⁹ I will begin with a consideration of the sublime and then return to the specular relationships in the novel.

II. THE SUBLIME AND RELATED TERMS IN CALEB WILLIAMS

II.I. GODWIN AND THE SUBLIME

The only critic who has, to my knowledge, pointed to the significance of Godwin's use of the term sublime in Caleb Williams, linking it to the presiding master signifier Edmund Burke, is Marilyn Butler:

[T]he rhetoric of terror is accounted for more particularly in another of Burke's books that Godwin knew well, and re-read in the early 1790s, A Philosophical Enquiry into … the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). There Burke holds that terror, the source of the sublime … is evoked, characteristically, by contemplating power. Power may be invested in a figure of authority, a master or a king, but ultimately it derives from God.²⁰

In what follows Butler sketches some further qualities of the Burkean sublime. She particularly emphasizes the feeling of terror induced by the notion of omnipotence, the “awe and solemnity of the divine presence,” and notes that we as humans are as nothing in relation to that overwhelming power of divinity.²¹ Butler might have added that the sublime does not merely correlate with vastness but is also, typically, evoked by obscurity and can therefore be associated with mystery and veiled power. Moreover, in the Burkean schema, the sublime correlates with tragedy.²² Butler goes on to contrast Burke's conception of the sublime with a passage from Godwin's Political Justice in which he contends that “[t]he sublime and pathetic are barren, unless it be the sublime of true virtue, and the pathos of true sympathy.”²³ Unaccountably, Butler fails to use the interesting insight afforded by the juxtaposition of Burke and Godwin for a reanalysis of Caleb Williams and the novel's deployment of the concept of the sublime.

The significance of Burke's theory of the sublime for Godwin can be gleaned from two other important passages. In an unpublished essay of Godwin's entitled “Of History and Romance” (1797), which David McCracken unearthed in 1970, Godwin contended that the novel must be “a higher and more valuable form of writing than history.” The historian, according to Godwin, is “a romance writer, without the ardour, the enthusiasm, and the sublime licence of the imagination.”²⁴ All three terms: ardour, enthusiasm, and sublime, are key terms in Caleb Williams. Godwin's essay contains additional references that are of crucial significance for Caleb Williams. Thus, the “history of individuals,” as Godwin argues, provides readers with an educational “standard for comparison and judgment,” and especially “[i]t is the contemplation of illustrious men, such as we find scattered through the long succession of ages, that kindle into a flame the hidden fire within us”; and he particularly refers us to the ancients for our contemplation of philosophical truth. In other words, Godwin sees history as a species of romance (a charged term in Caleb Williams), and he regards true history as an exercise in the sublime: the novel should partake of the sublimity of the imagination by representing the human sublime, that is, great men of exalted virtue.²⁵ The sublimity of virtue in the represented character is then sympathetically imbibed by the reader: “While we admire the poet and the hero, and sympathise with his generous ambition or his ardent exertions, we insensibly imbibe the same spirit, and burn with kindred fires.”²⁶ This formula suggests that, whatever reservations Godwin may have had about Burke's political standpoint in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, he did not entirely discard Burke's aesthetic theories. Indeed, as Boulton points out in reference to another passage from Political Justice, the sublime constitutes for Godwin the ultimate test of the true aspirations of mankind: “Sublime and expansive ideas produce delicious emotions. … When we are engaged in promoting [man's] benefit, we are indeed engaged in a sublime and ravishing employment.”²⁷ One should not therefore simply read Caleb Williams as an exercise in discrediting the Burkean sublime, even if—and one would really need to specify to which extent this is actually true—the novel can in other respects be seen as a rebuttal of Burke's theses.

The third passage that I here wish to refer to before launching into my own analysis is Godwin's encomium on Burke from 1797, written as a memorial to the late “patriot” and “philanthropist” in a footnote which he added to the revisions of Political Justice on the occasion of Burke's death:

In all that is exalted in talents, I regard him [Burke] as the inferior of no man that ever adorned the face of the earth; and, in the long record of human genius, I can find for him few equals. In subtlety of discrimination, in magnitude of conception, in sagacity and profoundness of judgment, he was never surpassed.²⁸

Godwin additionally notes Burke's “grandeur and [the] integrity of his feelings of morality,” but then goes on to lament Burke's principal fault, his mistaken deference and admiration for the aristocracy which Godwin considered to be a “corrupt system of government” that had managed “to undermine and divert from their genuine purposes the noblest faculties that have yet been exhibited to the observation of the world.”²⁹ Burke, according to Godwin, is therefore one of those memorable geniuses from whom we are meant to imbibe virtue through the mediation of the sublime. Burke's corruption by the aristocratic system is to be deplored as a major tragedy because his example must have served to lead many astray. As Boulton already notes, the very same language is used at the end of Caleb Williams to lament Falkland's fall from grace, who is said to have imbibed the “poison of chivalry” (postscript, 326) which had grown in the “rank and rotten soil” of our “corrupt wilderness of human society” (postscript, 325). In an elegiac address to Falkland reminiscent of Godwin's later encomium on Burke, Caleb calls his antagonist a “nobl[e] spirit” whose “intellectual powers were truly sublime, and [whose] bosom burned with a godlike ambition” (postscript, 325).

This echo of Caleb's characterization of Falkland in Godwin's memorial footnote on Burke has of course been read as corroborating a reading of Caleb Williams in which Caleb is led astray by his unwarranted admiration for Falkland (or Burke), and in which at the end of the novel he rises to a superior realization of, and compassion for, Falkland's lapse into depravity. That corruption is presented as all the more serious a failing since it infected a truly virtuous and benevolent person: “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” The Burkean subtext in Godwin also allows itself to be interpreted as an invective against personalized institutions, in reference to another passage from Political Justice. As Damrosch argues, Godwin rejects embodied institutions because they “create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment,” or—we might add—terror; and, as Burke himself noted in the Hastings trials, “oppression and robbery … are more bearable when exercised by persons whom we have been habituated to regard with awe, and to whom mankind for ages have been accustomed to bow.”³⁰ From this perspective, therefore, Caleb's admiration for Falkland, and Falkland's sublimity, appear to be entirely misplaced, injurious, and dangerous for the commonwealth. The fact that Caleb “becomes” Falkland in the final scene of the novel, that he rues having brought him to justice, and that he continues to venerate his mortal antagonist does not sit well with these interpretations, and it will be my attempt in these pages to provide a more differentiated reading of Caleb Williams's use of the sublime that can accommodate both the continued positive evaluation of the sublime and the criticism of its harmful consequences.

II.II. THE SUBLIME IN CALEB WILLIAMS

Burke's Enquiry is invoked in the novel in a much more general way than the noted references to chivalry or the epideictic passages on Burke and Falkland would indicate.³¹ Several other key concepts besides Falkland's obsession with chivalry on closer analysis turn out to derive from Burke's Enquiry. Thus the Enquiry starts with the tell-tale sentence: “The first and the simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind, is curiosity.”³² “Novelty,” the section title, immediately links the fascinating aspects of newness with the uncanny effect of uncertainty—what is novel is also sometimes terrifying; curiosity seeks out the surprising, which may turn out to be amazing or astonishing in their eighteenth-century meanings. Other section headings in part 1 of Burke's Enquiry also refer to key concepts in Caleb Williams: “Society and Solitude,” “Sympathy, Imitation, and Ambition” (compare Godwin's essay “On History and Romance,” and the frequent references to Falkland's ambition), “Sympathy,” “Of the Effects of Tragedy,” “Imitation,” and “Ambition.”³³ Romance and chivalry are used as interchangeable terms in Caleb Williams: both Caleb and Falkland imbibe the poison (of chivalry and curiosity) from their reading of romances which celebrate the sublime genius of great men. The range of references to Burke's treatise on the sublime is thus quite extensive. It is therefore surprising to find that the significance of the concept of the sublime in Caleb Williams (except as a pointer towards Burke) has not received more attention in readings of the novel. This is even more curious when one realizes that David McCracken almost stumbled upon the truth in 1970 when he noted Godwin's successive readings of Burke's work, particularly of the Enquiry.³⁴

The sublime is present in Caleb Williams not only in the just-cited passage characterizing Falkland's tarnished aspirations, or even solely in reference to the figure of Falkland (and therefore Burke); the word sublime (sublimity) occurs at several critical junctures of the novel, and it is supplemented by a large number of other key terms that are materially linked to the concept of the sublime. If one traces the occurrence of all of these key words and phrases in the novel, the sublime emerges as one of three major fields of reference in the text. I would contend that the other two master concepts are the theater and sympathy. As I will argue, the sublime is intrinsically linked to the spectacle of the theater and to the evocation of sympathy on the part of the spectators; hence the three concepts are actually closely connected within Burke's theory of the sublime. Just as the sublime has an undercurrent of its very opposite, the tyrannical or satanic, sympathy likewise can become corrupted into disease or madness. It is the poison or disease of sublunar human society that infects Falkland, and the only way to combat this poison lies in the exercise of genuine sympathy and love that wins out over the tyrannical counterpart of sublimity (despotism, terror, vengeance). Sympathy and true sincerity, which are constitutive of one another, allow for a positive utilization of the sublime; as Godwin proposed in another chapter of Political Justice, a revolution of the current state of affairs can only be brought about by open discussion and the persuasion of others:

The true instruments for changing the opinions of men are arguments and persuasion. The best security for an advantageous issue is free and unrestricted discussion. In that field truth must always prove the successful champion.³⁵

The three major key areas therefore interconnect by means of the theatrical scenario which involves both the sublime (terror) and sympathy (pity) and functionalizes the ambivalence between truth or sincerity, on the one hand, and artful deception and persuasion on the other. I have found the following key terms in Caleb Williams that correlate with the three central concepts sublimity, the theater, sympathy:

1. SUBLIMITY (and its dark undercurrents)
   • —sublime, exalted, elevated
   • —the divine, God; worship, veneration; angel, martyr
   • —omnipresence, omniscience, penetration
   • —superiority, serenity
   • —light, luminary (Clare) vs. gloom, obscurity
   • —virtue, humility, fortitude
   • —benevolence, beneficence, generosity
   • —greatness; ambition; imperiousness; pride; Alexander
   • —astonishment, terror, awe, mysterious, obscurity
   • —destiny, fatality, calamity, catastrophe, crisis, ruin
   • —rage, paroxysm, blast(ing)
   • —tyranny, despotism; subjugation, subordination
   • —fiend, devil, monster, adversary, demon; infernal, diabolical; wiles
   • —animal, insect, reptile; victim
   • —wretch, villain, scoundrel, rascal, miscreant
   • —malice, resentment, indignation, cruelty, depravity, barbarity, ferocity; insolence
   • —wicked, vicious, odious, execrable, vile, base
   • —brutal, ferocious, cruel, malicious
   • —torture, rack, inquisition vs. martyr

The basic connotations of the sublime relate to attributes of divinity. But God can also, negatively, be figured as a despot or tyrant. Tyranny and pride engender resentment and lead to rebellion. Some of these negative terms therefore evoke God's counter-image, Satan; while others (monster) simply refer to the subhumanly evil. God's divine vengeance (God as the principle of awe, terror, and wrath) crushes man, who is no more than an insect on the face of this earth: hence the references to blasting, insect, and vermin. Divine wrath is a paroxysm of rage, but also of madness—thus there is a connecting point with madness here (paroxysm of rage, paroxysm of madness).³⁶ God as destiny is also responsible for unexplained and mysterious events; hence the cluster fatality and calamity (which links with tragedy in the theatrical arena). The field of reference SUBLIME also includes a sub-area in which martyrdom and the sublime are connected. Both Caleb and Falkland are referred to as victims and martyrs, as are Mr. Clare and Brightwel, and this cluster of key terms is expanded on the negative side by the many references to dungeons and prisons, to torture and the Inquisition.

1. THEATER
   • —tragedy, stage, scene, spectacle
   • —scaffold; criminal; torture (see SUBLIME)
   • —trial
   • —persuasion
   • —truth, sincerity vs. duplicity, hypocrisy
   • —appearance/veil vs. truth
   • —innocence vs. guilt
   • —spotless, unblemished (vs. diseased, tarnished. See SYMPATHY: disease)
2. SYMPATHY (and its obverse: madness/disease)
   • —love, respect, esteem vs. curiosity, suspicion
   • —honour, fame, reputation; ambition, rivalry
   • —sympathy; heart, soul; sensibility
   • —enthusiasm, rapture
   • —adoration, veneration, admiration, reverence (see SUBLIME)
   • —seeing into another's soul, watching; spying
   • —tears, compassion, pity
   • —anguish, agony, distress, misery, despair, torment (see SUBLIME: torture)
   • —madness, insanity, distemper, disease
   • —folly, envy, jealousy
   • —frenzy
   • —precipice
   • —poison
   • —pestilence, plague, pest

In this article I will concentrate on the ramifications of key area 1, sublimity. Particular attention will be given to the influence of these key terms on the mirroring of characters. Area 2, the theater, provides the setting for the enactment of sublimity and the locus for sublimity's effect of sympathy, constituted by key area 3.³⁷

III. CONNOTATIONS OF SUBLIMITY

III.I. THE DIVINE—ADORATION AND EXECRATION

There are but few men who are not Ambitious of distinguishing themselves in the Nation or Country where they live, and of growing Considerable among those with whom they converse. There is a kind of Grandeur and Respect, which the meanest and most insignificant part of Mankind endeavour to procure in the little Circle of their Friends and Acquaintance. The poorest Mechanick, nay, the Man who lives upon common Alms, gets him his Sett of Admirers, and delights in that Superiority which he enjoys over those who are in some Respects beneath him. This Ambition, which is natural to the Soul of Man, might methinks receive a very happy turn.

—Spectator 219, 10 November 1711³⁸

There have been men indeed splendidly wicked, whose endowments threw a brightness on their crimes, and whom scarce any villainy made perfectly detestable because they never could be wholly divested of their excellencies; but such have been in all ages the great corrupters of the world, and their resemblance ought no more to be preserved than the art of murdering without pain. … It is therefore to be steadily inculcated that virtue is the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness; and that vice is the natural consequence of narrow thoughts; that it begins in mistake, and ends in ignominy.

—Rambler 4, 31 March 1750³⁹

The sublime has traditionally been linked with God: sublime landscapes astonish human observers and cow them into abject insignificance by the terror of divine omnipotence that is represented by the grandeur, vastness, obscurity, and overwhelming magnitude of sublime natural phenomena. In Political Justice Godwin had associated the appreciation of sublime landscape with virtue and sensibility:

The man of taste and liberal accomplishments … acquires new senses, and a new range of enjoyment. The beauties of nature are all his own. He admires the overhanging cliff, the wide-extended prospect, the vast expanse of the ocean, the foliage of the woods, the sloping lawn and the waving grass. He knows the pleasures of solitude, when man holds commerce alone with the tranquil solemnity of nature. … He enters, with a true relish, into the sublime and pathetic. He partakes in all the grandeur and enthusiasm of poetry.⁴⁰

In Caleb Williams, however, landscape does not figure prominently; we tend to encounter the lonely wilderness, metaphorical desert, or impenetrable forest, rather than the prototypical sublime mountain cliffs, abysses, crags, and wild, dangerous water torrents. Even when Falkland withdraws into the wilderness to nurse his melancholy, the rocks, the yawning precipice, and the water torrents signify his “lethargy of despair” and his incipient madness (the paragraph commences with a reference to Falkland's “fits of insanity”) (124). Falkland is not an overawed spectator of the divine as manifested in nature; if at all, the passage suggests that he is in sympathy with the wild landscape and himself represents the terrible aspect of divine nature.

Sublimity in the novel is therefore directly associated not with landscape but with moral indications of divinity: virtue, and particularly benevolence and magnanimity. It is also, though ambivalently, linked with greatness as instanced in great men, particularly Alexander the Great. Falkland, for obvious reasons, defends the greatness of Alexander against Caleb's doubts about the justification of mass slaughter—an argument clearly loaned from Fielding's Jonathan Wild. Like Falkland, Alexander “formed to himself a sublime image of excellence, and his only ambition was to realise it in his own story,” and he exhorts Caleb to “find in Alexander a model of honour, generosity and disinterestedness” and praises Alexander for “the cultivated liberality of his mind and the unparalleled grandeur of his projects [which] must stand alone the spectacle and admiration of all ages of the world” (110-11). As if echoing Addison's remarks in the Spectator essay quoted above, Falkland links ambition to respect and “esteem”: “As soon as I was capable of a choice, I chose honour and the esteem of mankind as a good I preferred to all others. You know, it seems, in how many ways my ambition has been disappointed” (120).⁴¹ Caleb, by contrast, irreverently asks whether “this great hero was [not] a sort of a madman” (111), thereby linking Alexander's ambition for grandeur with the very frenzy and insanity that Falkland displays throughout the novel.⁴²

Great men are great men in Falkland's terms not merely because of their great deeds but because of the admiration, reverence, and veneration they inspire in others through their generosity and benevolence. Falkland's jewel, his fame or reputation, depends on the regard others have for him, an idea popularized in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).⁴³ As Caleb concurs in a later passage: “genuine heroes … will be found the truest friends of the whole, so the multitude have nothing to do, but to look on, be fashioned and admire” (117).⁴⁴ The great man, like the hero of a play on stage, is therefore created in the sympathetic gaze of the multitude, and the reverence or awe he inspires derives from the model of divine benevolence—rather than from the terror of divine vengeance. God's genuine sublimity is of course beyond doubt, but as Caleb immediately senses, great men can make believe that they are heroes, astonishing the multitude by “false colours” that “obscure … the true state of things” (117). The theatrical metaphor in Caleb Williams can therefore be recognized as a crucial invalidation of the self-evident workings of the sublime (as well as of truthfulness). Godwin critiques the concept of Christian divinity as figured in the God of punishment and terror: violence and ferocity in this novel tend to be cover-ups for guilty secrets. If God is as divinely benevolent as described in the Scriptures, He should have no need for divine rage, nor should the novel's figures of corrupted divinity, Falkland and Tyrrel, need to be in the grip of paroxysm and insane frenzy.

The term sublime is applied in the novel to several people, to Falkland and Alexander, but also implicitly to Caleb and explicitly to Mr. Clare. I contend that the one and only example of true sublimity in the novel is rendered in the character of Mr. Clare, who displays all the positive divine attributes without arrogating any of the terrible powers of divinity to himself. Clare is also the first person to receive the label sublime in the novel. Although in the opening chapters Caleb had described his new master as “compassionate,” he then noted his “incessant gloom,” his being “peevish and tyrannical” and succumbing to “frenzy.” Only after these designations does Caleb go on to praise the “benevolence of his actions,” his “integrity,” and adds that his household (not Caleb himself!) “regarded him upon the whole with veneration as being of a superior order” (7). Falkland then surprises Caleb at his trunk, evokes a reaction of thunderous rage in the course of which Falkland calls him a “spy,” “villain,” and “wretch” (8), and this leads into Mr. Collins's narrative about Falkland in chapter 2. Collins, we should note, does not once use the term sublime in reference to Falkland but exclusively applies the label to Mr. Clare; that is, if we trust Caleb Williams to repeat Collins' narrative correctly on that point. Since Caleb himself labels Falkland as sublime as soon as he himself takes over as narrator in book 2 (“Then I recollected the virtues of my master, almost too sublime for human nature” [107]), the absence of the term in book 1 must surely be significant.

Mr. Clare, a poet who has dedicated his life to “the sublimest efforts of genius” (23), combines in himself all the highest virtues of mankind. His intellectual powers are characterized by a “wild enthusiasm” (24)—a phrasing whose modifier proves significant in comparison to other occurrences of enthusiasm in the novel.⁴⁵

The reader is acquainted with his [Mr. Clare's] works; he has probably dwelt upon them with transport; and I need not remind him of their excellence. But he is perhaps a stranger to his personal qualifications. He does not know that his productions were scarcely more admirable than his conversation. In company he seemed to be the only person ignorant of the greatness of his fame. To the world his writings will long remain a kind of specimen of what the human mind is capable of performing; but no man perceived their defects so acutely as he, or saw so distinctly how much yet remained to be effected. He alone appeared to look upon his works with superiority and indifference [contrast with pride!]. One of the features that most eminently distinguished him was a perpetual suavity of manners, a comprehensiveness of mind, that regarded the errors of others without a particle of resentment, and made it impossible for any one to be his enemy. He pointed out to men their mistakes with frankness and unreserve; his remonstrances produced astonishment and conviction [not terror!]; but without uneasiness in the party to whom they were addressed; they felt the instrument that was employed to correct [not punish!] their irregularities, but it never mangled what it was intended to heal.

(24)

Mr. Clare, in his work, inspires sublime “transport,” but he himself is unaware of his own superiority. His major influence consists in convincing people without producing resentment or displaying rage. Clare, unlike the terrible God of vengeance, that is, unlike Falkland, astonishes without thunder.⁴⁶ In fact, Clare is an idealized picture of Edmund Burke, without Burke's characteristic rage—a feature given to Falkland in the novel.⁴⁷ Clare's persuasiveness derives from inspiration and sympathetic influence on his listeners: “Mr. Clare carried it home to the heart”; “the countenances of his auditors … sympathised with the passions of the composition” (26).⁴⁸ When Clare reads Falkland's poem, he “exhibits” its beauties to full advantage (26), giving ample scope to the implicitly sublime features of Falkland's composition: “The pictures conjured up by the creative fancy of the poet were placed full to view, at one time overwhelming the soul with superstitious awe, and at another transporting it with luxuriant beauty” (26). Note how Falkland's poem “overwhelms” the listeners with “awe.” Clare is therefore right in admonishing Falkland to “act up to the magnitude of [his] destiny” (26) and to devote his powers to more serious exploits. In Clare's handling of the situation, even the loaded term passion is neutralized to legitimate proportions.⁴⁹

Mr. Clare's divine qualities emerge most forcefully during his final illness and death. His only enemy is Death: “The enemy is too mighty and too merciless for me,” he says (33). The disease, a “malignant contagious distemper” (31), is countered by Clare with composure and cheerfulness: in other words, he displays Christian fortitude. Mr. Clare, therefore, gives in only to the inevitable, and he dispenses wisdom and exemplary solicitude for others even on his deathbed. Falkland promises Clare to watch out for his hot temper and to beware of Tyrrel, but Clare ironically notes his inability to protect Falkland from the “malignant distemper” to which he is prone:

I believe there are few people that could run into a danger of this kind [that is, the disease] with a better prospect of escaping. In your case, at least the garrison will not, I trust, be taken through the treachery of the commander. I cannot tell how it is, that I, who can preach wisdom to you, have myself been caught. But do not be discouraged by my example. I had no notice of my danger, or I would have acquitted myself better.

(32-33)

Ironically, although Falkland is well advised of his weakness, he does indeed eventually succumb to the disease.

Mr. Clare's truly sublime nature manifests itself particularly in Falkland's veneration for him. Just as Caleb asks Falkland to kill him and reiterates his love and admiration for him (121), Falkland at the death of Mr. Clare evinces a frenzy of grief and despair, and a feeling of his own inferiority: “Is this the end of genius, virtue and excellence? Is the luminary of the world thus for ever gone? Oh, yesterday! yesterday! Clare, why could not I have died in your stead? Dreadful moment! Irreparable loss!” (36).⁵⁰ In the context of this chapter, Falkland's noble attitude is contrasted with Tyrrel's “uncultivated brutality” (36). Tyrrel has the effrontery to pity Clare for a “[p]oor wretch” who will have much to answer for on account of having made him (Tyrrel) miserable. The death of Clare sets Tyrrel on his final career of mischief, since his grudging veneration of Clare (“venerable character”) had previously “disposed him to submission” (37). Clare, that is, had exercised true authority without recourse to brutal force; his only means of persuasion were good example and wisdom.⁵¹

If Clare is the character closest to the ideals of human sublimity, with Falkland closely aspiring to this ideal, Tyrrel, Grimes, and Gines are situated at the opposite end of that scale. Since Falkland is so frequently described by means of divine attributes, it is appropriate that Tyrrel and his associates should be referred to as devils, demons, and animals.⁵² However, the same terms are also attributed to Falkland by Caleb Williams, and by Falkland and Forester to Caleb. Thus, the adjective savage is applied to Falkland (“savagely terrible in his anger” [125]); and Caleb is called not merely “a monster of depravity” (174), but also a “demon” (173), “serpent” (174), “monster of ingratitude” (174), a “wretch” (174), “vile calumniator” (174), and a “pest” (175). The opposite of God is the Devil, and so Caleb's insistence that he is unpractised in the “wiles” of this world (173) links up with his accusation of diabolic vengeance against Falkland. Falkland is called his “adversary” (172, 235), he displays a “diabolical” countenance (120) and assumes an “expression as of supernatural barbarity” (113)—an epithet used earlier for Tyrrel (89) and the Hawkinses (104) and to be applied later to the realm outside civilization (“Let me hold [my life] at the mercy of elements, of the hunger of beasts or the revenge of barbarians,” says Caleb on escaping from prison and before he falls into the hands of Gines [210]). Likewise, the words depraved/depravity and malice are applied to all three major antagonists, Tyrrel, Falkland, and Caleb Williams.⁵³ In one crucial scene, Falkland appears to Caleb as the adversary indeed:

The figure and appearance of Mr. Falkland, his death-like weakness and decay, his more than mortal energy and rage, the words that he spoke, the motives that animated him, produced one compounded effect upon my mind that nothing of the same nature could ever parallel. The idea of his misery thrilled through my frame. How weak in comparison of it is the imaginary hell, which the great enemy of mankind is represented as carrying every where about with him!

(284)

Not only does Caleb here diabolically “thrill” at Falkland's misery—a term that is, let us note, a key word in the aesthetics of the sublime. Moreover, the circumlocution of Caleb in his reference to divine retribution, which clearly distances itself from the reality of hell and the existence of the devil (“imaginary”; “is represented as”), can be juxtaposed with an earlier telling passage in which Caleb referred to God by a similarly hearsay formula:

Did his [Falkland's] power reach through all space, and his eye penetrate every concealment? Was he like that mysterious being, to protect us from whose fierce revenge mountains and hills we are told might fall on us in vain?

(240)

This odd reluctance to name God, this effort to distance himself from the Christian father of mankind, is significant in the portrayal of Caleb, but even more so in terms of the novel and of Godwin's agnosticism. In so far as God employs the power of terror in order to enforce His authority, He acts like a despot (like Falkland) who does not merit the love and reverence expended on Him. Only true mutual sympathy and respect should regulate relationships; authority must not be enforced by violence.⁵⁴ Religion, as in the hands of the Inquisition, is an institutionalized form of despotism. Nevertheless, the ideas of divine benevolence, and of human virtue and greatness, are apt to seduce mankind by the pretense that God is a patron extending his benefits to a worshipping congregation of servants. In the reality of Calvinism, however, God has behaved as a tyrant towards his slaves.

The true mirror image of Clare in the novel is Brightwel, whose death Caleb watches over with much the same reaction as Falkland does over Clare's. Caleb is shattered at Brightwel's death, which he calls a “tragedy,” and like Falkland, he would have liked to die in the victim's stead; and while Falkland raves in unavailing anger at the cruelty of Destiny, Caleb excoriates the cruelties of the legal system:

At no time in the whole course of my adventures was I exposed to a shock more severe than I received from this man's death. The circumstances of his fate presented themselves to my mind in their full complication of iniquity. From him and the execrations with which I loaded the government that could be the instrument of his tragedy, I turned to myself. I beheld the catastrophe of Brightwel with envy. A thousand times I longed that my corse had laid in death, instead of his. I was only reserved, as I persuaded myself, for unutterable woe. In a few days he would have been acquitted, his liberty, his reputation restored; mankind perhaps, struck with the injustice he had suffered, would have shown themselves eager to balance his misfortunes and obliterate his disgrace. But this man died; and I remained alive! I, who, though not less wrongfully treated than he, had no hope of reparation, must be marked as long as I lived for a villain, and in my death probably held up to the scorn and detestation of my species!

(192-93)

Unlike Falkland, who would have liked to die in Clare's stead because he acknowledges his own inferiority, Caleb's shock is tinged with self-pity, fear, and self-righteousness: for him, death would have provided a welcome termination to his troubles.

The sublime as benevolent sublunar divinity, it can therefore be concluded, appears only twice in the novel, in the figures of Mr. Clare and Brightwel. Falkland and Caleb, by contrast, initially arrogate sublimity to themselves. Adoration of Falkland turns out to be a misplaced faith since Falkland's “idol” is his reputation and, like Clare, he is himself but an “idol” for the people (102, 32).⁵⁵ Falkland's claim to divinity, that is, is a fake, and the adoration he elicits is idolatrous. Caleb's initial claim to sublimity, if there is one, collapses even more quickly, since it is so obviously motivated by resentment and indignation and since it is tantamount to the arrogation of divine vengeance in his rebuttal of Falkland's persecution.

III.II. SAINTS AND DEVILS

This takes me to the question of Caleb's own position on the scale between sublimity and villainy. Although in my previous remarks Caleb has been presented in consistently negative terms, this has frequently been in response to key phrases of the sublime that he seems to abuse for his unsublime interests (fortitude, ambition, honour, poet, etc.). At one point in the novel, however, Caleb is said to share in the sublime when he becomes a writer in his Welsh retreat: “In the theatre upon which I was now placed I had no rival. My mechanical occupation had hitherto been a non-resident; and the school-master, who did not aspire to the sublime heights of science I professed to communicate, was willing to admit me as a partner in the task of civilizing the unpolished manners of the inhabitants” (290). Since he is treated with great respect by the villagers, the label may be less ironic than it seems. The most crucial scene, however, is the final confrontation with Falkland in the published version of the novel's ending. Here Caleb's tale strikes every listener with “astonishment” (“Every one that heard me was petrified with astonishment. Every one that heard me was melted into tears” [postscript, 323-24]), and he awes even Falkland into respect. By conceding to Caleb the “greatness and elevation” of his “mind” (324), Falkland implies the sublimity of Caleb's action of forgiveness. It is no coincidence that Caleb's brand of astonishment produces tears, not terror, and that Falkland's expression of esteem strikes astonishment into Caleb's heart: “He rose from his seat supported by the attendants, and, to my infinite astonishment, threw himself into my arms!” (324). This benign version of sublimity seems to echo Mr. Clare's.⁵⁶

It is a truly remarkable fact, for instance, that Caleb, when imprisoned, never appeals to God for deliverance. He moves through three successive phases—a phase of complete despondency and despair; a phase of triumphant mental liberty over his oppressors; and a practical phase of contemplating escape from the jail. In not one of these three phases does he appeal to God for his liberation, the alleviation of his suffering, or for the strengthening of his resistance. This is particularly remarkable in phase two when Caleb's mental conquest over his incarceration evokes the standard typology of transcendence as popularized by religious literature from the Middle Ages. For Caleb “stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage,” but it is neither God nor his beloved (as with Lovelace) who helps him attain this desirable triumph over the body; his source of comfort and supernatural strength is the revolutionary spirit of revolt against injustice, his belief in nonreligious Truth.

My fortitude revived. I had always been accustomed to chearfulness, good humour and serenity, and this habit now returned to visit me at the bottom of my dungeon. No sooner did my contemplations take this turn, than I saw the reasonableness and possibility of tranquillity and peace, and my mind whispered to me the propriety of showing in this forlorn condition that I was superior to all my persecutors. Blessed state of innocence and self approbation! The sunshine of conscious integrity pierced through all the barriers of my cell, and spoke ten thousand times more joy to my heart, than the accumulated splendours of nature and art can communicate to the slaves of vice.

(185)

Caleb here assumes the role of a medieval saint or martyr; his fortitude is complemented by his peace of mind, and the term serenity links his condition with that of Mr. Clare before his death.⁵⁷ His state is indeed “blessed”—a religious term appropriate to the genre of the saint's legend. The contrast between his admirable awareness of his own “innocence” and “integrity” and the sinful nature of the “splendours of nature and art” echoes standard elements of hagiography, and the piercing sunlight of his own virtue tropes on the transcendental and amorous aspects of the genre.⁵⁸

However, Caleb's quasireligious serenity turns out to be resolutely secular; indeed, he triumphantly derives it from the imagined “impotence of [his] persecutor” (187). Caleb's triumph is therefore not one of humble trust in God who has raised him above earthly concerns—a description more appropriate for Brightwel; it relies, on the contrary, on Caleb's regaining of his curiosity, his imagined superiority, and on the unconstrained exercise of his imagination. He “employed [him]self with imaginary adventures” (185-86), rehearsing the tribunal before which he is to appear with consummate rhetorical skill. Caleb puts himself on a stage and plays out in his “fancy” (a loaded term!) “scenes of insult and danger, of tenderness and oppression” (186). These scenes uncannily mirror the experiences of Falkland, as is also indicated in the following sentence: “In some of my reveries I boiled with impetuous indignation, and in others patiently collected the whole force of my mind for some fearful encounter” (186). This neatly parallels Falkland's outbursts of frenzy and his resumed self-possession at several junctures in the novel.⁵⁹ Most remarkable of all, Caleb in the exercising of his “eloquence” becomes “a poet” (186)—an alter ego of Falkland as well as Mr. Clare.

Caleb's triumph of serenity and his oratorial skill, for which he arrogates to himself the name of “poetry,” cannot in actual fact lay claim to the sublime qualities displayed by Mr. Clare. Caleb's serenity is born of revolutionary hatred and self-aggrandizement, and he therefore abuses the spirit of sublimity even more drastically than Falkland, whose poem Mr. Clare found to be a wasted effort in view of the magnitude of Falkland's potential for doing other, practical good. Indeed, Caleb's very language expresses the diabolical nature of his so-called serenity, indicating that he is still in the grip of the very imp of the perverse that made him exult over Falkland's presumed guilt (129-30):

While I was thus employed I reflected with exultation upon the degree in which man is independent of the smiles and frowns of fortune. I was beyond her reach, for I could fall no lower. To an ordinary eye I might seem destitute and miserable, but in reality I wanted for nothing. My fare was coarse; but I was in health. My dungeon was noisome; but I felt no inconvenience.

(186)

Caleb's “exultation” is not one that lifts him above earthly concerns by means of love and sympathy; indulging in rhetoric and oratory, he goes on to contrast himself with “the man of artificial society” (187) whose sinful wealth he outlines in a familiar eighteenth-century litany:

Palaces are built for his reception, a thousand vehicles provided for his exercise, provinces are ransacked for the gratification of his appetite, and the whole world traversed to supply him with apparel and furniture. Thus vast is his expenditure, and the purchase slavery. He is dependent on a thousand accidents for tranquillity and health, and his body and soul are at the devotion of whoever will satisfy his imperious cravings.

(187)

It is noteworthy that Caleb here accuses others of the “gratification” of their desires; the term gratification is employed elsewhere to designate the quasisexual consummation that Caleb experiences when satisfying his curiosity (144, 158), and it also links up with Grimes's even less savory attempt to rape Emily (64).⁶⁰ The reference to slavery of course is an implicit critical allusion to Falkland, the symbolic despot, tyrant, and oppressor, and the phrasing “satisfy his imperious cravings” not only refers us back to Falkland's identification with Alexander, who required “a vast expence … in erecting the monument of his fame” (111); it additionally indicates that Caleb is afraid of being swallowed up by Falkland's (quasi)erotic drives.

Caleb's confrontation with death—in contrast with Mr. Clare's true serenity and humble acquiescence—turns into a rebellious duel of equal antagonists. Clare had calmly confronted the enemy (death) that had stormed his garrison (32-33), but Caleb wants to fight with “the king of terrors” on equal terms:

In addition to the disadvantages of my present situation, I was reserved for an ignominious death. What then? Every man must die. No man knows how soon. It surely is not worse to encounter the king of terrors in health and with every advantage for the collection of fortitude, than to encounter him already half subdued by sickness and suffering. … You may cut off my existence, but you cannot disturb my serenity.

(187)

This passage constitutes a neat rebuttal of Burke's theory of the sublime, where death, the “king of terrors,” is treated as the source of the sublime.⁶¹ Rather than bowing before the terrors of death which, at this point, would certainly “press too nearly,” Caleb turns the threat of death into a source of the sublime for himself—he acquires, he claims implicitly, true sublimity over the king of terrors; in other words, he refuses to be cowed.⁶² Falkland's own confrontation with an ignominious death at the end of the novel, in contrast to Caleb's truculent spirit, partakes more of Clare's serenity, though Falkland's fortitude is unmitigated by hope or love. He confronts the king of terrors in the consciousness of his well-deserved punishment:

You [Caleb] have inflicted on me the most fatal of all mischiefs, but I bless the hand that wounds me. … I am prepared to suffer all the vengeance of the law. You cannot inflict on me more than I deserve. … If however you wish to punish me, you must be speedy in your justice; for, as reputation was the blood that warmed my heart, so I feel that death and infamy must seize me together.

(postscript, 324-25)

Falkland tries to imitate Clare; but since he is guilty, he has to expect the “vengeance” of the law rather than the forgiveness of the divine Being. Falkland's refusal to name God at this crucial juncture also aligns him with Caleb.

III.III. ENGINES OF TYRANNY AND THE CALAMITIES OF FATE

It has been noted that Falkland behaves like the avenging God of the Old Testament, and that he pursues Caleb with apparent omnipotence and omniscience. Falkland, like Tyrrel, acts like a despot, but so do the state and established religion. There are several interesting references to the Inquisition and to institutionalized torture in the book which tend to align despotism not only with the tyrant of the saint's legend, who prototypically has the saint tortured, but also with the traditional church and its functionaries who are out to torment by guilt, if not by the rack, the individual who fails to become a slave to their orthodoxy. Besides these political connotations, within the same cluster of key phrases we get recurring references to the torture that a guilty conscience and particularly an envious or jealous mind inflict on the subject. Thus, tyranny not only actively employs torture against its victims; it can be demonstrated to (justly) inflict torment on itself since tyranny indeed constitutes an aberration, a malignant distemper, of the mind, a frenzy that overtakes the subject against its own better judgment.

These key connections first appear in the exchange between Tyrrel and Emily where Tyrrel's predicament quite clearly parallels that of Falkland in his relation to Caleb (they wound one another in their point of honor), and where Tyrrel prefigures the final catastrophe when he will do precisely the same thing to Falkland. This is Tyrrel's tirade to Emily:

“That man [Falkland] is a legion of devils to me! I might as well have been a beggar! I might as well have been a dwarf or a monster! 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. He is my rival and my persecutor. And at last, as if all this were not enough, he has found means to spread the pestilence in my own family. You, whom we took up out of charity, the chance born brat of a stolen marriage! you, must turn upon your benefactor, and wound me in the point that of all others I could least bear it. If I were your enemy, should I not have reason? Could I ever inflict upon you such injuries as you have made me suffer? And who are you? The lives of fifty such cannot atone for an hour of my uneasiness. If you were to linger for twenty years upon the rack, you would never feel what I have felt.”

… [Emily:] “But he [Grimes] is not fit for me, and torture shall not force me to be his wife!”

(54)⁶³

Tyrrel calls Falkland a “rascal,” a “scoundrel,” and a “legion of devils”—all terms later to be applied to Caleb by Falkland and Forester—and he rejects the appellation of “tyrant” directed at himself, seeing Falkland not only as his rival for respect in the village community but also as his “persecutor.” He regards himself as Emily's patron and “benefactor” and accuses her of inflicting torments (of jealousy) on him. His hyperbole about the extent of his own torment is neatly elaborated into a sadistic dream of revenge on Emily; he fantasizes about useless and protracted suffering. Emily's answer to her cousin, however, assumes the much more positive figuration of motivated resistance—her refusal to marry Grimes is cast in the form of a martyr's refusal to convert to the heathenish faith, here, Tyrrel's uncivilized religion of envy, jealousy, and cruelty. Appropriately, Tyrrel is “astonished” at the “spirit” evinced by Emily (55)—an implicit notation of her “sublime” effect on him. Emily's reaction to Tyrrel's diabolical hints is echoed later when Falkland rises from his humiliating defeat by Tyrrel before the assembly: “Mr. Falkland's mind was full of uproar like the war of contending elements, and of such suffering as casts contempt on the refinements of inventive cruelty” (96). The “refinements of inventive cruelty” correspond to the mortal torture that Tyrrel has inflicted on his sensibilities.

The imagery of torture recurs again in an exchange between Mr. Raymond, the sublime robber captain, and the execrable Gines who in this scene is expelled from the community of outlaws. Raymond refuses to be “tortured” by the fear of Gines's treachery to the gang, therefore braving the possibility of his execution if Gines did indeed call the police.

Rascal! said he, do you menace us? Do you think we will be your slaves? No, no, do your worst! Go to the next justice of the peace and impeach us. … Did you believe that we would live in hourly fear of you, tremble at your threats, and compromise, whenever you should so please, with your insolence? That would be a blessed life indeed! I would rather see my flesh torn piecemeal from my bones! Go, sir! I defy you! You dare not do it! You dare not sacrifice these gallant fellows to your rage, and publish yourself to all the world a traitor and a scoundrel! If you do, you will punish yourself, not us! Begone!

(216-17)

Note the recurrence of the key terms scoundrel and slaves to denote those wielding, or succumbing to, illegitimate power. The passage is interesting additionally because it describes a method of execution which is not the standard one for thievery—Mr. Raymond would simply have been hanged at Tyburn—but invokes the punishment for treason (drawing and quartering) as well as the well-known French eighteenth-century spectacles of execution for regicide.⁶⁴ Raymond visualizes himself in the position of a regicide at the same time that he accuses Gines of possible treachery against himself who has been the king of the gang; in a sympathetic reversal he therefore projects on himself the punishment that Gines would merit for his treachery against his master. Note also the references to fear and slavery—Raymond refuses to be cowed by the divine sublimity of the law as personified in its putative satanic representative Gines-qua-traitor. Moreover, the passage implicitly traces lines of connection with Caleb, who is the cause of this altercation and a witness to the scene. Caleb will in fact become a traitor to Falkland, and since Falkland stands in the symbolic place of a king or a God, his punishment for symbolic regicide (patron-icide) will be perpetual torment by his guilty conscience. Indeed, earlier Caleb had ruminated on his calamity of imprisonment by Falkland who “preferred to govern [him] by terror” and lamented his “miserable sentence”: “Well then, the rest of my life must be devoted to slavish subjection? … I envied the condemned wretch upon the scaffold. I envied the victim of the inquisition in the midst of his torture. They know what they have to suffer. I had only to imagine every thing terrible, and then say, The fate reserved for me is worse than this!” (145). Caleb—like Tyrrel—aligns his torment with another's suffering on the rack; but his anguish relates to the uncertainty about the mode of punishment to be inflicted on him and his fear of Falkland's sentence.⁶⁵ This is Falkland's “sublime” effect on Caleb, which—in truly Burkean fashion—consists in terror and fear.

If the previous examples have seemed to expose Tyrrel and Falkland for their despotic cruelty, the blame needs to be laid at the door of Caleb, too: Caleb has operated like a spy in his behavior towards Falkland, and indeed at one point he admits that he is an “inquisitor” of sorts. Caleb has been dangling a “bait” before Falkland, trying to “entrap him” by putting “questions and innuendos” to him that were “regulated with the cunning of a grey-headed inquisitor,” lancing Falkland's “secret wound” (109). His strategies of inquiry result in one of Falkland's outbursts:

Base, artful wretch that you are! learn to be more respectful! Are my passions to be wound and unwound by an insolent domestic? Do you think I will be an instrument to be played on at your pleasure, till you have extorted all the treasures of my soul?

(118)

Caleb is “extort[ing]” information, and Falkland is experiencing his probings as torture, though he is still able in response to assume the position of a god who crushes Caleb as some insignificant insect of no account: “whereas before now I have winced at them [Caleb's tricks] with torture, I am now as tough as an elephant. I shall crush you in the end with the same indifference that I would any other insect that disturbed my serenity” (153). Caleb attempts to enslave Falkland to his will as Falkland has enslaved Caleb.⁶⁶

Besides these incriminatory references to Caleb's own cruelty, the novel explicitly links the simile of torture to the tyrannical legal system, and to the Bastille-like nature of British carceral institutions.

We talk of instruments of torture; Englishmen take credit to themselves for having banished the use of them from their happy shore! Alas, he that has observed the secrets of a prison, well knows that there is more torture in the lingering existence of a criminal, in the silent, intolerable minutes that he spends, than in the tangible misery of whips and racks!

(180)

Among my melancholy reflections I tasked my memory, and counted over the doors, the locks, the bolts, the chains, the massy walls and grated windows that were between me and liberty. These, said I, are the engines that tyranny sits down in cold and serious meditation to invent. This is the empire that man exercises over man.

(181)

Not the continental instruments of judicial torture but the very doors, locks, bolts, and chains of incarceration are “engines” of tyranny that constitute the “empire” of man over man and turn the free man into a slave: “I have felt the iron of slavery grating upon my soul” (182). Caleb's “soul-sickening loathing” at the prospect of “spend[ing] a few weeks in a miserable prison, and then to perish by the hand of the public executioner” (183) makes him contemplate the entire world as a punitive institution: “I regarded the whole human species as so many hangmen and torturers. I considered them as confederated to tear me to pieces; and this wide scene of inexorable persecution inflicted upon me inexpressible agony” (183), and he imagines himself crushed by Falkland's delegated power just as Falkland had threatened: “I saw treachery triumphant and enthroned; I saw the sinews of innocence crumbled into dust by the gripe of almighty guilt” (183). Falkland's quasisublime divinity is experienced as the revenge of the Almighty, but that almighty power is only a guilty usurper of the tyrannical empire of human affairs.

These findings can be linked up with the generally negative associations of the divine in Godwin's work. In particular, the divine in Caleb Williams is frequently pictured negatively as destiny or fate, and malignant fate, fatality, and calamity at that. Caleb's very first sentence shows that destiny has a hand in his misfortunes: “My life has for several years been a theatre of calamity” (3). This is echoed when he believes he has found out Falkland's guilt, and in the enthusiasm of the discovery comments: “Thus was I hurried along by an uncontrolable destiny” (130). Caleb's next fatal step, the attempt to open the trunk, is again described as an involuntary evil urge: “my steps by some fatality were directed to the private apartment at the end of the library” (131); there his eyes are “suddenly caught by the trunk” (131), and he is “seized” by “I know not what infatuation … too powerful to be resisted” (132). In the grip of this “uncontrolable passion” (132) Caleb figures himself as the passive victim of demonic forces both inside and outside himself, and these forces are a kind of destiny that haunts him, just as Falkland will persecute him like a malicious destiny later in the novel. Not only Caleb is subjected to destiny: Tyrrel, too, believes himself to be the victim of a “malicious destiny” (46) because of Falkland's interference, and at the height of his despotic sway he is actuated towards further malice, “curs[ing] that blind and malicious power which delighted to cross his most deep laid schemes” (80). Tyrrel, in calling Falkland a “demon” (120), assumes destiny to be treacherous and evilly disposed towards him, and he curses “his stars, which took, as he apprehended, a malicious pleasure in making Mr Falkland at every turn the instrument of his humiliation” (23). Falkland himself laments his fall into disgrace as having been caused by a “malignant destiny.” The murder of Tyrrel is related in a similarly passive construction—“a sharp-pointed knife [that] fell in my way” (135)—and Hawkins “by some miraculous accident” happens to pass by and therefore draws suspicion on himself. It is only at the end of the novel that Falkland talks about his guilt and takes full responsibility for his actions, whereas Caleb continues to see his experiences as “calamities” (postscript, 325).

The term “calamity” recurs in the novel too frequently for me to discuss individual passages.⁶⁷ Besides “calamity,” “fate,” and “destiny,” one also finds the phrases “catastrophe,” “ruin,” and the reference to “blasted” reputation to indicate negative influences on the major characters. Only Emily, one may note, hopes for a benevolent “fate” (41) that might remove the obstacles to a relationship between Falkland and herself. It is also interesting that the ordeal of the Hawkinses is not once referred to as a “calamity,” nor is the ordeal of Emily, since they are truly innocent.⁶⁸ Even the accused peasant, who has “one unlucky minute … poison all his hopes” (128), never once speaks of a calamity. Whether one's disasters are experienced as the impact of destiny or not, all tyrannical strategies aim at the “ruin” of their victims. Emily—with the sexual undertone appropriate to the circumstances—faces “ruin” (63), and so do the Hawkinses (71, 77). Tyrrel, who has thus ruined his dependents, is also keen to “ruin” Falkland: “This Falkland haunts me like a demon. … He poisons all my pleasures. I should be glad to see him torn with tenter-hooks, and to grind his heart-strings with my teeth. I shall know no joy, till I see him ruined” (31). Tyrrel, who experiences Falkland's influence on him as that of an evil demon, an evil spirit, behaves like a devil himself and images the treatment he wishes to give Falkland in terms of the devilish torments of his own mind. (Both the “tenter-hooks” and “grinding one's heart-strings” are typically applied to mental despair.) Caleb, like the Hawkinses, also faces “ruin” (123, 161, 172, 269), in particular a ruin that seems to involve everybody around him as well (296). Like Tyrrel, in his most desperate moment, Caleb in retaliation threatens to “ruin” Falkland (314), and this ruin he effects in the end. But Falkland himself does not see himself ruined, although all his “prospects are concluded”: “You have inflicted on me the most fatal of all mischiefs, but I bless the hand that wounds me” (postscript, 324).⁶⁹ Nor does Falkland at this point lament his “blasted reputation,” but talks of his “crimes” (325).

This is all the more significant since the term blast recurs with great frequency throughout the text. In volume 1, chapter 8, it is used as a synonym of ruin in “[Tyrrel] did everything in his power to blast the young lady's reputation” (56), and Hawkins is concerned about his son's blasted hopes if he loses his reputation in jail (75). Most interestingly, Falkland applies the term blast to Tyrrel when he throws him out of the rural assembly, calling Tyrrel an “inhuman, unrelenting tyrant!” and a “miserable wretch”: “Go, shrink into your miserable self! Begone, and let me never be blasted with your sight again” (95). Ironically, Tyrrel does indeed manage to blast Falkland's reputation soon after.⁷⁰ The term blast has divine connotations of omnipotent power. Its use in the noted circumstances therefore descries an arrogation of the divine prerogative on the part of Falkland, Caleb, and Tyrrel.

The despotism of God is, moreover, arrogated by Caleb when at moments of supreme indignation and in the scene of reconciliation with Falkland he employs the intimate thee and thou to address his antagonist. The thou is here the thou of the Biblical God confronting man the worm with His omnipotence and man's insignificance in the scheme of things; in Caleb's language, the usage is therefore one of calculated insolence—putting down Falkland by arrogating to himself the powers of divinity. When Caleb repudiates Falkland's tyranny after the message from Gines that he is not allowed to leave England, he inveighs against Falkland as a Nero or Caligula:

Tyrants have trembled surrounded with whole armies of their Janissaries! What should make thee inaccessible to my fury?—No, I will use no daggers! I will unfold a tale—! I will show thee for what thou art, and all the men that live shall confess my truth!—Didst thou imagine that I was altogether passive, a mere worm, organized to feel sensations of pain, but no emotion of resentment? Didst thou imagine that there was no danger in inflicting on me pains however great, miseries however dreadful? Didst thou believe me impotent, imbecil [sic] and idiot-like, with no understanding to contrive thy ruin, and no energy to perpetrate it? … Shall I regret the ruin that will overwhelm thee? Too long have I been tender-hearted and forbearing! What benefit has ever resulted from my mistaken clemency? There is no evil thou hast scrupled to accumulate upon me! Neither will I be more scrupulous! Thou hast shown no mercy; and thou shalt receive none!

(314)

In this passage Caleb, as Falkland's alter ego, imaginatively crushes Falkland as Falkland has tried to crush him; he threatens to murder him with his tale as Falkland murdered Tyrrel; and he threatens to perpetrate revenge, to ruin Falkland, just as Falkland has ruined him. He wants to be calm, and a lion—both terms earlier applied to Falkland—and he repudiates forbearance and clemency, terms used by Falkland and Forester in relation to Falkland's behavior towards Caleb (for example, 172 and 281). Caleb here echoes Falkland's earlier diatribe against him: “It is well! said he, gnashing his teeth, and stamping upon the ground. You refuse the composition I offer! I have no power to persuade you to compliance! You defy me! At least I have a power respecting you, and that power I will exercise; a power that shall grind you into atoms” (284). Caleb's contemptuous “thou”-ing of Falkland in the soliloquy inverts the power relations between them. At the end of the novel, however, Caleb uses thee and thou to lament the ruin of Falkland which he has himself helped to bring about: “Falkland, I will think only of thee, and from that thought will draw ever fresh nourishment for my sorrows! One generous, one disinterested tear I will consecrate to thy ashes! A nobler spirit lived not among the sons of men. Thy intellectual powers were truly sublime, and thy bosom burned with a godlike ambition” (postscript, 325). In these final words Caleb assumes an attitude of reverence, or of the affect of sublimity, towards Falkland. The spectacle of man's confrontation with God has been converted into a theater in which man faces man in an exchange of sympathy; Falkland and Caleb recognize each other's sublime virtues; they recognize, that is, their mutual humanity. That humanity has been elicited by mutual sympathy, by an abnegation of the pseudodivine sublimity of tyrannical power.

IV. CONCLUSION

We have traced above the various strands of sublimity as they weave through qualities of the divine, both the positive qualities of serenity and benevolence and the negative qualities of terror, vengeance, and punitive annihilation. In the course of this discussion it has emerged that the negative aspects of divinity preponderate in the novel and that they are linked to a political argument. “Things as they are” are based on a system of tyranny by the strong over the weak—a situation lamented by Falkland before his fatal lapse.

It makes one's heart ache to think that one man is born to the inheritance of every superfluity, while the whole share of another, without any demerit of his, is drudgery and starving; and that all this is indispensible. We that are rich, Mr. Tyrrel, must do every thing in our power to lighten the yoke of these unfortunate people. We must not use the advantage that accident has given us, with an unmerciful hand. Poor wretches! they are pressed almost beyond bearing as it is; and, if we unfeelingly give another turn to the machine, they will be crushed into atoms.

(77)⁷¹

It is only accident, that is as much as to say: destiny, which has brought about this state of affairs, and the oppression of the poor can become fatal if the masters by their “machines” give another “turn” to this oppression, crushing the already weak and unfortunate subjects as the torturer presses his victims to death.⁷² These terms evoke precisely the negative connotations associated with divinity in the novel: Falkland in his rage wants to “crush” Caleb like an insect and “grind” him “into atoms” (284). The term “machine” again is quite relevant in the context; in the novel “engine” and “machine” have been used in reference to “instruments” of torture or metaphorically in reference to the malignant strategies of Gines—a telling name. The pretended sublime in the novel is therefore a terrifying sublime of a vengeful divinity. The weak, however, may turn on their oppressors: “if I [Caleb] were pursued like a wild beast till I could no longer avoid turning on my hunters, … I would encounter the calumny in its stronghold” (302). The rebel, by resorting to a similar array of tyrannical instruments, likewise participates in the negative effects of the pseudodivine.

With these thunders of divine retribution are contrasted the true martyrs of the text, not Falkland or Caleb (although both lay claim to the dignity of martyrdom) but the real victims of the novel who face their ruin with fortitude and equanimity: foremost of all Mr. Clare, Brightwel, and the two “wretches” that are “pressed beyond bearing”—Emily and Hawkins. Despite their sublime qualities, Falkland and Mr. Raymond face their respective calamities with rage and indignation, and Caleb indulges in the same paroxysms of indignation as Falkland. A less heroic form of virtue may be noted in Mr. Collins, Falkland's steward, whom Caleb admires and reveres and therefore wishes to engage in reciprocal sympathy (309-11). Caleb desists from involving Mr. Collins in his troubles, and he does so because he foresees “the dreadful catastrophe” and “possible calamity” which Mr. Collins would be facing if he made a common cause with Caleb (311). Caleb recognizes, that is, that he infects others with negative effects of the sublime. He also notes that Collins's “fortitude” might shrink from such eventualities—thereby linking Collins with Emily, the true martyr. Sublimity of a lesser kind is also figured in the old man who recognizes Caleb for a hunted fugitive and refuses to turn him over to the bloodhounds despite his disgust and “abhorrence” at Caleb's true identity, that of the faithless servant or “monster” (249). This old man seems to Caleb “extremely venerable” (246), and he notes his “sensibility” (a key term in reference to Falkland!) and “benevolence” (246). As with Mr. Collins, Caleb experiences “affection and esteem” for the old man and delights in the exchange—the old man represents that “expectation of sympathy, kindness and the goodwill of mankind” (247) which Caleb has been shut out from for so long. He is therefore “inexpressibly affected at the abhorrence this good and benevolent creature expressed against [him]” (249). Like Laura, this old man refuses to listen to Caleb's story. The negative effects of the (pseudo) sublime, therefore, shut out Caleb from the natural exchange of human sympathy.

Although Godwin's critique of the negative sublimity of societal institutions appears to support his revolutionary tenets and to serve as a rebuttal of Burke's patriarchal views, Godwin's novel is in actual fact much more ambivalent in its treatment of the sublime. This is true particularly because of the prominence given to sympathy in the text. Not only do we get numerous hints about the unreliability, not to say deceitfulness, of Caleb's insolent and overbearing behavior; the discourse of sympathy in the novel, I would argue, actually reinstates the sublime as an ideal of benevolence and unqualified affection for others, as divine Christian love (agape), and it thereby cancels out the aesthetics and politics of terror. Godwin rescues the notion of the sublime by infusing it with the workings of sympathy: the “sublime and pathetic are barren, unless it be the sublime of true virtue, and the pathos of true sympathy.”⁷³ True virtue and true sympathy do not repose on power but on a mutual exchange between equals. Such mutuality builds a basis of common trust, of sincerity and truth. Sympathy cannot exist in a society of tyrants and slaves.⁷⁴ Persuasion, reason, and justice are the pillars of Godwin's novel just as they are the fundaments of his Political Justice. The true justice that is rendered to Falkland by Caleb in the final scene of the novel is an ideal justice since it balances the merited regard for Falkland's virtues with sympathy and pity for his fall. Falkland's willingness to make retribution as required by the law does not serve to reinstate the legal system which he had earlier regarded as unnecessarily cruel; on the contrary, it indicates that he has regained his true dignity in facing death, the death of his reputation—the only thing he really cared about.⁷⁵ And like Mr. Clare, he does so lovingly, praising Caleb for his admirable persistence, fortitude, and truthfulness—accepting Caleb, finally, as his true equal if not superior. By humbling himself in this manner, Falkland regains his innate spark of sublimity as he blesses the Caleb who has thus brought ruin upon him.

In his final paragraphs, Caleb provides an explanation for Falkland's tragic fall: he had imbibed the poison from the “rank and rotten soil” of the “corrupt wilderness of human society” (postscript, 325). Caleb's analysis therefore links Falkland's fall to a disease (similar to the “malignant distemper” which kills Mr. Clare) and extends the metaphor to cover his metamorphosis from benevolence to jealousy, from reason to madness (326). This lapse into sickness (brought on by the “poison of chivalry,” that is, the “imagined superiority” [31] and claim to power by one class of mankind over another) parallels Tyrrel's conversion from a good-natured, if coarse cousin and landlord, into a barbarous tyrant devoid of any sympathy for Emily or the Hawkinses. It also precipitates Caleb's own corruption by the same poisonous concoction (his love of romance) into a distrustful, scheming, and vengeful antagonist of his master. The system of romantic inequality, that is, corrupts and ruins both the master and the servant, the oppressor and the slave. It forces the master to exercise his power to the hilt, giving the machine one more fatal turn; and it forces the oppressed to become artful in their legitimate defence, thereby corrupting their (supposedly) native innocence and truthfulness.⁷⁶

Yet Caleb's thesis of innate goodness and sympathy is partly disproved by his initial reaction to Falkland, which moves from curiosity to anxiety. Caleb's obsession with curiosity, of course, takes us back to Burke's theory of the sublime, in which curiosity had been introduced as “the first and the simplest emotion” of the human mind.⁷⁷ Caleb's indulgence in speculation and reasonable inquiry turns bad. Sympathy, if actuated by envy, manipulative interests, or resentment, as is the case in the imaginary relationship between Tyrrel and Falkland and, later, between Falkland and Caleb, gives rise to violence and then appropriates to itself the tools of the negative sublime. Genuine untarnished sympathy resorts only to the violence of conviction and persuasion and is imaged in the metaphors of seduction. (The sublime, already with John Dennis, was said to “commit a pleasing rape upon the soul.”)⁷⁸

I have told a plain and unadulterated tale. … Such were the accents dictated by my remorse. I poured them out with uncontrolable impetuosity, for my heart was pierced, and I was compelled to give vent to its anguish. Every one that heard me was petrified with astonishment. Every one that heard me was melted into tears. They could not resist the ardour with which I praised the great qualities of Falkland; they manifested their sympathy in the tokens of my penitence. … [Falkland's] indignation against me was great … It was increased, when he discovered me, as he supposed, using a pretence of liberality and sentiment, to give new edge to my hostility. But, as I went on, he could no longer resist. He saw my sincerity; he was penetrated with my grief and compunction. He rose from his seat … and threw himself into my arms!

(postscript, 323-24)

Idealized sympathy is, therefore, closely linked to a sublime rape of the other's soul. This takes us back to the homosocial overtones in the novel, which are quite clearly articulated in this passage. It also establishes a link to other dangerous effects of sympathy in the eighteenth-century novel, most prominently incest.⁷⁹ Like the sublime, sympathy is therefore a concept of threatening ambivalence.

Instead of rejecting the aesthetics of the sublime, as did Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, Godwin uses the equally problematic notion of sympathy to deconstruct the religious and ideological tenets underpinning Burke's fundamentally conservative beliefs. This enables him to preserve the ideal of the sublime. In present-day society, he argues, Things As They Are display a tarnished, adulterated reality of the sublime; the true sublime has become infected by the power relations of conservative ideology. The true sublime can be recovered only in a society based on political justice, one in which reign sympathy, reason, justice, and true equality. In such a society the distemper bred of the inequality between social ranks and the unfair distribution of power and wealth has no soil in which to root, and therefore leaves unblemished the spotless innocence of humanity, its innate sympathetic sublimity. In the world as we know it the sublime is tarnished; in the utopia of Political Justice it may reacquire its original splendors.

Notes

1. William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794), ed. David McCracken, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991). Hereafter cited parenthetically by page number. This is based on the third edition of Caleb Williams (1797) to the extent of incorporating additions and changes from the second and third editions of the novel. Where appropriate, I have considered the first edition of 1794, in which the wording is often substantially different, using the new Pickering critical edition for the purpose. See Godwin, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), ed. Pamela Clemit, Pickering Masters Series (London: Pickering, 1992).

2. For studies of Caleb Williams as a radical novel, see Raimund Schäffner, Anarchismus und Literatur in England (Heidelberg: Winter, 1997). See also Gustav H. Klaus, who considers Caleb Williams to be Godwin's apology for the excesses of the French revolution (“William Godwin's Things as They Are: Sozialgeschichte im Roman,” GRM [Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift] 36 [1986]: 399-413; 407-10). The fact that Caleb believes himself to be a murderer at the end of the novel can be read as a recognition of the Revolution's responsibility for triggering excesses worse than those of the ancien régime. This view has been anticipated by Hans-Joachim Lang, “Godwin's Caleb Williams as a Political Allegory,” in Literatur als Kritik des Lebens. Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Ludwig Borinski, ed. Rudolf Haas, Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock, and Claus Uhlig (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1975), 148-66; 158. Studies of Caleb Williams as an English Jacobin novel include Christoph Bode, “Godwin's Caleb Williams and the Fiction of Things as They Are,” in English Romantic Prose: Papers Delivered at the Bochum Symposium, September 30 to October 1, 1988, ed. Günter Ahrends and Hans-Jürgen Diller (Essen: Blaue Eule, 1990), 95-115; 96. On the Romanticism of Godwin's novel, see the classic study by Robert Kiely, The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972). It is not really quite clear what, precisely, is the Romantic novel since this genre overlaps considerably with the Gothic novel. Kenneth W. Graham defines the Romantic themes and techniques of Caleb Williams by pointing to the novel's “social outcasts and noble transgressors” and the “surreal disorder of consciousness” (The Politics of Narrative: Ideology and Social Change in William Godwin's Caleb Williams [New York: AMS, 1990], 1). Nor can Caleb Williams be divorced from the tradition of the sentimental novel, as we will see. On Caleb Williams as a spy novel, see Lang, who even calls it a “thriller” (149). Compare also Michael DePorte, “The Consolations of Fiction: Mystery in Caleb Williams,” Papers on Language and Literature 20 (1984): 154-64.

3. George Woodcock, “Notes on the Novels of William Godwin,” Dalhousie Review 54 (1975): 685-97, 685. Lang quotes George Saintsbury's now plainly dated dismissal of Caleb as a hero with whom “it is impossible to sympathize” since he “is actuated by the very lowest of human motives, sheer inquisitiveness” (166).

4. Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793; London: Penguin, 1985). The text is based on the third edition of Political Justice (1798). Unless otherwise indicated, citations to Political Justice are to this edition. Gary Handwerk, “Of Caleb's Guilt and Godwin's Truth: Ideology and Ethics in Caleb Williams,” ELH 60 (1993): 939-60; Graham.

5. Bode, 96.

6. On the subject of unreliability, compare Nünning, who discusses exaggerated asseverations of the veracity of the narrator's discourse as a typical signal of unreliability. See “Unreliable Narration”: Studien zur Theorie und Praxis unglaubwürdigen Erzählens in der englisch-sprachigen Literatur, ed. Ansgar Nünning and others (Trier: WVT, 1998), 28. On Caleb's inconsistencies see Mitzi Myers, “Godwin's Changing Conception of Caleb Williams,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 12 (1972): 591-628; Eric Rothstein, “Caleb Williams,” in Systems of Order and Inquiry in Later Eighteenth-Century Fiction (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975). Thus, Caleb asserts again and again that he was merely driven to his actions by harmless curiosity (108, 119); but the nearly diabolical exhilaration that he experiences when he is certain of Falkland's guilt (129-30) suggests that Caleb is either deliberately lying about his real motives of hatred or that he is naively incapable of analyzing his true feelings and unwittingly gives himself away.

7. Rudolf F. Storch, “Metaphors of Private Guilt and Social Rebellion in Godwin's Caleb Williams,” ELH 34 (1967): 188-207. See also Walter Allen, introduction to Godwin, The Adventures of Caleb Williams; or, Things as They Are, ed. Herbert van Thal (London: Cassell, 1966), for a similar religious reading of Caleb Williams (vii-xv).

8. Alex Gold, Jr., “It's Only Love: The Politics of Passion in Godwin's Caleb Williams,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19 (1977): 135-60, 150-55. Gold explicates his analysis by ample reference to Sigmund Freud on paranoia and fixation. Thus, according to Freud, it is “precisely the most loved person of his own sex that becomes [the paranoid's] persecutor” (quoted in Gold, 150); the paranoiac believes himself to be “the only object of significant attention” (151), succumbing to states of megalomania; he is unable to relate to women; and paranoia correlates with “fixation, repressed homosexuality, and delusion” (153). For further psychoanalytic analysis note also Robert J. Corber, who summarizes Caleb's predicament: “He cannot possibly love Falkland because Falkland persecutes him, and if he does not love Falkland, then he has preserved his masculinity” (“Representing the ‘Unspeakable’: William Godwin and the Politics of Homophobia,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1 [1990]: 85-101; 95).

9. See Corber; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985), 91, 116.

10. Gold, 145, 157.

11. On the influence of Burke on Godwin, see Storch; James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge, 1963), 227-30; Marilyn Butler, “Godwin, Burke, and Caleb Williams,” Essays in Criticism 32 (1982): 237-57; 252; David McCracken, “Godwin's Caleb Williams: A Fictional Rebuttal of Burke,” Studies in Burke and His Time 11 (1969): 1442-52; and McCracken, “Godwin's Reading in Burke,” English Language Notes 7 (1970): 264-70.

12. Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 84-87.

13. Susan Staves, “The Construction of the Public Interest in the Debates over Fox's India Bill,” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 18 (1995): 175-98; 197, n. 37.

14. Such an analysis of Burke's sexual leanings would also tend to throw some very interesting light on Burke's demonization of Warren Hastings in the impeachment trials, and it might put a quite different construction on Burke's notedly jejune and bathetic depictions of virtuous women in distress. On the similarity of Godwin's infatuation with Burke to Caleb's infatuation with Falkland, see the two articles by McCracken; and Boulton, 227-30.

15. See, most prominently, the discussion in Myers, 624; Gold, 142-43; Klaus, 401-4; Graham; as well as Mona Scheuermann, “From Mind to Society: Caleb Williams as a Psychological Novel,” Dutch Quarterly Review 7 (1977): 117; Robert W. Uphaus, “Caleb Williams: Godwin's Epoch of Mind,” Studies in the Novel 9 (1977): 279-98; Donald R. Wehrs, “Rhetoric, History, Rebellion: Caleb Williams and the Subversion of Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 28 (1988): 497-511; 504.

16. For relations to guardians, see Butler, 246; and Gold, 141-43; for victimizations, see Wehrs, 502; Corber, 89; and Klaus, 403.

17. Rothstein, 216.

18. See Uphaus, 292-93; and Burton R. Pollin, “The Significance of Names in the Fiction of William Godwin,” Révue des langues vivantes 37 (1971): 388-99; 391. Myers notes further parallels, among them that between Falkland and Spurrel as betrayers of Caleb (611). Ronald Paulson points out that Grimes and Tyrrel are doubles (Representations of Revolution [1789-1820] [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983], 230-36), and a student of mine, Rachel Lavery, noted that Gines and Caleb share a predilection for spying.

19. On the imaginary nature of character pairings, compare Wehrs.

20. Butler, 249. Klaus discusses Burke's influence on Godwin at length (406-10) and quotes two passages that attribute sublimity to Burke and Falkland respectively: (a) the Mucius letter of 1785, where Burke is said to have “the energies of patriotism and the sublimity of virtue” (Godwin, Uncollected Writings [1785-1822]: Articles in Periodicals and Six Pamphlets, One with Coleridge's Marginalia [Gainesville, Fla.: Scholar's Facsimiles & Reprints, 1968], 323); and (b) Caleb's laudatio of Falkland in the epilogue of Caleb Williams: “Thy intellectual powers were truly sublime” (325). Klaus does not elaborate on the significance of the sublime. Unless otherwise indicated, all emphases in quotations are my own.

21. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ed. Adam Phillips, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), 2.5.63-64.

22. Compare Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 1.14.42-43; 1.15.43-44. See also Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. L. G. Mitchell, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 80.

23. Butler, 249-50; Political Justice, 395. The chapter “Of Good and Evil” is an addition to the second edition (1796). Compare Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. Variants, ed. Mark Philp, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 4 (London: Pickering, 1993), 211.

24. David McCracken, “Godwin's Literary Theory: The Alliance Between Fiction and Political Philosophy,” Philological Quarterly 49 (1970): 113-33, 124. The essay is reprinted as appendix 4 (358-73) in the Penguin edition of Caleb Williams, edited by Maurice Hindle, and is now also available in the Pickering edition. See Godwin, “Of History,” in Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin, 1988); Godwin, “Essay of History and Romance,” in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 5: Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit (London: Pickering, 1993), 290-301. The quotation is from “Of History,” 372.

25. McCracken, “Godwin's Literary Theory,” 122 (“history of individuals”); “Of History,” ed. Hindle, 362.

26. “Of History,” ed. Hindle, 362.

27. Political Justice, 308-9. Quoted in Boulton, 219.

28. Political Justice, 788n.

29. Political Justice, 789.

30. Burke, Reflections, 77; Burke, quoted in Leo Damrosch, “Godwin: Resymbolizing the World,” in Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 216-41, 226.

31. See, for instance, McCracken, “Godwin's Reading in Burke,” 267-68.

32. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 1.1.29.

33. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 1.11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17.

34. In the 1790s Godwin carefully reread the Enquiry, taking notes. See McCracken, “Godwin's Reading in Burke,” 265-28.

35. “Mode of Effecting Revolution,” in Political Justice, ed. Philp and Gee, 4:2.115. The passage is deleted in the second edition, which completely rewrites chapters 2 and 3 of book 4 and merges them into a new chapter 2. For a similar argument in the later edition see Political Justice (273-75), where Godwin condemns revolutions in favor of reform initiated by rational argument. On the mutual constitutiveness of sympathy and sincerity, Godwin writes: “True sincerity will be attended with that equality which is the only sure foundation of love, and that love which gives the best finishing and lustre to a sentiment of equality” (Political Justice, 321). The chapter “On Sincerity” in Political Justice is substantially different in the first and second editions. Whereas, in the original edition, it was chapter 4 of book 4 of volume 1, it became chapter 6 in the revisions which also drastically rewrote the text of the cited section. For the original wording see Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Philp and Gee, Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, vol. 3 (London: Pickering, 1993).

36. These phrases recur in the novel (for example, 109, 112, 125). On Godwin and religion see Hans-Jürgen Proske, Die Szene wird zum Tribunal: Tragischer Mythos und Prozeßhandlung in Godwin's Caleb Williams, Anglistische Studien (Köln: Böhlau, 1988); and B. J. Tysdahl, William Godwin as a Novelist (London: Athlone, 1981). For Godwin, as Proske argues at length, the Christian religion constituted a system of despotism and God was a tyrant (160-61). See also Tysdahl (51-52) on the terrible sublimity of God in Godwin's world view.

37. For a discussion of the theatrical metaphor and sympathy see Monika Fludernik, “Sympathetic Affect and Artful Deception—Rhetorical Ambivalence in William Godwin's Caleb Williams,” in Images of Man in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Walter Göbel (Trier: WVT, 2001), and “Spectacle, Theater and Sympathy in William Godwin's Caleb Williams,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14 (2001).

38. The Spectator, Vol. 2, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 351.

39. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), 1:23-25.

40. Political Justice, 394.

41. This neatly parallels Caleb's estimation of his own status: “I was not born indeed to the possession of hereditary wealth; but I had a better inheritance, an enterprising mind, an inquisitive spirit, a liberal ambition” (255).

42. In Political Justice, Godwin praised Caesar and Alexander after a passage exalting Satan's fortitude in his battle against divine despotism, arguing that Caesar and Alexander had good intentions and “had their virtues” (309). The passage appears in the appendix to chapter 5 of book 4. In the original version it had been placed in appendix 1 following chapter 4 of book 4. See Political Justice, ed. Philp and Gee, 4:146-47.

43. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

44. The same theatrical metaphor shows up in Addison's further arguments in Spectator 219, 353.

45. Falkland, according to Collins, evinces “a spirit of the most ardent enthusiasm” (10), a sign of his incipient mental imbalance. Worse, Caleb “exclaimed in a fit of uncontrolable enthusiasm” (129) that Falkland is the murderer of Tyrrel (this is the scene after the trial in which Falkland gives himself away), and the insalubriousness of this enthusiasm is indicated additionally by Caleb's confession that his “blood boiled within” him (129), and that he was in a “kind of rapture” (129). (Rapture and ravishing, like enthusiasm, are of course suspicious terms in the eighteenth century.) This can be contrasted with Caleb's “rapture” earlier in the book when he tells Falkland that he loves and worships him “as a being of a superior nature” (121) and thinks “with astonishment, even with rapture, of the attention and kindness” of Falkland (121). Not only is Caleb projecting positive divine attributes on Falkland just after having provoked him to what he reads as merited quasi-divine vengeance for his behavior (“Let me go and hide myself where I may never see you more” [120]; “Kill me if you please” [121]); his rapture is obviously a kind of ravishing by Falkland's superior force, rather than the result of Falkland's goodness and persuasive powers. (And, yes, I think the sexual innuendo is deliberate.)

46. Note that Caleb, in his fantasies of revenge against Falkland, assumes the role of the God of revenge: “I will speak with a voice more fearful than thunder! … I will be triumphant and crush my seemingly omnipotent foe” (314).

47. See Kramnick's biography of Burke, which puts Burke's fits of temper into the very title of the monograph: The Rage of Edmund Burke.

48. The Pickering edition has “had before [gone along] with the passions of the composition” (25).

49. Already on the next page, passion collocates with “fierceness” and refers to Tyrrel's “violent invectives” of envy (27); see also 65, where Miss Melville's harmless “passion” for Mr. Falkland (already mentioned on 45) is contrasted with Tyrrel's “jealousy” and “unfeeling tyranny” which Falkland compares to “the passions of fiends” (65). Nearly all other references to passion in the novel concern either Caleb or Falkland and are unsavoury in quality since they refer to Falkland's anger (118) and Caleb's curiosity (for example, “high tide of boiling passion” [118, 126, 133]; and see 212, where Caleb strikes Gines]). Caleb denies these negative overtones by claiming that he knows nothing of the “passions” of the world (106), and he represents his passions as harmless curiosity or as mere sympathy with Mr. Forester (142). Passion—like enthusiasm—is indeed very negatively connoted in the novel, and it leads to all sorts of other evil deeds born of envy, jealousy, and rage. See also the reference to Falkland's and Tyrrel's “temper” (28).

50. Note the blasphemous—by eighteenth-century standards—accusation of God in this exclamation.

51. The crucial position of Mr. Clare, and his affinity with Brightwel, have been noted by Kristen Leaver in her “Pursuing Conversations: Caleb Williams and the Romantic Construction of the Reader,” Studies in Romanticism 33 (1994): 589-610, 602-3. Leaver points out especially that Brightwel and Clare are “celebrated for their powers of sympathy” and are free from all suspicion and guile.

52. Tyrrel's malice “might have disarmed the devil” (22); and Falkland is a “devil” to Caleb (174). Twice Falkland is called a “fiend” (140, 274). Caleb is possessed by the “demon” of his curiosity (119), just as Falkland is deprived of revenge by “some demon” (120), namely destiny. The robbers are called “wild beasts” (210), but Caleb is also referred to as a beast (302); Grimes is labelled an “animal” (47), but so is Caleb (156, 256). Falkland features in the narrative as a “tyger” (240) and “lion” (261), and the latter appellation is also given to Caleb (314). The parallel has been noted by Paulson, 232.

53. Tyrrel's “depravity” (80) is contrasted with Falkland's passing from “a life unstained by a single act of injury to the consummation of human depravity” (103). Falkland applies the epithet to Caleb when he accuses him of theft (162), and it is picked up by Forester (174). Caleb finally applies the term to the legal system of tyranny: “Among my melancholy reflections I tasked my memory, and counted over the doors, the locks, the bolts, the chains, the massy walls and grated windows that were between me and liberty. These, said I, are the engines that tyranny sits down in cold and serious meditation to invent. This is the empire that man exercises over man. … How great must be his depravity or heedlessness who vindicates this scheme for changing health and gaiety and serenity, into the wanness of a dungeon and the deep furrows of agony and despair!” (181). For malice, see 48, 55 (both times applied to Tyrrel); 174 (Falkland attributes it to Caleb). Tyrrel also laments the “malicious destiny” (46) in the shape of Falkland that has interfered with his plans.

54. See, for instance, the following passages in Political Justice, ed. Philp and Gee, 6.3.330, 7.1-4.367-85.

55. Compare also: “This it is to be a gentleman! a man of honour! I was the fool of fame. My virtue, my honesty, my everlasting peace of mind were cheap sacrifices to be made at the shrine of this divinity” (135).

56. A parallel can be drawn also with Thomas Holcroft's Anna St. Ives (1793; reprint, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), in which the hero of sublime virtue, Frank Henley, wins over Clifton by similarly benignant actions. Note that Clifton, the arch-villain and descendant of Richardson's Lovelace, is awed by Henley into repentance by being apostrophized as having “a mind fitted for the sublimest emanations of virtue” (424). The comparison of Caleb Williams with Anna St. Ives is particularly instructive in view also of the homosocial element in Godwin's novel; the absence of a true love interest in the hero becomes very clear when one views the novels side by side.

57. The term “martyr” is applied to Falkland (a “martyr in the public cause” [172]), to the angelic figure of Brightwel (193), and to Caleb (276), but it also implicitly pertains to Emily's ordeal. Tyrrel and Falkland perceive themselves to be martyrs of fate. See also: “Surrounded as I am with horrors I will at least preserve my fortitude to the last” (136). It would be interesting to trace the echoes of Godwin's allusions to Job in this section of the novel. Martin Battestin has shown persuasively how The Vicar of Wakefield is based on the current theological debates regarding the figure and behavior of Job. Godwin's novel and even Caleb himself seem to invoke both The Vicar of Wakefield and the Biblical precedent. See Battestin, “Goldsmith: The Comedy of Job,” in The Providence of Wit. Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 193-213.

58. See Karl-Heinz Göller, “The Metaphorical Prison as an Exegetical Image of Man,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 17 (1990): 121-45, for the medieval sources of a tradition that reaches well into the Romantic period. Compare also Fludernik, “Carceral Topography: Spatiality and Liminality in the Literary Prison,” Textual Practice 13 (1999): 43-77, and “The Topos of Carceral Transcendence in the Literary Tradition” (under consideration).

59. See 8 (“rage”; “tolerably composed”); 129 (“stubborn patience”; “horror and despair”); or 136 (“even in frenzy I can preserve my presence of mind and discretion”).

60. As has been noted before, Caleb's curiosity has decidedly sexual overtones, particularly when he breaks open the trunk (132). On sexual innuendo in the novel, see Corber, 92. Storch also notes the very distinctive discourse of romantic love in Caleb Williams (195).

61. Compare: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime … But as pain is stronger in its operation than pleasure, so death is in general a much more affecting idea than pain … ; nay, what generally makes pain itself … more painful is, that it is considered as an emissary of this king of terrors” (Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 1.7.36).

62. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 1.7.36.

63. In the first edition this passage occurs in chapter 8, rather than chapter 7, of the text (Pickering edition, 59).

64. The king of course represents divinity on earth, hence the harshness of the punishment for regicide. Treason against Falkland is treason “against the sovereignty of truth” (323), or, criminality against God the Father who must be regarded as entirely benevolent. Compare Handwerk (948), and Paulson (233).

65. The reference to the rack is also an allusion to Smith's A Theory of Moral Sentiments, where this figure is employed to define sympathy (chapter 1, “Of Sympathy,” 9).

66. Compare Johnson's dictum in the Rambler: “No condition is more hateful or despicable, than his who has put himself in the power of his servant … authority, thus acquired, is [seldom] possessed without insolence, or that the master is not forced to confess … that he has enslaved himself by some foolish confidence” (Rambler 68, November 10, 1750, 1:362). Note also Falkland's use of the word “serenity” in the quotation. This provides another parallel to Caleb's ungodly serenity in prison.

67. In reference to Caleb the term “calamity” occurs sixteen times (3, 145, 157, 193, 149, 276, 282, 296-98, 303, 306, 311, 318, 322, 325); Falkland applies the term to his predicament three times (98, 103, 120), and it is used also in reference to Brightwel (192).

68. The term “catastrophe” is applied once to the Hawkinses (79), and the other three times to Falkland (96, 311, 323).

69. Compare in contrast Caleb's “My fairest prospects have been blasted” (3).

70. Tyrrel had earlier himself felt “blasted” by guilt at a reprimand by Falkland (75). Caleb, too, feels “blasted with lightening” (134) when he becomes aware of the gravity of his crime (trying to open the trunk). Falkland, the divinity that is able to exercise Jovian powers, is indeed responsible for Caleb's miseries: “because he [Falkland] was miserable, my happiness, my name, and my existence have been irretrievably blasted” (10). Caleb, of course, succeeds Tyrrel in blasting Falkland's idol, reputation (102, 281), but likewise has his own “character” (308) and “reputation” (225, 304) and his “free spirit” and “firm heart” (255) blasted by Falkland. In fine, Caleb is “blasted and branded in the face of the whole world” (300), and this statement from Laura most aptly images Falkland's divine sway of vengeance over Caleb, Falkland's negative sublimity.

71. In the first edition the passage occurs in chapter 6 (Pickering edition, 43).

72. Note that Falkland is able to shift the blame on the Hawkinses, because “by some miraculous accident” (135) they happened to be in the town that evening.

73. Political Justice, 395.

74. The link between sympathy and freedom is also made by Godwin in his letter to Joseph Gerrald (23 January 1794). He exhorts Gerrald, “Let every syllable you utter be fraught with persuasion” and suggests that he should address the jury in the following terms: “… I do not believe you will be slaves. I do not believe that you will be inaccessible to considerations irresistible in argument, and which speak to all the genuine feelings of the human heart.” (Quoted in Nicholas M. Williams, “‘The Subject of Detection’: Legal Rhetoric and Subjectivity in Caleb Williams,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 9 [1997]: 479-96, 479.)

75. Compare: “I will never lend my assistance to the reforming mankind by axes and gibbets; I am sure things will never be as they ought, till honour and not law be the dictator of mankind, till vice is taught to shrink before the resistless might of inborn dignity, and not before the cold formality of statutes” (175). These sentiments correspond to Godwin's antipunitive stance in Political Justice.

76. Compare Caleb's remarks on his strategies to deceive the jailor: “In these proceedings it is easy to trace the vice and duplicity that must be expected to grow out of injustice. … I was not prepared to maintain the unvaried sincerity of my manners, at the expence of a speedy close of my existence” (194).

77. Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, 29.

78. The quotation in full is: “the sublime does not so properly persuade us, as it ravishes and transports us, and produces in us a certain admiration, mingled with astonishment and surprise, which is quite another thing than the barely pleasing, or the barely persuading; that it gives a noble vigour to a discourse, an invincible force, which commits a pleasing rape upon the very soul of the reader; that whenever it breaks out where it ought to do, like the artillery of Jove, it thunders, blazes, and strikes at once, and shows all the united force of a writer. Now I leave the reader to judge, whether Longinus has not been saying here all along that sublimity is never without passion.” See John Dennis, The grounds of criticism in poetry (1704), as extracted in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 35-39, 37.

79. For an illustration of this argument, see Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy. Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 21-23, 32-34, and throughout.