Caleb Williams | Page 6

I had, how could I tell
that the second and third judgment would be more favourable than the
first? Then what would have been the result? No; I had nothing for it
but to wrap myself in my own integrity. By dint of resolution I became
invulnerable. I resolved to go on to the end, trusting as I could to my
own anticipations of the whole, and bidding the world wait its time
before it should be admitted to the consult.
I began my narrative, as is the more usual way, in the third person. But
I speedily became dissatisfied. I then assumed the first person, making
the hero of my tale his own historian; and in this mode I have persisted
in all my subsequent attempts at works of fiction. It was infinitely the
best adapted, at least, to my vein of delineation, where the thing in
which my imagination revelled the most freely was the analysis of the
private and internal operations of the mind, employing my
metaphysical dissecting knife in tracing and laying bare the involutions
of motive, and recording the gradually accumulating impulses which
led the personages I had to describe primarily to adopt the particular
way of proceeding in which they afterwards embarked.
When I had determined on the main purpose of my story, it was ever
my method to get about me any productions of former authors that
seemed to bear on my subject. I never entertained the fear that in this
way of proceeding I should be in danger of servilely copying my
predecessors. I imagined that I had a vein of thinking that was properly
my own, which would always preserve me from plagiarism. I read
other authors, that I might see what they had done, or, more properly,
that I might forcibly hold my mind and occupy my thoughts in a
particular train, I and my predecessors travelling in some sense to the
same goal, at the same time that I struck out a path of my own, without
ultimately heeding the direction they pursued, and disdaining to inquire
whether by any chance it for a few steps coincided or did not coincide
with mine.
Thus, in the instance of "Caleb Williams," I read over a little old book,
entitled "The Adventures of Mademoiselle de St. Phale," a French

Protestant in the times of the fiercest persecution of the Huguenots,
who fled through France in the utmost terror, in the midst of eternal
alarms and hair-breadth escapes, having her quarters perpetually beaten
up, and by scarcely any chance finding a moment's interval of security.
I turned over the pages of a tremendous compilation, entitled "God's
Revenge against Murder," where the beam of the eye of Omniscience
was represented as perpetually pursuing the guilty, and laying open his
most hidden retreats to the light of day. I was extremely conversant
with the "Newgate Calendar" and the "Lives of the Pirates." In the
meantime no works of fiction came amiss to me, provided they were
written with energy. The authors were still employed upon the same
mine as myself, however different was the vein they pursued: we were
all of us engaged in exploring the entrails of mind and motive, and in
tracing the various rencontres and clashes that may occur between man
and man in the diversified scene of human life.
I rather amused myself with tracing a certain similitude between the
story of Caleb Williams and the tale of Bluebeard, than derived any
hints from that admirable specimen of the terrific. Falkland was my
Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes, which, if discovered,
he might expect to have all the world roused to revenge against him.
Caleb Williams was the wife who, in spite of warning, persisted in his
attempts to discover the forbidden secret; and, when he had succeeded,
struggled as fruitlessly to escape the consequences, as the wife of
Bluebeard in washing the key of the ensanguined chamber, who, as
often as she cleared the stain of blood from the one side, found it
showing itself with frightful distinctness on the other.
When I had proceeded as far as the early pages of my third volume, I
found myself completely at a stand. I rested on my arms from the 2nd
of January, 1794, to the 1st of April following, without getting forward
in the smallest degree. It has ever been thus with me in works of any
continuance. The bow will not be for ever bent:
"Opere in longo fas est obrepere somnum."
I endeavoured, however, to take my repose to myself in security, and
not to inflict a set of crude and incoherent dreams upon my readers. In

the meantime, when I revived, I revived in earnest, and in the course of
that month carried on my work with