The Last Man

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  CHAPTER IV.

  I RETURNED to my family estate in the autumn of the year 2092. My heart hadlong been with them; and I felt sick with the hope and delight of seeingthem again. The district which contained them appeared the abode of everykindly spirit. Happiness, love and peace, walked the forest paths, andtempered the atmosphere. After all the agitation and sorrow I had enduredin Greece, I sought Windsor, as the storm-driven bird does the nest inwhich it may fold its wings in tranquillity.

  How unwise had the wanderers been, who had deserted its shelter, entangledthemselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of the world call"life,"--that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual torture. To live,according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, wemust also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; wemust not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must havebeen the inmate of our bosoms; fraud must have lain in wait for us; theartful must have deceived us; sickening doubt and false hope must havechequered our days; hilarity and joy, that lap the soul in ecstasy, must attimes have possessed us. Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for thisfeverish species of existence? I have lived. I have spent days and nightsof festivity; I have joined in ambitious hopes, and exulted in victory:now,--shut the door on the world, and build high the wall that is toseparate me from the troubled scene enacted within its precincts. Let uslive for each other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home,near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, thebeauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let usleave "life," that we may live.

  Idris was well content with this resolve of mine. Her native sprightlinessneeded no undue excitement, and her placid heart reposed contented on mylove, the well-being of her children, and the beauty of surrounding nature.Her pride and blameless ambition was to create smiles in all around her,and to shed repose on the fragile existence of her brother. In spite of hertender nursing, the health of Adrian perceptibly declined. Walking, riding,the common occupations of life, overcame him: he felt no pain, but seemedto tremble for ever on the verge of annihilation. Yet, as he had lived onfor months nearly in the same state, he did not inspire us with anyimmediate fear; and, though he talked of death as an event most familiar tohis thoughts, he did not cease to exert himself to render others happy, orto cultivate his own astonishing powers of mind. Winter passed away; andspring, led by the months, awakened life in all nature. The forest wasdressed in green; the young calves frisked on the new-sprung grass; thewind-winged shadows of light clouds sped over the green cornfields; thehermit cuckoo repeated his monotonous all-hail to the season; thenightingale, bird of love and minion of the evening star, filled the woodswith song; while Venus lingered in the warm sunset, and the young green ofthe trees lay in gentle relief along the clear horizon.

  Delight awoke in every heart, delight and exultation; for there was peacethrough all the world; the temple of Universal Janus was shut, and man diednot that year by the hand of man.

  "Let this last but twelve months," said Adrian; "and earth will become aParadise. The energies of man were before directed to the destruction ofhis species: they now aim at its liberation and preservation. Man cannotrepose, and his restless aspirations will now bring forth good instead ofevil. The favoured countries of the south will throw off the iron yoke ofservitude; poverty will quit us, and with that, sickness. What may not theforces, never before united, of liberty and peace achieve in this dwellingof man?"

  "Dreaming, for ever dreaming, Windsor!" said Ryland, the old adversary ofRaymond, and candidate for the Protectorate at the ensuing election. "Beassured that earth is not, nor ever can be heaven, while the seeds of hellare natives of her soil. When the seasons have become equal, when the airbreeds no disorders, when its surface is no longer liable to blights anddroughts, then sickness will cease; when men's passions are dead, povertywill depart. When love is no longer akin to hate, then brotherhood willexist: we are very far from that state at present."

  "Not so far as you may suppose," observed a little old astronomer, by nameMerrival, "the poles precede slowly, but securely; in an hundred thousandyears--"

  "We shall all be underground," said Ryland.

  "The pole of the earth will coincide with the pole of the ecliptic,"continued the astronomer, "an universal spring will be produced, and earthbecome a paradise."

  "And we shall of course enjoy the benefit of the change," said Ryland,contemptuously.

  "We have strange news here," I observed. I had the newspaper in my hand,and, as usual, had turned to the intelligence from Greece. "It seems thatthe total destruction of Constantinople, and the supposition that winterhad purified the air of the fallen city, gave the Greeks courage to visitits site, and begin to rebuild it. But they tell us that the curse of Godis on the place, for every one who has ventured within the walls has beentainted by the plague; that this disease has spread in Thrace andMacedonia; and now, fearing the virulence of infection during the comingheats, a cordon has been drawn on the frontiers of Thessaly, and a strictquarantine exacted." This intelligence brought us back from the prospect ofparadise, held out after the lapse of an hundred thousand years, to thepain and misery at present existent upon earth. We talked of the ravagesmade last year by pestilence in every quarter of the world; and of thedreadful consequences of a second visitation. We discussed the best meansof preventing infection, and of preserving health and activity in a largecity thus afflicted--London, for instance. Merrival did not join in thisconversation; drawing near Idris, he proceeded to assure her that thejoyful prospect of an earthly paradise after an hundred thousand years, wasclouded to him by the knowledge that in a certain period of time after, anearthly hell or purgatory, would occur, when the ecliptic and equator wouldbe at right angles.[1] Our party at length broke up; "We are all dreamingthis morning," said Ryland, "it is as wise to discuss the probability of avisitation of the plague in our well-governed metropolis, as to calculatethe centuries which must escape before we can grow pine-apples here in theopen air."

  But, though it seemed absurd to calculate upon the arrival of the plague inLondon, I could not reflect without extreme pain on the desolation thisevil would cause in Greece. The English for the most part talked of Thraceand Macedonia, as they would of a lunar territory, which, unknown to them,presented no distinct idea or interest to the minds. I had trod the soil.The faces of many of the inhabitants were familiar to me; in the towns,plains, hills, and defiles of these countries, I had enjoyed unspeakabledelight, as I journied through them the year before. Some romantic village,some cottage, or elegant abode there situated, inhabited by the lovely andthe good, rose before my mental sight, and the question haunted me, is theplague there also?--That same invincible monster, which hovered over anddevoured Constantinople--that fiend more cruel than tempest, less tamethan fire, is, alas, unchained in that beautiful country--thesereflections would not allow me to rest.

  The political state of England became agitated as the time drew near whenthe new Protector was to be elected. This event excited the more interest,since it was the current report, that if the popular candidate (Ryland)should be chosen, the question of the abolition of hereditary rank, andother feudal relics, would come under the consideration of parliament. Nota word had been spoken during the present session on any of these topics.Every thing would depend upon the choice of a Protector, and the electionsof the ensuing year. Yet this very silence was awful, shewing the deepweight attributed to the question; the fear of either party to hazard anill-timed attack, and the expectation of a furious contention when itshould begin.

  But although St. Stephen's did not echo with the voice which filled eachheart, the newspapers teemed with nothing else; and in private companiesthe conversation however remotely begun, soon verged towards this centralpoint, while voices were lowered and chairs drawn closer. The nobles didnot hesitate to express their fear; the other party endeavoured to treatthe matter lightly. "Shame on the country," said Ryland, "to lay so m
uchstress upon words and frippery; it is a question of nothing; of the newpainting of carriage-pannels and the embroidery of footmen's coats."

  Yet could England indeed doff her lordly trappings, and be content with thedemocratic style of America? Were the pride of ancestry, the patricianspirit, the gentle courtesies and refined pursuits, splendid attributes ofrank, to be erased among us? We were told that this would not be the case;that we were by nature a poetical people, a nation easily duped by words,ready to array clouds in splendour, and bestow honour on the dust. Thisspirit we could never lose; and it was to diffuse this concentrated spiritof birth, that the new law was to be brought forward. We were assured that,when the name and title of Englishman was the sole patent of nobility, weshould all be noble; that when no man born under English sway, felt anotherhis superior in rank, courtesy and refinement would become the birth-rightof all our countrymen. Let not England be so far disgraced, as to have itimagined that it can be without nobles, nature's true nobility, who beartheir patent in their mien, who are from their cradle elevated above therest of their species, because they are better than the rest. Among a raceof independent, and generous, and well educated men, in a country where theimagination is empress of men's minds, there needs be no fear that weshould want a perpetual succession of the high-born and lordly. That party,however, could hardly yet be considered a minority in the kingdom, whoextolled the ornament of the column, "the Corinthian capital of polishedsociety;" they appealed to prejudices without number, to old attachmentsand young hopes; to the expectation of thousands who might one day becomepeers; they set up as a scarecrow, the spectre of all that was sordid,mechanic and base in the commercial republics.

  The plague had come to Athens. Hundreds of English residents returned totheir own country. Raymond's beloved Athenians, the free, the noble peopleof the divinest town in Greece, fell like ripe corn before the mercilesssickle of the adversary. Its pleasant places were deserted; its temples andpalaces were converted into tombs; its energies, bent before towards thehighest objects of human ambition, were now forced to converge to onepoint, the guarding against the innumerous arrows of the plague.

  At any other time this disaster would have excited extreme compassion amongus; but it was now passed over, while each mind was engaged by the comingcontroversy. It was not so with me; and the question of rank and rightdwindled to insignificance in my eyes, when I pictured the scene ofsuffering Athens. I heard of the death of only sons; of wives and husbandsmost devoted; of the rending of ties twisted with the heart's fibres, offriend losing friend, and young mothers mourning for their first born; andthese moving incidents were grouped and painted in my mind by the knowledgeof the persons, by my esteem and affection for the sufferers. It was theadmirers, friends, fellow soldiers of Raymond, families that had welcomedPerdita to Greece, and lamented with her the loss of her lord, that wereswept away, and went to dwell with them in the undistinguishing tomb.

  The plague at Athens had been preceded and caused by the contagion from theEast; and the scene of havoc and death continued to be acted there, on ascale of fearful magnitude. A hope that the visitation of the present yearwould prove the last, kept up the spirits of the merchants connected withthese countries; but the inhabitants were driven to despair, or to aresignation which, arising from fanaticism, assumed the same dark hue.America had also received the taint; and, were it yellow fever or plague,the epidemic was gifted with a virulence before unfelt. The devastation wasnot confined to the towns, but spread throughout the country; the hunterdied in the woods, the peasant in the corn-fields, and the fisher on hisnative waters.

  A strange story was brought to us from the East, to which little creditwould have been given, had not the fact been attested by a multitude ofwitnesses, in various parts of the world. On the twenty-first of June, itwas said that an hour before noon, a black sun arose: an orb, the size ofthat luminary, but dark, defined, whose beams were shadows, ascended fromthe west; in about an hour it had reached the meridian, and eclipsed thebright parent of day. Night fell upon every country, night, sudden,rayless, entire. The stars came out, shedding their ineffectual glimmeringson the light-widowed earth. But soon the dim orb passed from over the sun,and lingered down the eastern heaven. As it descended, its dusky rayscrossed the brilliant ones of the sun, and deadened or distorted them. Theshadows of things assumed strange and ghastly shapes. The wild animals inthe woods took fright at the unknown shapes figured on the ground. Theyfled they knew not whither; and the citizens were filled with greaterdread, at the convulsion which "shook lions into civil streets;"--birds,strong-winged eagles, suddenly blinded, fell in the market-places, whileowls and bats shewed themselves welcoming the early night. Gradually theobject of fear sank beneath the horizon, and to the last shot up shadowybeams into the otherwise radiant air. Such was the tale sent us from Asia,from the eastern extremity of Europe, and from Africa as far west as theGolden Coast. Whether this story were true or not, the effects were certain.Through Asia, from the banks of the Nile to the shores of the Caspian, fromthe Hellespont even to the sea of Oman, a sudden panic was driven. The menfilled the mosques; the women, veiled, hastened to the tombs, and carriedofferings to the dead, thus to preserve the living. The plague wasforgotten, in this new fear which the black sun had spread; and, though thedead multiplied, and the streets of Ispahan, of Pekin, and of Delhi werestrewed with pestilence-struck corpses, men passed on, gazing on theominous sky, regardless of the death beneath their feet. The christianssought their churches,--christian maidens, even at the feast of roses,clad in white, with shining veils, sought, in long procession, the placesconsecrated to their religion, filling the air with their hymns; while,ever and anon, from the lips of some poor mourner in the crowd, a voice ofwailing burst, and the rest looked up, fancying they could discern thesweeping wings of angels, who passed over the earth, lamenting thedisasters about to fall on man.

  In the sunny clime of Persia, in the crowded cities of China, amidst thearomatic groves of Cashmere, and along the southern shores of theMediterranean, such scenes had place. Even in Greece the tale of the sun ofdarkness encreased the fears and despair of the dying multitude. We, in ourcloudy isle, were far removed from danger, and the only circumstance thatbrought these disasters at all home to us, was the daily arrival of vesselsfrom the east, crowded with emigrants, mostly English; for the Moslems,though the fear of death was spread keenly among them, still clungtogether; that, if they were to die (and if they were, death would asreadily meet them on the homeless sea, or in far England, as in Persia,)--if they were to die, their bones might rest in earth made sacred by therelics of true believers. Mecca had never before been so crowded withpilgrims; yet the Arabs neglected to pillage the caravans, but, humble andweaponless, they joined the procession, praying Mahomet to avert plaguefrom their tents and deserts.

  I cannot describe the rapturous delight with which I turned from politicalbrawls at home, and the physical evils of distant countries, to my own dearhome, to the selected abode of goodness and love; to peace, and theinterchange of every sacred sympathy. Had I never quitted Windsor, theseemotions would not have been so intense; but I had in Greece been the preyof fear and deplorable change; in Greece, after a period of anxiety andsorrow, I had seen depart two, whose very names were the symbol ofgreatness and virtue. But such miseries could never intrude upon thedomestic circle left to me, while, secluded in our beloved forest, wepassed our lives in tranquillity. Some small change indeed the progress ofyears brought here; and time, as it is wont, stamped the traces ofmortality on our pleasures and expectations. Idris, the most affectionatewife, sister and friend, was a tender and loving mother. The feeling wasnot with her as with many, a pastime; it was a passion. We had had threechildren; one, the second in age, died while I was in Greece. This haddashed the triumphant and rapturous emotions of maternity with grief andfear. Before this event, the little beings, sprung from herself, the youngheirs of her transient life, seemed to have a sure lease of existence; nowshe dreaded that the pitiless destroyer
might snatch her remainingdarlings, as it had snatched their brother. The least illness caused throesof terror; she was miserable if she were at all absent from them; hertreasure of happiness she had garnered in their fragile being, and keptforever on the watch, lest the insidious thief should as before steal thesevalued gems. She had fortunately small cause for fear. Alfred, now nineyears old, was an upright, manly little fellow, with radiant brow, softeyes, and gentle, though independent disposition. Our youngest was yet ininfancy; but his downy cheek was sprinkled with the roses of health, andhis unwearied vivacity filled our halls with innocent laughter.

  Clara had passed the age which, from its mute ignorance, was the source ofthe fears of Idris. Clara was dear to her, to all. There was so muchintelligence combined with innocence, sensibility with forbearance, andseriousness with perfect good-humour, a beauty so transcendant, united tosuch endearing simplicity, that she hung like a pearl in the shrine of ourpossessions, a treasure of wonder and excellence.

  At the beginning of winter our Alfred, now nine years of age, first went toschool at Eton. This appeared to him the primary step towards manhood, andhe was proportionably pleased. Community of study and amusement developedthe best parts of his character, his steady perseverance, generosity, andwell-governed firmness. What deep and sacred emotions are excited in afather's bosom, when he first becomes convinced that his love for his childis not a mere instinct, but worthily bestowed, and that others, less akin,participate his approbation! It was supreme happiness to Idris and myself,to find that the frankness which Alfred's open brow indicated, theintelligence of his eyes, the tempered sensibility of his tones, were notdelusions, but indications of talents and virtues, which would "grow withhis growth, and strengthen with his strength." At this period, thetermination of an animal's love for its offspring,--the true affection ofthe human parent commences. We no longer look on this dearest part ofourselves, as a tender plant which we must cherish, or a plaything for anidle hour. We build now on his intellectual faculties, we establish ourhopes on his moral propensities. His weakness still imparts anxiety to thisfeeling, his ignorance prevents entire intimacy; but we begin to respectthe future man, and to endeavour to secure his esteem, even as if he wereour equal. What can a parent have more at heart than the good opinion ofhis child? In all our transactions with him our honour must be inviolate,the integrity of our relations untainted: fate and circumstance may, whenhe arrives at maturity, separate us for ever--but, as his aegis indanger, his consolation in hardship, let the ardent youth for ever bearwith him through the rough path of life, love and honour for his parents.

  We had lived so long in the vicinity of Eton, that its population of youngfolks was well known to us. Many of them had been Alfred's playmates,before they became his school-fellows. We now watched this youthfulcongregation with redoubled interest. We marked the difference of characteramong the boys, and endeavoured to read the future man in the stripling.There is nothing more lovely, to which the heart more yearns than afree-spirited boy, gentle, brave, and generous. Several of the Etonians hadthese characteristics; all were distinguished by a sense of honour, andspirit of enterprize; in some, as they verged towards manhood, thisdegenerated into presumption; but the younger ones, lads a little olderthan our own, were conspicuous for their gallant and sweet dispositions.

  Here were the future governors of England; the men, who, when our ardourwas cold, and our projects completed or destroyed for ever, when, our dramaacted, we doffed the garb of the hour, and assumed the uniform of age, orof more equalizing death; here were the beings who were to carry on thevast machine of society; here were the lovers, husbands, fathers; here thelandlord, the politician, the soldier; some fancied that they were even nowready to appear on the stage, eager to make one among the dramatis personaeof active life. It was not long since I was like one of these beardlessaspirants; when my boy shall have obtained the place I now hold, I shallhave tottered into a grey-headed, wrinkled old man. Strange system! riddleof the Sphynx, most awe-striking! that thus man remains, while we theindividuals pass away. Such is, to borrow the words of an eloquent andphilosophic writer, "the mode of existence decreed to a permanent bodycomposed of transitory parts; wherein, by the disposition of a stupendouswisdom, moulding together the great mysterious incorporation of the humanrace, the whole, at one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but,in a condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the variedtenour of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and progression."[2]

  Willingly do I give place to thee, dear Alfred! advance, offspring oftender love, child of our hopes; advance a soldier on the road to which Ihave been the pioneer! I will make way for thee. I have already put off thecarelessness of childhood, the unlined brow, and springy gait of earlyyears, that they may adorn thee. Advance; and I will despoil myself stillfurther for thy advantage. Time shall rob me of the graces of maturity,shall take the fire from my eyes, and agility from my limbs, shall stealthe better part of life, eager expectation and passionate love, and showerthem in double portion on thy dear head. Advance! avail thyself of thegift, thou and thy comrades; and in the drama you are about to act, do notdisgrace those who taught you to enter on the stage, and to pronouncebecomingly the parts assigned to you! May your progress be uninterruptedand secure; born during the spring-tide of the hopes of man, may you leadup the summer to which no winter may succeed!

  [1] See an ingenious Essay, entitled, "The Mythological Astronomy of theAncients Demonstrated," by Mackey, a shoemaker, of Norwich printed in 1822.[2] Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution.