One of Tyrrel’s tenants, Mr. Hawkins, incurred his master’s displeasure, and he and his family were turned out of house and home. The laws and customs of the country are used to oppress the victims. Tenants must be kept in their places. The presumption is that they are in the wrong, and so the unscrupulous Tyrrel had no difficulty in imprisoning the son. Shelley says: “That in questions of property there is a vague but most effective favoritism in courts of law, and, among lawyers, against the poor to the advantage of the rich—against the tenant in favour of the landlord—against the creditor in favour of the debtor.” (Prose. Vol. II, p. 326.) Falkland remonstrated with Tyrrel for this piece of injustice, but this served only to increase Tyrrel’s hatred of him. At length the crisis came. Tyrrel is driven out of a rural assembly by Falkland. He returned soon afterwards, struck Falkland, felled him to the earth, and kicked him in the presence of all. Falkland was disgraced, and to him disgrace was worse than death. “He was too deeply pervaded with the idle and groundless romances of chivalry ever to forget the situation, humiliating and dishonourable according to his idea, in which he had been placed upon this occasion. To be knocked down, cuffed, kicked, dragged along the floor! Sacred heaven, the memory of such a treatment was not to be endured.” Next morning Mr. Tyrrel was found dead in the street, having been murdered at a short distance from the assembly-house. That day marked the beginning of that melancholy which pursued Falkland in after years. The public disgrace and chastisement that had been imposed upon him were not the whole of the mischief that happened to the unfortunate Falkland. It was rumored that he was the murderer of his antagonist. He was examined by the neighboring magistrates and acquitted. It was absurd to imagine that a man of such integrity should commit such an atrocious crime. Suspicion then fell on the Hawkinses. They were tried, condemned, and afterwards executed. From thenceforward the habits of Falkland became totally different. He now became a rigid recluse. Everybody respected him because of his benevolence, but his stately coldness and reserve made it impossible for those about him to regard him with the familiarity of affection.
Caleb Williams turned all these particulars over and over in his mind and began to suspect that Falkland was the real murderer of Tyrrel. His curiosity became an overpowering passion which was ultimately the cause of all his misfortunes. Falkland realizes that his secretary is convinced of his guilt, so he determines to silence him forever. He calls Williams into his room and confesses his guilt to him. Falkland said that he allowed the innocent Hawkinses to die because he could not sacrifice his fame. He would leave behind him a spotless and illustrious name even should it be at the expense of the death and misery of others. He then told Caleb that if ever an unguarded word escaped from his lips he would pay for it by his death or worse. This secret was a constant source of torment to Williams. Every trifling incident made Falkland suspicious and consequently increased the misery of his secretary. At length Caleb flees, but is taken back, falsely accused of theft, and cast into prison. In all this Falkland contrives to manage things so as to increase his reputation for benevolence. Williams is made to appear an ungrateful wretch. The impotence of the law to secure justice to the weak is only equalled by the wretchedness of the prisons to which they are condemned. “Thank God,” exclaims the Englishman, “we have no Bastile! Thank God with us no man can be punished without a crime!” “Unthinking wretch!” writes Godwin, “Is that a country of liberty, where thousands languish in dungeons and fetters? Go, go, ignorant fool! and visit the scenes of our prisons. Witness their unwholesomeness, their filth, the tyranny of their governors, the misery of their inmates! After that show me the man shameless enough to triumph, and say ‘England has no Bastile!’ Is there any charge so frivolous, upon which men are not consigned to those detested abodes? Is there any villainy that is not practiced by justices and prosecutors, etc.?”
Williams tries to escape from prison and is caught in the attempt. He was then treated more cruelly than ever. He made another attempt to escape and was successful. The rest of the novel is taken up with an account of all that Williams suffered in his endeavors to keep out of the reach of the law. He falls in with a band of outlaws whose rude natural virtues are contrasted with the meanness and corruption of the officers of the law. He is at last caught, but Falkland, to make himself appear magnanimous, does not press the charge against Williams. Instead he persecutes Caleb by poisoning people’s minds against him. Everywhere Caleb goes he is followed by an emissary of Falkland who contrives to convince people that Williams is an ungrateful scoundrel. He can stand the persecution no longer and so determines to accuse Falkland of the murder of Tyrrel. Williams does this in a way to carry conviction to his hearers. Falkland finally breaks down, throws himself into Williams’ arms, saying, “All my prospects are concluded. All that I most ardently desired is forever frustrated. I have spent a life of the basest cruelty to cover one act of momentary vice, and to protect myself against the prejudice of my species.... And now (turning to the magistrates) do with me as you please. 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.” He survived this event but three days. “A nobler spirit than Falkland’s,” Godwin writes, “lived not among the sons of men. Thy intellectual powers were truly sublime, and thy bosom burned with a godlike ambition. But of what use are talents and sentiments in the corrupt wilderness of human society? It is a rank and rotten soil, from which every finer shrub draws poison as it grows. Falkland! thou enteredst upon thy career with the purest and most laudable intentions. But thou imbibest the poison of chivalry with thy earliest youth; and the base and low-minded envy that met thee on thy return to thy native seats, operated with this poison to hurry thee into madness....” All these evils flow from Falkland’s standard of morals—and his is the aristocratic, traditional one. He is the victim of the false ideal of chivalry. The errors of Falkland, Shelley writes, “sprang from a high though perverted conception of human nature, from a powerful sympathy with his species and from a temper, which led him to believe that the very reputation of excellence should walk among mankind unquestioned and unassailed.”
Protests against this condition of affairs were not wanting, it is true, but they did not influence men to any great extent. Cowper, for example, criticizes most severely the luxury and vices of his age.
Rank abundance breeds
In gross and pampered cities, sloth and lust
And wantonness and gluttonous excess.
He deplores the corruption in church and state, and pleads for a return to religion. In the Progress of Error he pictures Occidius as
A cassock’d huntsman and a fiddling priest.
Himself a wanderer from the narrow way,
His silly sheep, what wonder if they stray.
Although he lashes the follies of his time in The Task, Table Talk, and Expostulation, still he does not attack the institutions of his country with the vehemence characteristic of later writers. His poems are a mild expression of the revolutionary spirit that was then gathering strength.
At a very early age Shelley showed signs of hatred for existing institutions. These became more pronounced as he grew older, until they finally blazed forth in Queen Mab in 1813. This poem is considered by some to be merely a declamatory pamphlet in verse. Shelley himself described it at one time as “villainous trash.” Like a true radical he gathers up all the evils of society, its crimes, misery, and oppression, and feels them so keenly that he makes them part of his own being. This collected lightning he discharged in one awful flash in Queen Mab.
The first two parts of this poem bear a striking resemblance to Volney’s Les Ruines.[25] In Queen Mab a fairy descends and takes up Ianthe’s soul to heaven that she may see how to accomplish the great end for which she lives, and that she may taste that peace which in the end all life will share. Ianthe merited this boon because she vanquished earth’s pride and meanness and burst “the icy chains of custom.” Volney’s traveler is likewise disengaged from his body and conveyed to the upper regions by a Genius. Many consolations await him there as a reward for his unselfishness and desires for the happiness of mankind. The earth is plainly visible to both Volney’s traveler and Shelley’s spirit, Ianthe, and its thronging thousands seem like an ant-hill’s citizens. Volney’s traveler sees but a few remains of the hundred cities which once flourished in Syria. All this destruction was caused by cupidity. In the same way the Spirit of Ianthe finds that from England’s fertile fields to the burning plains where Libyan monsters dwell—