Falkner: a Novel
Copyright© 2025 by Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
Chapter 26
FALKNER’S NARRATIVE
“To palliate crime, and, by investigating motive, to render guilt less odious—such is not the feeling that rules my pen; to confer honour upon innocence, to vindicate virtue, and announce truth—though that offer my own name as a mark for deserved infamy—such are my motives. And if I reveal the secrets of my heart, and dwell on the circumstances that led to the fatal catastrophe I record, so that, though a criminal, I do not appear quite a monster, let the egotism be excused for her dear sake—within whose young and gentle heart I would fain that my memory should be enshrined without horror, though with blame.
“The truth, the pure and sacred truth, will alone find expression in these pages. I write them in a land of beauty, but of desolation—in a country whose inhabitants are purchasing by blood and misery the dearest privileges of human nature—where I have come to die! It is night; the cooing aziolo, the hooting owl, the flashing fire-fly, the murmur of time-honoured streams, the moonlit foliage of the gray olive woods, dark crags, and rugged mountains, throwing awful shadows, and the light of the eternal stars—such are the objects around me. Can a man speak false in the silence of night, when God and his own heart alone keep watch! when conscience hears the moaning of the dead in the pauses of the breeze, and sees one pale, lifeless figure float away on the current of the stream! My heart whispers that before such witnesses the truth will be truly recorded; and my blood curdles, and my nerves, so firm amid the din of battle, shrink and shudder at the tale I am about to narrate.
“What is crime?
“A deed done injurious to others—forbidden by religion, condemned by morality, and which human laws are enacted to punish.
“A criminal feels all mankind to be his foes, the whole frame of society is erected for his especial ruin. Before he had a right to choose his habitation in the land of his forefathers—and, placing the sacred name of liberty between himself and power, none dared check his freeborn steps—his will was his law; the limits of his physical strength were the only barriers to his wildest wanderings—he could walk erect and fear the eye of no man. He who commits a crime forfeits these privileges. Men from out the lowest grade of society can say to him, ‘You must come with us!’—they can drag him from those he loves, immure him in a loathsome cell, dole out scant portions of the unchartered air, make a show of him, lead him to death, and throw his body to the dogs; and society, which for the innocent would have raised one cry of horror against the perpetrators of such outrages, look on and clap their hands with applause.
“This is a vulgar aspect of the misery of which I speak—a crime may never be discovered. Mine lies buried in my own breast. Years have passed, and none point at me and whisper, ‘There goes the murderer!’ But do I not feel that God is my enemy, and my own heart whispers condemnation? I know that I am an impostor—that any day may discover the truth; but more heavy than any fear of detection is the secret hidden in my own heart; the icy touch of the death I caused creeps over me during the night. I am pursued by the knowledge that naught I do can prosper, for the cry of innocence is raised against me, and the earth groans with the secret burden I have committed to her bosom. That the death-blow was not actually dealt by my hand in no manner mitigates the stings of conscience. My act was the murderer, though my intention was guiltless of death.
“Is there a man who at some time has not desired to possess, by illegal means, a portion of another’s property, or to obey the dictates of an animal instinct, and plant his foot on the neck of his enemy? Few are so cold of blood or temperate of mood as not, at some one time, to have felt hurried beyond the demarcations set up by conscience and law; few but have been tempted without the brink of the forbidden; but they stopped, while I leaped beyond—there is the difference between us. Falsely do they say who allege that there is no difference in guilt between the thought and act; to be tempted is human; to resist temptation—surely, if framed like me, such is to raise us from our humanity into the sphere of angels.
“Many are the checks afforded us. Some are possessed by fear; others are endowed by a sensibility so prophetic of the evil that must ensue, that perforce they cannot act the thing they desire; they tremble at the idea of being the cause of events over whose future course they can have no control; they fear injuring others—and their own remorse.
“But I disdained all these considerations—they occurred but faintly and ineffectually to my mind. Piety, conscience, and moral respect yielded before a feeling which decked its desires in the garb of necessity. Oh, how vain it is to analyze motive! Each man has the same motives; but it is the materials of each mind—the plastic or rocky nature, the mild or the burning temperament—that rejects the alien influence, or receives it into its own essence and causes the act. Such an impulse is as a summer healthy breeze just dimpling a still lake to one—while to another it is the whirlwind that rouses him to spread ruin around.
“The Almighty who framed my miserable being made me a man of passion. They say that of such are formed the great and good. I know not that—I am neither; but I will not arraign the Creator. I will hope that in feeling my guilt—in acknowledging the superexcellence of virtue, I fulfil, in part, his design. After me, let no man doubt but that to do what is right is to ensure his own happiness; or that self-restraint, and submission to the voice of conscience implanted in our souls, impart more dignity of feeling, more true majesty of being, than a puerile assertion of will and a senseless disregard of immutable principles.
“Is passion known in these days? Such as I felt, has any other experienced it? The expression has fled from our lips; but it is as deep-seated as ever in our hearts. Who, of created beings, has not loved? Who, of my sex, has not felt the struggle, and the yielding in the struggle, of the better to the worse parts of our nature? Who so dead to nature’s influence as not, at least for some brief moments, to have felt that body and soul were a slight sacrifice to obtain possession of the affections of her he loved? Who, for some moments in his life, would not have seen his mistress dead at his feet rather than wedded to another? To feel this tyranny of passion is to be human; to conquer it is to be virtuous. He who conquers himself is, in my eyes, the only true hero. Alas, I am not such! I am among the vanquished, and view the wretch I am, and learn that there is nothing so contemptible, so pitiable, so eternally miserable, as he who is defeated in his conflict with passion.
“That I am such, this very scene—this very occupation testifies. Once the slave of headlong impulse, I am now the victim of remorse. I am come to seek death, because I cannot retrieve the past; I long for the moment when the bullet shall pierce my flesh, and the pains of dissolution gather round me. Then I may hope to be, that for which I thirst, free! There is one who loves me. She is pure and kind as a guardian angel—she is as my own child—she implores me to live. With her my days might pass in a peace and innocence that saints might envy; but so heavy are the fetters of memory, so bitter the slavery of my soul, that even she cannot take away the sting from life.
“Death is all I covet. When these pages are read, the hand that traces them will be powerless—the brain that dictates will have lost its functions. This is my last labour—my legacy to my fellow-beings. Do not let them disdain the outpourings of a heart which for years has buried its recollections and remorse in silence. The waters were pent up by a dam—now they rush impetuously forth—they roar as if pursued by a thousand torrents—their turmoil deafens heaven; and what though their sound be only conveyed by the little implement that traces these lines—not less headlong than the swelling waves is the spirit that pours itself out in these words.
“I am calmer now—I have been wandering beside the stream—and, despite the lurking foe and deceptive moonbeams, I have ascended the steep mountain’s side—and looked out on the misty sea, and sought to gain from reposing nature some relief to my sense of pain. The hour of midnight is at hand—all is still—I am calm, and with deliberation begin to narrate that train of circumstances, or rather of feelings, that hurried me first to error, then to crime, and, lastly, brought me here to die.
“I lost my mother before I can well remember. I have a confused recollection of her crying—and of her caressing me—and I can call to mind seeing her ill in bed, and her blessing me; but these ideas are rather like revelations of an ante-natal life, than belonging to reality. She died when I was four years old. My childhood’s years were stormy and drear. My father, a social, and, I believe, even a polite man in society, was rough and ill-tempered at home. He had gambled away his own slender younger brother’s fortune and his wife’s portion, and was too idle to attend to a profession, and yet not indolent enough for a life devoid of purpose and pursuit. Our family was a good one; it consisted of two brothers, my father, and my uncle. This latter, favoured of birth and fortune, remained long unmarried; and was in weak health. My father expected him to die. His death, and his own consequent inheritance of the family estate, was his constant theme; but the delayed hope irritated him to madness. I knew his humour even as a child, and escaped it as I could. His voice, calling my name, made my blood run cold; his epithets of abuse, so frequently applied, filled me with boiling but ineffectual rage.
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