Is all this nothing? Is all this necessary for the maintenance of civil order? Let it be recollected that for this distinction there is not the smallest foundation in the nature of things; that, as we have already said, there is no particular mold for the construction of lords, and that they are born neither better nor worse than the poorest of their dependents. It is this structure of aristocracy, in all its sanctuaries and fragments, against which reason and philosophy have declared war. It is alike unjust, whether we consider it in the castes of India, the villainage of the feudal system, or the despotism of the patricians of ancient Rome dragging their debtors into personal servitude to expiate loans they could not repay. Mankind will never be in an eminent degree virtuous and happy, till each man shall possess that portion of distinction, and no more, to which he is entitled by his personal merits. The dissolution of aristocracy is equally the interest of the oppressor and the oppressed. The one will be delivered from the littleness of tyranny, and the other from the brutalizing operation of servitude.

[EVILS OF MARRIAGE]

. It is absurd to expect that the inclinations and wishes of two human beings should coincide through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and to live together is to subject them to some inevitable portion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness. This cannot be otherwise, so long as man has failed to reach the standard of absolute perfection. The supposition that I must have a companion for life, is the result of a complication of vices. It is the dictate of cowardice, and not of fortitude. It flows from the desire of being loved and esteemed for something that is not desert.

But the evil of marriage as it is practiced in European countries lies deeper than this. The habit is, for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex to come together, to see each other for a few times and under circumstances full of delusion, and then to vow to each other eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are presented with the strongest imaginable temptation to become the dupes of falsehood. They are led to conceive it their wisest policy to shut their eyes upon realities,

happy if by any perversion of intellect they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of their companion. The institution of marriage is a system of fraud; and men who carefully mislead their judgments in the daily affair of their life, must always have a crippled judgment in every other concern. We ought to dismiss our mistake as soon as it is detected; but we are taught to cherish it. We ought to be incessant in our search after virtue and worth; but we are taught to check our inquiry, and shut our eyes upon the most attractive and admirable objects. Marriage is law, and the worst of all laws. Whatever our understandings may tell us of the person from whose connection we should derive the greatest improvement, of the worth of one woman and the demerits of another, we are obliged to consider what is law, and not what is justice. Add to this that marriage is an affair of property, and the worst of all properties. So long as two human beings are forbidden by positive institution to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice is alive and vigorous. So long as I seek to engross one woman to myself, and to prohibit my neighbor from proving his superior desert and reaping the fruits of it, I am guilty of the most odious of all monopolies. Over this imaginary prize men watch with perpetual jealousy, and one man will find his desires and his capacity to circumvent as much excited as the other is excited to traverse his projects and frustrate his hopes. As long as this state of society continues, philanthropy will be crossed and checked in a thousand ways, and the still augmenting stream of abuse will continue to flow.

The abolition of marriage will be attended with no evils. We are apt to represent it to ourselves as the harbinger of brutal lust and depravity. But it really happens, in this as in other cases, that the positive laws which are made to restrain our vices, irritate and multiply them. Not to say that the same sentiments of justice and happiness which, in a state of equal property, would destroy the relish for luxury, would decrease our inordinate appetites of every kind, and lead us universally to prefer the pleasures of intellect to the pleasures of sense. . . .

It cannot be definitively affirmed whether it be known in such a state of society who is the father of each individual child. But it may be affirmed that such knowledge will be of no importance. It is aristocracy, self-love, and family pride that teach us to set

a value upon it at present. I ought to prefer no human being to another because that being is my father, my wife, or my son, but because, for reasons which equally appeal to all understandings, that being is entitled to preference. One among the measures which will successively be dictated by the spirit of democracy, and that probably at no great distance, is the abolition of sur

names.

ANN RADCLIFFE

THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO

1794

[This romance, the best known of its author's works, is sometimes regarded as the first of the "tales of terror" (but see Walpole's Otranto, above). The following extract exemplifies Mrs. Radcliffe's "peculiar art of exciting terror and impatient curiosity by the invention of incidents apparently supernatural, but eventually receiving a natural explanation," and at the same time her use of natural scenery as the setting for the action of her romances, on account of which she has been considered "a precursor of that general movement towards the delineation and comprehension of external nature which was to characterize the nineteenth century." (Both quotations are from Dr. Richard Garnett's article in the Dictionary of National Biography.) The passages here reprinted are from chapters XVIII and XIX.]

At length the travelers began to ascend among the Apennines. The immense pine forests, which at that period overhung these mountains, and between which the road wound, excluded all view but of the cliffs aspiring above, except that now and then an opening through the dark woods allowed the eye a momentary glimpse of the country below. The gloom of these shades, their solitary silence, except when the breeze swept over their summits, the tremendous precipices of the mountains that came partially to the eye, each assisted to raise the solemnity of Emily's feelings into awe. She saw only images of gloomy grandeur or of dreadful sublimity around her; other images, equally gloomy and equally terrible, gleamed on her imagination. She was going, she scarcely knew whither, under the dominion of a person from whose arbitrary disposition she had already suffered so much, to marry, perhaps, a man who possessed neither her affection nor esteem, or to endure, beyond the hope of succor, whatever punishment revenge - and that Italian revenge — might dictate. The more she considered what might be the motive of the journey, the more she became convinced that it was for the purpose of concluding her nuptials with Count Morano, with the secrecy which her resolute resistance had made neces

sary to the honor, if not the safety, of Montoni. From the deep solitudes into which she was emerging, and from the gloomy castle of which she had heard some mysterious hints, her sick heart recoiled in despair, and she experienced that, though her mind was already occupied by peculiar distress, it was still alive to the influence of a new and local circumstance; why else did she shudder at the image of this desolate castle?

As the travelers still ascended among the pine forests, steep rose over steep, the mountains seemed to multiply as they went, and what was the summit of one eminence proved to be only the base of another. At length they reached a little plain, where the drivers stopped to rest the mules, whence a scene of such extent and magnificence opened below as drew even from Madame Montoni a note of admiration. Emily lost, for a moment, her sorrows in the immensity of nature. Beyond the amphitheatre of mountains that stretched below, whose tops appeared as numerous almost as the waves of the sea, and whose feet were concealed by the forests, extended the campagna of Italy, where cities, and rivers, and woods, and all the glow of cultivation, were mingled in gay confusion. The Adriatic bounded the horizon, into which the Po and the Brenta, after winding through the whole extent of the landscape, poured their fruitful waves. Emily gazed long on the splendors of the world she was quitting, of which the whole magnificence seemed thus given to her sight only to increase her regret on leaving it. . . .

From this sublime scene the travelers continued to ascend among the pines, till they entered a narrow pass of the mountains, which shut out every feature of the distant country, and in its stead exhibited only tremendous crags, impending over the road, where no vestige of humanity, or even of vegetation, appeared, except here and there the trunk and scathed branches of an oak, that hung nearly headlong from the rock into which its strong roots had fastened. This pass, which led into the heart of the Apennines, at length opened to day, and a scene of mountains stretched in long perspective, as wild as any the travelers had yet passed. Still vast pine forests hung upon their base, and crowned the ridgy precipice that rose perpendicularly from the vale, while above the rolling mists caught the sunbeams, and touched their cliffs with all the magical coloring of light and shade. The scene seemed perpetually changing, and