1818-1820.
So schwing empor dich, Geist, und verweile jetzt
Beim Tode, jetzt durchdringe die Wolke, die
Den Sonnenstrahl der Auferstehung
Fallen nicht lässt in die offnen Gräber!
Lenau.
The first intelligence that Maturin was contemplating a new novel is found in his caustic letter to Murray (Nov. 1816) concerning the non-appearance of the revised edition of Bertram: he mentions, in passing, that he will not have occasion to trouble the publisher about his prose-work, as he has been ‘honoured by the offer of a Society of literary Gentlemen in England, to print the work at their own expense, and to raise a large sum by subscription for the writer.’ The prose-work alluded to was, no doubt, Women; or, Pour et Contre, which appeared in the beginning of 1818. Of the literary gentlemen nothing further was heard, but the author seems really to have been laid under some kind of obligation with regard to the publication of his novel. In September 1817 Maturin states that he is beginning to finish a novel for Mr. Constable, who has displayed unexampled liberality in the matter; and on Nov. 17:th he writes, likewise to Murray: ‘My novel will come out I believe next month. The Countess of Essex has done me the honour to accept of the dedication and an unknown friend has remitted a considerable sum to Mr. Constable in aid of the publication, so that I am in hopes he will have no reason to repent his liberality to me.’ It was through the influence of Scott that the Constables had been induced to purchase the copyright of the book, and it is not improbable that Scott had also played the part of the unknown friend, though it is surprising that such generosity should have been requisite in the present case. To Scott, too, the publishers appealed about a difference that arose between the author and themselves while the proofs were already going through the press. Maturin had composed a preface with the object of defending Bertram—always his favourite production—against the attack of Coleridge, which he had not been quite able to get over. Out of place as a tirade of this sort unquestionably was here, it became the more objectionable by delivering a furious counterblast upon certain of Coleridge’s works. The manuscript being forwarded to Scott, he replied to it with the following letter[104] which, though unfortunately the only specimen left of his communications to Maturin, clearly shows the cordial relations between the master of Abbotsford and his Irish protegé:
26:th February 1818.
Dear Sir—I am going to claim the utmost and best privilege of sincere friendship and goodwill, that of offering a few words of well-meant advice; and you may be sure that the occasion seems important to induce me to venture so far upon your tolerance. It respects the preface to your work which Constable and Co. have sent to me. It is as well written as that sort of thing can be; but will you forgive me if I say—it is too much in the tone of the offence which gave rise to it to be agreeable either to good taste or to general feeling. Coleridge’s work has been little read or heard of, and has made no general impression whatever—certainly no impression unfavourable to you or your play. In the opinion, therefore, of many, you will be resenting an injury of which they are unacquainted with the existence. If I see a man beating another unmercifully, I am apt to condemn him upon the first blush of the business, and hardly excuse him, though I may afterwards learn he had ample provocation.
I never let the thing cling to my mind, and always adhered to my resolution, that if my writings and tenor of life did not confute such attacks, my words never should.
Let me entreat you to view Coleridge’s violence as a thing to be contemned, not retaliated,—the opinion of a British public may surely be set in honest opposition to that of one disappointed and wayward man. You should also consider, en bon Chretien, that Coleridge has had some room to be spited at the world, and you are, I trust, to continue to be a favourite with the public—so that you should totally neglect and despise criticism, however virulent, which arises out of his bad fortune and your good.
I have only to add, that Messrs Constable and Co. are seriously alarmed for the effects of the preface upon the public mind as unfavourable to the work. In this they must be tolerable judges, for their experience as to popular feeling is very great; and as they have met your wishes, in all the course of the transaction, perhaps you will be disposed to give some weight to their opinion upon a point like this. Upon my own part I can only say, that I have no habits of friendship, and scarce those of acquaintance with Coleridge—I have not even read his autobiography—but I consider him as a man of genius, struggling with bad habits and difficult circumstances.
Besides, your diatribe is not hujus loci. We take up a novel for amusement, and this current of controversy breaks out upon us like a stream of lava out of the side of a beautiful green hill; men will say you should have reserved your disputes for reviews or periodical publications, and they will sympathise less with your anger, because they will not think the time proper for expressing it. We are bad judges, bad physicians, and bad divines in our own case; but, above all, we are seldom able when injured or insulted to judge of the degree of sympathy which the world will bear in our resentment and our retaliation. The instant, however, that such degree of sympathy is exceeded, we hurt ourselves and not our adversary; I am so convinced of this, and so deeply fixed in the opinion, that besides the uncomfortable feelings which are generated in the course of literary debate, a man lowers his estimation in the public eye by engaging in such controversy, that, since I have been dipped in ink, I have suffered no personal attacks (and I have been honoured with them of all descriptions) to provoke me to reply. A man will certainly be vexed on such occasions, and I have wished to have the knaves where the muircock was the bailie—or, as you would say, upon the sod—but it is, however, entirely upon your account that I take the liberty of stating an opinion on a subject of such delicacy. I should wish you to give your excellent talents fair play, and to ride this race without carrying any superfluous weight; and I am so well acquainted with my old friend the public, that I could bet a thousand pounds to a shilling that the preface (if that controversial part is not cancelled) will greatly prejudice your novel.
I will not ask your forgiveness for the freedom I have used, for I am sure you will not suspect me of any motives but those which arise from regard to your talents and person; but I shall be glad to hear (whether you follow my advice or no) that you are not angry with me for having volunteered to offer it.
My health is, I think, greatly improved; I have some returns of my spasmodic affection, but tolerable in degree, and yielding to medicine. I hope gentle exercise and the air of my hills will set me up this summer. I trust you will soon be out now. I have delayed reading the sheets in progress after vol. I that I might enjoy them when collected.—Ever yours etc—Walter Scott.
Advice thus tactfully conveyed could not easily be resisted, and the offensive introduction was withdrawn. The short preface which appeared in print, though also relative to Maturin’s other writings, was to quite a different purpose; in it Maturin for the first time publicly owns the authorship of his earlier romances, but only to declare them devoid of all merit:
When I look over those books now, I am not at all surprised at their failure; for, independent of their want of external interest, (the strongest interest that books can have, even in this reading age) they seem to me to want reality, vraisemblance; the characters, situations, and language, are drawn merely from imagination; my limited acquaintance with life denied me any other resource. In the Tale which I now offer to the public, perhaps there may be recognised some characters which experience will not disown. Some resemblance to common life may be traced in them. On this I rest for the most part the interest of the narrative. The paucity of characters and incidents (the absence of all that constitutes the interest of fictitious biography in general) excludes the hope of this work possessing any other interest.
The external incidents in Women are rich and fantastic enough, as will be seen, nor does its superiority consist in the occurrence of the characters in ordinary life, but in the manner in which they are handled, in the penetration which a true poet applies to his personages, whether imaginary or otherwise. Maturin’s modest plea for what has later been called realism, is wound up with a passage perfectly characteristic of his prefaces: humble in appearance, but making, in its way, a strong appeal to the curiosity of the reader:
If this plain avowal of the want of effect in my former attempts does not mitigate the severity of critical animadversion, I have one more plea to offer, which I hope may prove not ineffectual, that it is the last time I ever shall trespass in this way on the indulgence of the public. One more attempt I shall make, and then address my “valete” to the audience, with little hope of being able to add, “plaudite.”
The story opens briskly. The hero, whose name is Charles De Courcy, is travelling up to Dublin from some remote part of Ireland, when, not far from the capital, the coach breaks down. Most of the passengers stop at the village where the accident takes place, but Charles, with the enthusiasm of early youth, continues his way on foot. On arriving, towards evening, at the outskirts of the town, he is passed by a carriage of mysterious appearance; a stifled cry issuing from within seems to indicate that some one is being forcibly carried away. Charles follows in the same direction and, though he soon loses sight of the vehicle, unexpectedly lights upon its burden in a cottage which he enters to make inquiries about his way. He is received by an old beggar-woman, apparently a maniac, and, notwithstanding her anxiety to get rid of him, Charles perceives, in an inner room, the form of a young girl lying immovable, as though in a swoon. Defying the beldam’s imprecations as well as her active resistance, he seizes the girl and hurries out of the house. In the darkness he successfully evades the pursuit of some persons whom he understands to be the agents of the old woman, and at length reaches the lodge at the gate of Phoenix Park. A messenger despatched to town for a carriage returns in company with a gentleman who has accidentally heard him talk about the matter. The new-comer addresses the girl as his niece and immediately removes her in the carriage. He also offers a seat to Charles, but makes no further communication to him about the mystery; the whole adventure dissolves like a dream. The exertion, however, put forth by Charles on the occasion, throws him upon a sick-bed where he is faithfully nursed by a friend called Montgomery, a young man of a Methodist turn of mind. One evening when Charles is able to walk out again, he attends his friend to the chapel which the sect is in the habit of frequenting; he goes there only to kill time, little expecting that he is to meet the girl whom he rescued from the hands of the maniac. She is greatly agitated on seeing him, whereupon he is spoken to by an elderly lady who is with her; though she very unwillingly alludes to the late adventure, she kindly invites him to visit them in their house, which invitation Charles accepts with delight, being already very much in love with the girl. The family of Wentworth appears to consist only of Mr. W., a wealthy man retired from business, otherwise a bigot of a rather unpleasant character, whose sole interest is Calvinistic controversy; of his wife, also intensely religious, but at the same time a woman of head and heart; and of the niece, Eva, a timid and delicate being, who scarcely seems to belong to this world. Charles becomes a constant visitor at the house, yet the intercourse affords him but little satisfaction. Calvinism is the only thing between heaven and earth the Wentworths find worth discussing, and he soon despairs of Eva ever being capable of any other feeling towards him than ordinary gratitude. His strength is wasted by passion and disappointment, and he is again seized with a serious illness. While watching at the bedside of his delirious friend, Montgomery comes to know of his attachment to Eva. Montgomery is in the same predicament himself, but after a victorious struggle with his own aspirations he reveals Charles’s secret to his guardian—De Courcy has no family, only bright prospects of family wealth—whom he has thought it advisable to call to town. This gentleman goes straight to the Wentworths, where his negotiations are crowned with success: when Charles’s health is restored, he is admitted into the family as the acknowledged lover of Eva. His relations to her do not, however, undergo any remarkable change. Eva has scarcely had courage to confess to her aunt that Charles is not indifferent to her, and would never dream of showing her love to any one but her Maker; she is utterly incapable of reciprocating the enthusiastic passion of De Courcy. Charming as she is, the narrowness of her mind and occupations cannot but cool his ardour in course of time—nor has the general atmosphere of the house any attractions to offer to a young man of the world. Charles has at once been set down by Mr. Wentworth as a proper object of conversion, and from this topic his conversation never departs; literature, poetry, and fine arts are not even mentioned between them. One day then all Dublin—except the evangelical circles—is excited by the arrival of Madame Dalmatiani, reputed to be the foremost singer and actress in Europe, who has been induced to give some performances in the Irish capital. Notwithstanding Wentworth’s remonstrations, Charles visits the theatre every night when Madame Dalmatiani—or Zaira, as she is called—is to appear; and it is after becoming personally acquainted with her, that he begins to disregard the maxim expressed in the verse which stands as the motto to the book:
’Tis good to be merry and wise,
’Tis good to be honest and true;
’Tis good to be off with the old love
Before you be on with the new.
He is irresistibly drawn to the refined and luxurious home of Zaira, which indeed forms a striking contrast to the gloomy surroundings he has lately been used to. His visits to the house of the Methodist grow less and less frequent, and before long he becomes the most faithful attendant of Zaira, who, on her part, is by no means unmoved by his intense adoration. They are constantly together; once, on an excursion to Wicklow, they encounter the old woman who had arranged the mysterious abduction of Eva. She addresses them with her usual impetuosity of language, and seems to show some faint recollection of having seen Zaira before. In the meantime the infatuation of De Courcy is made the talk of the town and reaches even Eva in her retirement. She courageously makes up her mind to accompany some of her few worldly-minded acquaintances to the theatre, and when she sees the brilliant apparition of Zaira, she feels that she is lost. Zaira has, indeed, been informed by Montgomery that Charles is engaged to Eva, and generously struggles with her own affections; but when she is leaving Ireland she at the last moment allows him to bear her company. They are, however, not to marry at once, but set out on a journey, during which she intends to ‘develop his soul’ with literature and science. They first proceed to Paris where the Allies are then assembled—the events of the story occur in 1814—and the great metropolis is gayer then ever. Here De Courcy for the second time shows a tendency to forget the maxim quoted above, and an estrangement—involuntary on the part of Zaira—takes place between the lovers. When Montgomery appears with the news that Eva is dying, Charles is broken down by a fit of repentance and returns to Ireland as soon as he is able. Notwithstanding his despair he is not allowed to see Eva, who is fading away like a flower, in spite of most careful medical attendance. As for Zaira, the departure of Charles leaves her in the greatest agony of mind, cutting off the only tie that binds her to life. She finds no longer any happiness in the exercise of her talents; philosophy affords her no consolation, religion has not power to heal her aching heart. She even contemplates ending her sufferings by suicide, but lacks the strength. Sick in mind and body she at last betakes herself to Dublin, where she leads a very quiet life, being chiefly engaged in works of charity among the poor. In a miserable cottage she one evening happens to light upon the old beggar-woman who has figured in the course of the story. She appears to be lying on her death-bed and has, in her last moments, sufficiently recovered her reason to recognize her visitor and inform her that she is her mother. The story of Zaira’s earlier life—she in reality is a native of Ireland—is now given in one of her own letters to a friend.—She is the illegitimate daughter of a rich and despotic land-owner who resided in the West of Ireland and distinguished himself by the irregularities of his private life. Zaira was the only one of his children he ever took any notice of; he early observed her uncommon talents and had her instructed in everything except religion, being himself a convinced atheist. At the age of fifteen she was secretly married to her Italian music-master; but when she became a mother the story could no longer be concealed from her father, who, inconsistently enough, was so incensed at the ‘want of principle’ in his daughter, that he expelled the couple from his house for ever. The Italian, a heartless rascal, separated the child from the mother and left it behind them in Ireland. Then he took his wife to Italy where he compelled her to go on the stage. Gradually she developed into the greatest artist of her time, though almost unwittingly, being always closely guarded by her husband, who reaped all the benefit of her successes. At his death she found herself in possession of a large property which she had earned but never yet enjoyed. The first use she made of her newly-gained liberty was to write to her father and inquire after the fate of her child. The old man promised to give her the information she wanted, and Zaira hurried to Dublin; but scarcely had she arrived there when she learned that her father had suddenly died without leaving any references to the child. Having thus lost all hope of ever finding her child, she again left Ireland in company with De Courcy.—Zaira’s mother was, for some time, the favourite mistress of the mighty man, but then, when she was overtaken in the act of carrying away Zaira in order to bring her up in the Catholic religion, he had turned her out of the house. Subsequently she partially lost her reason, preserving, however, a passionate devotion to her faith, and the desire of imparting it to her descendants guided all her actions; Zaira being out of her reach she turned her attention to Zaira’s child. She led the life of a beggar more by choice than of necessity, for she had, when occasion arose, means of hiring people to carry out her schemes: once, in fact, she was quite on the point of securing the person of her granddaughter who, after the departure of Zaira, had been committed to the care of a wealthy couple in Dublin, and educated as their niece under the name of Eva Wentworth.—Thus Zaira at last becomes acquainted with her daughter’s circumstances. She hastens to the house of Wentworth, but arrives just a moment after Eva has closed her eyes in death of which her mother has been the indirect cause. Shortly afterwards De Courcy also goes the way of all flesh, while Zaira, when the story ends, ‘still lives,’ though a shadow of her former self.
The reproduction of the bare outlines of the story of Women is an easy matter compared to that of Maturin’s earlier novels; what Scott wrote in the Edinburgh Review with reference to the style, is equally true of the construction of the book: ‘We observe, with pleasure, that Mr. Maturin has put his genius under better regulation than in his former publications, and retrenched that luxuriance of language, and too copious use of ornament, which distinguishes the authors and orators of Ireland, whose exuberance of imagination sometimes places them in the predicament of their honest countryman, who complained of being run away with by his legs.’ Nevertheless it is the form which, even here, is most subject to criticism. The book can be divided into two principal parts, the first of which comprises the events happening before Zaira’s journey to Paris with De Courcy, while the second is devoted to the analysis of her mental sufferings after her separation from him; the experiences of De Courcy in the French metropolis, and the closing scenes in Dublin, are allowed comparatively little space. The description of the struggles of Zaira clearly is of secondary importance for the development of the plot, where it thus makes a hiatus of extraordinary length. The narrative is, besides, now and then broken by letters and discussions all of which are not kept within proper bounds. The positive merits, however, of each separate part of the work, more than atone for any lack of proportion in its construction.
Of all the scenes in the book, those in the first part dealing with the Methodist circles of Dublin, unquestionably are the most interesting. Maturin often said that he was no judge of his own works, but he was not mistaken in seeing the main virtue of Women in that it bears ‘some resemblance to common life.’ Formerly, as has been seen, Maturin’s ideas of his special powers had led him carefully to avoid the sphere of ‘common life,’ both in his treatment of external incident and, still more, of emotion; but the fact is that those powers, when ripened into maturity, were distinguished by a versatility not to be confined to any special style of fiction. In Melmoth he returned, with undiminished powers, to the field of pure imagination, against which the preface to Women denotes but a momentary reaction. It was not, perhaps, for artistic reasons only that Maturin, in the present work, described an aspect of common life as led in the rigidly Calvinistic community; the exposure of the less amiable qualities of the sect might have been a not unwelcome side-issue for him, considering the vast difference of his own views from those of the ‘evangelical people,’ at whose instance the peculiarities of Maturin himself had, no doubt, received much damnation. Yet although there certainly is an under-current of satire, that satire never has a ring of personal animosity; on the contrary, it is relieved by a tone of genuine humour and brightened, above all, by the introduction of the angelic figure of Eva. The pursuits and occupations going on in the house of Wentworth, the whole atmosphere of a place where Calvinistic pamphlets are the only literature that is tolerated, and the only music ever enjoyed consists of evangelical hymns—all this is reflected in a manner the very graphicness of which suggests impartiality. The household bears the stamp of its master, who is incapable of cherishing more than one idea at a time:
His manners were repulsive, his understanding narrow, and his principles inflexibly rigid; his mind was rather tenacious than strong; what little he knew, he knew thoroughly, and what he once acquired he retained for ever. Early in life he had made a large fortune with a spotless character, and having retired from business, found his mind utterly vacant; by the persuasion of his wife, he was induced to listen to the evangelical preachers, and (as is often the case with converts either in early youth or in advanced life,) in a short time he far outwent his preceptors. Calvinism, Calvinism was every thing with him; his expertness in the five points would have foiled even their redoutable refuter, Dr. Whitby himself; but his theology having obtained full possession of his head, seemed so satisfied with its conquest, that it never ventured to invade his heart.—
To a character thus formed, the abstinence from the vanities of life costs no struggle, and implies no victory over himself, for Calvinism is sufficient to afford him amusement as well as edification; the most enthusiastic playgoer could not await a first night with more eagerness than Wentworth looks forward to an occasion upon which a Socinian, a Catholic, an Arian, and an Arminian Methodist, are to be exposed ‘for the whole night to the battery of a dozen resolute Calvinists.’ In the house of Wentworth the community naturally can feel safe from any disturbing interferences, and it is, in fact, their habitual place of meeting. Among the daily guests is the greatest orator of the sect, a Tartuffian figure called Macowen, who appears to have also a private reason for visiting the family:
He was the son of a poor labourer, the tenant of a wealthy gentleman in Cork, whose wife was evangelical; she instructed the children of her husband’s tenants in her own system; her husband gave her no disturbance; he followed his fox-hounds all day, and damned his wife’s Methodism over his claret all night. The good lady went her own way, and discovering in this lad, maugre his fierce red hair and bare broad feet, evident marks of his being “a growing and a gracious character” — — — — She proposed a subscription among her friends to enable him to enter the university, and be qualified “to minister at the altar.”
The subscription went on zealously, and young Macowen entered College; but when once there, his views, as they were called, expanded so rapidly, that no Church Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Independent, had the good fortune precisely to suit his sentiments in orthodoxy of system, or purity of discipline. Thus he moved a splendid and erratick meteor, shedding his light on the churches as he passed, but defying them all to calculate his orbit, or ascertain his direction. In the mean time, it had been suggested to him that many evangelical females, of large fortune, would not be unwilling to share his fate. This hint, often repeated and readily believed, threw a most odious suavity into his manner; his overblown vulgar courtesy was like the flowers of the poppy, all glare and stench. Under these circumstances, he had become the intimate of the Wentworth family; and from the moment he beheld Eva, his feelings were what he could not describe, and would not account for even to himself, but what he was determined implicitly to follow. His system took part with his inclinations, and in a short time he believed it a duty to impress her with the conviction that her salvation must depend on her being united with him.—
The inmost reason for Mr. Wentworth having suffered so meritorious a wooer to be outrivalled by the unbelieving De Courcy lies in his still being enough of a man of business fully to appreciate the considerable property the latter is heir to. His wife, on the other hand, is really attached to the preserver of her ‘niece.’ She is a woman remarkable for intelligence of mind and dignity of character; and though her manner appears stiff and constrained by the influence of her religion, she is naturally warm-hearted and loves Eva as if she were her own child. She cannot, however, do much to enliven the heavy routine fixed by Wentworth and Macowen, the monotony of which is broken only by scenes like the following. De Courcy and Montgomery call one morning when the gentlemen are sitting at the breakfast-table, engaged in an animated controversy with a new convert:
The muffins had been swallowed wholesale, the eggs scarcely tasted, (though Macowen was a very good judge of eggs), and the tea drank scalding hot, in the rage of debate, and still it raged. Mrs. Wentworth sat at her knitting, at safe distance from the field of battle, and Eva poured out cup after cup in silence. Macowen had been pressing the new convert for a test of his faith; for he had no idea of a man’s having any religion unless he could specify it under a particular denomination, and signify his creed by a kind of free-masonic sign, technical and decisive. This the convert refused, it seems; and as the young men came in, he was bellowing, with a cup of tea in his hand, which he was spilling in the trepidation of his rage,—“No, sir—no, sir—never, never. I will neither be Catholic or Protestant, Arminian or Calvinist.”
“Don’t put Arminian first,” said Mr. Wentworth.
He went on.—“Neither Trinitarian or Arian—neither Universalist or Particularist. No sir.—Sir, I will be a Christian.—Yes, I will be a Christian, (foaming with passion). I will—I will be a Christian.” And his voice was actually a roar, and he thumped the table in the fury of his vociferation and the eagerness of his orthodoxy.—
Against this sombre background stand out the characters of the principal personages. Eva, the most pathetic among all the figures of Maturin’s creation, is drawn with a skill almost unparalleled in the art of representing a character in the purest and most ethereal light imaginable, without detracting anything from an unswerving fidelity to nature. She is as real in her goodness as in her timidity and inexperience. She has all the passive loveliness which can possibly flourish in such surroundings as hers, and is completely devoid of every active quality implying any degree of independence of mind. There is nothing brilliant about her, and the range of her ideas is certainly narrow. She would not think of doubting the infallibility of the opinions expressed by Mr. Wentworth or Macowen; but for her own part she instinctively clings to what there is best and noblest in her religion; and what little energy she possesses is employed, not in controversy, but in works of charity among the children of the poor. She is never severe to any one except herself, and shows firmness only in a punctual attention to her own religious duties. With these she unfortunately feels the demands of her temporal bridegroom to be irreconcilable, and though she suffers greatly under the conflict, she cannot find her way out of it. Her attachment to De Courcy is true and deep; but she is, as Scott said, ‘unable to express her passion otherwise than by dying for it.’ A passion of so unsubstantial a description would have put to severe trial the patience of most lovers, let alone that of De Courcy who, at the commencement of the story, is a young man of seventeen, without any self-denying tendencies. The inclination of Maturin to represent his heroes and heroines in their earliest dawn of youth sometimes led to implausibilities, but not in the present case. De Courcy is the most carefully sketched of all his male characters, delineated, in fact, with a subtlety and penetration far in advance of what the fiction of the time usually attained. His chief characteristics are precocity and weakness; constitutional weakness, in spite of a splendid external appearance, and an inconsistency of mind and fickleness of disposition constantly at war with the good and generous qualities which the author, with impartial hand, bestows upon him. The interest of a ‘protector’ with which he regards Eva after their little adventure very soon and very naturally yields to a deeper feeling which, to begin with, knows of no pretensions. On the first occasion of his being invited to the house of Wentworth he is plunged amid an evangelical dinner-party, most capitally described, where he feels but ill at ease, being the only ‘unenlightened’ person present; the gentlemen are sitting apart, ‘on their chairs sublime, in thought more elevate, and reason high’ in terms which he does not even understand—and the ladies are gathered in the drawing-room talking, for the most part, nothing at all; but one look from Eva repays him all his weariness and embarrasment: ‘For months after he fed on that look; it came to him like a beam of light, and he forgot whether it was day or night when it glanced before his eyes.’ Yet the pleasure of feeding on a look sooner or later will be exhausted, and a character like his is not formed to bear disappointments. He is almost broken down both in mind and body when he suspects that he is indifferent to Eva, and when he has learned that this is not so, the incompatibility of their views and habits seems to raise insuperable obstacles between them. Their short hours of confidence are always interrupted in the same way:
One evening he had succeeded in prevailing on her to listen to “The Lay of the Last Minstrel;” she was struck by the introduction, and Charles was proceeding with that increasing confidence which the increasing interest of a listener gives a reader, when the clock struck, and she reminded him it was time to go to the evening lecture at Bethesda Chapel. Charles, with a sigh, threw aside the poem, and accompanied her. The sermon was eloquent and long, the congregation profoundly attentive; Charles sate abstracted and listless. As they returned, the lovely calmness of a vernal night revived the feelings of Charles; and as Eva leaned on his arm, and sometimes raised her looks (but with other feelings than his) to the bright blue spangled sky, that exquisite passage broke involuntarily from his lips, that ends with, “for lovers love the western star.”
Eva started, started with actual terror; she felt the name or language of love like a profanation of the moment, and told him that she was trying to recollect the substance of the sermon she had just heard, and impress it on her memory. Charles was silent; and silently accompanied her home, where nothing but the sermon was spoken of, and every division and subdivision of theological subtlety was run on it to exhaust the hour that must intervene till the bell was rung for the servants to attend the family devotions, and a long extempore prayer from Mr. Wentworth concluded the night.
There is, in the purity and innocence of Eva, something sublime that often makes Charles himself feel it almost a crime to intrude upon her with too vehement declarations of a worldly passion. The result of this is, however, that they never ‘love like lovers,’ and it is shown with much psychological insight how they gradually glide away from each other by reason of an unnatural spiritualization of their mutual relations. Their estrangement is subsequently hastened by the appearance of Zaira, whose society Charles from the first imprudently cultivates. In the person of Zaira critics have been wont to see an expression of the usual ‘extravagance’ of Maturin’s writings. Yet allowing for some casual exaggeration of her great talents, the general characterization stands on a very high level. The figure is not new in Maturin—both Lady Montrevor in The Wild Irish Boy and Armida Fitzalban in The Milesian Chief are studies of this kind; but Zaira is depicted with a moderation and veracity infinitely superior to either. She is none of those distinguished dilettantes that have acquired their accomplishments conveniently in their leisure hours; she is a professional artist and has attained her prominence through hard and unremitting work—work which, as a matter of fact, is the only way to the pinnacles of art. Her character is naturally noble, and she is free from all haughtiness and caprice. Under the bitter sorrow she has sustained, her heart has remained pure and tender, yearning ever for love which she has never met with. In the isolation she has suffered during the greater part of her existence, her mind has been cultivated and her abilities developed at the expense of her experience in practical affairs; she has become curiously unfamiliar with real life and displays, on several occasions, a naiveté almost equal to that of Eva herself. This contrast between her superior intellect and her incapacity of extricating herself from the difficulties of common life is presented with an exquisite skill, and to it she owes the tragedy of her fate. Zaira’s attachment to De Courcy originates, on her part, in a need of tenderness that has nothing to do with passion. The news of the loss of her child throws her into a desolation of mind in which she first receives his enthusiastic admiration with a feeling inspired by the instinct of self-preservation. She says in a letter to her friend:
How often! oh, how often! gazing on his perfect form, have I wished that, if it were possible, such had been the child I lost, such were the child I found! It is impossible, I feel, for the heart long to be vacant. One image filled mine for many years, and the very length and intensity of those feelings created a habit of the heart, which it might have been fatal to my existence, or my reason, not the have indulged.—
From this, indeed, there is but a short step to love, though she is, characteristically enough, herself the last to become aware of it. Knowing that Charles is engaged she tries to persuade herself that what she feels for him is only friendship which can well be extended to her rival; and she succeeds in building up a theory in which she, at the time, firmly believes:
The friendship, which will be the charm of my future existence, will be purified and ennobled by the certainty that the object of it is devoted to another, to whom he will shortly be united; and the security which is enough to satisfy my own heart, I do not hesitate to offer to the world careless whether it will accept or reject it.
But if the world could ever read a heart, the innocence of mine would astonish and convert it. At this moment, my whole pile of future happiness rests on the foundation of theirs—Yes, of theirs. To see two beings, equally amiable, equally beloved, enriched by my fortune—improved by my talents—and elevated by the distinction which I have not dishonourably attained, would be not only beyond all I have ever enjoyed, (alas! that has been but little hitherto,) but all that I have even conceived. I shall feel like the happy genius, who constructed a palace of gems for the favoured Aladdin and his bride, and then was seen no more.—
Her correspondent, a Frenchwoman of fashion, at once understands the situation; and her letters—which are very cleverly written and present an amusing mixture of frivolity and acute observation—tear down the theory of Zaira and open her eyes to the state of her own feelings. Once acknowledged, these feelings, rapidly grow stronger, and the end, in spite of desperate attempts at bridling her passion, is what has been told.—Neither does Charles leave Eva without a great deal of honest and painful struggling against his new infatuation, though he knows that his strength is not to be relied upon. He is induced to make a final appeal to Eva in a fine scene—: she is frightened by a thunderstorm into a swoon when Charles, supporting her, hears her whisper something about his intention of forsaking her—which she purposely never alludes to. The situation vividly reminds him of their first meeting, and his tenderness for her takes hold of him once more:
“Desert you—never, never—May the lightning strike me first!—Forsake you—never, never—Eva, my beloved—beloved of my soul—Yes, warm your cold cheek on mine; yes, rest your dear, dear head on my bosom; do not let its beatings startle you—Yes, twine your lovely fingers in mine—It is a heart that loves you, yours is prest to; it is a hand that soon will be yours you clasp—Why do your fingers wander so wildly among my hair, my love? one ringlet of yours is worth all that ever—And how often has this hair,” he continued wildly, “been damp with despair? how often has it been torn in anguish, since I knew Zaira?”
Eva revived, and her pure feelings acting instinctively, she started from his arms, and still pale with terror, she tried to falter out an apology for her terrors.
“No,” said De Courcy, pursuing, and kneeling at her feet, “no, you must not fly me. This is a decisive moment—a moment that must end many struggles. Eva, already are you cold, already silent? Is it only in terror and danger you cling to me? Is it only in the terrible intervals of paroxysm and insensibility that I am ever doomed to feel your arms twined round me, to hear your lips utter my name? Already I see your countenance averted from me, the moment it has the power to give a conscious look.”
And so it was; for Eva, trembling at the recollection that her arms had been thrown round him, sat abashed and confounded.
“Eva, I call on you passionately, solemnly. This is the crisis of both our destinies. Speak—tell me that you love—love me as I wish, as I demand to be loved. Bind me to you by an irresistible confession—make me yours for ever. One word, one penetrating word of fire. One word of the language of the heart. Utter it, and bless me.”
Eva, struggling between her timidity and her passion, tried to comply with, his wishes. She searched her feelings, for something that might correspond with his. It was in vain; her pure heart had not one image that reflected the ardour of his. Her lip knew no language that could answer him. Distressed and perplexed, she sat with distress and perplexity increasing, anxious to give him some proof of her sincerity, but unable to give one that would satisfy him.
“Eva, speak, do you love me?”
“Have I not said so?”
“Oh! when we love, it is so easy to pour out the proofs with an overflowing sensibility; the heart luxuriates in those proofs of its being deeply touched; it is oppressed by its own fullness, and delights to communicate what it cannot bear undivided. If you loved, Eva, love itself would inspire you with involuntary testimonies; your very silence would be eloquence, nor would I have to kneel at your feet for a word in vain.”
“What can I say?” said Eva, his doubts becoming too strong for her fears; “is passion to be mistrusted, because its power renders, us speechless?” And trembling at her own temerity in uttering these words, she became silent.
Was De Courcy satisfied with this declaration? We know not; for it is certain that there is an exaggerated sensibility, a sensibility that doubts its own truth, and is better satisfied with words than with things. It requires to be paid in its own coin, and would rather hear a florid sentiment than accept of the most perfect sacrifice.
This interview is indeed decisive: it is the last time the passion, of De Courcy flames up in the presence of Eva. When the hour of Zaira’s departure draws nigh he renounces ‘all engagements, all ties, and all objects’—and obtains her permission to accompany her. He has already sent a note to Eva begging her to forgive him if she can, in answer to which note he receives a long letter, said by a critic[105] to be ‘for feeling, for eloquence, for heart-touching resignation, and impassioned grief, almost unique in the language.’ The writing of this letter is made easy to her by the presentiment that she will not overlive his desertion of her; and her resignation is so free from all factitious generosity and all ostentatious self-sacrifice, that the beatings of a human heart are, as it were, audible through the lines.—
In connection with Zaira’s stay in Ireland a few glimpses are given of the higher society of Dublin, which, no doubt, also ‘bear some resemblance to common life.’ Maturin was, by this time, familiar with all the circles the town could boast of, and the drawing-room does not escape a fling of his good-natured satire any more than the conventicle. De Courcy is introduced to Zaira at a large evening party, given in her honour by a Lady Longwood, the wife of one of his guardians. The bustle excited by the presence of Zaira; the idle expectations of a more substantial refreshment, entertained by ‘mammas and misses’ who have been talking themselves hungry in her praise; Lady Longwood moving among her guests canvassing applauses for the indifferent musical performances of her silly daughters, before the eyes of the greatest artist in Europe: all is described with a humour and a vivacity that makes one regret that Maturin so seldom, in his writings, gave vent to those high spirits by which he was distinguished in private life. One of the finest chapters in this part of the book is further the one containing an account of Eva’s visit to the theatre. She is enough of a woman to feel an irresistible desire of seeing her famous rival, but would never dare to speak about it to her foster-parents. Going out, however, she one day accidentally meets Lady Longwood and her daughters, with whom she is slightly acquainted, and, summoning up all her courage, accepts their invitation to accompany them to witness Zaira’s last appearance on the stage. Her confusion at the theatre where everything is new to her, the overwhelming impression produced upon her by the brilliant apparition of Zaira, and her anguish when she observes De Courcy behind the scenes are analysed with a dramatic force and a marvellous penetration into the innocent soul-life of Eva. Less interesting, from an artistic point of view, are the scenes taking place at the house of Zaira, chiefly filled with literary discussions. A well-sketched personage, however, present on most of these occasions, is De Courcy’s friend Montgomery: a blunt and honest character who sees with unselfish grief that his friend is beginning to neglect Eva, and who tries to bring him back to the way of duty by the not very chivalrous means of endeavouring to detect and point out immoral or blameworthy tendencies in the views and principles of Zaira. To this end he obstinately contradicts her where he can, and once, weary of hearing Zaira’s taste called ‘classical,’ he makes a furious attack upon the entire classical literature, falling upon the ancients ‘with redoutable, repeated blows, slaying them, like Sampson, by thousands.’ These doubts as to the excellence of one of the corner-stones of English education roused the wrath of the critics of Women, who, naturally enough, felt irritated at being told that in their own days Horace would have been hanged and Juvenal stood in the pillory. The method of ascribing to the author the opinions of his personages, always applied with vigour in the case of the Rev. Mr. Maturin, came here, for once, pretty near the truth. It is not only in Women that he displays a hostility to classical studies; in one of his sermons he speaks of them with a marked and candid antipathy:
I will say it is the black and crying sin of civilized Europe, to compel their children to familiarize their young imaginations with the most brutal crimes, and force their most unripened passions, by placing them in a hot-bed of unutterable impurity. This we do—this we have done for centuries—and this we shall answer for in eternity. Let me propose one plain question to the admirers of the classic writers, as they are called: If a father finds his son reading such passages as occur in their books in his own language, would he not fling the vile pages into the flames, and scarce think those flames too bad for the author?
As Maturin himself had been, for a long time, occupied in giving instruction in this same branch of learning, he knew very well that the copies of the ancients committed into the hands of British school-boys were carefully pruned of the passages he took such offence at; and his eccentric inveighings against the classical writers expressed, after all, his artistic temperament rather than any zeal for morality. His literary tastes were eminently romantic, notwithstanding his admiration for Pope. He had accepted the revival of Mediaevalism in all its phases; his own work began under the auspices of Mrs. Radcliffe and ended with an imitation of Walter Scott; and his works possess every quality generally termed romantic. But Maturin’s Women affords, at the same time, a striking proof of the fact that the romantic writers could occasionally greatly excel in realism, though the spirit of classicism was to them foreign and indeed odious.—
The fancy of Zaira to devote a year before her intended marriage to De Courcy to an ‘intellectual existence’ during which she is to finish his education, is as consistent with her ideal and theoretical cast of mind as it is inconsistent with anything like common prudence. Paris is, moreover, the most unfortunate place she could choose for the commencement of her task; in the most brilliant society of Europe not even Zaira can make so unique a figure as in Dublin, and to the fluctuating mind of De Courcy the gay metropolis has a thousand things to offer, calculated to attract him more than the conversation of Zaira. Among these is a person called Eulalie de Touranges—otherwise unimportant, but just giving him the pleasure of a transitory flirtation, new to his experience, and irresistible at his age. Thus the relation between the lovers very soon becomes constrained in a way appropriately described in a letter of one of Zaira’s friends:
Yesterday I met them at a party at our friend ——’s. The circle was brilliant, and Zaira was unusually eloquent in literature. At the end of a striking sentence which had called forth loud applauses from her auditors, she looked round with a flush of triumph in her lovely countenance for De Courcy. She saw him engaged, not in conversation, but in delighted listening attention to the beautiful Eulalie de Touranges. He was bending over her chair in silence. I marked the change in her countenance, in her voice; the subsiding of her whole figure; the gloomy vacancy of disappointment in her expression. Her hearers did not notice it; they pressed her with some new remarks. She attempted to answer, but evidently did not understand them; struggled to recover her composure, and went on, obviously not knowing of what she was speaking. Music was proposed soon after; and apparently determined to force De Courcy to feel an interest in what she was undertaking, she asked him what she should sing. He appeared not pleased at the publicity which this application gave him, and returned some slight answer, referring her to her own choice. She sat down. I could hear her sigh. She turned languidly over the leaves of her music-book, and sung an air sotto voce with a tone, a look, a manner unlike—oh, how unlike Zaira! At the close of the air, she turned her head almost imperceptibly, and saw De Courcy arranging the men on a chess-board with Mademoiselle de Touranges. The last notes of the air were nearly unintelligible.—
The episode with Eulalie de Touranges is not the only circumstance contributing to the alienation between De Courcy and Zaira. The very basis of their friendship is unnatural. No man, as Maturin simply remarks, is pleased to be the pupil of a woman, and to be continually reminded of the superiority of Zaira cannot fail to become irritating to De Courcy. His liaison to an actress is, moreover, often misconstrued in a way that is very disagreeable to him; but, weak as he is, instead of resolutely defending her honour, he only wishes to get rid of her. Once he is told that Zaira has been married and even had a child, the fate of whom is entirely unknown. His love to her being already on the decline, he feels, and not quite without reason, greatly incensed at her having never mentioned this to him. The innocent figure of Eva begins to reappear to his mind, and when he hears from Montgomery that Eva is lying dangerously ill, his sensitive nature is utterly shocked at the thought of his being the cause of her death. Nothing can now detain him at Paris. The development of these incidents is traced with an inner logic that makes De Courcy’s return to Ireland appear not only natural but inevitable, and forces the reader at once to accept the argumentation. Scott, indeed, says in his critique on Women that De Courcy’s desertion of Zaira is not ‘half so probably motived as his first offence against the code of constancy;’ but his judgment proceeds, no doubt, from an honest indignation at a hero so lamentably deficient in what had always been considered as the principal qualification of one, fidelity in love: summing up the characteristics of De Courcy, the author of Waverley concludes by wishing him to the devil. Yet De Courcy, although the ‘hero’ of an extensive novel, is meant to be neither admired nor hated, only understood, and the characterization is executed with a realism which the time was not quite able to appreciate.—As for Zaira, she knows nothing of the art of keeping the interest of a lover alive by occasionally exercising some reserve towards him; it is impossible for her not to show clearly that he is all she lives for, and this deep and serious view of their relation would, even in itself, inspire a kind of awe in the fickle-minded De Courcy. Now the passion of Zaira is heightened according as that of De Courcy cools down; she is seized with that eccentric, all-absorbing infatuation which persons of genius sometimes conceive for objects wholly unworthy of it. Having been kept, for a time, painfully hovering between hope and despair, she is at last relieved from all doubts. It happens in rather a hackneyed way: she gets hold of a bit of paper on which De Courcy has begun to compose an answer to his guardian who has written to him and implored him to come back, and Zaira makes out the words: ‘I am weary, sick to the soul of my present situation; I shall fly from it as soon as possible.’ The lack of originality, however, is easily forgotten in the almost appalling power with which the sufferings of Zaira are described, sufferings that gradually deprive her of her talents and her health, of everything but life. Of pride she has never had much; now she loses every trace of it. Although aware that she is wearying him, she is still anxious to appear in his company, and when he actually begins to shun her, she even follows him in the street, and stealing to his hotel, at last sees him depart. But for the tender care which some of her French friends take of her, Zaira would perish; to restore her to her former vigour, however, is not in human power. She cannot find peace in any of her old pursuits, nothing can divert her mind from the calamity that has befallen her. At this time she is thrown into the society of an atheistic philosopher who, in support of his theories, endeavours to prove to her that misery is, and must be, the lot of all intellectual beings. Their conversations on this subject unquestionably belong to the longueurs of the book; as the adoption of his sceptical views would not, in her present state of mind, be of any solace to Zaira, the discourses are unnecessarily protracted, and her escape from the ‘snares’ of the philosopher does not appear so meritorious as is probably intended. But all the more impressively are described Zaira’s attempts at turning to religion, seeking consolation in a living faith. Her friends have taken her to a beautiful villa in the country, where she has a singular experience while roaming about in a summer night:
— — — The garden, with its placid regular beauty, tortured her by its contrast to the agitation of her soul. A gate, at the extremity of it, opened into a wood; she hurried into the wood, its darkness was as light unto her, it seemed as a shelter from her own thoughts, and she fled to it with avidity. Nature, in all its rich and exhaustless luxuriance, has nothing to the eye or to the soul so delicious as the mild splendour of moonlight, shed over the darkness of a forest. There is darkness beneath for the unhappy to muse—there is light above for the happy to gaze on—and the trembling gleams between the branches give a strong image of life, chequered indeed with fitful and precarious lustre, but of which the predominant image is gloom—diversified, but essential.
Zaira wandered on; the beauty of the night, the mildness of the climate, precluded all apprehension from her wandering at this late hour. She found herself in a part of the wood where the thick-mingling branches excluded all light, but a tremulous and chequered gleam, that appeared and disappeared among the foliage above, as it was agitated slightly by the breeze. Suddenly a figure appeared to her in the darkness; a white figure, as large as life. She started at first, but a moment after approached it; just where it seemed to stand, the trees opened a little, and the moonlight fell strongly on it, producing a remarkable and solemn effect. It was a figure of Christ on the cross, which had been taken from a ruined church in the neighbourhood, and placed there by the peasantry. It was of wood, but it was well executed, and the light that fell on it at once concealed its defects, and magnified its expression. What an object for a mind in the state of Zaira’s!—Accident, that had so often presented her with the most terrible omens, seemed in this to seek to make atonement. The image of the Saviour of the world hanging on the cross a sacrifice for mankind, surrounded by darkness, and concentrating and reflecting the light solely from his own figure, was an intuitive symbol of relief. She approached it, as she would the presence of a friend. The pale and dying countenance, the woe-bent head, the outspread arms, seemed to unite the expression of suffering and protection—singular but intelligible combination. None can pity but those who have suffered. “He that suffered, being tempted, is able to succour those that are tempted.”
As Zaira gazed on this figure, it seemed to live, to speak to her. Texts of scripture rushed on her heart, as if whispered to it by the Deity. She appeared to hear these sounds issuing audibly from the lifeless lips of the figure—“Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” She obeyed the call thus echoed from the bottom of her heart; she prostrated herself before the cross. Her spirit was bowed down along with her body, as she exclaimed, “Oh, my God! accept a heart that has wandered, but longs to return to its Saviour. Purify it, regenerate it, fill it with the love of you alone. Had it known no other but yours, it had never been almost broken. Let your Spirit descend on it, and aid me to struggle with that image, for which all its pulses have beat, which has been wrapt in its very core. You alone are worthy of that place, which a mortal has too long usurped. Vindicate it for yourself, and set me free. Deliver me into the glorious liberty of the children of God, unconscious of any presence, incapable of admitting any image, but yours; dead to the world, and absorbed in God alone.”
But though she uttered these words, it seemed as if some inner winding of her treacherous heart was disclosed to her, where the image of Charles rested, and defied the power even of heaven to displace him. It seemed to her as if she dreaded lest her own prayers should be heard; and that if the Deity had that moment offered to efface that image for ever from her soul, to make it as the image of one she had never seen or seen always with indifference, she would have shrunk from the offer, and implored any other infliction at his hands.—
The religious inspiration Zaira has thus felt for a moment does not return, although she passes the greater part of the night before the Crucifix, where she is, in the morning, found insensible. All her devotional exercises are in vain; for as she cannot find peace in the spirit of religion, her efforts to embrace its empty forms are also doomed to fail. She makes some arrangements to enter a convent, but is deterred from it after a conversation she holds with an old nun, a resident of the place. The results of an existence that leads to apathy and stupefaction, that deadens every feeling and makes living automata of human beings, are displayed in the person of the nun with all the force expressing Maturin’s innate horror at a life in monotony—and Zaira abandons her intention with a strong conviction that she could not buy the salvation of her soul at the price of killing it first. The convent was, indeed, the usual refuge of fictitious characters in great distress; in The Heart of Midlothian which appeared in the same year as Women, Lady Staunton—the ‘Zaira’ of that great novel—ends in a continental convent practising all the vigils and austerities of the religion, and is then heard of no more. Yet it would have been a too convenient way of quenching the fire by which Zaira is consumed, and breaking off the psychological process she is undergoing, to shut her within the walls of a convent. The author pursues with unfaltering consistency the restless strivings of her powerful mind after forgetfulness which she both wishes and dreads. Perceiving that her aim cannot be reached in solitude, she engages in acts of private charity, visiting the poor and sick until she is tired out. Satisfaction, however, is denied her; it is boldly shown that a person, however good and noble, cannot perforce make herself religious, and that there are circumstances under which that remedy fails, without any fault of the patient’s. Weary to the soul, she at last decides to put an end to her life. In all her vicissitudes, it must be observed, her nature has remained unchanged, and with the most terrible reality before her eyes she still lives half in a world of theories. She discusses the subject of suicide with her friends, and passes some painful nights in reading accounts of the deaths of Brutus and Cato.[106] Yet at the decisive moment her reason wanders; dream and reality are blended; magnificent visions chase each other through her delirious brain, and on recovering she clearly remembers having seen a white figure whom she imagines to be the Irish girl, once forsaken for her. This figure continues to haunt her mind, and as it is something she can concentrate her thoughts upon, it soon becomes an idée fixe with her. Weak and exhausted as she is, she travels to Dublin. From a morbid inclination as much as for philanthropical reasons she keeps on visiting the filthiest streets and most miserable hovels, in one of which, as has been related, she finds her wretched mother.—
To this part of the book, above all others, must be applied what Alaric Watts wrote in 1819: ‘“Women” is a work which, with all its dullness, its monotony of suffering, and its horrible anatomy of the moral frame, stands alone among modern writings—there is nothing like it—its profound and philosophic melancholy, its terrible researches into the deepest abysses of the human heart, and of human feeling—its daring drawing the veil of the “holy of holies,” while the hand that draws it trembles at the touch, make it a work unequalled in the list of English novels.’ This sentence was justified; Women stood alone among contemporary writings. The tendency pointed out by Watts is one which, according to a modern writer,[107] indicates the latest phase in the development of the novel: ‘Yet I think he is but a superficial student of the literature of recorded time who does not note one tendency of later work, of later method, of later procedure, of later life, as compared with earlier work, earlier method, earlier procedure, and earlier life, which seems to imply an underlying law. — — — This law of tendency is, in general, that the depiction of the external, objective, carnal, precedes, in every form of expression of which we can have records, the consideration of the internal, the subjective, the spiritual. We go from shapes, and forms, and bulk, and externals, to the presentation of the life within.’ Now the growth of the ‘novel of personality’ towards a closer representation of the ‘life within’ does not show any remarkable progress during the second decade of the century which, on the contrary, is marked by the rapid rise of the historical novel. It is no wonder that the depth and intensity with which the inner life is depicted in Maturin’s Women, should make a powerful impression upon thoughtful minds, though on the part of the larger public the book met with the usual fate of a work in advance of its time.—
While Zaira is well-nigh breaking down under the inconstancy of De Courcy, her daughter is, in Dublin, pining away from the same cause. In the Wentworth family things are going on in the same old style, Eva only is able to take less and less part in the usual proceedings. The symptoms of her disease manifest themselves in a general weakness, alarmingly increasing. Physicians are duly consulted—sea-air is recommended by one, mountain-air by another. Eva submits to all with a passive smile; she has not the least doubt that she is hastening to her grave. Soon, indeed, this becomes evident to the rest of the family, and Wentworth already plans what evangelical institutions might be supported by the fortune which will probably fall to him after Eva’s death, that is, the capital settled on her by her grandfather. A little incident exposing, in a masterly way, the inmost characters of the principal members of the circle, is related in connection with a meeting where Macowen is requested to give a ‘word of prayer.’ This gentleman, who also has been thwarted in love, deems this a suitable opportunity of taking his revenge, and exercises his eloquence entirely at the expense of Eva:
—he implored the mercy of Heaven for a wanderer who had strayed from the fold; for one “who had forsaken the guide of her youth, and forgotten the Covenant of her God; who had loved strangers, and after them would go.” And as he went on, aided by the sympathising murmur of the audience, his memory supplying him with images, and his passions with eloquence, there was not a single metaphor in the Old Testament descriptive of the apostacy of the Jews from their God, that he did not apply to Eva, who, compelled to kneel out this martyrdom, wished to sink into the earth to escape it. This cruel holding her up as an object to a numerous circle, was the most painful trial she had yet experienced. Wentworth thought it excellent, and expressed much hope from the strivings of that godly man in her behalf. Mrs. Wentworth thought very differently; her feelings were so much outraged, she could hardly remain on her knees; and when her husband soon after proposed Macowen to be of a party that was to meet at their house, Mrs. Wentworth strenuously declared, “He should not come into their city, nor shoot an arrow there.” And Wentworth was not displeased with her opposition to his wishes, because it was couched in the language of Isaiah, whom Macowen had taught him to call the fifth evangelist.
One evening as Eva is sitting in her garden, De Courcy appears before her; she swoons in his arms and, from that moment, does not leave her bed. He besieges Mrs. Wentworth with letters and supplications, but is no more admitted to Eva, whose only wish is to die in peace. It is not without much exertion of her feeble strength that she succeeds in repelling the image of her lover from her thoughts and fixing them on religion alone, yet at length she attains the tranquillity which Zaira had sought in vain, and her last moments are undisturbed by any earthly memories. The pitiable state into which De Courcy is reduced is spoken of in a tone evincing the author’s latent sympathy for him, but he forbears to give any detailed relation of the end of his hero: a character like De Courcy is interesting only in hours of happiness and enthusiasm. And as a crowning touch of the knowledge of the conditions of human nature displayed in Maturin’s Women must be mentioned the circumstance that Zaira remains alive. She is strong, having never been accustomed to self-indulgence. At an age when Eva and Charles knew no external compulsion, but were free to follow the dictates of their feelings, Zaira was placed face to face with real life in its sternest aspect, and the strenuous work into which she was driven, has, while she has had strength to go through it at all, hardened her vitality so that death touches her not when it would be most welcome. She lives on in the painful consciousness of having caused the death of her child, unknown and unnoticed. The book ends with this melancholy aphorism:
When great talents are combined with calamity, their union forms the tenth wave of human suffering—grief becomes inexhaustible from the unhappy fertility of genius, and the serpents that devour us, are generated out of our own vitals.
Women is, in conception as well as in execution, the most original of Maturin’s novels. What literary reminiscences there may be discerned—and these are but of a superficial character—lead, for the most part, back to his own work. It has already been said that his second book, The Wild Irish Boy, contains scenes and personages that anticipate certain things in the present work. The hero there was not unlike De Courcy; his affections would hover between a brilliant mother and a pale and delicate daughter; his friend Hammond was a very distinct prototype of Montgomery. Hammond approves of Lady Montrevor as little as Montgomery does of Zaira, and he also is anxious to detect something condemnable in the opinions and conversation of the remarkable woman who has bewitched his friend. The imperfectly sketched characters and the clumsy composition of The Wild Irish Boy are of little interest in themselves, but they clearly show the enormous advance of Maturin’s powers after the success of Bertram. In Zaira critics were inclined to see an imitation—hostile reviewers said a caricature—of M:me de Staël’s Corinne. Scott writes: ‘We have — — — — hinted at some of the author’s errors; and we must now, in all candour and respect, mention one of considerable importance, which the reader has perhaps anticipated. It respects the resemblance betwixt the character and fate of Zaira and Corinne—a coincidence so near, as certainly to deprive Mr. Maturin of all claim to originality, so far as this brilliant and well-painted character is concerned. In her accomplishments, in her beauty, in her talents, in her falling a victim to the passion of a fickle lover, Zaira closely resembles her distinguished prototype.’ All this is true, yet the most essential point of contact between the two characters is left unmentioned. The type was one that had occupied Maturin’s imagination long before he wrote Women; it might with as much reason be asserted that the accomplishments and outward appearance of Armida in The Milesian Chief were borrowed from Corinne (1807). But one trait in Zaira, which, in all probability, was directly influenced by M:me de Staël, is her sweetness of temper and lack of pride—a quality which excludes from the descriptions of her suffering the ‘frenetical’ element Maturin’s earlier writings were noted for. Otherwise the figure of Corinne, though depicted in a calmer style, is much more exaggerated than Zaira: the latter is only a celebrated actress—and a very learned woman certainly; while Corinne is, in addition to this, a gifted painter, an eminent poetess, and a national heroine. Of the external circumstances of Corinne’s destiny several can be pointed out which, no doubt, have their analogies in Women—the mystery that covers her early life before she rises to the height of fame; the unhappy issue of her attachment to a man unworthy of her, and the final loss of her great talents. What, however, there is most remarkable in the history of Zaira, the minute analysis of the progress of her sufferings, that, in short, which Watts holds forth so eloquently, has no parallel in the book of M:me de Staël who is content only to state the result of the mental struggles her heroine undergoes. Corinne is not a novel in the same sense as Women; its weight lies neither in incident nor psychology, but in its broad-minded raisonnement about life and literature in the European countries of the time. The characters are subjected to a quite conventional treatment, and it is curious to see how closely the death of Corinne resembles the death of Eva, though nobody ever thought of accusing Maturin of imitation in this respect. The observation which Maturin makes with reference to Zaira, M:me de Staël applies to Corinne: ‘Quand une personne de génie est douée d’une sensibilité véritable, ses chagrins se multiplient par ses facultés mêmes: elle fait des découvertes dans sa propre peine comme dans le reste de la nature; et, le malheur du coeur étant inépuisable, plus on a d’idées, mieux on le sent;’—but nevertheless she succeeds in finding the harmony of mind which is the natural inheritance of Eva. She fixes her thoughts on religion alone, and, decidedly refusing to see her lover or answer his letters, declares her only wish to be to die in peace:—‘au moment de mourir Dieu m’a fait la grâce de retrouver du calme, et je sens que la vue d’Oswald remplirait mon âme de sentiments qui ne s’accordent point avec les angoisses de la mort. La religion seule a des secrets pour ce terrible passage.’ Maturin, on the other hand, does not shrink from drawing the extreme conclusions from his definition, and shows with a merciless consistency that she who was born a Zaira can never become an Eva.
The originality of yet another personage in Women was disputed, in so far as some critics maintained Zaira’s mother to be a copy of Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering (1815). This romantic creation of Scott—a spinner of intrigues in the shape of an old hag of wild manners and questionable sanity—variations of which reappear in several of the Waverley novels, was very likely to attract a novelist of Maturin’s temperament and may have had some share in the origin of the old Irishwoman. There is, however, this great difference, that Meg is more of a type, the Irishwoman more of an individual. The former, who admirably succeeds in her plans, is a schemer by profession, a gipsy and the leader of a whole tribe; the latter has become what she is through a series of personal calamities, and completely fails in the fantastic aim which she is pursuing: she dies in misery without having converted any of her descendants.—Zaira’s mother is the only person in the book who is demonstratively Irish, a representative of the lower classes. The description of her appearance is impressive, even terrible:
She was a frightful and almost supernatural object; her figure was low, and she was evidently very old, but her muscular strength and activity were so great, that, combined with the fantastic wildness of her motions, it gave them the appearance of the gambols of a hideous fairy. She was in rags, yet their arrangement had something of a picturesque effect. Her short tattered petticoats, of all colours, and of various lengths, depending of angular shreds, her red cloak hanging on her back, and displaying her bare bony arms, with hands whose veins were like ropes, and fingers like talons; her naked feet, with which, when she moved, she stamped, jumped, and beat the earth like an Indian squaw in a war-dance; her face tattooed with the deepest indentings of time, want, wretchedness, and evil passions; her wrinkles, that looked like channels of streams long flowed away; the eager motion with which she shook back her long matted hair, that looked like strings of the grey bark of the ash tree, while eyes flashed through them whose light seemed the posthumous offspring of deceased humanity,—her whole appearance, gestures, voice, and dress, made De Courcy’s blood run cold within him.
A certain ‘picturesque effect,’ intended as a token of her nationality, is carefully preserved in all her sayings and doings, but never emphasized so as to make her attractive in any way. Maturin, as has been seen, was not fond of idealizing the Irish people, and the street-types occurring in Women form no exception to the rule. Otherwise Women is a psychological novel without any national tendency, notwithstanding a few patriotic sentences and political allusions to the unfortunate state of the country. Nor is there anything peculiarly Irish in the principal events of the book, except in Zaira’s early history, which gives a glimpse of the primitive and unregulated life led on a remote Irish estate at that period. As this part, however, supplies the groundwork for the whole fabric, Allan Cunningham[108] is not entirely wrong in calling Women ‘an Irish story, wild, wonderful, and savage, with many redeeming touches of pathos and beauty.’—Amidst all the realism of the book, an incident with something of a supernatural import is unexpectedly introduced; whether this be a characteristically Irish trait or no, a study of Maturin must take account of it. It is told that on a pleasure-party, at the time when the intimacy between Zaira and De Courcy is ripening into love, he twice sees the apparition of Eva, which remains unseen by others; and Eva, on the same afternoon, in a dream imagines herself in exactly the same situation in which she appears to De Courcy. This incident, mentioned in a few words but with a remarkable seriousness, caused Scott, in his critique on Women, to refer to and quote the suppressed passages of Bertram.—
Scott’s benevolent review is one of the most pleasant specimens of his literary criticism. Cordial praise from the man whom he considered the greatest writer of the age, must have occasioned much satisfaction to Maturin, so much the more as the two other critiques which Women directly gave rise to were to a very different purpose. Anything more unintelligent than an article in the Monthly Review[109] it would be difficult to find. The writer ever probes for the moral reasons of the author’s describing this or that, and of Maturin’s treatment of the Methodists he comes to this wonderful conclusion:
To expose the repellent and unsocial manners of this sect, who are called in derision, levelled at their own presumption, ‘evangelical,’ seems the main moral object of the writer; and we grant that his design, had it been executed judiciously, and fairly, would have been praiseworthy: but it is obvious that, to attain this purpose of discountenancing spiritual pride and gloomy superstition, the author must not on the one hand grossly overcharge the picture which he wishes to hold up to reprobation; nor, on the other, must he omit to present a rational and amiable contrast, in the person of at least one specimen of pure and social Christianity. In both these points, Mr. Maturin has entirely failed.
Of what the writer so strongly feels the loss of, Maturin has, in fact, given not one but three instances: what is there of spiritual pride in Eva? or what of gloomy superstition in Montgomery and Mrs. Wentworth? Still more stupid is another charge against the author’s fairness, which the writer tries to make much of. De Courcy receives, while in Paris, a letter from his guardian—an old and conservative clergyman who, in principle, disapproves of dramatic art and those who practise it—in which he eagerly dissuades De Courcy from marrying an actress. This letter, the reviewer says, he has read ‘with equal surprise and displeasure,’ and continues: ‘We cannot conceive how Mr. Maturin, as the countryman of Miss O’Neil, whose virtues are the groundwork and the glory of her talents, can have brought himself to pronounce such a sweeping condemnation of the characters of actresses. If he should say, “These are only arguments in the mouth of an advocate against an imprudent marriage,” he who has been so unusually connected with the stage should have taken some opportunity to counteract, or to modify, the unmitigated censure.’ But is not the whole life of Zaira a modification of any censure? and is it not shown at almost every page to what a moral superiority and greatness of soul an actress is capable of rising? Unjust as this critique is, it is nothing to the savage attack delivered upon the book in the Quarterly Review.[110] At this time the famous literary warfare between Croker and Lady Morgan was at its hottest, and Maturin’s friendship with the authoress—she is admiringly spoken of even in Women—had, no doubt, its share in the extraordinary venomousness of the article, which there is no difficulty in recognizing as a production of Croker himself. He treats the book as an intentional parody on novels in general; but the satirical tone is often broken by bursts of great vehemence, and ignoble allusions to Maturin’s profession are by no means spared:
Parodies, as we once before said, should be short—Mr. Maturin’s, though admirably sustained, is too long, and we may venture to say also that the mask is never sufficiently removed—we know that the reverend author means to be merry at the expense of novel writers and portfolio pedants, but we regret to say that we have heard that some persons, mistaking his book for a serious production, have censured it as degrading, by its folly, its ignorant pedantry, its constant fustian, and its occasional blasphemy, the character of a clerical author; while others, equally well disposed, but more simple, have looked upon it not only as serious but as meritorious, and have praised it as having all the qualities of an excellent novel.
That Maturin’s Women has never been reprinted cannot but be regarded as one of the curiosities in the history of the English novel.
In the February number of the British Review 1818 appeared an article, by Maturin, on Miss Edgeworth’s tales of Harrington and Ormond. It was originally intended for the Quarterly Review; in his letter to Murray from Sept. 27, 1817, Maturin says that his article is ready, and only waits an order for transmission. His first contribution to the Quarterly, the critique of Sheil’s Apostate, which had not met with a favourable reception, was, however, to be also his last. In another letter, dated Nov. 17, Maturin writes: ‘I can easily comprehend a truth which your politeness would conceal, that the inferiority and not the lateness of my article was the cause of its rejection. I am extremely obliged by your kindness in suggesting an application to the British Review; I have availed myself of it and must entreat your pardon for the trouble it imposes on you.’ At that time Maturin was still anxious to have a place in the Quarterly, little as his own production harmonized with the views advocated by the literary staff of that periodical—though the exceedingly inimical criticism which both Women and Melmoth afterwards received there, probably made an end of his desire to have any connection with it. Whatever might have been the cause of the rejection of the article, it appears that Murray later mediated in Maturin’s behalf with the British Review, which was induced to accept it. The article is composed after the same pattern as the critique on Sheil—though it is far more interesting—: the development and history of the novel is traced from its earliest beginnings up to the new stories of Miss Edgeworth. Several quotations have been made, in the foregoing pages, from this typical essay of Maturin, where the Gothic Romance is happily and enthusiastically characterized, and the great novelists of the 18:th century mentioned with an astonishing lack of appreciation. Miss Edgeworth, however, is highly panegyrized; but it is quite evident that Maturin’s opinion of his celebrated countrywoman is more akin to respect and esteem than to ardent and genuine admiration. He cannot conceal that she is deficient in those romantic qualities of passion and feeling for nature, which to him mean the highest pitch of inspiration:
Such is Miss Edgeworth’s sacred horror of any thing like exaggerated feeling, or tumid language; such her anxiety for reducing her characters, where they are not meant to be heroes, to the level of ordinary feelings and occupations, and lowering the intoxications of romance to a “sober certainty of waking bliss,” that she appears as averse from the enthusiasm of nature as from the enthusiasm of passion. — — — We do “grievously suspect” that Miss Edgeworth is one of those who would have joined with Johnson in his laugh against the pastoral prosers who “babble of green fields;” and we rather fear that she speaks her own sentiments in the person of Lord Glenthorne in Ennui, when he gives all the “Beauties of Killarney to the devil.”
Maturin’s criticism of the two particular, tales now under discussion is very severe, of Ormond decidedly too much so. This well-known Irish story being the very antipode of the patriotic novels produced by Lady Morgan and Maturin, it is no wonder it did not appeal to him. There are no soul-stirring adventures, no breath of romance, and the ancient glory of Ireland is not even alluded to. —
Romantic, in the highest degree, is Maturin’s next work, his tragedy of Fredolfo, which was written in the course of the year 1818. The economic success of Women had bettered his circumstances, and the alluring prospect of a successful drama once more began to loom before his fancy. As early as January 28:th Maturin communicates to Murray that he has been made ‘a very liberal offer to write a tragedy for Covent Garden;’ Fredolfo, in all probability, was the fruit of this offer, though it was not acted there until April 1819. Maturin’s correspondence with Murray—that part, at least, which is extant—breaks off in August 1818, and there is little to tell of his life until the appearance of Fredolfo, except that he was fortunate enough to form another of those literary friendships he always desired. Alaric Watts became, at that time, editor of the New Monthly Magazine or Universal Register, where he published his admiring article on Maturin. This article, according to some autobiographical notes of Watts,[111] brought him the acquaintance of the novelist:
I have no distinct recollection of the occasion of my introduction to this remarkable man; but I have little doubt that it originated in my having written a memoir of him in the first series of the New Monthly Magazine, to accompany a fantastic-looking portrait of him in that periodical. He was at that time in the zenith of his fame. At all events, I was solicited by him, in 1819, to superintend the production, at Covent Garden Theatre, of a tragedy from his pen, entitled “Fredolpho.”
The tragedy turned out a failure as complete as it was undeserved: Fredolfo is not only the best of Maturin’s dramatic compositions, but a work of considerable poetic value.
The scene in Fredolfo is laid in Switzerland, which country had, through Byron, become as popular with the romantic writers as Sicily and Spain had been during the bloom of the Gothic Romance. Fredolfo the hero is an ancient and respected Swiss lord, who has gallantly pleaded his country’s cause against the tyranny of Austria:
He was his country’s idol—Switzerland,
Through all her rescued cantons, blessed her champion;
For, when he sat in council, from his head
Sprang Liberty, a living goddess arm’d!
Nor lack’d his hand the thunder to defend her.—
Yet he is not happy, for a crime weighs upon his mind. Once, years ago, his solitary castle on St. Gothard had been, during his absence, visited by the Austrian governor Wallenberg, who on the same occasion seduced his wife. Shortly after Fredolfo’s return Wallenberg was murdered near the castle; the deed was done by Fredolfo, with the assistance of one single attendant, a fiendish and deformed dwarf called Berthold. The cries of Wallenberg, however, attracted the attention of a young Swiss peasant, Adelmar, who was wandering in the mountains. He rushed to the place offering his help to the assailed party, but was himself left there, severely wounded, without having recognized any of the fighters. This unexpected witness to the scene now became an object of Fredolfo’s pursuit; he had him secretly carried away from Switzerland and compelled him to live in a foreign country. Here he was allowed every comfort he could desire, but his longing for his native land was too strong for him, and at last he made his way back to Switzerland. Knowing Fredolfo to be his pursuer he still established himself in the vicinity of the castle, and even succeeded in winning the love of Fredolfo’s only daughter, Urilda.
The play opens in the castle whither, while a violent storm is raging, Fredolfo and his daughter are expected to return from Altdorf. Urilda, committed to the care of Berthold, is travelling in advance; but Berthold arrives at the castle alone, with the intelligence that Urilda’s horse has been frightened and carried away by a flood, together with its burden. After a while, however, Urilda is brought home. She has been saved by a stranger in whom she, on recovering, recognizes Adelmar, the object of her love and her father’s hatred. Their tête-à-tête is interrupted by the news that Fredolfo, too, is perishing in the storm. Moved by Urilda’s despair Adelmar departs to save her father, and successfully helps him out of a chasm among the mountains. He then wishes to depart without revealing himself, but as Fredolfo insists on seeing his face, he at last flings back his mantle. Fredolfo, on discovering by whom he has been rescued, is seized with fury, and when they are joined by his attendants, he commands Adelmar to be secured and conveyed to the dungeon of the castle; only the intervention of Urilda, who comes out to meet them, saves the life of her lover. Fredolfo observes with intense agitation the tender relation between Urilda and Adelmar. Now Berthold, who has been casting his eyes upon Urilda and hates Adelmar as a rival, eagerly advises Fredolfo to put him to death. Fredolfo, however, sets Adelmar at liberty, and from that moment Berthold is his implacable enemy. Soon indeed an opportunity for vengeance arises. Wallenberg, the present Austrian governor and son of the murdered one, makes his unexpected appearance at the castle. He has been the cause of Fredolfo’s bringing her daughter away from Altdorf; he freely confesses to have ‘gazed upon the maid with lawless love,’ but now he indicates that he will honourably claim her hand from her father. Fredolfo summons her daughter to answer for herself, and her answer is proudly rejective. Wallenberg departs in rage, and Berthold offers to bear him company, casting a look upon Fredolfo from which he understands that he is now a lost man.
The first two acts, which comprise what is related above, are, in every respect, the best part of the play. They have the character of an introduction containing the necessary premisses for the catastrophe that follows, but they are well conceived and full of stirring life. In the very first scene the tragedy of Fredolfo is alluded to by an old attendant of his in a conversation with a minstrel, and the spectator thus becomes aware that a gloom is cast over the life of the hero. At the arrival of Berthold it becomes clear that he is the evil genius of the drama; he is received by the inmates of the castle with curses and maledictions, and when Urilda recovers from her swoon she shows equal horror and disgust at the sight of him. Berthold has been regarding her with indications of love, but now it is seen how his love is changed into hatred, and thoughts of vengeance already begin to fill his mind. From the beautiful dialogue between Urilda and Adelmar it appears that he is the object of Fredolfo’s dislike, which explains the agitation of Fredolfo on recognizing his preserver. Then the scenes of the rupture between Berthold and his master, and of Wallenberg’s visit and departure, follow each other in well-balanced succession. The release of Adalmar from his prison is, indeed, somewhat undramatically executed, in so far as Fredolfo simply sends Berthold to open the door for him, and he disappears without any further ado; but this act of generosity marks the stage which the mental progress of Fredolfo has now reached. He is weary of his long struggle against the fate that nevertheless is approaching; he feels that his crime, however defensible, is drawing near its punishment, and he can do no more than resignedly give himself up to whatever is to come. The mutual relations of Fredolfo and Adelmar are essentially the same as those of Falkland and Caleb in Godwin’s Caleb Williams, another phase of which Maturin had utilized in Montorio. Falkland, too, has been driven to commit a murder under exceptional circumstances; Caleb alone is acquainted with the deed, and he pursues him with relentless vigour until his own strength is wasted. The difference is that Fredolfo is already at the beginning of the drama reduced to that state of exhaustion in which all resistance ends, and that his crime is known, besides to Adelmar—who, indeed, is not quite certain whether Fredolfo was one of the nocturnal combatants—to an enemy much more dangerous. Fredolfo shares the general abhorrence of Berthold, but dares not dismiss him. Berthold follows him like an evil conscience, embittering every moment of his existence, and now endeavours to prompt him to do away with Adelmar:
What scowl’st thou on, with thy portentous smile,
Passing like lightning, o’er thy stormy visage?
It is some evil, or thou could’st not smile!
Bert. (with bitter irony.)
I mark with awe the patriot’s private moments;
These are thy triumphs, Virtue, view, and boast them!
(suddenly changing.)
Oh! what a fool is the brute multitude,
To shout “a God!” before this hollow image!
Ha! ha! ha! things are well balanced here;—
The evening’s groan repays the morning’s boast.
Vice were too humble, but for scenes like these,
And hopeless Villainy, lacking such solace,
Would turn an anchorite for very sadness!
Fred. Thou tool of wrath, which, while I grasp, I shudder,
Though one wild moment’s sudden agony
Made me a fiend, I am a man again.—
I would not harm that youth for many worlds;
Go, and release the prisoner.
Bert. (Drawing his dagger, and pointing to it with a significant gesture.)
Thus, perchance?—
Fred. (giving him a key.)
No, villain, thus—bid him be free, and live!
Bid, him, if possible, forget—if not,
Let him revenge—I’m weary of the struggle!—
When Berthold hints at his feelings towards Urilda, Fredolfo loses all self-command, and only the sudden arrival of Wallenberg saves Berthold from immediate destruction. He has, however, now made up his mind to desert his master.
In the next act Wallenberg reappears at the castle, attended by Berthold and his guard, and accuses Fredolfo of the murder of his father. Fredolfo is thereupon taken to the prison of Altdorf, and Urilda suffers herself to be dragged away with her father. Adelmar has also journeyed to Altdorf, where he engages himself in preparing a rising among the citizens for the rescue of Fredolfo. Here he is seen by Berthold, who invents a ruse in order to secure him. Wallenberg enters the prison where Urilda is tending her father, and pretends to have forgiven him and determined to set him at liberty; only for the sake of appearances the place should be stormed by the people, led by some youth ‘of bold and enterprising arm,’ for which time Wallenberg promises to dismiss the guards. Urilda at once remembers Adelmar and finds opportunity of sending word to him. The following night Adelmar and his band then rush in, but are met by Wallenberg and his soldiers, who have been lying in wait for them. While the battle is raging, Wallenberg re-enters the prison and, revelling in the agony of Urilda, pronounces Fredolfo’s death-warrant. The forces of Adelmar, however, appear to be stronger then has been expected, and Fredolfo is really liberated, though Adelmar himself is disarmed and captured and remains, together with Urilda, in Wallenberg’s power.—Fredolfo is carried to a cavern in the mountains, where he observes, with horror, that Urilda is not with him. He implores his followers to go back and save her, when Berthold arrives to inform him that if he refuses to suffer his death sentence, his daughter is to suffer it instead. Fredolfo instantly prepares to go, but at the same time they are joined by Adelmar, who has escaped from the prison; he has placed Urilda by the altar of a shrine and comes now to re-gather his band. In the meantime Wallenberg and his attendants, in vain opposed by a prior, break into the church. As Fredolfo and his party enter it shortly afterwards, Wallenberg snatches Urilda up to the altar and, drawing his dagger, points it to her breast. Fredolfo, understanding her danger, dismisses his band. Adelmar also is induced to give up his sword to Wallenberg: whereupon Wallenberg stabs him with the selfsame weapon and then releases Urilda. Fredolfo now recovers himself, rushes upon Wallenberg and mortally wounds him. Urilda expires upon the body of her lover, and Fredolfo alone is left alive.—
The last three acts are not, considered as drama, quite abreast of the introduction. The development of the action is, upon the whole, made too dependent on the caprices of Wallenberg; the purely horrible elements of the play are dilated upon with too remarkable a predilection, especially the demonstrations of the diabolic natures of Wallenberg and Berthold sometimes take undue space. Before Adelmar’s attack upon the prison, for instance, there is a long scene filled with enticements on the part of Berthold to get Urilda to sign a paper in the belief that it contains an order of liberation for her father, but which paper really is the death sentence of Adelmar. Apart from the unnaturalness of this proceeding, it has no connection with the events that follow: Adelmar makes his escape, and the death warrant is no more alluded to; the sole purpose of the scene is to bring out the excruciating pain felt by Urilda when she is thus kept hovering between hope and fear, and the extraordinary wickedness of Berthold. Yet notwithstanding this and certain other awkwardnesses of a similar kind, it is undeniable that the construction is firmer and far better regulated than in Maturin’s earlier plays, and the place of the hero as the central figure is well sustained by means of the skill and moderation with which the characterization is executed. The reader has, in fact, some misgivings that he is to share the fate of Manuel, go mad and start raving; but Fredolfo retains his reason to the end, and the weary resignation that has hold of his mind lends him a dignity and a calmness very different from the fury of his enemies.
What, however, raises the first two acts so far above the rest, is the romantic glamour shed over the persons and events, much of which fades away as the play advances. The figure of Adelmar is an exceedingly poetic one. He does not—like Bertram—belong to the typically ‘Byronic’ heroes; there is nothing demoniac or criminal about him. Yet he is not bloodless or commonplace; he has an air of romance and mystery of his own, and his speech is pervaded, as it were, by an echo from his native Alps. He never assumes any pose, for he can afford to do without one. His dialogue with Urilda, in the first act, contains the best things Maturin ever wrote in verse.
Uril. — — — —
He comes! oh, God! it cannot, cannot be!—
And does he dare amid these walls to seek me?
For me he trembled—for himself he fears not.
(Rushing up to him.)
Away! away! thou must not enter here!
There is a voice from out these walls forbids thee!—
My father hates thee, tracks thy hunted steps—
(Relaxing from fear into tenderness, and falling into his arms.)
Adelmar, art thou here?—and was it thou?
Adel. Yes; Adelmar, the unowned, the wanderer.
The stranger—almost to himself unknown;
He, o’er whom midnight murder darkly watches,
He, who on unseen daggers plants his steps,
And tramples them to clasp thee:—Yes, I follow’d thee
O’er the dark mountains—through the night I follow’d;—
The spirits of the tempest raised their arms
To snatch thee, and I grappled with their might,—
Wrestled with them in darkness, and o’ercame them.
Bright star, emerging sole on my fate’s blackness,
Shed thy last light on me! (kneeling) ’twill be the last!
— — — — —
— — — — —
Adel. (solemnly.) I am the child of woe,
Of persecution, and of mystery;
Fredolfo’s name—the name his country worships—
Rung in my infant dreams.—I was a boy,
Wild and imaginative, full of thoughts
That mountain-spirits to their children whisper,
I might have been a hero!
Uril. Might have been! Thou art!
Adel. I should have been, but for thy father!
A peasant child, amid the mountain steeps,
St. Gothard’s heights I wander’d—the storm’s shrieks
I heard, and echoed in wild fearless mirth,
Like children, who in awful ignorance sport;—
There came another shriek,—a shriek of murder!
(Urilda shudders.)
Uril. (starting and agitated.) Murder! but, then, my father was not there,—
Or was there—but to save?
Adel. I will not speak—
Dark thoughts come thronging with that night’s remembrance.
Twice, twice, with horrible strength the voice shrieked murder!
I flew in madness there.—Amid the night
Darkly I grappled with two shadowy forms,
Beneath whose gripe a struggling warrior heaved,
Then lay a corse.—I had no arms.—
— — — — — —
— — — — — —
Adel. Time pass’d as in dream, and oft I thought
That the dead warrior in his mountain grave
Slept unremember’d—then, by ruffian hands
Dragg’d from my hut, all tremblingly I follow’d—
Far in a sea-toss’d bark the ruffians bore me;—
A voice was in the wind, that swell’d the sails,—
That charm’d them ne’er to let their freight return!
Uril. A voice!—what voice?
Adel. I know not;—but I cried,
Who tears a freeman from his mountain-home?
Who rends the child his country cannot spare
From her spread arms? The answer was,—Fredolfo!
Uril. (shrieking with amazement.) Impossible!
Adel. I cried, ‘impossible.’
Years, mournful years, in a strange land were wasted,
Wasted to me—the land was beautiful—
Fair rose the spires, and gay the buildings were,
And rich the plains, like dreams of blessed isles;
But, when I heard my country’s music breathe,
I sigh’d to be among her wilds again!
I climb’d a bark’s tall side—an arm grasp’d mine—
Struggling, I turn’d, and ask’d who dared withhold me?
A dark-eyed ruffian answer’d,—’twas Fredolfo!
— — — — —
In the latter part of the play Adelmar, though a moving force in the action, appears only by glimpses, so that the impression he leaves is the most uniformly favourable of all the personages, being free from the general decline of characterization towards the end. Urilda is altogether more conventional than Adelmar, and does but seldom, by any action of her own, make good the very fine things said about her. In the second act Wallenberg says, seeing her approach:
She comes with all that shrinking bashfulness,
The eloquence of motion, mute, but felt.
The air around her breathes of purity;
And, as she moves, her equal tread’s fine impulse
Falls on the ear like harmony;—the light
That gleams on her fair locks and slender form
Crowns them with hallowed glory, like some vision
To saintly eyes reveal’d!—She is a thing
To knee and worship. Beauty hath no lustre,
Save when it gleameth through the crystal web
That Purity’s fine fingers weave for it;
And then it shows like Venus from the wave,
The fresh drops clinging to her beauty still!—
In the figures of Wallenberg and Berthold, Maturin’s unrestrained imagination within the field of the horrible carried him to a length to which the failure of the play has been ascribed. Talfourd,[112] while admitting that it contains ‘passages of a soft and mournful beauty, breathing a tender air of romance,’ says, with reference to these two personages: ‘In “Fredolfo,” the author, as though he had resolved to sting the public into a sense of his power, crowded together characters of such matchless depravity, sentiments of such demoniac cast, and events of such gratuitous horror, that the moral taste of the audience, injured as it had been by the success of similar works, felt the insult, and rose up indignantly against it.’ The same opinion has been expressed by a later critic:[113] ‘The wickedness of Berthold the dwarf and Wallenberg surpasses all bounds of reason. Neither is a human being at all.’ Less depravity, no doubt, would be sufficient, yet the question is not so much of the amount as of an unskilful display of it; in the first two acts neither character is unnatural, nor are they much worse than many famous villains in literature. Wallenberg appears as a subtly drawn tyrant of unbridled passions, accustomed blindly to follow all his freaks; his attachment to Urilda is hardly more than a passing caprice. His proposal for her hand is characteristically worded:
Fredolfo, hear me!—Friend, or foe, I reck not—
Spite of the pride that burns upon my cheek.
Spite of the blood, whose cold recoiling drops
Refuse to flow ere they would mix with thine;
Spite of our nations, natures, hearts averse,
Of all that makes me shudder while I sue,—
I claim thy daughter’s hand!
A love like this is never very far from hatred, and, when disappointed, it is naturally turned into a furious thirst for revenge which spares neither its object nor its cherisher:
I could rend out the veins that throb for her;—
I could on mine own heart fix suicide’s fangs,
So they defaced that form it dares to cherish!
Upon these sentiments he acts, and his ‘wickedness’ is not without consistency, only it is spread out so as to affect the symmetry of the composition. The same is still more true of Berthold, who, in the beginning, appears to be not only sinning, but sinned against. It is not quite clear how he has, previous to the events of the play, deserved the detestation of all his neighbours; to a great extent it seems to be inspired by his bodily deformity. His love to Urilda is tender enough; leaning over her, when she is lying senseless, he speaks this beautiful monologue:
Oh! it renews the heart to gaze oh thee!
Thou thing of power, that hast not life, but givest it:—
Thou beautous even in death—making death beautous!
Those softly closed lids, in whose rich veil
The unseen light dwells lovely,—the wan cheek,
Amid whose pallid bower death weds with beauty;
The faintly-falling arms, the woe-bent head—
Oh! still be thus! Oh, yes, be ever thus!—
While thus I see thee calm, I deem thee kind.
Those eyes will ope—to turn their light from me;
Those arms will wave, to chide me with their softness;
And, oh! that lip,—that rubied cup of bliss,
That flows with joy for all, pour hate on me!
Of a creature who can speak like this it can hardly be said that he is no human being at all. As for the prophecy expressed in the last lines, it is verified the moment Urilda revives; and as Berthold then resolves upon his vengeance it is not difficult to understand that a being with his wild and primitive standpoint shuns no means in order to effect it. The part was considered an important one by Maturin, who wished particular care to be bestowed upon it. In his letter to Watts[114] about the performance of Fredolfo he says: ‘I must revert to the part of Berthold, which is sufficiently eccentric and extravagant. Don’t let him, on my account, appear a ludicrous figure. Perhaps his deformity may be best expressed by a certain savage picturesqueness of costume, which I could sketch were I upon the spot, but which I readily submit to your taste in my absence; but don’t let him be ludicrous, that must be the ruin of the play. No one could bear a kitchen Richard. Much depends on Berthold.’—A certain resemblance of Berthold to Richard III is indeed obvious. Their criminal instincts are excited by bitterness arising from a sense of their personal disadvantages. Some reflections of Berthold:
I could, such is my heart’s o’erflowing spleen
To all that loved, and lovely are—methinks,
I could, even with a look,—as thus—dart through him
The basilisk’s eye-fang—dying on the throe,
lead (mutatis mutandis) back to the opening monologue of Richard III:
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;—
— — — — —
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain — — — —
Something of a ‘kitchen Richard’ Berthold, however, is, inwardly if not outwardly: he is a Richard without genius or grandeur. The same difference is noticeable in the case of another literary figure that presumably influenced the character of Berthold—Rashleigh Osbaldistone in Scott’s Rob Roy which appeared in 1818, just at the time when Maturin was composing Fredolfo. The ‘wickedness’ of Rashleigh is by no means incomparable to that of Berthold, but he is in possession of an intellectual power and mental superiority which makes him the most prominent figure in the environment in which he is depicted. Berthold, though neither ludicrous nor unnatural, is not sufficiently interesting to support the important part assigned to him, having nothing to counterbalance his ‘matchless depravity.’
The principal rôles of Fredolfo were in the best hands at Covent Garden: Fredolfo was played by Young, Adelmar by Charles Kemble, Berthold by Yates, Wallenberg by Macready and Urilda by Miss O’Neill. Maturin expected success in a kind of hopeful anxiety. His letter to Watts of April 17, alluded to above, displays his usual overflowing gratitude to those who took an interest in his productions, and his inclination to speak, on such occasions, slightingly of them himself:
“My inestimable friend,” he begins, “I never deplored my want of l’eloquence de billet before; but if I possessed all the eloquence I do not possess, it must fail under the task of expressing my obligations to you. How much do I not owe you, and how much am I not proud to owe you! I have implicitly followed your advice and written to Young. Your suggestions as to curtailment I adopt unhesitatingly; reject and retain what you like. Present, I beg you, my best acknowledgments to Mr. Young for his friendly zeal for a part but little worthy of his great abilities; and in your kindness, apologise to Mr. Charles Kemble, Mr. Macready, and the other gentlemen, for my not having had the pleasure of witnessing their talents, and thus of qualifying myself for writing parts more worthy of their acceptance than the wild and crude sketches of Adelmar and Wallenberg.”
The fact was, however, that only Yates appeared to be satisfied with his rôle. The failure of the play was, as Watts proceeds to say,[115] due to this indisposition of the principal actors, to the blunders of the minor ones, and, in the public opinion, to the last outburst of the unchivalrousness of Wallenberg:
Miss O’Neill was cast for the principal part, but displayed little interest in it, and did not hesitate, some three weeks before the play was produced, to prophesy its failure. — — — The immediate cause of its damnation was the exquisitely ridiculous manner in which one of the inferior actors advanced upon the stage, with the deliberation of an undertaker, and apprised the audience, with the most stoical calmness, that his master was at that moment perishing in a snowstorm on the mountains. The stolidity of this gentleman ... and the sedateness with which he delivered himself of the following harrowing ejaculation—
“My Lord! my Lord! the storm! He perishes!”
precipitated the audience into a fit of merriment from which it was found impossible to recover them, until a gallant young officer, having delivered up his sword to his more successful antagonist, is slaughtered with it on the spot. This thoroughly un-English incident so revolted the audience as to convert their merriment into indignation, and to not another word would they listen. I had presented to Maturin’s notice the danger of this situation; but neither Harris, the manager, nor Macready, who took the part of the assassin, appeared to think much of the objection. With the exception of Yates, who made an extremely effective part of Berthold, and Macready, always conscientious and thorough, little effort was made for the play, and its failure was irremediable.
The merriment was unfortunately roused as early as in the first act, and the many impressive scenes of the introduction passed by unheeded. As to the offending mode of Adelmar’s death, it takes place in the very end, after which there is not much more to listen to, nor is it probable that it would have been sufficient to damn the play, if the whole had been favourably received. Now, however, Fredolfo was silently dropped, without even any critiques being visible; Maturin’s career as a dramatist was practically at an end. Watts dismisses his melancholy story with the remark that—‘Maturin, the most impulsive and eccentric of Irishmen—and that is saying a great deal—bore his disappointment with some philosophy.’
A positive result of this philosophy was that Maturin returned to novel-writing and produced Melmoth the Wanderer, his most famous romance. Before coming to that, however, a few other things remain to be noted. About the same time as Fredolfo was acted, there appeared[116] some unpublished scenes from Manuel. In a letter to Henry Colburn, dated March 15, Maturin says of the extracts:—‘Detached from the tragedy they seem to me very feeble and I would advice you to consult a literary friend before you venture to insert them in your Magazine—should you publish them pray let it be in your poetical department, they are not of importance enough to appear in any other.’—The scenes treat of the dread of De Zelos lest his crime should be discovered, and of Manuel in the castle where he is banished; they are indeed of little importance, rising in no way above the average level of this the feeblest of Maturin’s poetical productions.—In the course of 1819 Maturin published, further, a collection of Sermons. Popular as he is said to have been as a preacher, the volume did not prove a success; it was marked by the disadvantages of Maturin’s double vocation. ‘His sermons, too,’ says his biographer,[117] ‘betrayed the struggles of a poetical mind endeavouring to adapt itself to the prevailing austerity of a particular class of religionists: and, between the party which rejected his book because it was not evangelical, and those who would not read it because it was not a romance, it was his fate to please neither, and fail.’ A benevolent critic in a contemporary[118] points out a certain want of any ‘order of arrangement’ and adds that ‘though these Sermons, if well delivered, must have had great effect from the pulpit, the impression, at the same time, could scarcely be anything else than transient.’
That Melmoth the Wanderer is nowadays considered the work by that which its author stands or falls,[119] sufficiently explains why Maturin is only mentioned in connection with the school of terror. The ‘terrific’ elements in Melmoth are, it is true, strong enough to render it the greatest novel of that school in the English language. All the same, it is much too complex to be confined within the limits of one single school, while its general purport connects it with some of the greatest works of European literature in its period. As for the production of Melmoth, that was carried on under circumstances distressing and even dismal; Maturin’s short period of opulence had passed for ever, and it was only the silent hours of night he was able to devote to his literary labours. His mode of composing, at that time, has been impressively described by a friend:[120]
Returning late in the evening, it was then after a slight refreshment that his literary task commenced, and I have remained with him repeatedly, looking over some of his loose manuscripts, till three in the morning, while he was composing his wild romance of “Melmoth.” Moderate, and indeed abstemious in his appetites, human nature, and the over-busy and worked intellect, required support and stimulus, and brandy-and-water supplied to him the excitement that opium yields to others; but it had no intoxicating effect on him: its action was, if possible, more strange, and indeed terrible to witness. His mind travelling in the dark regions of romance, seemed altogether to have deserted the body, and left behind a mere physical organism, his long pale face acquired the appearance of a cast taken from the face of a dead body; and his large prominent eyes took a glassy look; so that when, at that witching hour, he suddenly, without speaking, raised himself, and extended a thin and bony hand, to grasp the silver branch with which he lighted me down stairs, I have often started, and gazed on him as a spectral illusion of his own creation.
Melmoth the Wanderer appeared in autumn 1820 and was, by permission, inscribed to the ‘most noble the Marchioness of Abercorn.’ A preface[121] explains the genesis of the book:
The hint of this Romance (or tale) was taken from a passage in one of my Sermons, which (as it is to be presumed very few have read) I shall here take the liberty to quote. The passage is this.
“At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord, disobeyed His will, and disregarded His word—is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his salvation? No, there is not one—not such a fool on earth, were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!”
This passage suggested the idea of “Melmoth the Wanderer.” The Reader will find that idea developed in the following pages, with what power or success he is to decide.
The preface ends with one of those apologies of an artist for creating works of art, which Maturin thought proper to make every now and then, but which do not strike one as being over-sincere:
I cannot again appear before the public in so unseemly a character as that of a writer of romances, without regretting the necessity that compels me to it. Did my profession furnish me with the means of subsistence, I should hold myself culpable indeed in having recourse to any other, but—am I allowed the choice?
The preface, as will be seen, really does not give more than a ‘hint,’ either of the story or of its hero. It is not the enemy himself who is made to traverse mankind with the gloomy offer; Melmoth the Wanderer is a poor mortal who has, driven by an insatiable thirst for forbidden knowledge, bartered the hope of his own salvation for certain privileges not allotted to common man. Among these is the quenching of his soul’s thirst, a life prolonged by 150 years and the ability of rapidly performing great distances and appearing where he pleases, unhindered by lock or bolt. His contract with the evil one can be cancelled only if he finds another mortal who is willing to change destinies with him. Such mortal it soon becomes Melmoth’s sole wish to encounter. His curiosity is perfectly satisfied; his partly superhuman existence grows an intolerable burden to him, and he looks with terror and anxiety towards the expiration of his term, when he will be lost for all eternity. The greater part of his prolonged existence is occupied in tracing out and visiting human beings in utmost misery and wretchedness, and tempting them to buy their temporal salvation at the cost of their eternal, but none, ‘to gain the world, will lose his own soul,’ and when the term does expire, Satan inexorably claims his due.
Melmoth, as we are told towards the end of the story by a clergyman who has known him in his youth, is originally an Irishman of good family, of ‘various erudition, profound intellect, and intense appetency for information.’ About the year 1650 he travels in Poland and there becomes ‘irrevocably attached to the study of that art which is held in just abomination by all who name the name of Christ.’ After some years the clergyman, then residing in Germany, is summoned to a dying friend who turns out to be Melmoth. He confesses that he has—without explaining how—committed ‘the great angelic sin,’ and has but one thing to ask of his friend: ‘I sent for you to exact your solemn promise that you will conceal from every human being the fact of my death—let no man know that I died, or when, or where.’ At an hour, predicted by Melmoth with great exactitude, his strength begins to fail, and he becomes perfectly cold, like a corpse. The friend then leaves him, but afterwards, while travelling on the Continent, he is continually haunted by rumours of Melmoth being still alive. It is, accordingly, after his apparent death that Melmoth has been re-animated into his new, weird existence, and that his hopeless wanderings commence.
The idea of melting Faust and Mephistopheles into one person was strikingly original, and the figure of Melmoth keeps, in the fiction of the time, a place distinctly its own, even if a great many minor traits, relative both to its human and its superhuman character, can be traced to literary sources more or less obvious. There is Milton’s Satan,[122] grand and awful in his fallen state; there is the legend of the Wandering Jew,[123] who restlessly travels from land to land, in hope of eventually being delivered of his curse—as does his counterpart at sea, the Flying Dutchman; there is the Radcliffe hero, tormented by secret crimes and mysteriously appearing and disappearing, and his successor the Byronic hero with his large and gloomy eyes and with his sardonic yet strangely fascinating smile; and finally the Rosicrucians,[124] so common in the imaginative tales of the time: all these can, in glimpses, be recognized in the Wanderer. From some contemporary stories Maturin seems to have borrowed certain ingredients directly appertaining to the wonderful change which Melmoth undergoes. The incident of his apparent death recalls John William Polidori’s story of The Vampyre (1819).[125] The hero, who turns out to be a vampyre living on the blood of men—or preferably of women—is mortally wounded while travelling with a friend in Greece, and his greatest care, like Melmoth’s, is to conceal his death:
“Swear!” cried the dying man, raising himself with exultant violence, “Swear by all your soul reveres, by all your nature fears, swear that for a year and a day you will not impart your knowledge of my crimes or death to any living being in any way, whatever may happen, or whatever you may see.”
Afterwards the vampyre re-appears in society and, thanks to the oath of his friend, succeeds in making his sister one of his victims. Of greater importance, however, are the impulses Maturin received from Godwin’s St. Leon. Here an old man, under circumstances mysterious and but imperfectly described, communicates to Reginald de St. Leon the secret of everlasting youth and inexhaustible wealth. The hero joyfully consents to relieve the old man of what seems to be a burden to him; but almost at the very moment the bargain is made, he becomes deeply unhappy:
Methought the race of mankind looked too insignificant in my eyes. I felt a degree of uneasiness at the immeasurable distance that was put between me and the rest of my species. I found myself alone in the world. Must I for ever live without a companion, a friend, any one with whom I can associate upon equal terms, with whom I can have a community of sensations, and feelings, and hopes, and desires, and fears?
This must be indicated as one of the fundamental ideas in Melmoth the Wanderer, also.
Maturin’s romance belongs to the stories of the supernatural only in so far as the personality of Melmoth is concerned; otherwise, the ‘Gothic elements’ contained in it consist of the usual external apparatus, calculated to appeal to the reader’s sense of ‘fear arising from objects of invisible terror,’ as stated in the preface to Montorio. The book consists of six different tales with nothing in common except the appearance, at the critical moment, of Melmoth the Wanderer. The whole is extraordinarily involved, and the only means of analysis is to treat each tale separately.[126]
When the story begins, in 1816, a young man of the name of John Melmoth is summoned from Dublin to the county of Wicklow, to attend a dying uncle. John is the orphan son of a younger brother and has passed his joyless life alternately in an humble attic in Dublin, and on the estate of this same uncle, an old miser, who has scarcely allowed his young visitor food enough; he has, however, been taught to consider himself his uncle’s heir apparent, and, consequently, to treat him with the utmost deference. On arriving at the country-house John finds it in a most desolate and neglected state, as well as the miser himself, who lies on his death-bed attended by an old village Sybil whom he employs to avoid the expense of a doctor, and sundry menials impatiently waiting for the death of their master to enable them to celebrate a wake with more food and drink than they are wont to see during a whole year. The miser is well aware of these genial expectations, which by no means contribute to the sweetening of his last moments. The arrival however of John somewhat enlivens him; he even commissions his nephew to bring him a glass of liquor from a small closet, which John well remembers nobody but his uncle has ever been allowed to enter. Once in the closet, he sees on the wall the portrait of a man in middle age, whose eyes appear to him to shed an unearthly lustre from the old canvas; on the border of the picture he reads: Jhn. Melmoth, anno 1646. The picture detains him in the closet a few moments more than necessary, whence his uncle concludes that he has been examining it. With terrible exertion he whisperingly communicates to John that the original of the picture is still alive and that he himself is—on that account—dying of fright. The same night old Melmoth expires, and John, to his horror, sees the door opened by a stranger who distinctly resembles the portrait in the closet.
From the miser’s will it appears that he has made John his sole heir. He has, moreover, added a memorandum to the will, in which he enjoins his nephew to destroy the portrait alluded to, as well as an old manuscript which he will also find in the closet. John’s curiosity is roused about the mystery connected with his family, the more so as he gathers that his uncle has, during his last years, been constantly hanging over a manuscript which he always concealed if any one entered the room. From the old Sybil John learns what tradition has kept alive of the secrets of the family. She states that the elder brother of the Melmoth who first settled in Ireland as a follower of Cromwell, was a great traveller and seldom visited his family; once when he appeared all were surprised to see that he had undergone no external change whatever, although he ought to have been, at that time, a very old man. His visit was but short, and at his departure he left his portrait behind him. Some years afterwards a person arrived who appeared to be most anxious to know as much as possible about Melmoth the traveller; but the family being unable—or unwilling—to communicate anything of importance, he departed and, in his turn, left behind him a manuscript. As to the traveller, the hag concludes, he is generally believed to be alive and to make his appearance on the death of such members of the family as have something weighing upon their conscience.—After having burnt the portrait, John devotes himself to read the old, discoloured, mutilated manuscript as well as he is able. The writing is interrupted by many illegible lines; sometimes whole pages are missing. What he makes out is that the writer, an Englishman called Stanton, was travelling in Spain in 1676 and there saw a countryman of his who excited much superstitious horror among the populace, and, as it seemed, not quite without cause. Stanton himself had heard him break into a demoniac laughter on seeing two persons blighted by lightning, and shortly afterwards heard a story still more terrible. At a fashionable wedding-feast he had frightened all by the unearthly glare of his eyes, and even killed a priest who was going to utter a prayer, by merely staring at him. The wedding had ended by the bride being found dead in the arms of the bridegroom, who had lost his reason on the same occasion; and this tragic event also had been attributed to the machinations of the stranger—Melmoth the traveller. Stanton, tormented by an inexplicable longing to see and hear more of his mysterious countryman, had returned to England and spent several years in fruitless attempts to get sight of him. At length he had met him outside a theatre, and Melmoth had uttered a horrible prophecy of their meeting soon again in a madhouse. And he was right; Stanton was confined at a hospital through the means of a designing relative, and when the horrors of his situation had well-nigh spent him, Melmoth had appeared in his cell, spoken much to him and finally offered to bring about his liberation, on certain conditions. The pages where these conditions are expounded are illegible in the manuscript John is examining, but it appears that Stanton had rejected them in great rage, whereupon Melmoth had departed. When Stanton finally gained his liberty he had resumed his restless pursuit of Melmoth. He had also visited Ireland, and left there the manuscript containing a narrative of his adventures.
So the manuscript ends; but John is soon to learn more of his interesting ancestor. One night, in a violent storm, a vessel is wrecked and lost on the coast. All the neighbourhood gather on the shore and, under John’s command, do their best to save the crew, but their efforts are ineffectual. In the midst of his toil John perceives a man standing tranquilly upon a rock somewhat out of the way, and suddenly a terrible laugh is heard. Remembering the manuscript John rushes towards him, stumbles on his way and falls down into the sea. The only one of the shipwrecked who has succeeded in reaching the coast gets hold of him and clings to him until both are thrown on the shore by a huge wave. They are carried up to the manor-house, and after some days their strength is restored. The stranger is found to be a Spaniard; his first question is, whether John’s name is not Melmoth. Receiving an answer in the affirmative he shows him a portrait, which John instantly recognizes as a miniature of the one he has destroyed. The Spaniard, apparently a man who has suffered much, then proceeds to tell the story of his life.
The narrative related above, lengthy as it is, serves as a sort of introduction to all that follows, affording the first imperfect glimpses of the Wanderer. The scenes which are enacted in the dreary, half-decayed country-house before and after the miser’s death are the best-written passages in Melmoth, representing, together with certain chapters in Women, Maturin’s art on its very highest level; and this art, it is as well to observe, is eminently realistic. Little as the abode of old Melmoth has in common with the household of Mr. Wentworth, there is the same blending of intensely suggestive ‘atmosphere’ and minute truthfulness to nature about the descriptions. The sorry state of the manor to which John Melmoth travels and which recalls his gloomiest memories, is vividly painted thus:
As John slowly trod the miry road which had once been the approach, he could discover, by the dim light of an autumnal evening, signs of increasing desolation since he had last visited the spot,—signs that penury had been aggravated and sharpened into downright misery. There was not a fence or a hedge round the domain: an uncemented wall of loose stones, whose numerous gaps were filled with furze or thorns, supplied their place. There was not a tree or shrub on the lawn; the lawn itself was turned into pasture-ground, and a few sheep were picking their scanty food amid the pebble-stones, thistles, and hard mould, through which a few blades of grass made their rare and squalid appearance.
The house itself stood strongly defined even amid the darkness of the evening sky; for there were neither wings, or offices, or shrubbery, or tree, to shade or support it and soften its harsh outline. John, after a melancholy gaze at the grass-grown steps and boarded windows, “addressed himself” to knock at the door; but knocker there was none: loose stones, however, there were in plenty; and John was making vigorous application to the door with one of them, till the furious barking of a mastiff, who threatened at every bound to break his chain, and whose yell and growl, accompanied by “eyes that glow and fangs that grin” savoured as much of hunger as of rage, made the assailant raise the siege on the door, and betake himself to a well-known passage that led to the kitchen. A light glimmered in the window as he approached: he raised the latch with a doubtful hand; but, when he saw the party within, he advanced with the step of a man no longer doubtful of his welcome.
The party in question consists of old Melmoth’s servants and ‘followers.’ This was the last time Maturin depicted his countrymen, the lower Irish, and never had he done so with more vigour and penetration. They are described without even a semblance of idealization; specifically Irish is only their instinctive deference to persons of higher rank, and their endless circumlocutions of speech, but there is no boisterous and overflowing humour about them, still less a breath of soul-stirring romance; they simply are what circumstances have made them, and that is, in this case at least, a set to be both disliked and distrusted. Yet the picture does not lack its brighter side. These people cannot, as a matter of course, be expected to be exactly sorry at the approaching end of their master, but John Melmoth has nothing to fear from them, and that there is much in them that is naturally good and brave is seen in their spontaneous efforts to save the sinking vessel. There is an old housekeeper who is described with a kind of rough sympathy and not without strokes of humour. John has always been an object of her tenderness—long ago, when he was staying in the house and was sent hungry to bed, she had often stolen up to him with something she had had much trouble to save, and she still kindly insists on calling him her ‘whiteheaded boy.’ To be sure, she avails herself of her knowledge how to get at the store of spirits by a way unknown to old Melmoth, and so has made ample preparations for his honour’s wake in good time; but she is, at the same time, really anxious to think of his soul in his departing hour, and conceives it to be her religious duty perforce to put upon him a clean shirt when that solemn hour draws nigh.—The old Sybil, on the other hand, is a decidedly unsympathetic figure, a humbug and an impostor of the first order, a type not common in the fiction of the time.
Old Melmoth is extremely well drawn; in the few pages treating of him his character stands perfectly clear before the reader. Though always of a niggardly turn, he has once been a gentleman, and has, in fact, never committed actual wrongs in the course of accumulating his wealth. ‘He was,’ says the housekeeper, ‘of a hard hand, and a hard heart, but he was as jealous of another’s right as of his own. He would have starved all the world, but he would not have wronged it of a farthing.’ He is, towards the end of his life, tormented by fear as much as by the passion of avarice. His days are passed in the revolting but irresistible task of studying the manuscript, and he firmly believes that he has seen his mysterious ancestor in his own house. In the superstitious horror that never leaves him he clings, as it were, all the more eagerly to something real and concrete, and, having nought else, he cherishes his worldly goods until he sits in the kitchen to save a fire in his own room and expresses, as his last, the desire to be buried in a parish coffin. A fragment of his conversation best illustrates the character of old Melmoth:
—“What made you burn sixes in the kitchen, you extravagant jade? How many years have you lived in this house?” “I don’t know, your honour.” “Did you ever see any extravagance or waste in it?” “Oh never, never, your honour.” “Was any thing but a farthing candle ever burned in the kitchen?” “Never, never, your honour.” “Were not you kept as tight as hand and head and heart could keep you, were you not? answer me that.” “Oh yes, sure, your honour; every sowl about us knows that,—every one does your honour justice, that you kept the closest house and closest hand in the country,—your honour was always a good warrant for it.” “And how dare you unlock my hold before death has unlocked it,” said the dying miser, shaking his meagre hand at her. “I smelt meat in the house,—I heard voices in the house,—I heard the key turn in the door over and over. Oh that I was up,” he added, rolling in impatient agony in his bed, “oh that I was up, to see the waste and ruin that is going on. But it would kill me,” he continued, sinking back on the bolster, for he never allowed himself a pillow; “it would kill me,—the very thought of it is killing me now.” The women, discomfited and defeated, after sundry winks and whispers, were huddling out of the room, till recalled by the sharp eager tones of old Melmoth.—“Where are ye trooping to now? back to the kitchen to gormandize and guzzle? Won’t one of ye stay and listen while there’s a prayer read for me? Ye may want it one day for yourselves, ye hags.” Awed by this expostulation and menace the train silently returned, and placed themselves round the bed, while the housekeeper, though a Catholic, asked if his honour would not have a clergyman to give him the rights (rites) of his church. The eyes of the dying man sparkled with vexation at the proposal. “What for,—just to have him expect a scarf and hat-band at the funeral. Read the prayers yourself, you old ——; that will save something.”—
With these scenes of strong and sordid realism is mingled the supernatural fear felt for the traveller; but sparingly and skilfully as this supernatural element is used, it does not disturb the general style of the narrative. It only serves to heighten the gloominess of the atmosphere and to excite the reader’s curiosity. This curiosity is admirably kept alive throughout the whole. It increases gradually, being never satisfied. When John asks the old hag to tell him all she knows about his ancestor, it is stated that she leaves him excited with a story, wild, improbable, actually incredible. The story is not at once related to the reader; he is left in suspense about it, while John Melmoth immediately proceeds to gather more information from the manuscript. It appears, however, that candles there are none in the house, and until such are procured from a neighbouring village, he sits alone in the dreary room, while night falls upon him and the sky is overcast with dark clouds promising a long continuance of gloom and rain. Now he in his thoughts recapitulates the story he has just heard, the one with reference to the traveller and his portrait. The messenger sent to the village then returning, John seeks out the manuscript and begins, by the ghastly light of a couple of candles, to decipher a story much wilder than that which he has from the hag. It is easy to perceive that the increase of interest is greater with this succession, than if the calmer passage about the preparations for studying the manuscript were placed between the two stories.—As for the fragmentary manuscript itself, it of course always breaks off at the most thrilling moment.
By the opening chapters of Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin’s first romance of Montorio is called to mind in a way clearly showing the disadvantages of the Radcliffe style and the general inferiority in the construction of stories of that school. The figure of Schemoli—which, as has been shown, is a typically Radcliffeian hero—is here, in many respects, a prototype of Melmoth: the obscurity in which his person is veiled as well as his sudden and unimpeded entrances where he is not expected, are traits which have descended to the Wanderer; but the supernaturalness of the latter is real and need not be explained as some utterly incredible, merely human attainments. In one of the half-ruinous apartments of the castle of Muralto where Annibal is so fond of rambling, there is an old portrait, the eyes of which are, by the tricks of Schemoli, made to appear to him as living. The impression made on John Melmoth by the portrait in the miser’s secret closet is a result of that same preternatural quality in the original, which, once accepted, defies all ‘natural’ elucidations and is not followed by the disappointment necessarily appertaining to such. Thus the artistic effect of these scenes is of a permanent kind and preserves its charm even at re-perusal, which is never the case with the puerile tricks of the Radcliffe stories. Yet notwithstanding this slight supernatural import, the incidents taking place in the house of old Melmoth cannot be ranked among the actual ‘Gothic’ stories. These incidents are not fantastical or violent enough, and the style is too strikingly realistic; nor does the ‘passion of supernatural fear’ here seem to be the ultimate object of the author. The tale of Stanton, on the other hand, is typically a production of the school of terror. To begin with, the introduction of a story by the discovery of an old, half-moulding manuscript was a favourite one with most of the writers of this school, and the manuscript studied by John Melmoth affords all the usual requisites: Spanish environs, with ruins both Moorish and Roman, amid thunder and lightning; wedding-feasts in great houses with dead bride and insane bridegroom; religious intolerance, Inquisition, and fear of the devil. These passages are rather rhapsodical—as indeed they are meant to be—and less interesting than Stanton’s subsequent experiences in England; the madhouse where Stanton is confined is described more horribly than any prisons of the Inquisition in any romance of terror. The time of action is that of Charles II: a period in which Maturin was deeply versed and which had a strange fascination for him. In his pursuit of Melmoth, Stanton is said often to visit places of public amusement, and it is at a theatre he at last discovers him. This gives Maturin occasion to insert a brilliant study of the theatrical performances of that time, most evidently written con amore, in spite of the strong emphasis laid upon the loose morals of these amusements. After one performance, during which a great commotion is caused by the attempt of an actress to stab her rival in good earnest, Stanton meets Melmoth in the deserted street, where he has been waiting for him. Stanton being, at first, at a loss what to say, Melmoth quietly announces that they will soon meet again:—‘the place shall be the bare walls of a madhouse, where you shall rise rattling in your chains, and rustling from your straw, to greet me,—yet still you shall have the curse of sanity, and of memory. — — I never desert my friends in misfortune. When they are plunged in the lowest abyss of human calamity, they are sure to be visited by me.’
Here, for the first time, is given the clue to Melmoth’s personality and the purpose of his wanderings; from the tale of Stanton it can also be concluded that Melmoth has the power of contributing to, as well as predicting, the destiny of his victims. The prophecy is fulfilled. Stanton’s eccentric mode of living and incessant talk of Melmoth, whom nobody else has ever seen, rouses the belief in his madness. Of this belief his nearest relative and heir, an unscrupulous man, resolves to avail himself. He procures a place in a madhouse which he easily induces the careless and absent-minded Stanton to visit, and there he is forced to remain. The picture which Maturin draws of this place is frightful in the extreme, yet doubtless historically true, in as much as lunatics at that time were treated exactly like criminals, chains and whip being the only medicine resorted to by the keepers, many of whom were most inhuman ruffians. But this picture is also in other respects pervaded by the spirit of the time. About the Restoration insanity raged in England more than at any other period before or since, and the fanaticism, both religious and political, of the preceding decades, has amply furnished the madhouses with wretched inmates. As Stanton’s next neighbours there are a puritan weaver, who has lost his reason after listening to one of the celebrated preachers of the day, and a loyalist tailor, who has been ruined by too liberal a credit to the cavaliers; and these two pass the nights in desperate controversies which make the very walls ring. Further, there is a woman who has lost her husband and all her children in the great London fire—this, too, a topic of the day. Once a week, the night of her disaster, she recapitulates the horrors which have befallen her:
The maniac marked the destruction of the spot where she thought she stood by one desperate bound, accompanied by a wild shriek, and then calmly gazed on her infants as they rolled over the scorching fragments, and sunk into the abyss of fire below. “There they go—one—two—three—all!” and her voice sunk into low mutterings, and her convulsions into faint, cold shudderings, like the sobbings of a spent storm, as she imagined herself to “stand in safety and despair,” amid the thousand houseless wretches assembled in the suburbs of London on the dreadful night after the fire; without food, roof, or raiment, all gazing on the burning ruins of their dwellings and their property. She seemed to listen to their complaints, and even repeated some of them very affectingly, but invariably answered them with the same words, “But I have lost all my children—all!” It was remarkable, that when this sufferer began to rave, all the others became silent. The cry of nature hushed every other cry,—she was the only patient in the house who was not mad from politics, religion, inebriety, or some perverted passion; and terrifying as the out-break of her frenzy always was, Stanton used to await it as a kind of relief from the dissonant, melancholy, and ludicrous ravings of the others.
It is clear that Stanton well-nigh loses his own reason in this neighbourhood. At first he tries to effect his liberation by observing a calm and sane behaviour, but seeing that his sanity is interpreted as the refined cunning of a madman, he gradually gives up all hope. He grows careless and neglects himself; at last he never rises from his wretched bed, and when Melmoth, according to his promise, appears in his cell, he is indeed ‘in the lowest abyss of human calamity.’ To judge from some indistinct lines in the manuscript, Stanton from the first receives him with distrust; for on the following pages Melmoth exerts all his terrible eloquence to induce Stanton to listen to him. He holds out to him the prospect of his soon losing his reason, or, still more dreadful, of his fear of losing it becoming a hope—nay, even to the life to come Melmoth extends his gloomy anticipations. He points out that as there is not a crime which madmen are not prepared to commit, the soul of a madman is not likely to be favourably judged, but, on the contrary, destroyed along with the reason, the loss of which, accordingly, implies the loss of immortality. Thus even his eternal welfare will depend upon his consenting to be liberated by Melmoth. The conditions for this are illegible in the manuscript, but it appears that Stanton indignantly rejects them. He does not, however, reap very great benefits by his steadfastness, for, being finally liberated, his life is to pass in the same restless anxiety as before, and in the same fruitless efforts to see his tormentor once more.—
The manuscript being finished the story turns back to John Melmoth and the shipwrecked Spaniard. The description of the storm is fine and animated enough, although this mode of introducing the stranger was none of the newest, even if somewhat better in its place here than in Bertram. Here the Spaniard only is saved, and he now becomes the hero, Melmoth the Wanderer disappearing for a considerable time. The happenings in the house of old Melmoth, with the tale of Stanton inserted, form the first great section of the book, being still of an introductory character. The general effect is an excellent one. The desolated country-house is a very appropriate back-ground to the fantastical incidents read in the ancient manuscript; and different as are the styles of the two narratives, the contrast is not inartistic. This introduction to Melmoth is evidently reflected in some fantastic productions of later time. The idea of the Wanderer’s marvellous portrait has been supposed[127] to reappear in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)—Wilde, whose mother was a niece of Maturin, was well acquainted with his great-uncle’s romance; it will be remembered that he lived his last years in Paris under the name of Sebastien Melmoth. In one of the most famous English ghost-stories, Bulwer-Lytton’s The Haunted and the Haunters (1859), the mysterious being is first introduced by means of a miniature portrait, bearing a strange, never-to-be-forgotten expression. He has much in common with Melmoth the Wanderer. His existence is prolonged for centuries—not, indeed, by any pact with the devil, but by the extremely developed ‘energetic faculty that we call will.’ He turns up in various countries and in various guise, arranging, at his departures, a mock celebration of his own obsequies. He has the same unlimited knowledge as Melmoth, and it seems to interest him as little; and though his supernatural life is traced to a scientific source, it is even hinted that a power like his, however malignant, cannot injure the good and the brave.
Owing, probably, to the great length and extraordinary contents of Melmoth, this introduction seems to have been passed by with but little notice on the part of the critics. There are some lines on it in a contemporary review,[128] interesting in so far as they show that the first chapters, exaggerated as they were accused of being, were at once felt to differ from the rest, and have little to do with the obsolete school of unnatural terrors:
The opening of the book is natural and simple, relating the dependence of a poor lad, John Melmoth, on an old miser of an uncle, and his sudden call from college to attend his uncle on his death-bed. — — — We shall not inflict upon our readers the horrors attending the miser’s death-bed, or the manner in which his neighbours and servants enjoyed the scene of his departure; though there are some features of the description very natural, and others, we doubt not, very national: but then our author never stops in the right place. Over doing, Anglice, exaggeration, seems a passion with him.
The ‘natural and simple’ was what people were beginning to have an appetite for; Melmoth, like Montorio, came into the world just a little too late to be exactly what the public wanted.
In the Tale of the Spaniard the stranger relates to John Melmoth a part of his life which has been passed amid extraordinary hardships and sufferings, in desperate attempts to escape from a convent in Madrid, and subsequently in the prisons of the Inquisition. He is a descendant of the ducal house of Monçada; his mother is of a rank far inferior, and Alonzo (the hero) is born before his parents are united in marriage, for which reason he is educated in strict seclusion. The marriage, however, is at last acknowledged by the old duke, Alonzo’s grandfather, but Alonzo, before his birth, has already been devoted to God and destined to become a minister of religion, in expiation of his mother’s crime. Inspired by her Director she fanatically insists on Alonzo’s entering a convent of ex-Jesuits, and as this is much against the inclinations of Alonzo, the contention grows very acute. Alonzo’s father is good-natured but weak; in his heart he commiserates his son, but dare not oppose the menaces of the Director, who urges the fulfilment of the vow solely to maintain and augment his own power over the family. To overcome Alonzo’s resistance every means, fair and foul, are resorted to, and finally a promise is extorted from him to become a novice. These proceedings it is of interest to compare to certain chapters in the great Italian novel I promessi sposi (1827) of Alessandro Manzoni—namely, to those in which Gertrude, the daughter also of a duke, is, likewise for family reasons, forced to take the veil. There is much resemblance between her fate and Alonzo’s. From their earliest childhood their future vocation is spoken of as a thing irrevocably decided, as well as perfectly agreeable to themselves, and as they grow old enough to have an opinion of their own, allurement and compulsion is alternately used to subdue it; during their noviciate they are treated with peculiar indulgence on account of their birth and high connections; and the demoralizing influence of coersion, which shows itself in a repulsive hypocrisy, is strongly emphasized in both cases. It would, of course, be too bold to assert that Manzoni had received any impulses from Melmoth, although he is known to have been a student of English literature, especially of Scott; but the parallel unquestionably goes to show that this part of Melmoth is not only a work of anti-catholic imagination, without any relation to real life in Catholic society. The mild and quiet style of Manzoni is, otherwise, as far as far can be from the indignant rage that burns in every line of the Spaniard’s tale. Maturin, as has been said, was convinced that his own ancestors had been victims of Catholic intolerance, and his antipathy to the darker sides of this religion, always keen, is nowhere so strongly expressed as in the present story. He sees nothing good in monastic life and refuses to find any redeeming features in a system which favours it. Young as Alonzo is, he fully comprehends the hypocrisy practised by the monks and novices, and immediately conceives an invincible aversion for the convent. This aversion is, in fact, shared by all its inmates; but those who themselves have lost all hope of liberation are, out of envy, most anxious to retain others in the same misery. Thus a frank, open word is never heard among them, and when trying to address his comrades, Alonzo is invariably repelled by the sanctimonious and untruthful air they assume towards him:
I said to them, “Are you, then, intended for the monastic life?” “We hope so.” “Yet I have heard you, Oliva, once (it was when you did not think I overheard you) I heard you complain of the length and tediousness of the homilies delivered on the eves of the saints.”—“I was then under the influence of the evil spirit doubtless,” said Oliva, who was a boy not older than myself. “Satan is sometimes permitted to buffet those whose vocation is but commencing, and whom he is therefore more afraid to lose.” “And I have heard you, Balcastro, say you had not taste for music; and to me, I confess, that of the choir appears least likely to inspire a taste for it.” “God had touched my heart since,” replied the young hypocrite, crossing himself; “and you know, friend of my soul, there is a promise, that the ears of the deaf shall be opened.” “Where are those words?” “In the Bible.” “The Bible?—But we are not permitted to read it.” “True, dear Monçada, but we have the word of our Superior and the brethren for it, and that is enough.” “Certainly; our spiritual guides must take on themselves the whole responsibility of that state, whose enjoyments and punishments they reserve in their own hands; but, Balcastro, are you willing to take this life on their word, as well as the next, and resign it before you have tried it?” “My dear friend, you only speak to tempt me.” “I do not speak to tempt,” said I, and was turning indignantly away — — —
When Alonzo, touched by the grief and despair of his mother, at last consents to take the vow and finally to enter the monastery, he is soon to see that hypocrisy is not the only vice thriving in that fertile soil. The incidents related above present a subtle and powerful picture of the influence of the Catholic church, but thus far there has been nothing actually horrible in the Spaniard’s tale. Now, however, the story becomes of rather a blood-curdling character. There is a conversation which Alonzo holds with an old monk who lies on his death-bed, which deserves to be quoted at some length, as it strikes the key-note of all the miseries of monastic life. These were, in Maturin’s opinion, the inevitable result of an existence stiffening away in brutalizing monotony, and never yet had he depicted such an existence in darker colours:
“But to me, and to all the community, you seemed to be resigned to the monastic life.” “I seemed a lie—I lived a lie—I was a lie—I ask pardon of my last moments for speaking the truth—I presume they neither can refuse me, or discredit my words—I hated the monastic life. Inflict pain on man, and his energies are roused—condemn him to insanity, and he slumbers like animals that have been found inclosed in wood and stone, torpid and content; but condemn him at once to pain and insanity, as they do in convents, and you unite the sufferings of hell and of annihilation. For sixty years I have cursed my existence. I never woke to hope, for I had nothing to do or to expect. I never lay down with consolation, mockeries of God, as exercises of devotion. The moment life is put beyond the reach of your will, and placed under the influence of mechanical operations, it becomes, to thinking beings, a torment insupportable.
“I never ate with appetite, because I knew, that with or without it, I must go to the refectory when the bell rung. I never lay down to rest in peace, because I knew the bell was to summon me in defiance of nature, whether I was disposed to prolong or shorten my repose. I never prayed, for my prayers were dictated to me. I never hoped, for my hopes were founded not on the truth of God, but on the promises and threatenings of man. My salvation hovered on the breath of a being as weak as myself, whose weakness I was nevertheless obliged to flatter, and struggle to obtain a gleam of the grace of God, through the dark distorted medium of the vices of man. It never reached me—I die without light, hope, faith, or consolation.”
Under circumstances like these the most passionate contentions are excited by the slightest causes, and the minutest deviations from regularity are regarded as adventures of the most important gravity. Yet the liveliness thus aroused naturally becomes morbid and distorted, and degenerates into ‘spleen, malignity, curiosity.’ The soul is stunted for ever, and the mind grows impervious to every great or generous feeling; barbarous punishments are inflicted for the slightest offences. Alonzo is, from his very entrance there, the black sheep of this community. He is, indeed, most punctual in his religious performances, but it is easy to see that he is not penetrated with the spirit of the monastical life, and his exactness in the forms only ‘will not do’ for the monks. They can not excite his interest about such matters as whether the hour for matins should be postponed ‘full five minutes,’ and even a sham miracle is performed for his sake in vain. Before long an unexpected incident gives them opportunity of assuming towards him an attitude decidedly hostile. One night the porter of the convent smuggles to Alonzo a scrap of paper, which turns out to be a letter from his brother Juan, whom he has seen but once and who is intent upon effecting his liberation from the convent.
Juan, the younger son of the duke Monçada, has been educated by the Director and, from his earliest infancy, been taught to hate his brother and regard him as a bastard and usurper of his rights. In this the Director first succeeds, but then the impetuous and vehement nature which he has tried to develop in Juan, is suddenly turned against himself. To the monastical life Juan has an aversion as strong as that of Alonzo himself, and when he learns that the latter is to be made a monk, he cannot but think it an injustice, and begins to feel a strange interest in his unfortunate brother. It is a fine and touching piece of juvenile psychology Maturin gives in the short sketch of Juan. A mind naturally generous, if ever so spoiled and distorted by improper education, always wishes its enemy to be in a fighting condition; and when Juan thinks of Alonzo as a monk, an object unfit for hate and unable to defend himself, his feelings of hostility are replaced by a passion exactly opposite, only stronger, as being conformable to his natural instincts. He now finds out all the wrongs done to Alonzo, and devotes his energies to his liberation. Alonzo, he learns, can reclaim his vows, if he declares them to have been extorted from him by fraud or terror; the business can be carried on in a civil court. Juan then procures an able advocate and succeeds in bribing the porter of the convent, through whom Alonzo is to send him a written memorial to be used by the advocate.
Having received his brother’s communication Alonzo at once proceeds to write the memorial, on the pretext of writing his confessions, and safely dispatches it to Juan. His frequent demands for paper, however, have excited the suspicions of the Superior, and Alonzo is accused of having employed the paper granted to him in some purpose contrary to the interests of the community. His cell and his person are searched with a zeal showing that the monks have, at last, got something to do. Nothing is found, but a few days later a copy of the memorial is sent by the advocate to the Superior. Now Alonzo is subjected to severe persecution on the part of the community, led by its brutal Superior. First of all he is confined in a subterranean dungeon, where he passes three days fighting with reptiles. Then he is removed to his cell, as the Superior, on account of the publicity with which the suit is carried on, dare not keep him actually imprisoned; still the community seems to have resolved that if he is to quit the convent, he is not to do so alive. He becomes the object of complete excommunication. He is excluded from the matins and from the church in general, and publicly pointed out as an object of the greatest abhorrence; he is never spoken to, every one shrinking from him as from a polluted being. At meals a mat is placed for him in the midst of the hall, where he is supplied with offal from the kitchen. The crucifix, the rosary, the vessel for holy water and everything else is removed from his cell so that at last there is nothing left except the bare walls and a miserable bed. The worst of all is that he is denied repose. One night he awakes to see his cell in flames; hideous figures have been scrawled on the walls with phosphorus. Another night he is aroused by a voice whispering to him temptations and blasphemies until he almost believes he is spoken to by the enemy of mankind. He cannot suppress a cry of horror; immediately a monk rushes in asking why he disturbs him in his sleep. Alonzo alleges turbulent dreams and the monk departs, but the following night the scenes are renewed. The voice becomes more and more horrible, uttering things which a good Catholic would shudder even to think of; once the image of the mother of God is displayed to him, and the voice exhorts him to spurn it and to spit upon it. Weak and delirious though he is, Alonzo still has power to resist these invitations. He cannot, consequently, be accused of obeying the temptations of Satan, but the news of his being subjected to them spread rapidly through the convent. Everybody believes, or pretends to believe it, and the general horror towards Alonzo increases; he is now excluded from all devotions. One night, when the voice again discusses the Madonna in an unutterable connection, the measure flows over:
I could bear it no longer. I sprung from my bed, I ran through the gallery like a maniac, knocking at the doors of the cells, and exclaiming, “Brother such a one, pray for me,—pray for me, I beseech you.” I roused the whole convent. Then I flew down to the church; it was open, and I rushed in. I ran up the aisle, I precipitated myself before the altar, I embraced the images, I clang to the crucifix with loud and reiterated supplications. The monks, awakened by my outcries, or perhaps on the watch for them, descended in a body to the church, but, perceiving I was there, they would not enter,—they remained at the doors, with lights in their hands, gazing on me. It was a singular contrast between me, hurrying round the church almost in the dark (for there were but a few lamps burning dimly), and the group at the door, whose expression of horror was strongly marked by the light, which appeared to have deserted me to concentrate itself among them. The most impartial person on earth might have supposed me deranged, or possessed, or both, from the state in which they saw me. Heaven knows, too, what construction might have been put on my wild actions, which the surrounding darkness exaggerated and distorted, or on the prayers which I uttered, as I included in them the horrors of the temptation against which I implored protection. Exhausted at length, I fell to the ground, and remained there, without the power of moving, but able to hear and observe every thing that passed. I heard them debate whether they should leave me there or not, till the Superior commanded them to remove that abomination from the sanctuary; and such was the terror of me into which they had acted themselves, that he had to repeat his orders before he could procure obedience to them. They approached me at last, with the same caution that they would an infected corse, and dragged me out by the habit, leaving me on the paved floor before the door of the church. They then retired, and in this state I actually fell asleep, and continued so till I was awoke by the bell for matins. I recollected myself, and attempted to rise; but my having slept on a damp floor, when in a fever from terror and excitement, had so cramped my limbs, that I could not accomplish this without the most exquisite pain. As the community passed in to matins, I could not suppress a few cries of pain. They must have seen what was the matter, but not one of them offered me assistance, nor did I dare to implore it. By slow and painful efforts, I at last reached my cell; but, shuddering at the sight of the bed, I threw myself on the floor for repose.—
With these procedures, however, the monks at last overshoot the mark. A closed community as the convent is, still the rumour is spread in Madrid, that a monk there is every night sorely harassed by the devil. This rumour also attracts the attention of the authorities, and the bishop of the diocese arrives to investigate the matter. He is a man calm, rigid, and passionless beyond measure, nor does he feel any personal sympathies for Alonzo; but when he sees the state of Alonzo’s cell and hears of the treatment he has been subjected to—which is contrary to the established rules of the convent—he sternly commands the Superior to restore everything to Alonzo and make him no longer an exception in any respect. Thus far, then, his torments now come to an end, but the greatest blow is yet to fall: intelligence reaches the convent of the failure of his appeal.
Day follows day without Alonzo’s heeding them, until a new adventure commences, more dreadful than all the previous, as Juan once more finds means of smuggling a letter to him. He has been kept in the country almost a prisoner, but has succeeded in escaping to Madrid and settling everything for the escape of Alonzo, which is to be accomplished with the help of one of the monks. This future companion of Alonzo is not an agreeable character; he has entered the convent in order to escape the punishment following parricide, and is a man who ‘envies Judas the thirty pieces of silver for which the Redeemer of mankind was sold.’ For money he has now undertaken to assist in the liberation of Alonzo. In spite of Juan’s encouragements, Alonzo feels despondent and disconsolate. He fully understands the difficulties of his enterprise; even if he should manage to quit the convent in safety, where could a runaway Spanish monk find refuge? Nevertheless he gets into contact with the monk, who soon fixes the night for their escapade. He has procured the key of a door leading to the vaults of the convent, which have long been disused. From the vaults there is a trap-door to a remote part of the garden, whence they are to climb the wall by a ladder procured by Juan. Before they start it strikes Alonzo that his companion cannot brave that risk merely on his account, and asks how he is, in future, to provide for his own safety. The answer has a peculiarity of its own, opening a prospect the like of which none of the ‘terrific’ writers before Maturin had invented:
“No, we must escape together. Could you suppose I would have so much anxiety about an event, in which I had no part but that of an assistant? It was of my own danger I was thinking,—it was of my own safety I was doubtful. Our situation has happened to unite very opposite characters in the same adventure, but it is an union inevitable and inseparable. Your destiny is now bound to mine by a tie which no human force can break,—we part no more for ever. The secret that each is in possession of, must be watched by the other. Our lives are in each other’s hands, and a moment of absence might be that of treachery. We must pass life in each watching every breath the other draws, every glance the other gives,—in dreading sleep as an involuntary betrayer, and watching the broken murmurs of each other’s restless dreams. We may hate each other, (for hatred itself would be a relief, compared to the tedium of our inseparability), but separate we must never.”
With these bright prospects the pair commence their nocturnal wandering in the subterranean vaults, one, no doubt, of the most frightful wanderings ever described in literature. All difficulties which possibly can be encountered in such enterprises are heaped upon them, from their first ineffectual attempts to force the door with the rusty key and with lacerated hands, till the moment they sink down, exhausted, at the trap-door, after losing their way, after seeing their lamps go out, and after stumbling all night in darkness amid terrors real and imaginary, physical and psychical. Alonzo remembers old superstitious tales of demons who seduce monks into the vaults of the convent, and almost fancies he can hear the choir of their infernal sabbath; he grows giddy and stupefied, his knees and hands are stript of skin, and an intolerable thirst is produced by the unnatural atmosphere. At last human nature can endure no more; they lay down ‘like two panting dogs’ in the darkness. When day draws nigh, a faint stream of light makes itself observable above their heads: they have arrived just at the trap-door they have been searching for. But even this hope is turned to despair when it appears that morning is so far advanced that people are already in the garden. They have to remain another twenty-four hours where they are. Retiring into a recess which the parricide seems to be acquainted with they fall asleep, but Alonzo is soon roused by the most hideous screams and imprecations which the other is uttering in his sleep. At last it becomes too much for Alonzo; he awakens his companion with great exertions and wildly vows he is not to sleep any more. The man obeys, but insists on telling a story which has reference to the very recess they are in and which proves to be as sinister as were his dreams.
When the parricide was admitted into the convent, he was appointed to be the executioner whenever a severe punishment was to be inflicted. This he accepted with delight; while hating, by nature, every human being and especially those who seemed happier than himself, he found his sole satisfaction in making others miserable. Opportunities were seldom lacking, and to the métier of executioner he united that of a spy. Once he was desired to keep an eye upon a young monk whose family had placed him in the convent in order to prevent him from marrying a woman of inferior rank. There was, in the air of that monk, something peculiarly hopeful which naturally excited suspicion. Shortly afterwards a young novice entered the community, and the monk and he immediately became inseparable. ‘They were for ever in the garden together—they inhaled the odours of the flowers—they cultivated the same cluster of carnations—they entwined themselves as they walked together—when they were in the choir, their voices were like mixed incense.’ The greater their happiness appeared, the more uneasiness they gave the spy, who was on his watch night and day. Little by little he drew the certain conclusion that the novice was a female, and one night, to his inexpressible joy, he perceived the novice vanish in the monk’s cell. He secured the door and rushed to his master; they broke into the cell and the Superior saw what he had never even thought of and never could understand. His rage was immense, and the punishment, in the invention of which the spy had his ample share, was to be worthy of the crime. The pair were conducted, under the delusion of effecting their escape, to the place where Alonzo is sitting now, and allured into a neighbouring recess which they never quitted alive. The spy kept watch at the door and gradually heard their love turn to hatred in the agonies of death. On the sixth day, when all was silent within, the door was unnailed; the spy now, for the first time, distinctly saw the features of the novice, and recognized those of his only sister.
This is the story which the parricide relates to Alonzo, sparing no details. In the meantime evening comes, and they venture to ascend through the trap-door, and breathe once more the air of heaven. They hurry through the garden and climb the wall. Already Alonzo feels himself supported by the arms of his brother and even enters the carriage which is waiting for them, when Juan is stabbed from behind and falls, bathing in his blood. Alonzo falls on his dead body, losing consciousness; when it returns after a long time, he finds himself in the prison of the Inquisition.—
The episode of the lovers who are immured alive was, of all the stories contained in Melmoth the Wanderer, the one which was most disapproved and which attracted the severest censure. The Edinburgh Review,[129] while regretting Maturin’s taste for horrible and revolting subjects, adds: ‘We thought we had supped full of this commodity; but it seems as if the most ghastly and disgusting portion of the meal was reserved for the present day, and its most hideous concoction for the writer before us,—who is never so much in his favourite element as when he can ‘on horror’s head horrors accumulate.’ Another critic[130] says, with reference to the parricide’s conversation: ‘It is no apology for this to say that it is the language of an atrocious villain—at war with society—steeped to the lips in crime—upon whose brow parricide is branded, and who, with a most profane license, is described by the author to be “beyond the redemption of a Saviour!” Personages should not be created by a novelist, whose deeds to be characteristic must be criminal, and whose phrase to be consistent must be blasphemous.’ It is not to be wondered at that the reviewers were shocked; the parricide is the most atrocious of all the characters of Maturin and death by starvation certainly a disgusting subject. Yet in their indignation they failed to notice the extraordinary skill and power displayed in this episode. Later it has been very differently judged, and, in fact, remained one of the best-known passages in the book. In the opinion of Planche[131] the death-scenes of the lovers form the most beautiful pages in Melmoth; and a modern writer[132] also declares the episode in question to stand artistically on a very high level and to show, in the conception of cruelty, a refinement surpassing even Poe’s in his tale of The Cask of Amontillado, which it slightly recalls in the almost scientific exactness with which the sensations of the victims are observed. The parricide gives this characteristic reason for his voluntary watch at the prison-door: ‘You will call this cruelty, I call it curiosity,—that curiosity that brings thousands to witness a tragedy, and makes the most delicate female feast on groans and agonies;’ and what interests him most is the moment when their love, annihilated by the pangs of hunger, gives way to hostility and rage. The man, he remarks, often accuses the woman as the cause of his sufferings, while she never utters a word which might pain or wound him: we see that the high opinion which Maturin entertained of feminine character asserts itself even in this gloomy instance. The episode of the lovers seems, upon the whole, to be but little influenced by any previous writers. Only the detail of the novice being recognized as the parricide’s sister is borrowed from the older school of terror, where the destroying of near relations was well-nigh indispensable.
The continuation of the Spaniard’s tale, on the other hand, is more closely modelled on patterns easily discernible, and does not quite come up to the beginning. When Alonzo has regained some strength he is, in his new prison, visited by his former companion the parricide, who informs him that he had stabbed Juan, which it was his business to do, the whole escape being a comedy, undertaken with the consent of the Superior, who wished to get rid of Alonzo by plunging him into a worse place; the parricide, for his part, has become a spy and a creature of the Holy Office. Things being now as bad as they can be, it is, at last, time for Melmoth the Wanderer to interfere. Between his examinations Alonzo is, every night, visited by a stranger who gives himself out as a fellow-prisoner and entertains Alonzo with discussions on various topics. There is, however, something strangely suspicious in his behaviour, and Alonzo is frightened by the unearthly lustre of his eyes. The suspicions of Alonzo gain strength when he is warned by one of the officials to be on his guard against a person who has been frequenting some of the cells and set at defiance all the vigilance of the Inquisition. He makes a candid confession of the visits of the stranger, hoping by this means to make a favourable impression upon his judges, but in this he is totally disappointed. A prisoner whom the devil is supposed to be so obstinate in visiting, can expect no mercy from the tribunal. Before Alonzo’s last examination Melmoth then discloses to him the ‘unutterable condition’ upon which his liberation might be expected. Alonzo never thinks of accepting it, and hastens to make a full confession to a priest, but his doom is sealed: he is sentenced to be burnt in an autodafé. When the sentence is announced he sees Melmoth sitting at one of the tables as secretary, and feels sure that he has been made the dupe of the inquisitorial officials.
On the morning on which the ceremony is to take place a fire breaks out within the walls of the Inquisition. Availing himself of the confusion Alonzo rushes out and finds his way to a narrow apartment in the end of a street. The apartment appears to belong to a Jew, known in Madrid as a good Catholic, but secretly clinging to the religion of his fathers. He is terrified almost to death at the sudden entrance of Alonzo—being just engaged in the initiation of a young son of his according to the Jewish rites—but they soon come to an understanding, and Alonzo remains in the house. The Jew subsequently finds out that Alonzo is generally believed to have perished in the fire. This piece of news, however, makes him incautious, and one day, during the absence of the Jew, he places himself in the window to watch a great religious procession. Among the participants he sees his former companion from the convent; at the moment he arrives beneath the window he is pointed out by some one as a parricide and a criminal of the blackest dye; the fury of the populace is roused, and the man is, after a fierce struggle, torn to pieces before Alonzo’s eyes. Alonzo stands riveted to the spot until the horrid spectacle is over; but the same night the house is searched through by the inquisitorial officials, who maintain that the soul of a deceased heretic has been seen hovering near it. The Jew has just time to conceal Alonzo under one of the boards of the floor, where a cavity of some dimensions seems to have been made for the purpose. While the Jew is invoking all the prophets, Alonzo plunges deeper in the recess and perceives a kind of passage running out from it. The passage ends in a room whither he is guided by a faint stream of light. In the room he finds a very old man, sitting at a table covered with books and globes and surrounded by skeletons and scientific instruments. Superstitious and inexperienced as he is, Alonzo takes him for an evil spirit, but is reassured by a certain calm dignity in the old man’s manner. He is, indeed, a Jewish sage who has passed nearly a life-time in the subterraneous community. He has even been expecting Alonzo, having learned the secret of his existence from the other Jew and having requested Alonzo to be sent to him to act as his ‘secretary.’ He places before Alonzo a manuscript, written in Spanish with Greek characters, which he is to copy out. During the interview Alonzo happens to mention that he has been tempted by an agent of the enemy, and stood firm. This agent the Jew rightly concludes to be Melmoth the Wanderer with whom, he hints, he has been acquainted in his youth, much to his misfortune. And the manuscript which he has compiled turns out to be a record of the achievements of Melmoth, of which a new one now succeeds the Tale of the Spaniard.
That the story of Alonzo di Monçada is a Gothic Romance of the first magnitude, has never been denied except by its author. In the preface to Melmoth the Wanderer Maturin says:
“The Spaniard’s Tale” has been censured by a friend to whom I read it, as containing too much attempt at the revivification of the horrors of Radcliffe-Romance, of the persecutions of convents, and the terrors of the Inquisition.
I defended myself, by trying to point out to my friend, that I had made the misery of conventual life depend less on the startling adventures one meets with in romances, than on that irritating series of petty torments which constitutes the misery of life in general, and which, amid the tideless stagnation of monastic existence, solitude gives its inmates leisure to invent, and power combined with malignity, the full disposition to practise. I trust this defence will operate more on the conviction of the Reader, than it did on that of my friend.
Now, there are probably not many readers on whose conviction this defence has operated, and who have not felt that Maturin’s distinctions, as a contemporary critic[133] put it, ‘between his own convents and those of old are rather fanciful than real.’ The defence can, at the utmost, be applied to the first part of Alonzo’s stay in the convent, although even there we find, among the ‘petty torments,’ instances of monks being flogged to death; and it must also be admitted that this part is the most original. According as the torments grow decidedly serious, the points of contact with Godwin and Lewis become more conspicuous. As for the latter part of the story, it is unquestionably a perfect ‘romance of horror,’ with the horrors introduced solely for their own sake, only so much more powerful in execution than its forerunners, that one might be tempted to think it was Maturin’s wish to show how such a book ought to be written. In the art of suggestion, so important in tales of this character, Maturin here, as in Montorio, stands between Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis, avoiding the excesses of both. His grasp on the subject-matter is always stronger than that of Mrs. Radcliffe, whose gentleness sometimes reduces her work to ‘a timid trifling with the world of phantoms and nameless terrors;’[134] while he seldom or never copies the coarseness of Lewis who, in fact, knows nothing of the art in question. This is particularly noticeable in Maturin’s treatment of the (very limited) supernatural element in Melmoth. He tells, no doubt, many frightful things and calls them by their names, but then there are also a great many circumstances which are said to be too horrible and unhallowed to relate. With sure artistic instinct Maturin forbears ever to expound the ‘incommunicable condition’ of Melmoth, whereas the surrender of their souls to the devil, made by Ambrosio and Matilda in The Monk, is laid down with a clearness and accuracy leaving nothing to be guessed. Another detail worthy of notice is the circumstance that the partly supernatural personality of the Wanderer makes an indelible impression upon those coming into contact with him, and marks them for life. Stanton, it will be remembered, knows no rest after having encountered Melmoth; his remaining days are spent in an indefatigable pursuit of him, the cause of which he could not even explain to himself; and a similar wish, it must be presumed, eventually drives Monçada to Ireland. Here may, indeed, be an influence from Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where the hero, in never-allayed anxiety, pursues the monster which he has created from one end of the world to the other, in order to prevent him from doing more mischief—: the artistic effect is, at all events, incomparably greater than that attained in The Monk, where the ghosts and spooks are treated with ease and familiarity, and where a Spanish nobleman relates that he has encountered the Wandering Jew, with a burning cross on his forehead, almost as nonchalantly as he would tell that he has met his brother. With this general difference in style and execution, many external motives from The Monk are utilized in the Spaniard’s tale, as they were in Montorio. The most conspicuous here, again, is the introduction of ecclesiastical cruelty and monastical oppression; the case of Ildefonsa in Montorio which, as we have seen, was suggested by the story of Agnes de Medina in The Monk, is here applied to Alonzo, with a power leaving both those romances far behind. The Domina of Lewis and the Superior of Maturin represent the same type: both are narrow-minded, hypocritical and revengeful, and pride themselves on the strict order and discipline maintained in their convents. Both are, on important occasions, surrounded by four satellites, who obey their every sign, and who are employed to drag recalcitrant monks and nuns to the subterranean dungeons, which, in both tales, are swarming with nauseous reptiles. A reminiscence of very unpleasant character, from Lewis, is also the dismal end of the parricide; in The Monk the same fate overtakes the Domina, when her cruelty to the young nun becomes known. She, too, is about to take part in a religious procession, when suddenly she is made an object of the rage of the people. As in the case of the parricide, neither the solemnity of the occasion, nor the respect for the priests present, nor fear of the soldiers can protect the victim from the populace, which presses on like a storm and never rests until its vengeance is fulfilled. In The Monk the Domina tries to make some sort of resistance, but ‘at length a flint, aimed by some well-directing hand, struck her full upon the temple. She sank upon the ground bathed in blood, and in a few minutes terminated her miserable existence;’ Maturin tells that the man does not cease to howl for mercy ‘till a stone, aimed by some pitying hand, struck him down. He fell, trodden in one moment into sanguine and discoloured mud by a thousand feet.’ It is but just to Mrs. Radcliffe to observe that she never would have described scenes like these.
The latter part of the story, containing the scenes in and after the Inquisition, is clearly influenced by Godwin. Of the examinations and official proceedings very little is told. Monçada, like St. Leon, is bound by an oath which he considers sacred, not to reveal what takes place under the roof of the Holy Office—an oath rather convenient to the author. St. Leon is, in his cell, visited by a creature of the Inquisition—a similar figure appears in The Italian of Mrs. Radcliffe—who tries to ensnare him in his own answers, the like of whom Alonzo supposes Melmoth to be. Both are finally condemned to flames, from which they escape in manners so closely alike, that the incident itself must be considered one of Maturing most obvious borrowings, although his execution, here again, is so much superior to his model, that it well-nigh recalls Shakespeare’s way of treating his ‘loans.’ When St. Leon is marching in the procession of the autodafé, some confusion arises from a horse rearing violently. This irritates the other horses, and the bustle becomes such that St. Leon succeeds in absconding and, like Alonzo, rushes down a narrow lane. All this is told in a few lines. In Melmoth the confusion is caused by a fire—an expedient less original but more acceptable—of which there is a description long and truly magnificent. In the end of the lane St. Leon, like Alonzo, forces his entrance into the habitation of a Jew, whom he terrifies to become his involuntary host and concealer. But while there are, in Godwin, no very interesting intérieurs from the Jewish community, the corresponding passages in Melmoth, though fantastic, are depicted with a lively minuteness, and the sudden appearance of Alonzo even with humour, of which refreshing quality there is but this short flash in the Spaniard’s tale. The Jew, it has been mentioned, is on the point of converting his son, who has been brought up a Catholic, all implements being ready and the cock to be sacrificed on the occasion fastened at the leg of a table:
There was something at once fearful and ludicrous in the scene that followed. Rebekah, an old Jewish woman, came at his call; but, seeing a third person, retreated in terror, while her master, in his confusion, called her in vain by her Christian name of Maria. Obliged to remove the table alone, he overthrew it, and broke the leg of the unfortunate animal fastened to it, who, not to be without his share in the tumult, uttered the most shrill and intolerable screams, while the Jew, snatching up the sacrificial knife, repeated eagerly, “Statim mactat gallum,” put the wretched bird out of its pain; then, trembling at this open avowal of his Judaism, he sat down amid the ruins of the overthrown table, the fragments of the broken vessels, and the remains of the martyred cock. He gazed at me with a look of stupified and ludicrous inanity, and demanded in delirious tones, what “my lords the Inquisitors had pleased to visit his humble but highly-honoured mansion for?” I was scarce less deranged than he was; and, though we both spoke the same language, and were forced by circumstances into the same strange and desperate confidence with each other, we really needed, for the first half-hour, a rational interpreter of our exclamations, starts of fear, and bursts of disclosure. At last our mutual terror acted honestly between us, and we understood each other.
The description of the subterranean abode is still more successful and entirely Maturin’s own. The old sage is indeed like a ghost of the past, where he sits among dusty manuscripts and the skeletons of his family, deceased a generation ago; and the atmosphere in which the new tale commence is extremely suggestive:
It was a night of storms in the world above us; and, far below the surface of the earth as we were, the murmur of the winds, sighing through the passages, came on my ear like the voices of the departed,—like the pleadings of the dead. Involuntarily I fixed my eye on the manuscript I was to copy, and never withdrew till I had finished its extraordinary contents.—
Even the person and character of the Wanderer, such as he appears in this tale, is less original than elsewhere in the book. His discussions in Alonzo’s cell, which are rather overloaded with historical information, may have been suggested by a passage in The Monk, where it is said of the Wandering Jew, that ‘he named people who had ceased to exist for many centuries and yet with whom he appeared to have been personally acquainted.’ Alonzo is struck by the same peculiarity in Melmoth, who relates anecdotes which happened during the reign of monarchs belonging to by-gone ages: ‘These circumstances were trifling, and might be told by any one, but there was a minuteness and circumstantiality in his details, that perpetually forced on the mind the idea that he had himself seen what he described, and been conversant with the personages he spoke of.’ To the reader, unfortunately, some of these anecdotes appear not only trifling but ridiculous, and the mysterious grandeur in which Melmoth ought to be veiled, is here not quite successfully sustained. His rôle during the fire is more impressive, and presents a parallel to the apparition seen by John Melmoth the night when the Spanish vessel is wrecked:
At this moment, while standing amid the groupe of prisoners, my eyes were struck by an extraordinary spectacle. Perhaps it is amid the moments of despair, that imagination has most power, and they who have suffered, can best describe and feel. In the burning light, the steeple of the Dominican church was as visible as at noon-day. It was close to the prison of the Inquisition. The night was intensely dark, but so strong was the light of the conflagration, that I could see the spire blazing, from the reflected lustre, like a meteor. The hands of the clock were as visible as if a torch was held before them; and this calm and silent progress of time, amid the tumultuous confusion of midnight horrors,—this scene of the physical and mental world in an agony of fruitless and incessant motion, might have suggested a profound and singular image, had not my whole attention been rivetted to a human figure placed on a pinnacle of the spire, and surveying the scene in perfect tranquillity. It was a figure not to be mistaken—it was the figure of him who had visited me in the cells of the Inquisition.—
A perfect ‘Gothic Romance’ as the Spaniard’s tale is in form, it is, fundamentally, a treatise against the omnipotence of the Catholic church, from which omnipotence all the evils and miseries directly arise. It is a protest against ‘a power whose influence is unlimited, indefinable, and unknown, even to those who exercise it, as there are mansions so vast, that their inmates, to their last hour, have never visited all the apartments;—a power whose operation is like its motto,—one and indivisible’—as it is a defence of another philosophy which values freedom, enjoyment of existence and natural affection. In this fight between theories the development of characters is, perhaps necessarily, neglected. Alonzo is but a vehicle by which the author gives vent to his own views; in himself he is impossible. It has already been pointed out that all the heroes of Maturin are very young, but the youth of Alonzo is a downright absurdity: he is not thirteen when his combat against monasticism commences; and even a precocious Spaniard could hardly, at that age, have conceived the idea of an improved Catholicism which he outlines on several occasions. For in all his vicissitudes he never ceases to be a good and sincere Catholic; it is not the religion, but its abuses, which Maturin—somewhat post festum, in 1820—is castigating.
The manuscript read by Monçada in the vault of the Jew commences with a narrative called the Tale of the Indians. In this tale—and only here—the Wanderer is the real hero and it is, so far, the central and most important part of the book. It has also been the most generally appreciated of all the tales in Melmoth and contains, indeed, passages of exquisite beauty, although as a composition it is broken and somewhat irregular. By way of contrast it is cleverly placed immediately after the Spaniard’s tale; the scene of action is removed from subterranean recesses and noxious vapours far away amid flowers and sunshine.
A small island in the Indian sea, where there has formerly stood a temple erected to the terrible goddess Seeva, has, after a series of earthquakes, become depopulated and totally deserted by the inhabitants of the mainland. Yet after some time it again has obtained the reputation of being the seat of a goddess, of an unknown and gentler character. Rumours of a vision seen there, lovely beyond description, spread among the natives, and young people get into the habit of offering fruits and flowers to the new goddess, who is supposed to be particularly well-disposed towards lovers. And inhabited the island really is. A small child, a girl, the sole survivor of the wreck of a Spanish vessel, has found refuge there and grows up a wild daughter of nature, as innocent as she is beautiful, as good as she is lovely. The flowers and birds are her friends; the shells are her toys; and the sense of fear is utterly unknown to her, there being nothing in her island which bears a hostile appearance. Until the great catastrophe there is not a cloud to disturb her paradisiacal existence. The catastrophe arrives in the person of Melmoth the Wanderer, who once chances to visit the deserted island and there finds Immalee—this is the name the natives have given their goddess. The few reminiscences of the Spanish language which she still retains are revived and developed in her intercourse with him, while her sentiments towards her visitor, at the same time, grow to an ardent attachment. When aware of this, Melmoth, with a generosity that does honour to an agent of the enemy, tears himself away and never revisits the island, nor do they meet again until Immalee has been discovered and taken back to her family in Spain.—
The idea of making the fanciful Indians worship Immalee as a deity was poetical enough, and it is finely told how two young lovers, who separately set out to the island with their offerings, find each other in the presence of the goddess, and return, happy, in the same canoe. The two are so fortunate as to get a sight of the mystical being:
The form was that of a female, but such as they had never before beheld, for her skin was perfectly white, (at least in their eyes, who had never seen any but the dark-red tint of the natives of the Bengalese islands). Her drapery (as well as they could see) consisted only of flowers, whose rich colours and fantastic grouping harmonized well with the peacock’s feathers twined among them, and altogether composed a feathery fan of wild drapery, which, in truth, beseemed an “island goddess.” Her long hair, of a colour they had never beheld before, pale auburn, flowed to her feet, and was fantastically entwined with the flowers and the feathers that formed her dress. On her head was a coronal of shells, of hue and lustre unknown except in the Indian seas—the purple and the green vied with the amethyst, and the emerald. On her white bare shoulder a loxia was perched, and round her neck was hung a string of their pearl-like eggs, so pure and pellucid, that the first sovereign in Europe might have exchanged his richest necklace of pearls for them. Her arms and feet were perfectly bare, and her step had a goddess-like rapidity and lightness, that affected the imagination of the Indians as much as the extraordinary colour of her skin and hair. The young lovers sunk in awe before this vision as it passed before their eyes. While they prostrated themselves, a delicious sound trembled on their ears. The beautiful vision spoke to them, but it was in a language they did not understand; and this confirming their belief that it was the language of the gods, they prostrated themselves to her again.
This same idea, however, gave rise to some other passages which sadly jar against the idyllic tone, besides being very unnecessary. The worship of Immalee, it is told, is chiefly practised by the younger generation, by whom the ferocious rites of the old religion are, accordingly, forgotten, which circumstance does not fail to excite much anger and disapproval among the old devotees, who are aroused to opposition against the new order of things. This it would have been quite sufficient briefly to state; but the fact that there exist, or have existed, revolting and inhuman forms of religious exercise, seems to have been a cancer constantly preying on Maturin’s mind, nor could he ever say enough on the subject. The satire levelled in Women at the rigid and bigoted Calvinism was, no doubt, well in its place, and the indignation with which monasticism and Inquisition are treated in the present work, can yet be understood; but the idea of pursuing, with bitter irony, the old Indian religion prescribing lacerations and human sacrifices, the loathsome character of which nobody would have dreamt of defending, is nothing short of ridiculous. The Indian idyll, beautiful as it is, might have afforded some surprise to those acquainted with Maturin’s views in general. The never-ending conflict between the fantastical novelist and the clergyman of the established church asserts itself very curiously in the whole conception of Immalee and her life in the island. Maturin had, more than once, strongly expressed his opinion, that a mode of life away from the benefits of civilization cannot but have a brutalizing effect upon human nature; in one of his sermons there is the following passage:
Let us ask ourselves what is human life? The question, my brethren, is of some importance—we must view man under three characters—as a savage—as a being whose intellectual faculties are cultivated—and lastly as acquainted with the blessedness of religion. What happiness do the former class know? The happiness of brutality—horrible felicity! if it be felicity—the happiness that may be shared with brutes: though some writers even of this age have struggled hard to prove that this is the best state of man. I would not notice them from this place but to notice the monstrous falsehood, which lies against God, and nature, and truth. The life of a brute was never intended to be the life of man. Yet there are writers, and some of those whom I address are acquainted with those writers, who would teach us that man in his natural state is most perfect, and that the heir of immortality is formed not to be above the beasts that perish.
Shortly after delivering this (not very brilliant) effusion, Maturin was himself one of ‘those writers.’ It is true that the story of Immalee is a work of pure imagination and that he does not exactly try to prove anything by it or to lay the case down as a doctrine; but all the same the fact remains that here a being, while living far from civilization and in absolute ignorance of religion, is represented as angelically good and deliciously happy, and that, after her entrance into a society where religion, may be in a corrupted form, pervades life in all its phases, she becomes most wretchedly miserable. Maturin, like most imaginative writers of the time, could not help once, at least, paying his tribute to the great ideal of a return to nature, so vigorously and eloquently put forth in the latter part of the previous century. Who the writers alluded to are it is, of course, not difficult to point out. Immalee’s spiritual parent is Rousseau, through the mediation of Bernardin de St. Pierre; she is a belated sister of Virginie who, before her, played with birds and flowers in exotic, Indian surroundings, depicted in glowing colours. Yet there can be no question of direct imitation. Immalee is original and romantic, she belongs as distinctly to the 19:th century as her prototype does to the 18:th. Maturin, as was his wont, made the case an extreme one; his heroine lives wholly by herself, taught and nurtured by nature alone, without a parent or philosopher to point out to her the benefits of such an education. And the character of Immalee, in all its fantasticalness, has infinitely more of ‘nature’ in it than there is in the tedious conventionalism of Virginie; nor is, after all, the one impossibility more improbable than the other. As Maturin did not create Immalee to advocate any theories, he was freer to endow her with those qualities that spring from das ewig weibliche. Her first encounter with the Wanderer—which takes place in the year of grace 1680—is most charmingly described:
The stranger approached, and the beautiful vision approached also, but not like an European female with low and graceful bendings, still less like an Indian girl with her low salams, but like a young fawn, all animation, timidity, confidence, and cowardice, expressed in almost a single action. She sprung from the sands—ran to her favourite tree;—returned again with her guard of peacocks, who expanded their superb trains with a kind of instinctive motion, as if they felt the danger that menaced their protectress, and clapping her hands with exultation, seemed to invite them to share in the delight she felt in gazing at the new flower that had grown in the sand.
With true feminine talkativeness she at once begins, in her imperfect language, to tell her visitor of her solitary life, her companions, and her innocent amusements. She tells that she is older than the moon, and never changes, although the roses fade; that she has often tried in vain to catch stars and moonbeams, and that she has a friend whose face meets hers in the stream when the sky is clear.
On this tabula rasa, then, is Melmoth to impress his peculiar views of the world and its conditions. It is stated that he regards her with compassion, which feeling he experiences for the first time in his life. His soul becomes the prey of contending passions, in the course of which is displayed what a critic[135] finely terms as ‘the naturalness and supernaturalness of it, the repulsion and attraction of it, the sublimity and devilry of it—not obviously balanced each to enhance each other, but as it were fused in the white heat of Maturin’s imagination;’ and as his human nature finally carries off the victory, the conviction is brought home to the reader that Melmoth himself deserves something of the compassion he bestows on Immalee. At first, indeed, he appears as a tempter, endeavouring to corrupt her mind and, above all, to incite in her a contempt for religion. He has a telescope by him which enables her distinctly to see the adjacent coast of India. She reviews some of the rites of the natives, the repulsiveness of which she does not understand. There is also a Turkish mosque which does not much appeal to her, but at last she perceives a half-hidden Christian church, whose meaning and tenets he is forced reluctantly to explain, whereupon she exclaims in exultation: ‘Christ shall be my God, and I will be a Christian!’ Understanding that her nature is incorruptible, Melmoth gives up regarding her as a victim. He leaves metaphysics alone and confines his discussions solely to the phenomena of this world. The European vessels that pass by the island furnish him with the opportunity of describing the effects of European civilization, and the kind of life led in European countries. The description is bitter, cynical and pessimistic; the darker sides of modern life—war, oppression, unjust laws, religious contests, unequal distribution of wealth—all is laid down in a language truly appalling, and wound up with the remark that, among human beings, the sole kind parents are those ‘who murder their children at the hour of their birth, or, by medical art dismiss them before they have seen the light; and, in so doing, they give the only creditable evidence of parental affection.’ By enfolding this sombre picture he tries to terrify her from wishing ever to see the world, and thus to keep her for himself, for in her society alone can he hope to forget his misery. She is the only oasis in the desert of his existence, the only human being on earth who does not instinctively shrink from him, and who is not frightened by the lustre of his eyes:
While he sat near her on the flowers she had collected for him,—while he looked on those timid and rosy lips that waited his signal to speak, like buds that did not dare to blow till the sun shone on them,—while he heard accents issue from those lips which he felt it would be as impossible to pervert as it would be to teach the nightingale blasphemy,—he sunk down beside her, passed his hand over his livid brow and wiping off some cold drops, thought for a moment he was not the Cain of the moral world, and that the brand was effaced,—at least for a moment.
Yet the impression made upon Immalee by the conversations of Melmoth is very different from what he intended. She sheds tears and suffers with the sufferers, but nevertheless she is seized with a longing towards the world. She has tasted from the tree of knowledge, and her peace of mind is gone. At the same time she feels that the society of the stranger is far more to her than that of her mute companions; every time he leaves her she implores him to return, and he, on his part, cannot resist the temptation although he sees he is destroying her happiness. She loves; and the more he terrifies her with his wild laugh and impetuous speech which is incomprehensible to her, the stronger grows her love. Her idyll is at an end, and her former occupations interest her no longer. Now she begins to prefer ‘the rocks and the ocean, the thunder of the wave, and the sterility of the sands.’ This change fills Melmoth with rage, as the society of Immalee thus loses the character of a calm refuge where he may snatch a moment of rest, and one stormy night he even contemplates her again in the light of a victim. Yet the innocent belief of Immalee that she is sheltered when he is near her, once more appeals to his better feelings: he frightens her, indeed, into a state of unconsciousness, but then, with a supreme effort, leaves the island for ever.
These are the bare outlines of this singular courtship in the Indian island. In point of language it contains the most magnificent passages in Maturin’s production, and the characterization also stands very high. Powerful as is the picture of the passions and emotions of Melmoth, it is surpassed by the art with which Immalee’s development from a wild and thoughtless girl into a woman who loves, and suffers for her love, is traced. The delineation of feminine psychology, in which Maturin always excelled, is here as masterly as it was in the case of Eva in Women, and there is, in Immalee, an inner truth quite independent of her fantastical circumstances. The very idea of dissimulation being foreign to her, she does not think of concealing her feelings, and amid the effusions of Melmoth—which sometimes come to the verge of the melodramatic—she is all simplicity and nature. As she has never seen any other human being, she can not understand or even surmise the exceptional character of Melmoth, nor know that he is not, and cannot be, a lover in the ordinary sense of the word. She only feels that she is ready for any sacrifice for him, and her attachment appears unaltered when they next meet in Spain.—
To the passages in which Melmoth describes to Immalee the state of the world and the conditions of human life, there is this marginal note:
As by a mode of criticism equally false and unjust, the worst sentiments of my worst characters, (from the ravings of Bertram to the blasphemies of Cardonneau), have been represented as my own, I must here trespass so far on the patience of the reader as to assure him, that the sentiments ascribed to the stranger are diametrically opposite to mine, and that I have purposely put them into the mouth of an agent of the enemy of mankind.[136]
That Maturin had suffered much from this mode of criticism there is no doubt, and it was certainly a cautious thing to do to fix a note of this kind to a sentence like the following:
“These people,” he said, “have made unto themselves kings, that is, beings whom they voluntarily invest with the privilege of draining, by taxation, whatever wealth their vices have left to the rich, and whatever means of subsistence their want has left to the poor, till their extortion is cursed from the castle to the cottage—and this to support a few pampered favourites, who are harnassed by silken reins to the car, which they drag over the prostrate bodies of the multitude.”
Yet this note cannot be taken quite literally, any more than those prefaces of Maturin where he depreciates his works. The discussions of Melmoth are introduced with the remark that ‘there was a mixture of fiendish acrimony, biting irony, and fearful truth, in his wild sketch, which was often interrupted by the cries of astonishment, grief, and terror, from his hearer.’ What there, accordingly, is of ‘fearful truth’ would, at least, seem to represent Maturin’s own views; and what Melmoth, for instance, says about religious wars, Maturin would doubtless have subscribed to at any time. The tone of latent conviction in many of these passages has been pointed out by a critic,[137] with the supposition that they were dictated by the disappointments and bitter experiences Maturin had met with in his life, and this may well be the case. From the literary point of view, however, the whole discourse is but an echo of the school of Rousseau, which Maturin was in the habit of condemning, but under whose influence the first part of the Tale of the Indians was written.[138] Sentences from the conversation of the old hermit in Paul et Virginie, like:
Le meilleur des livres, qui ne prêche que l’égalité, l’amitié, l’humilité et la concorde, l’Evangile, a servi pendant des siècles de prétexte aux fureurs des Européens,
are distinctly recalled:
Intent on their settled purpose of discovering misery wherever it could be traced, and inventing it where it could not, they have found, even in the pure pages of that book, which, they presume to say, contains their title to peace on earth, and happiness hereafter, a right to hate, plunder, and murder each other.
Apart from this, however, the tale is remarkably original as well as typically Maturineian. Among slight literary influences, a reminiscence from Ossian can be traced in a wild song of Immalee, after she has lost her peace:
The night is growing dark—but what is that to the darkness that his absence has cast on my soul? The lightnings are glancing round me—but what are they to the gleam of his eye when he parted from me in anger? — — —
Roar on, terrible ocean! thy waves, which I cannot count, can never wash his image from my soul,—thou dashest a thousand waves against a rock, but the rock is unmoved—and so would be my heart amid the calamities of the world with which he threatens me,—whose dangers I never would have known but for him, and whose dangers for him I will encounter.
Three years having elapsed, two persons in Madrid are, at the same time, exciting much interest and curiosity. One of them is a stranger of whom fearful rumours are abroad, although there is nothing extraordinary about him except the appalling lustre in his eyes; the other is a most beautiful female, who has recently turned up in Madrid as the new-found daughter of the merchant Aliaga and who lives in her father’s villa near the town. Once these two persons accidentally meet in the street, which accident is to have fatal consequences to all the members of the merchant’s family.
The household of Aliaga, who himself is absent on a voyage in the Indies, consists of his wife Donna Clara, his son Don Fernan, and the family confessor Fra Jose. Of these none is capable in the least of understanding Immalee—or Isidora, as she is now called—and she feels deeply unhappy in her new surroundings. Her unrestrained freedom of yore has been replaced by the strictest etiquette prescribing her duties to be ‘perfect obedience, profound submission, and unbroken silence, except when addressed to;’ and her warm and generous feelings are chilled by the cold and rigid Catholicism, very different from her own notions of religion. These latter are, indeed, considered to denote sheer madness after she once expresses the hope ‘that the heretics in the train of the English ambassador might not be everlastingly damned.’ Donna Clara is a woman of rigid mind and mediocrity of intellect, chiefly occupied in religious meditations of the narrowest kind. Her son is a selfish and brutal character from whom no kindness is to be expected. Isidora’s best friend is the priest, who, in contrast to his counterpart in the Spaniard’s tale, is described as a good and well-meaning person. Yet for the power of the church he, too, is prepared to sacrifice everything. Thus he, taking for pretext some superstitious rumours concerning the early life of Isidora, insists on her taking the veil, which scheme is indignantly opposed by Don Fernan, who calculates that the extraordinary beauty of his sister will be the means of the family forming, by marriage, a connection with the highest nobility of Spain. Before, however, either project has been realized, her meeting with Melmoth takes place, and he begins nightly to visit her under her casement.
These nocturnal meetings, which form the principal contents of the story, are quite worthy of the corresponding scenes in the first part. The present desolate state of Isidora is as convincingly described as her longing for the Indian island, to dream of which is her only happiness. The image of Melmoth is united to all that is dear to her, and she loves him as she loves the memories of bygone days:
“You were the first human being I ever saw who could teach me language and who taught me feeling. Your image is for ever before me, present or absent, sleeping or waking. I have seen fairer forms,—I have listened to softer voices, I might have met gentler hearts,—but the first, the indelible image, is written on mine, and its characters will never be effaced till that heart is a clod of the valley. I loved you not for comeliness,—I loved you not for gay deportment, or fond language, or all that is said to be lovely in the eye of a woman,—I loved you because you were my first,—the sole connecting link between the human world and my heart,—the being who brought me acquainted with that wondrous instrument that lay unknown and untouched within me, and whose chords, as long as they vibrate, will disdain to obey any touch but that of their first mover,—because your image is mixed in my imagination with all the glories of nature,—because your voice, when I heard it first, was something in accordance with the murmur of the ocean, and the music of the stars.”
In her artlessness she understands him as little as ever. At the renewal of their intercourse she feels an innocent desire—Maturin was too acute a psychologist to omit this circumstance—do dazzle him with her newly-acquired accomplishments, without being aware that the more unlike she is to everybody else, the more attractive she must be to him—that her sole attraction, in fact, lies in her being something new even in his worldwide experience. Seeing, however, that her accomplishments do not please him, she gives up every thought of herself:
She now had concentrated all her hopes, and all her heart, no longer in the ambition to be beloved, but in the sole wish to love. She no longer alluded to the enlargement of her faculties, the acquisition of new powers, and the expansion and cultivation of her taste. She ceased to speak—she sought only to listen—then her wish subsided into that quiet listening for his form alone, which seemed to transfer the office of hearing into the eyes, or rather, to identify both. She saw him long before he appeared,—and heard him though he did not speak. They have been in each other’s presence for the short hours of a Spanish summer’s night,—Isidora’s eyes alternately fixed on the sun-like moon, and on her mysterious lover,—while he, without uttering a word, leaned against the pillars of her balcony, or the trunk of the giant myrtle-tree, which cast the shade he loved, even by night, over his portentous expression,—and they never uttered a word to each other, till the waving of Isidora’s hand, as the dawn appeared, was the tacit signal for their parting.
The mental process which Melmoth undergoes is much the same as before. He approaches her with withering sarcasm and torments her with his diabolical laugh and terrible allusions, which she bears with gentleness and patience. She is still the only being who does not understand that he is to be feared, and in whose society—as described in the fine passage quoted above—he can obtain some rest and oblivion; and in these moments his human nature is again appealed to, and his better feelings prompt him once more to leave her. The only thing Isidora ever asks of him—from a sense of inborn dignity rather than acquired conventionality—is to discontinue his clandestine visits and appear before her family as her wooer. Once united to him by the rites of the Catholic church, she promises to follow him wherever it shall be. On one of these occasions Melmoth finds strength to take the decisive step:
“Would you then consent to unite your destiny with mine? Would you indeed be mine amid mystery and sorrow? Would you follow me from land to sea, and from sea to land,—a restless, homeless, devoted being,—with the brand on your brow, and the curse on your name? Would you indeed be mine? my own—my only Immalee?”—“I would—I will!”—“Then,” answered Melmoth, “on this spot receive the proof of my eternal gratitude. On this spot I renounce your sight!—I disannul your engagement!—I fly from you for ever!” And as he spoke, he disappeared.