Chapter V (9)

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.