Chapter V (10)

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.