Charles Robert Maturin: His Life and Works

III.

1816-1817.

Pope.

On the 9:th of May 1816 Maturin’s Bertram, or the Castle of St. Aldobrand had its first performance at Drury Lane and ran, under general acclamation, for twenty two nights in succession.

With similar distinctions, however, were then received a great many other plays, nowadays equally unknown and obscure. The disproportion between the enduring merits of a literary production and the admiration lavished upon it by its contemporaries was, at the time in question, most conspicuous in the field of the drama. The history of the whole 18:th century drama in England is, with a few brilliant exceptions, a history of decay. From the shock that the drama had suffered at the triumph of Puritanism in the preceding century it recovered but slowly, and in the meantime the cultivated public was strongly decided in favour of the novel; while an undreamed revival was taking place within the last-named branch of literature, the theatre long remained a meeting-place of ordinary pleasure-hunters. Even the advance of the actor was injurious to the drama, the excellence of the acting offering ample excuse for the inferiority of what was acted.[68] Yet the English drama of the latter 18:th century, viewed in broad outlines, followed the fiction. The spectator is taken into scenes of domestic life where the absence of the grander elements of tragedy is compensated with tender and always well-bred sentimentality. Out of this milieu, but under the freshening influence of classical comedy, there arose the dramatic masterpieces of the age, the comedies of Sheridan and Goldsmith.

The romantic drama which came after the sentimental, displays a spectacle still more unexhilarating. The fascination exercised by Shakespeare upon the young romantic movement bore fruit in the interpretations of great actors and, a little later, in the enthusiastic comments of eminent critics; but the playwrights could do nothing with a model that admitted neither approach nor imitation. This was realized by some of the dramatists themselves. Maturin wrote,[69] with reference to the sorry state of the English drama, which he calls a phenomenon unparalleled in the history of literature:

At the same time there came an influence from very different quarters. If it was not possible to enter into competition with the Elizabethans, there was no difficulty in imitating writers like Kotzebue, who left his mark upon much in the English drama of the time. Yet nothing remains even of those who aspired higher. Joanna Baillie was the most admired of them; Maturin quotes her often and calls her the greatest dramatist of the age; but in our days ‘no man reads her unless he must.’[70] Until the appearance of The Cenci (1819), the early 19:th century romanticism produced not a single drama worthy of the glorious traditions.

Considering this desert-like state of the then English drama, the éclat roused by Bertram is not surprising. Still it was less due to any of its dramatical qualities than to its closeness to the poetical standard in vogue just at the time of its performance; the point was made by the admirers as well as by the slanderers of the play, that it was conceived quite ‘in the taste of Lord Byron.’ If Maturin’s first romance had appeared a little too late, with regard to the style in which it was written, his first drama thus appeared at the right moment and met with the right interpretation. Whatever the opinion of Kean may have been of the play, he certainly realized the intentions of the poet with a skill that left nothing more to be desired. In an account of the first night we read:[71]

Such is count Bertram when presented to the spectator. Once he has been of wholly different character, while living in the kingdom of Sicily as

When his power, however, has become too great, and his plans turned out to be too ambitious for the safety of the state, Lord Aldobrand has contrived to overthrow him. Deprived of name and fortune he has only saved his life by flight; and the admired and accomplished courtier has subsequently been changed into a captain of a gang of robbers, of uncommon ferocity. In the meantime his betrothed bride, Imogine, a lady of comparatively humble birth, has been induced to give her hand to the selfsame Aldobrand, for the (not very original) purpose of saving an aged parent from ruin.—

By the coast of Sicily, then, in the vicinity of the castle of St. Aldobrand, the brotherhood of a convent are, at the opening of the play, roused from their sleep by a violent storm. At a short distance a vessel, to which they are unable to render assistance, is seen to go to pieces. One wild-looking and incoherently-speaking man alone is rescued and conducted to the prior in a state of utter exhaustion.—At the castle, too, the inmates are disturbed by the rage of the elements. Lord Aldobrand himself appears to be absent, and his lady is sitting in her apartment, contemplating a miniature picture of Bertram. She is joined by one of her maidens, to whom she now discloses the story of her life, assuring her that her heart still belongs to Bertram. The conversation is interrupted by the entrance of a monk, coming to request that the shipwrecked of whom, contrary to all expectation, many have been saved, might have, according to the wonted hospitality of Lord Aldobrand, free access to the castle. Upon Imogine answering that they are welcome, the whole band take up their residence at the castle; before that, however, Bertram—the stranger who was first saved—reveals his identity to the prior and vows vengeance on Aldobrand, the originator of his misfortunes. At the castle the majestic form and stern demeanour of Bertram attract the notice of Imogine, and she summons him to her presence. A scene of recognition takes place. Imogine explains her reasons for becoming the wife of Aldobrand; Bertram breaks out into furious accusations, but at last, when Imogine’s little boy runs in, he relents and kisses the child.

These are the contents of the first two acts. In the third Imogine arrives to the convent to confess to the prior that she has yielded to the temptation offered by the unexpected appearance of Bertram, and clandestinely met him several times. The prior—who, in the foregoing scene, has been exhorting Bertram to give up his companions and leave the country—is much horrified and recommends the most severe penances. While still at the convent, Imogine encounters Bertram and is made to promise him one further interview, after which he is to disappear from her life. The act is again closed by the entrance of the child, who comes to inform his mother that Lord Aldobrand has returned.

At the meeting intended to be their last, Bertram then appears to have taken advantage of Imogine’s weakness in a manner which even he is ashamed to recollect. Before he has time to execute his design of departing, he is informed by one of his gang that his being in Sicily has become known and that Lord Aldobrand holds a commission from the king to seek his life throughout the country. Bertram is again filled with inexorable rage towards his enemy, and remembers his determination to have revenge upon him.—In the meantime Aldobrand arrives at his castle where Imogine receives him in an agitated manner which he in vain endeavours to fathom. On her declaring that she has some penance to do, he leaves her alone; after a while Bertram enters, and she understands, with horror, that he is resolved to destroy her husband. Aldobrand has, indeed, just been summoned to the convent to share a feast in celebration of St. Anselm, but, owing to a flood which obstructs his way, he is compelled to turn back. On his return he is attacked by Bertram, and dies at the feet of Imogine.

In the fifth act the tidings of the murder of Aldobrand are brought to the convent by Imogine, who, in a frantic state of mind, rushes in which her child. The monks and the knights of St. Anselm hasten to the castle. Bertram has locked himself up in a chamber where he has passed all the night with the dead body; at the summons of the prior, however, he opens the door and suffers himself to be arrested.—The last scene is laid in a dark wood where Imogine, who has lost her reason, is lingering in a cavern. The way which leads Bertram to the place of execution passes by the cavern, and he, who has up till now shown no repentance, sinks down when he hears the piercing shrieks of Imogine. She comes out and expires at the sight of him, whereupon Bertram snatches the sword of one of the knights and stabs himself.

As a drama, Bertram is not well constructed. The plot is curiously void of consistency and inner logic; when the talk is interrupted by action, it seems to happen more or less at random. The effect of the shipwreck in the first act is destroyed by the sudden appearance of all the banditti who are saved in a manner altogether inexplicable and whose preservation, moreover, is quite unnecessary. They do not in any way interfere in the events; Bertram kills Aldobrand with his own hands, and when the deed is done, he receives no help from his companions: they disappear from the play as mysteriously as they enter it. The final determination of Bertram to take Aldobrand’s life is very imperfectly accounted for. He must, surely, have been aware that Aldobrand, if cognizant of his presence, would adopt vigorous measures for his persecution, whence his sudden rage when informed of this is rather surprizing. He exclaims, with reference to the calamity he has brought over Imogine:

but then he forgets that Aldobrand knows nothing of his relation to Imogine, or his repentance, or even of the fact that he has promised the prior to give up his trade and retire where the voice of man is never heard. Here, however, it must be mentioned that in the original manuscript of the play, Bertram is prompted to the committal of his crimes by an evil spirit who dwells in the forest and whom he insists on visiting. After his visit to the demon he seems so altered, and the stamp of an intercourse with a supernatural being is so visible upon him, that his own robbers shrink from him. These passages Maturin expunged on the advice of Scott, and, accordingly, made respective alterations in his play, though he consented to do so with great reluctance. The scenes in question were afterwards published by Scott in another connection;[72] he bestows high praise on their poetical beauty and hints, by way of comparison, at the effect produced upon Macbeth by the appearance of the witches. His motive for recommending Maturin to suppress them was that they were, in his opinion, unsuitable on the stage.[73] Generally speaking, a psychological argumentation certainly is, in a drama, preferable to a direct interference of a supernatural being who never appears himself; but here this argumentation is so weak that there also is some truth in the remark of another critic,[74] that without those scenes ‘the change from the Bertram of the second act to the Bertram of the fourth is inexplicable.’ Thus in either version the decisive point in the action is unsatisfactorily motived. Nor is it difficult to detect other implausibilities and makeshifts of a clumsy kind. The road of Aldobrand to the convent, for instance, is stopped by a flood which he is unable to cross even on horseback—because he must, some way or other, be brought back to the castle; but the flood does not hinder Imogine, the same night, from making the same journey on foot, carrying her child to boot. The child is introduced into the play in order to make an end of the second and third acts; what it has got to say sounds very unnatural. All the finales are ineffective, not least that of the fifth act. When Bertram has stabbed himself the prior rushes to him:

It will be remembered that in Montorio the last words of the hero were an expression of joy at the fact that he did not perish on the scaffold. Here the sentiment is repeated, but it is clearly not fortunate to put it in the mouth of the hero himself; if there is any relief brought about by his nobler mode of dying, the spectator ought to feel it spontaneously.—

It has already been seen, more than once, that the merits of Maturin’s works are not in their composition. The traces of his power which there admittedly[75] are in Bertram, are to be sought in richness of language and originality of style. Now and then, amid the ‘sound and fury’ of the whole, passages stand out where Maturin’s blank verse attains a sombre beauty of its own, while it expressively strikes the note of the time, vibrating with a genuinely romantic sense of loneliness, melancholy, and grandeur. Lines such as these, from the first interview of the hero with the heroine, doubtless did much to decide the partiality for Bertram of critics like Byron and Scott:

The omitted passages relative to Bertram’s dealing with the fiend of the forest are interesting for their novelty in Maturin. The supernatural element is here conceived in a manner quite alien to the Gothic Romance; it serves, in fact, to bring home a characteristic difference between the last-named movement and romanticism. It was the business of the ‘terrific’ school to trace the fear and horror aroused by unearthly apparitions in ordinary men; while in romantic poetry men of uncommon mould (like Byron’s Manfred) are, in consequence of their intercourse with spirits, made to grow still more distant from their neighbours and become themselves an object of awe in their unapproachable grandeur. Such is the case with Bertram after his visit to the demon, the description of which Scott found to be ‘executed in a grand and magnificent strain of poetry:’

The achievements of Bertram, as represented on the stage, bear, indeed, too much resemblance to the doings of a common ruffian, and he stands, both morally and poetically, on a lower level than any of Byron’s personages, though maintained, by reviewers,[76] to be ‘that same mischievous compound of attractiveness and turpitude, of love and crime, of chivalry and brutality, which in the poems of Lord Byron and his imitators has been too long successful in captivating weak fancies and outraging moral truth.’ Yet he undoubtedly is a hero; and though Maturin later calls him one of his worst characters, he ought not, at the time, to have been surprised at being accused[77] of ‘exciting undue compassion for worthless characters, or unjust admiration of fierce and unchristian qualities;’ It is, above all, in his capacity of a fallen angel that Bertram had old-established claims upon the interest and indulgence of the English public. Of his fall this account is given by Imogine:

This dismal change is regarded in a very ‘Miltonic’ light especially by the prior, who, himself represented as well-nigh a saint, could not but be supposed to express the view of the author. The impression that the hero makes upon the mind of the prior finds voice in eloquent outbursts:

This is uttered before Bertram has murdered Aldobrand; but that being done, the exaltation of the venerable prelate remains the same:

It is the great fault of Bertram as a dramatic character, that he so poorly upholds the high attitude assigned to him by others, and that his imposing qualities chiefly rest on declamatory effects. As a poetical figure he occasionally becomes, thanks to life antecedents, surrounded with a gloomy splendour exciting the kind of admiration so keenly resented by critics who felt themselves called upon to extend their verdict to the moral side of the question. The heroine was, though unjustly, comprised[78] in the condemnation of the pernicious tendency of the play:—‘it is too much the taste of the present day, to bring forward the guilty passion of a wife for her paramour — — — not, indeed, with direct admiration, but in such a manner, and with such a mixture of virtuous remorse and high-toned feeling, that we cannot hate the crime. Now a heroine who commits adultery certainly was a startling phenomenon on the English stage, and it was the occurrence of this offence which is said[79] finally to have caused Bertram to be put aside. Yet in the play there is no connivance at the frailty of Imogine. When she comes to unburthen her heart to the prior, this arbiter of morals has nothing but harsh words for her; he sees nothing sublime in her guilt, which at the end plunges her into the deepest misery. In the preface to his next play Maturin says, with reference to the shock he had given with the story of Imogine: ‘If Tragedy is not allowed to exhibit crimes and passions, what is left for her to exhibit?—If crime is attended with punishment as its consequence, I conceive the interests of morality are not compromised’—but he was not aware that it is sometimes the criminal more than the crime that the guardians of the interests of morality desire to hate.—Otherwise Imogine is sketched with something of Maturin’s skill at depicting female character, and hers is, as Kean observed, the principal part in the play as far as histrionic powers are concerned. Her reviving passion for Bertram, her misery and repentance are developed in a language comparatively free from the tinge of melodrama, and sometimes pervaded with a deep and natural feeling, like her confession to the prior:

The character of Aldobrand, little as he appears, is drawn with peculiar skill. He is an excellent man and has brought about the ruin of Bertram out of disinterested zeal for state and sovereign; in private life he is kindness itself and greatly revered by all, not least by his wife. It might seem as if the author had unnecessarily hazarded the sublime element in Bertram by making his enemy a man of worth; but where, then, would be the guilt in knocking down a rascal? Considering the character Bertram is intended to support, Aldobrand could hardly be otherwise, and he is, in all his respectability, somehow made clearly to display a total want of those brilliant and interesting traits the absence of which is his only disadvantage by the side of the hero.—Other characters to speak of there are not in the play. It is incomprehensible how Charles Nodier[80] could ascribe so important a part to the prior: ‘cependant c’est le Prieur qui est le héros de la tragédie, et son calme sublime contraste avec le désordre et les passions des corsaires, comme l’immobilité de ses antique murailles avec l’agitation des flots, domaine inconstant de ce peuple désespéré.’ The prior really presents an extraordinarily sorry figure. His calmness—which asserts itself only when action is required; in words he is as tempestuous as Bertram—is most akin to inertness, not to say imbecility. He is from the first initiated into Bertram’s vindictive designs against Aldobrand—who is a great friend of his—and does nothing to prevent them except talking in a way which gives vent to his fantastic admiration for Bertram, very unnatural in a person of his character and situation. His high-flown comments upon the hero are, throughout the play, nothing short of ridiculous, which they by no means are meant to be. It was, however, quite in keeping with the romantic spirit to introduce the convent into the turbulent scenes as an asylum of peace, inhabited by good and holy men—in contradiction to the Gothic Romance, where a convent usually is described as a nest of all sorts of devilry. This is the only instance in Maturin’s work where the milder view prevails; he was, in Melmoth, soon to return to the terrific style again with a force seldom equalled in literature.

The motive of adverse circumstances driving a high-souled man to become a captain of robbers is most famous from Die Räuber (1781) of Schiller. In that drama Gustave Planche[81] finds the ‘idée mère’ of Bertram, though he prefers the latter play:—‘les mêmes idées, qui dans Schiller resemblent à une dissertation, prennent dans Maturin la forme vivante et animée d’une légende surnaturelle, et cette différence suffirait pour établir la supériorité de Bertram sur les Brigands.’ It is, however, difficult to see where, in Bertram, the ideas of The Robbers come in at all. The drama of Schiller is, despite its bombastic language, a typical 18:th century production with a social tendency. The hero and his followers are—as in the case of the theorizing ‘Arcadian’ robbers in Godwin’s Caleb Williams—revolting against the constituent principles of society, the perverseness of which alone has occasioned their desperate enterprise; but the enterprise is, after all, discovered to be an unjustifiable means of changing the existing state of things. In Bertram there is nothing of the 18:th century. The adventure presented to the spectator is of a quite individual character, the case being applicable to the hero and no one else. He does not want to reform society; he does not place himself at the head of a gang of robbers on any ideal grounds; he falls. Nor are his companions robbers of the chivalrous type who keep a court of honour among themselves and take from the rich to give to the poor. Bertram himself says to some of them:

The play thus aims at nothing but the poetical exhibition of a man blending sublimity in guilt. The catchword of Karl Moor expresses his determination to surrender himself to justice, that is, voluntarily to meet the ‘felon death’ which Bertram, in his last cry, rejoices at having escaped. In all this there would appear, in Bertram, not a formally different application, but a total absence, of the ideas of The Robbers, and any influence from Schiller seems uncertain.—In some detached passages of Bertram critics tried to detect loans from several obscure plays, from Shakespeare, and even from Scott; but excepting the fact that The Tempest necessarily is called to mind by any play opening with a shipwreck, these loans are unimportant. The treatment of the other principal motive, the marriage of Imogine to the enemy of her lover, shows less originality. Its model, as pointed out in the Irish Quarterly Review 1852, is to be found in a play called Percy (1778), by Miss Hannah More. This was one of the first English dramas where the action is placed in romantic surroundings, although it resolves round the favourite topics of the day.[82] Percy, Earl of Northumberland, is the lover and destined husband of Elwina, daughter of Earl Raby. For some offence Raby breaks off all relations with Percy, who subsequently joins a crusade. During his absence Raby compels his daughter to marry Earl Douglas, an inveterate foe of Percy, and shortly after that the hero returns to England. Elwina, on one occasion, relates the story of her misfortunes to her maid, which passage has a direct correspondence in Bertram. The most conspicuous resemblance, however, is afforded by the scene where Elwina meets Percy and discloses to him that she is the wife of Douglas. Percy, like Bertram, is seized with a violent fury, and his words:

are distinctly echoed in Bertram’s:

The further development of the conflict is, as easily can be imagined, totally different in the two dramas—a heroine of Hannah More was the least likely of any to suggest the character of the lady Imogine.

It is generally asserted by biographers[83] that contemporary critics—with the single exception of Coleridge—were ‘enraptured’ about Bertram; but this, undoubtedly, is to say too much. Its supposed immoral tendency, as has already been seen, roused a storm of indignation in the columns of the reviews, where the passing acknowledgments of the author’s talent almost vanished. The opening lines of the criticism in the Eclectic Review are characteristic of the way in which the play was treated of:

Nor were the opinions even of those very strong powers always undivided. While the British Review makes mention of ‘vivacious touches of a very glowing pencil’ and pronounces that ‘the description as well as the pathetic force of many passages is admirable, and the rhythm and cadence of the verse is musical, lofty, and full of tragic pomp’—the Monthly Review maintains that the language is ‘strained, inverted, and bombastic on many occasions,’ and that ‘the versification, also, is often rough and imperfect; and a want of keeping, of harmonious colouring, and, we fear, of just design, is visible throughout.’ The severest attack upon Maturin’s play, however, was delivered by Coleridge[84] in an article uniting much cutting sarcasm with savage and indiscriminating abuse. It was supposed that Coleridge was irritated by the rejection of his Fall of Robespierre in favour of Bertram; in that light the article was, at least, regarded by Byron,[85] who refers to it in a letter to Murray, dated October 12:th 1819:

It is not quite clear in what manner Coleridge had been obliged, his play never appearing on the stage. If his criticism of Bertram was dictated by disappointment, that must have been galling indeed, for the tone prevailing in it is exceedingly acrimonious.[86] Every blunder in the composition, and unhappy turn of phrase in the impetuous style—not over-difficult to expose—is made the most of and the whole play torn to fragments, scene by scene, cleverly enough, but with a rancour which really conveys the impression of proceeding from a personal cause. The critic’s virtuous horror at the incidents is worked up to a pitch that leaves all other reviewers far behind; even the circumstance of Imogine, before she has recognized Bertram, sending for him and speaking to him, alone, is represented as a piece of gross indelicacy!—and if any spectator felt inclined to take a fancy to the hero, it certainly was no fault of Coleridge’s, who characterizes him, in a single breath, as ‘this felo de se, and thief-captain, this loathsome and leprous confluence of robbery, adultery, murder, and cowardly assassination, this monster — — —.’

However, some nonsense though these reviewers utter, their opinion of Maturin’s first play comes nearer to its final valuation than that of many later writers who boldly prophesied the author’s lasting immortality on account of Bertram. Among admiring biographers whose verdict was unsupported by any literary authority, there were critics of some reputation; Gustave Planche, writing in 1833, does not hesitate to say that Bertram contains scenes worthy of Hamlet and Macbeth. In opposition to this enthusiasm of the French, it is interesting to note the very sound judgment of Goethe. He had, in 1817, read the play and written a kind of advertisement of it, in which he reaches in a few words the kernel of the matter and explains the secret of its success: ‘Das neuste englische Publikum ist in Hass und Liebe von den Dichtungen des Lord Byron durchdrungen, und so kann denn auch ein Bertram Wurzel fassen, der gleichfalls Menschenhass und Rachegeist, Pflicht und Schwachheit, Umsicht, Plan, Zufälligkeiten und Zerstörung mit Furienbesen durcheinander peitscht und eine, genau besehen, emphatische Pose zur Würde eines tragischen Gedichtes erhebt.’[87]

One result of the success attending Bertram was—the play being produced anonymously—that several individuals began to make claims for the authorship. This circumstance contributed to Maturin’s determination to emerge from his anonymity and publicly take his place among the men of letters of his day. With regard to any further professional preferment this was definitely to burn his boats: a clergyman of the established church the writer of a play whose morality was generally pronounced to be an abomination. On the other hand the dream of his life now seemed realized, and the way open to the circles to which he felt himself to belong. He took the step; and, in order to make the most of it, accepted an invitation from London to come over to witness the triumph of his production. This was the only journey of any length ever undertaken by Maturin; if not very adventurous, it still was something of an enterprise at that time, when a crossing between Dublin and Liverpool could take up to 36 hours. Maturin’s stay in London did not exceed a month. He arrived there in the latter part of May, and the 22:nd of June he wrote, from home, his first letter to Murray, in acknowledgment of the kindness shown him by the publisher. In the New Monthly Magazine 1827 we read that Maturin was, while in the metropolis, ‘suddenly elevated to the most dizzy and flattering distinction,’ being ‘caressed by the first men of the day, recognized by the audience during the performance of his play, and received with acclamations.’ The language, however, in Maturin’s own letters referring to his reception is very different, and suggestive rather of a disappointment. Even in his first letter, when sending his respects to Mrs. Murray, he assures his correspondent that ‘to your friendly and hospitable attention I am indebted for the only pleasant hours passed during my sojourn in London.’ In another letter, from July 6:th, he returns to the theme with marked bitterness:

In spite of a soothing answer from Murray, the idea that he had not appeared to advantage continued to haunt Maturin. It ought to be mentioned, however, that in the letter quoted above there is an allusion to a member of the fair sex upon whom the impression made by the Irish guest seems to have been even more favourable than he could have wished—yet at the same time something to gratify the vanity of which he had, perhaps a little more than the usual allotment:

Bertram was the first of Maturin’s works that appeared with his name. It was published by Murray, and ran through seven editions in the course of 1816; the current price of 3 sh. for a new play was on this occasion raised to 4 sh. 6 d.[88] Together with the profits of the performance, the sum cleared by Maturin for his tragedy is said to have amounted to £ 1000. The consequences, however, of the unhappy transaction in which he had been involved some years before, disagreeably asserted themselves at this piece of good luck, and he speaks of his affairs in a pessimistic tone. In a letter to Murray dated August 19:th he says:

Yet, if Maturin had not made his fortune by his first tragedy, he probably intended to make it by his second, for he took no pains to undeceive his congratulators. He was, by all accounts, somewhat dazzled by the bright prospects he imagined to be dawning for him, when he returned to Dublin as the greatest of its literary celebrities, and he changed his mode of living accordingly. He was, as appears from his letters to Murray, under the impression of being born to a line of society embellished by elegance and refinement, and his recollections of the easy circumstances in which he had grown up had not vanished amid the privations of later life. After his arrival from London Maturin plunged into the delights of society and became a conspicuous figure in saloons and assemblies; and his unpretending house in York Street was re-furnished and decorated with a splendour of which a friend of his who, however, admits that he did not see Maturin’s home until a later period, when the whole show had disappeared, gives the following account:[89]

In this abode—whether it exactly answered to the above description or not—was then received what Dublin society had to offer not only in the way of intellect, but preferably of youth and beauty. What it was that attracted Maturin in his social intercourse is vividly described by his biographer:[90]

A very characteristic explanation of this gaiety is given by Mangan,[91] who ascribes it all to misery arising from unappreciated intellectual superiority. Maturin, he says,

Although the view applied by Mangan is too gloomy a one, it contains, no doubt, a certain amount of truth, and shows a remarkable penetration of Maturin’s character and situation. In his correspondence of that time Maturin repeatedly laments just his want of a literary friend or companion, and the absence of ‘excitement of any description’ that might inspire him to carry on his poetical occupations. As far as these were concerned, his spirit found little nourishment in his environs. Dublin was then rather void of literati, and the people he mixed with were, for the most part, of the usual, every-day character. Feeling thus that even the elite did not attain to the intellectual level he commanded, Maturin turned to the lighter style of social life—with real pleasure, as it corresponded to one side of his temperament, but sometimes, it is not unlikely, with a feverish intensity affording oblivion of the disadvantages under which he laboured, and escape from the melancholy that also was a constituent part of his mind. His nervousness might have been increased by doubts as to the duration of his present mode of existence, and at intervals there naturally came moments of weariness and tedium vitae. In his sermon preached on the first Sunday of the year 1817 Maturin exclaims:

Sentiments like these implied a general condemnation of the pursuits Maturin himself was engaged in all his life, and give one more illustration of the tragic contradiction between his profession and his inclinations. That the eccentricities of his conduct incurred a great deal of censure on the part of the more rigorous-minded has already been hinted; but his placidity of temper and easy, gentlemanly manners usually disarmed the displeasure of those coming into contact with him, and he had, upon the whole, no personal enemies. In his own parish he was universally beloved, and where his well-known figure emerged it attracted friendly attention, not unmixed with amazement. His outward appearance used to vary according to his conditions. When he could, he dressed in the highest fashion; his cash being at a low ebb, he would be seen walking about in a costume almost ostentatiously shabby. ‘Mr. Maturin’ says a writer,[92] ‘was tall, slender, but well proportioned, and on the whole, a good figure, which he took care to display in a well made black coat, tight buttoned, and some old light-coloured stocking-web pantaloons, surmounted in winter by a coat of prodigious dimensions, gracefully thrown on, so as not to obscure the symmetry it affected to protect.’ The portrait of Maturin, drawn by Brocas, which appeared in the New Monthly Magazine or Universal Register 1819 and which is reproduced in the 1892 edition of Melmoth the Wanderer, shows a self-portraying and uncommonly handsome face: the finely chiselled mouth indicating a tendency towards the gay and luxurious, while the gaze of the large and melancholy eyes suggests the horrors his imagination was wont to dwell upon. Those who saw him in his home were struck by the former quality greatly prevailing over the latter, as is told by a visitor:[93]

It is mentioned in most notes on Maturin that he was in the habit of placing a wafer on his forehead in his hours of inspiration, to signify to his family that he was not to be intruded upon. This—and many other caprices of a similar kind—might have happened once or twice and then been related at the tea-tables of Dublin as a token of the eccentricity of their literary curate. The story of the wafer seems to be contradicted, or at least greatly qualified, by the statements of some other writers. Carleton[94] says that Maturin had composed the greatest part of his earlier romances at Marsh’s library in St. Patrick’s Close, ‘on a small plain deal desk, which he removed from place to place according as it suited his privacy or convenience;’ and an intimate friend of his has said[95] that he never worked on his two last novels except in the stillness of night, when there was consequently no fear of his being disturbed. As for the inventive part of composition, one writer[96] reports the following utterance of Maturin:

This confidence was made just on one of those long pedestrian excursions to the county of Wicklow, which Maturin loved to undertake, especially in autumn, his favourite season. During his rambles he sometimes would enter into a literary discussion—which he in general is said to have been rather disinclined to do—and from the occasion now in question his interlocutor has preserved some of his opinions about the poets of England. He appears to have been most attracted by those who presented the least points of contact with his own production. With Byron he shared a boundless admiration for Pope, and of the living poets he liked best Crabbe and next to him Hogg. He was very fond of Moore who had, he said, done what he had wished to do himself, had he been able; but for the poetry of Byron he had a strong distaste, the more remarkable as he had often, as in the case of Bertram, been supposed deliberately to imitate the bard of The Corsair and Lara. What Maturin, however, objected to in Byron’s poems was not the spirit but the style:

Lastly may be quoted what Maturin, according to the same writer, once pronounced upon Walter Scott whom he, no doubt, loved best of all authors, ancient or modern:

Among the literary plans Maturin revolved in his mind after the success of his first play was the publication of a new edition of Montorio, for which romance he still entertained a partiality. Murray, however, did not venture a republication of it, nor was he favourably disposed towards a project of Maturin’s to give out a new copy of Bertram from the original manuscript, containing everything that had been omitted in the representation. Maturin seems, at first, to have taken it for granted that this revised edition, which he intended to dedicate to Scott, was to be issued; ‘may I beg to know,’ he writes in the letter from July 6:th, ‘why the corrected copy has not yet appeared, I am really disappointed at this, for, exclusive of my restoring many passages that might possibly give pleasure to the Readers (though not to the Dramatic spectator) I am most anxious that the preface, and above all the original dedication (a debt due by gratitude to my first literary friend Mr. Scott) should be made public.’ The question was under discussion for some time, but after a rather irascible epistle from Maturin dated Nov. 19:th, it was referred to no more. Maturin was already working at a new play, and the publisher prudently determined to wait how it would turn out before entering into any doubtful enterprises. In a letter from August 19:th Maturin sanguinely says that what he has written pleases him better than Bertram; but at the same time it is seen how lonely he felt in what now was to him a provincial seclusion:

The principal character of the drama on which Maturin was engaged had been suggested to him, while in London, on behalf of Kean. The tragedian was anxious to act the part of Lear, but that was rendered improper by the mental illness of George III; the part he wanted was, consequently, that of an old man in a state of decrepitude and insanity, but occupying a somewhat humbler place in society. The experiment was hazardous in every respect. It was required of Maturin to produce an imitation of one of the most famous characters in literature, without one of the principal qualifications for his greatness. A too close attendance to the desire of the actor laid a constant restraint upon his imagination, and thereto came some other inconvenient considerations. Referring to the attacks upon Bertram, Maturin says in his letter last quoted: ‘In my present attempt, I shall beware of moonlight interviews, and jobs for Doctors Commons; my Heroines shall form a complete Coro di Vestale, and my Hero shall be guilty only of murder and such Bagatelles.’ All this boded no good; and when Manuel was brought out at Drury Lane, early in the following year, it turned out a decided failure. Kean, finding it but a poor compensation for Lear, soon lost all interest in it, and its reception on the part of the public was a very cold one. The general disappointment is described in a letter from Murray to Byron, dated March 15:th 1817:[97]

The verdict of Byron, after he had read the play, was equally unfavourable. ‘It is the absurd work of a clever man,’ he writes to Murray in a letter from Venice dated June 14:th;[98] ‘as a play, it is impracticable; as a poem, no great things.’ One admirer, however, Maturin’s second tragedy was destined to meet: in a subsequent letter Byron tells[99] that ‘Monk’ Lewis, to whom he had lent it, preferred it to some extracts from Lalla Rookh which he read at the same time. For his own part Byron adds: ‘Of Manuel I think, with the exception of a few capers, it is as heavy a nightmare as was ever bestrode by indigestion.’ This opinion was, later on, embraced by the author himself, who says in a letter to Murray from Sept. 27:th:

Manuel, which was furnished with the longed-for dedication to Walter Scott, Esq. is, indeed, Maturin’s weakest production, and very little need be said about it.

Manuel, count of Valdi, is a distinguished Spaniard whose only son, Alonzo, was born to him in the evening of his life. Alonzo’s birth has frustrated the expectations of Manuel’s heir and kinsman De Zelos; the latter, with his children, is plunged into poverty and insignificance, and publicly slighted by all his former flatterers. He has conceived a vehement hatred against the innocent cause of his altered conditions, which feeling, however, is not shared by his children: his daughter Ximena is the beloved of Alonzo, and his son Torrismond is the lover of Victoria, the daughter of Manuel. Alonzo has, though still a youth, completely beaten the Moors in the battle of Tolosa, and the reports of his victory are, at the opening of the play, spreading through the city of Cordova. Manuel summons his friends to a feast with which he wishes to celebrate the return of Alonzo; the family of De Zelos, too, get an invitation. At the entertainment Manuel awaits his son with increasing impatience, but Alonzo never makes his appearance. At last his war-steed is heard galloping into the court-yard, yet he comes alone with blood upon the saddle and a broken lance trailing from the stirrup. With something like an inspiration Manuel immediately accuses De Zelos of having murdered his son. As no traces are found of Alonzo, De Zelos again becomes the heir to the estates of Valdi, and the grandees once more vie with each other in fawning upon him and feigning to disbelieve the accusations of Manuel. They are, however, to meet in the hall of justice, and though Manuel can produce no proof of his charge, he passionately maintains it to be true,

De Zelos is on the point of swearing himself to be innocent, when, agitated by Manuel’s shrieks of perjury, he claims a combat to vindicate his honour. Torrismond appears as his father’s champion, and the cause of Manuel is taken up by a stranger on the condition that he will be allowed to depart with his vizor closed and his name unknown. Manuel has long been hovering on the verge of madness, and when he now sees the stranger defeated, the insanity breaks out in all its fury.—The last act takes place at one of Manuel’s castles in the country, whither he is banished on account of his unproved accusations against De Zelos; he is attended only by his daughter and two faithful followers. In the meantime Ximena has resolved to seek refuge in a convent in the same vicinity. Passing by the chapel of the castle she descends into the vault when she is informed by her guide that a requiem is just being chanted to the soul of Alonzo. Here she is shortly afterwards joined by Manuel. His first impulse is to kill her, but he forbears when she declares that she has loved Alonzo; she also tells him that Alonzo’s murderer is now within the vault. Manuel rushes away and Torrismond, who is in pursuit of his sister, makes his appearance. To him Ximena repeats that she has found, lying on one of the tombs, the person who has murdered Alonzo; he has even given her his dagger which is furnished with the name of his employer, but made her swear that it is not to be examined except before the judges.—At the same time De Zelos with a large party of friends—also in quest of Ximena—arrive at the castle. Manuel is hurrying them to the vault when Torrismond rushes out crying that his father is innocent. As the judges happen to be of the party he unsheathes the dagger and reads the name of—his father. De Zelos, in despair, stabs himself, and Manuel, whose strength is worn out by now, expires in fearful ravings.—

Throughout the four first acts the tragedy is well-nigh deprived of all dramatic vigour by incessant interruptions of the main plot. That consists, or ought to consist, in the development of the fate of Manuel until his madness—like Lear’s—breaks out after an accumulation of disappointments; but besides there being, in every act, plenty of dialogue to no purpose, the interest is divided among episodes very loosely connected with the intrigue. The incidents of the last act are prepared by such a sub-plot, bearing upon an intention of De Zelos to marry his daughter to the chief justice; for that reason, it must be supposed, she leaves her home and sets out for the convent. The appropriate arrival to the castle, however, of all the personages required, especially that of De Zelos and his party, makes the whole act highly improbable and its construction puerile in the extreme. The madness of Manuel, also, is here quite insupportable, and it is not to be wondered at that Kean could not endure the role more than one evening. Of the characters De Zelos is, upon the whole, the most interesting. He is a kind of villainous Timon of Athens. When his fortune is gone he sees how his friends turn their backs upon him; he perfectly comprehends the worthlessness of their conduct—

yet instead of paying contempt with contempt, he is ready to commit a horrible crime in order to enable himself to re-enter their society. His lack of self-command, however, is so exaggerated and his nervousness so evident, that no one can be in doubt of his guilt, which is made only too clear by several incidents long before his name is read on the dagger. On one occasion his intended son-in-law tells him, much to his agitation, that a Moor has mysteriously whispered to him that De Zelos is a villain. When the unknown champion of Manuel then is defeated, he beckons De Zelos to him and, for a moment, discloses his face, which is black—at the sight of which De Zelos, ‘staggering with horror,’ falls into the arms of his son. This penitent Moor, whom De Zelos had hired to slay Alonzo, then appears to have travelled, wounded, to the ancient family-seat of his victim, thus adding to the number of people who, as if by appointment, are gathering there to die. As for the two heroines—who, according to the promise of the author, do not much occupy themselves with thoughts of love—they are so negligently treated that it is not quite clear what becomes of them. When Ximena reveals her discovery to Torrismond, she is said to be dying, but it is never explained why. Her fate is so obscure that the unknown writer of the witty epilogue to Manuel, after enumerating all the deaths occurring in the play, ends with the following reference to her:

The most depressing quality of Manuel, as a production of Maturin’s, is that its poetry certainly is ‘no great things.’ There is nothing of the breath of romance which runs through several passages of Bertram. The language is, for the most part, uninspired, and stored with hackneyed phrases and vulgar exclamations. A description of the battle of Osma, spoken by Manuel, was greatly admired by Alaric Watts,[100] but to a modern reader it is hardly enjoyable, as appears from the following fragment:

Critics took but little notice of Manuel. In the Monthly Review[101] there appeared an article in which the play is unmercifully cut up, and the circumstance of De Zelos’s dagger, above all, subjected to ridicule:

The absent-mindedness of De Zelos is referred to in the scene where Ximena tells her brother that she has seen the Moor:

A man of De Zelos’s vacillating character might, perhaps, be imagined capable of throwing, in a moment of ‘unguarded haste,’ his own dagger to the proxy—but the writer is quite right in condemning the expedient: if the villain of a tragedy is so nervous as to become ludicrous, the case is irrevocably lost.

Shortly after the performance of Manuel, Maturin’s critique on Sheil’s Apostate, referred to before, appeared in the Quarterly Review. The article, probably written in great haste, and endeavouring to give a survey of the history of drama, from the earliest times, is not particularly interesting, though it displays extensive reading and, upon the whole, a correct judgment. Nor was it very welcome to the editor. Gifford is said[102] to have subjected it to a partial re-arrangement, thinking it worth preserving on account of a certain ‘wild eloquence.’ The criticism of the Apostate, with which the article ends, is severe but not undeservedly so; the play had been a great success on the stage with Miss O’Neill in the heroine’s part,[103] but it belonged to the usual, ephemeral kind of the day.

Maturin’s own career, however, as a successful dramatist, had now come to an end, and the fame he had so suddenly reaped by his Bertram was not destined to increase in that field. Ambitious plans and dreams of future golden times were once again replaced by the cares and duties of ordinary life, and the house in York Street began to be visited by creditors instead of dancing parties. Yet the effect of his recent failure upon the spirits of Maturin was, to judge from his subsequent productions where his genius rose to its highest flights, tranquillizing rather than disheartening. Experience had taught him the futility of heeding any prescriptions from outside; in the years to come he relied solely upon his own instinct and produced those works for which, in truth, he ought to be remembered.

IV.

1818-1820.

Lenau.

The first intelligence that Maturin was contemplating a new novel is found in his caustic letter to Murray (Nov. 1816) concerning the non-appearance of the revised edition of Bertram: he mentions, in passing, that he will not have occasion to trouble the publisher about his prose-work, as he has been ‘honoured by the offer of a Society of literary Gentlemen in England, to print the work at their own expense, and to raise a large sum by subscription for the writer.’ The prose-work alluded to was, no doubt, Women; or, Pour et Contre, which appeared in the beginning of 1818. Of the literary gentlemen nothing further was heard, but the author seems really to have been laid under some kind of obligation with regard to the publication of his novel. In September 1817 Maturin states that he is beginning to finish a novel for Mr. Constable, who has displayed unexampled liberality in the matter; and on Nov. 17:th he writes, likewise to Murray: ‘My novel will come out I believe next month. The Countess of Essex has done me the honour to accept of the dedication and an unknown friend has remitted a considerable sum to Mr. Constable in aid of the publication, so that I am in hopes he will have no reason to repent his liberality to me.’ It was through the influence of Scott that the Constables had been induced to purchase the copyright of the book, and it is not improbable that Scott had also played the part of the unknown friend, though it is surprising that such generosity should have been requisite in the present case. To Scott, too, the publishers appealed about a difference that arose between the author and themselves while the proofs were already going through the press. Maturin had composed a preface with the object of defending Bertram—always his favourite production—against the attack of Coleridge, which he had not been quite able to get over. Out of place as a tirade of this sort unquestionably was here, it became the more objectionable by delivering a furious counterblast upon certain of Coleridge’s works. The manuscript being forwarded to Scott, he replied to it with the following letter[104] which, though unfortunately the only specimen left of his communications to Maturin, clearly shows the cordial relations between the master of Abbotsford and his Irish protegé:

Advice thus tactfully conveyed could not easily be resisted, and the offensive introduction was withdrawn. The short preface which appeared in print, though also relative to Maturin’s other writings, was to quite a different purpose; in it Maturin for the first time publicly owns the authorship of his earlier romances, but only to declare them devoid of all merit:

The external incidents in Women are rich and fantastic enough, as will be seen, nor does its superiority consist in the occurrence of the characters in ordinary life, but in the manner in which they are handled, in the penetration which a true poet applies to his personages, whether imaginary or otherwise. Maturin’s modest plea for what has later been called realism, is wound up with a passage perfectly characteristic of his prefaces: humble in appearance, but making, in its way, a strong appeal to the curiosity of the reader:

The story opens briskly. The hero, whose name is Charles De Courcy, is travelling up to Dublin from some remote part of Ireland, when, not far from the capital, the coach breaks down. Most of the passengers stop at the village where the accident takes place, but Charles, with the enthusiasm of early youth, continues his way on foot. On arriving, towards evening, at the outskirts of the town, he is passed by a carriage of mysterious appearance; a stifled cry issuing from within seems to indicate that some one is being forcibly carried away. Charles follows in the same direction and, though he soon loses sight of the vehicle, unexpectedly lights upon its burden in a cottage which he enters to make inquiries about his way. He is received by an old beggar-woman, apparently a maniac, and, notwithstanding her anxiety to get rid of him, Charles perceives, in an inner room, the form of a young girl lying immovable, as though in a swoon. Defying the beldam’s imprecations as well as her active resistance, he seizes the girl and hurries out of the house. In the darkness he successfully evades the pursuit of some persons whom he understands to be the agents of the old woman, and at length reaches the lodge at the gate of Phoenix Park. A messenger despatched to town for a carriage returns in company with a gentleman who has accidentally heard him talk about the matter. The new-comer addresses the girl as his niece and immediately removes her in the carriage. He also offers a seat to Charles, but makes no further communication to him about the mystery; the whole adventure dissolves like a dream. The exertion, however, put forth by Charles on the occasion, throws him upon a sick-bed where he is faithfully nursed by a friend called Montgomery, a young man of a Methodist turn of mind. One evening when Charles is able to walk out again, he attends his friend to the chapel which the sect is in the habit of frequenting; he goes there only to kill time, little expecting that he is to meet the girl whom he rescued from the hands of the maniac. She is greatly agitated on seeing him, whereupon he is spoken to by an elderly lady who is with her; though she very unwillingly alludes to the late adventure, she kindly invites him to visit them in their house, which invitation Charles accepts with delight, being already very much in love with the girl. The family of Wentworth appears to consist only of Mr. W., a wealthy man retired from business, otherwise a bigot of a rather unpleasant character, whose sole interest is Calvinistic controversy; of his wife, also intensely religious, but at the same time a woman of head and heart; and of the niece, Eva, a timid and delicate being, who scarcely seems to belong to this world. Charles becomes a constant visitor at the house, yet the intercourse affords him but little satisfaction. Calvinism is the only thing between heaven and earth the Wentworths find worth discussing, and he soon despairs of Eva ever being capable of any other feeling towards him than ordinary gratitude. His strength is wasted by passion and disappointment, and he is again seized with a serious illness. While watching at the bedside of his delirious friend, Montgomery comes to know of his attachment to Eva. Montgomery is in the same predicament himself, but after a victorious struggle with his own aspirations he reveals Charles’s secret to his guardian—De Courcy has no family, only bright prospects of family wealth—whom he has thought it advisable to call to town. This gentleman goes straight to the Wentworths, where his negotiations are crowned with success: when Charles’s health is restored, he is admitted into the family as the acknowledged lover of Eva. His relations to her do not, however, undergo any remarkable change. Eva has scarcely had courage to confess to her aunt that Charles is not indifferent to her, and would never dream of showing her love to any one but her Maker; she is utterly incapable of reciprocating the enthusiastic passion of De Courcy. Charming as she is, the narrowness of her mind and occupations cannot but cool his ardour in course of time—nor has the general atmosphere of the house any attractions to offer to a young man of the world. Charles has at once been set down by Mr. Wentworth as a proper object of conversion, and from this topic his conversation never departs; literature, poetry, and fine arts are not even mentioned between them. One day then all Dublin—except the evangelical circles—is excited by the arrival of Madame Dalmatiani, reputed to be the foremost singer and actress in Europe, who has been induced to give some performances in the Irish capital. Notwithstanding Wentworth’s remonstrations, Charles visits the theatre every night when Madame Dalmatiani—or Zaira, as she is called—is to appear; and it is after becoming personally acquainted with her, that he begins to disregard the maxim expressed in the verse which stands as the motto to the book:

He is irresistibly drawn to the refined and luxurious home of Zaira, which indeed forms a striking contrast to the gloomy surroundings he has lately been used to. His visits to the house of the Methodist grow less and less frequent, and before long he becomes the most faithful attendant of Zaira, who, on her part, is by no means unmoved by his intense adoration. They are constantly together; once, on an excursion to Wicklow, they encounter the old woman who had arranged the mysterious abduction of Eva. She addresses them with her usual impetuosity of language, and seems to show some faint recollection of having seen Zaira before. In the meantime the infatuation of De Courcy is made the talk of the town and reaches even Eva in her retirement. She courageously makes up her mind to accompany some of her few worldly-minded acquaintances to the theatre, and when she sees the brilliant apparition of Zaira, she feels that she is lost. Zaira has, indeed, been informed by Montgomery that Charles is engaged to Eva, and generously struggles with her own affections; but when she is leaving Ireland she at the last moment allows him to bear her company. They are, however, not to marry at once, but set out on a journey, during which she intends to ‘develop his soul’ with literature and science. They first proceed to Paris where the Allies are then assembled—the events of the story occur in 1814—and the great metropolis is gayer then ever. Here De Courcy for the second time shows a tendency to forget the maxim quoted above, and an estrangement—involuntary on the part of Zaira—takes place between the lovers. When Montgomery appears with the news that Eva is dying, Charles is broken down by a fit of repentance and returns to Ireland as soon as he is able. Notwithstanding his despair he is not allowed to see Eva, who is fading away like a flower, in spite of most careful medical attendance. As for Zaira, the departure of Charles leaves her in the greatest agony of mind, cutting off the only tie that binds her to life. She finds no longer any happiness in the exercise of her talents; philosophy affords her no consolation, religion has not power to heal her aching heart. She even contemplates ending her sufferings by suicide, but lacks the strength. Sick in mind and body she at last betakes herself to Dublin, where she leads a very quiet life, being chiefly engaged in works of charity among the poor. In a miserable cottage she one evening happens to light upon the old beggar-woman who has figured in the course of the story. She appears to be lying on her death-bed and has, in her last moments, sufficiently recovered her reason to recognize her visitor and inform her that she is her mother. The story of Zaira’s earlier life—she in reality is a native of Ireland—is now given in one of her own letters to a friend.—She is the illegitimate daughter of a rich and despotic land-owner who resided in the West of Ireland and distinguished himself by the irregularities of his private life. Zaira was the only one of his children he ever took any notice of; he early observed her uncommon talents and had her instructed in everything except religion, being himself a convinced atheist. At the age of fifteen she was secretly married to her Italian music-master; but when she became a mother the story could no longer be concealed from her father, who, inconsistently enough, was so incensed at the ‘want of principle’ in his daughter, that he expelled the couple from his house for ever. The Italian, a heartless rascal, separated the child from the mother and left it behind them in Ireland. Then he took his wife to Italy where he compelled her to go on the stage. Gradually she developed into the greatest artist of her time, though almost unwittingly, being always closely guarded by her husband, who reaped all the benefit of her successes. At his death she found herself in possession of a large property which she had earned but never yet enjoyed. The first use she made of her newly-gained liberty was to write to her father and inquire after the fate of her child. The old man promised to give her the information she wanted, and Zaira hurried to Dublin; but scarcely had she arrived there when she learned that her father had suddenly died without leaving any references to the child. Having thus lost all hope of ever finding her child, she again left Ireland in company with De Courcy.—Zaira’s mother was, for some time, the favourite mistress of the mighty man, but then, when she was overtaken in the act of carrying away Zaira in order to bring her up in the Catholic religion, he had turned her out of the house. Subsequently she partially lost her reason, preserving, however, a passionate devotion to her faith, and the desire of imparting it to her descendants guided all her actions; Zaira being out of her reach she turned her attention to Zaira’s child. She led the life of a beggar more by choice than of necessity, for she had, when occasion arose, means of hiring people to carry out her schemes: once, in fact, she was quite on the point of securing the person of her granddaughter who, after the departure of Zaira, had been committed to the care of a wealthy couple in Dublin, and educated as their niece under the name of Eva Wentworth.—Thus Zaira at last becomes acquainted with her daughter’s circumstances. She hastens to the house of Wentworth, but arrives just a moment after Eva has closed her eyes in death of which her mother has been the indirect cause. Shortly afterwards De Courcy also goes the way of all flesh, while Zaira, when the story ends, ‘still lives,’ though a shadow of her former self.

The reproduction of the bare outlines of the story of Women is an easy matter compared to that of Maturin’s earlier novels; what Scott wrote in the Edinburgh Review with reference to the style, is equally true of the construction of the book: ‘We observe, with pleasure, that Mr. Maturin has put his genius under better regulation than in his former publications, and retrenched that luxuriance of language, and too copious use of ornament, which distinguishes the authors and orators of Ireland, whose exuberance of imagination sometimes places them in the predicament of their honest countryman, who complained of being run away with by his legs.’ Nevertheless it is the form which, even here, is most subject to criticism. The book can be divided into two principal parts, the first of which comprises the events happening before Zaira’s journey to Paris with De Courcy, while the second is devoted to the analysis of her mental sufferings after her separation from him; the experiences of De Courcy in the French metropolis, and the closing scenes in Dublin, are allowed comparatively little space. The description of the struggles of Zaira clearly is of secondary importance for the development of the plot, where it thus makes a hiatus of extraordinary length. The narrative is, besides, now and then broken by letters and discussions all of which are not kept within proper bounds. The positive merits, however, of each separate part of the work, more than atone for any lack of proportion in its construction.

Of all the scenes in the book, those in the first part dealing with the Methodist circles of Dublin, unquestionably are the most interesting. Maturin often said that he was no judge of his own works, but he was not mistaken in seeing the main virtue of Women in that it bears ‘some resemblance to common life.’ Formerly, as has been seen, Maturin’s ideas of his special powers had led him carefully to avoid the sphere of ‘common life,’ both in his treatment of external incident and, still more, of emotion; but the fact is that those powers, when ripened into maturity, were distinguished by a versatility not to be confined to any special style of fiction. In Melmoth he returned, with undiminished powers, to the field of pure imagination, against which the preface to Women denotes but a momentary reaction. It was not, perhaps, for artistic reasons only that Maturin, in the present work, described an aspect of common life as led in the rigidly Calvinistic community; the exposure of the less amiable qualities of the sect might have been a not unwelcome side-issue for him, considering the vast difference of his own views from those of the ‘evangelical people,’ at whose instance the peculiarities of Maturin himself had, no doubt, received much damnation. Yet although there certainly is an under-current of satire, that satire never has a ring of personal animosity; on the contrary, it is relieved by a tone of genuine humour and brightened, above all, by the introduction of the angelic figure of Eva. The pursuits and occupations going on in the house of Wentworth, the whole atmosphere of a place where Calvinistic pamphlets are the only literature that is tolerated, and the only music ever enjoyed consists of evangelical hymns—all this is reflected in a manner the very graphicness of which suggests impartiality. The household bears the stamp of its master, who is incapable of cherishing more than one idea at a time:

To a character thus formed, the abstinence from the vanities of life costs no struggle, and implies no victory over himself, for Calvinism is sufficient to afford him amusement as well as edification; the most enthusiastic playgoer could not await a first night with more eagerness than Wentworth looks forward to an occasion upon which a Socinian, a Catholic, an Arian, and an Arminian Methodist, are to be exposed ‘for the whole night to the battery of a dozen resolute Calvinists.’ In the house of Wentworth the community naturally can feel safe from any disturbing interferences, and it is, in fact, their habitual place of meeting. Among the daily guests is the greatest orator of the sect, a Tartuffian figure called Macowen, who appears to have also a private reason for visiting the family:

The inmost reason for Mr. Wentworth having suffered so meritorious a wooer to be outrivalled by the unbelieving De Courcy lies in his still being enough of a man of business fully to appreciate the considerable property the latter is heir to. His wife, on the other hand, is really attached to the preserver of her ‘niece.’ She is a woman remarkable for intelligence of mind and dignity of character; and though her manner appears stiff and constrained by the influence of her religion, she is naturally warm-hearted and loves Eva as if she were her own child. She cannot, however, do much to enliven the heavy routine fixed by Wentworth and Macowen, the monotony of which is broken only by scenes like the following. De Courcy and Montgomery call one morning when the gentlemen are sitting at the breakfast-table, engaged in an animated controversy with a new convert:

Against this sombre background stand out the characters of the principal personages. Eva, the most pathetic among all the figures of Maturin’s creation, is drawn with a skill almost unparalleled in the art of representing a character in the purest and most ethereal light imaginable, without detracting anything from an unswerving fidelity to nature. She is as real in her goodness as in her timidity and inexperience. She has all the passive loveliness which can possibly flourish in such surroundings as hers, and is completely devoid of every active quality implying any degree of independence of mind. There is nothing brilliant about her, and the range of her ideas is certainly narrow. She would not think of doubting the infallibility of the opinions expressed by Mr. Wentworth or Macowen; but for her own part she instinctively clings to what there is best and noblest in her religion; and what little energy she possesses is employed, not in controversy, but in works of charity among the children of the poor. She is never severe to any one except herself, and shows firmness only in a punctual attention to her own religious duties. With these she unfortunately feels the demands of her temporal bridegroom to be irreconcilable, and though she suffers greatly under the conflict, she cannot find her way out of it. Her attachment to De Courcy is true and deep; but she is, as Scott said, ‘unable to express her passion otherwise than by dying for it.’ A passion of so unsubstantial a description would have put to severe trial the patience of most lovers, let alone that of De Courcy who, at the commencement of the story, is a young man of seventeen, without any self-denying tendencies. The inclination of Maturin to represent his heroes and heroines in their earliest dawn of youth sometimes led to implausibilities, but not in the present case. De Courcy is the most carefully sketched of all his male characters, delineated, in fact, with a subtlety and penetration far in advance of what the fiction of the time usually attained. His chief characteristics are precocity and weakness; constitutional weakness, in spite of a splendid external appearance, and an inconsistency of mind and fickleness of disposition constantly at war with the good and generous qualities which the author, with impartial hand, bestows upon him. The interest of a ‘protector’ with which he regards Eva after their little adventure very soon and very naturally yields to a deeper feeling which, to begin with, knows of no pretensions. On the first occasion of his being invited to the house of Wentworth he is plunged amid an evangelical dinner-party, most capitally described, where he feels but ill at ease, being the only ‘unenlightened’ person present; the gentlemen are sitting apart, ‘on their chairs sublime, in thought more elevate, and reason high’ in terms which he does not even understand—and the ladies are gathered in the drawing-room talking, for the most part, nothing at all; but one look from Eva repays him all his weariness and embarrasment: ‘For months after he fed on that look; it came to him like a beam of light, and he forgot whether it was day or night when it glanced before his eyes.’ Yet the pleasure of feeding on a look sooner or later will be exhausted, and a character like his is not formed to bear disappointments. He is almost broken down both in mind and body when he suspects that he is indifferent to Eva, and when he has learned that this is not so, the incompatibility of their views and habits seems to raise insuperable obstacles between them. Their short hours of confidence are always interrupted in the same way:

There is, in the purity and innocence of Eva, something sublime that often makes Charles himself feel it almost a crime to intrude upon her with too vehement declarations of a worldly passion. The result of this is, however, that they never ‘love like lovers,’ and it is shown with much psychological insight how they gradually glide away from each other by reason of an unnatural spiritualization of their mutual relations. Their estrangement is subsequently hastened by the appearance of Zaira, whose society Charles from the first imprudently cultivates. In the person of Zaira critics have been wont to see an expression of the usual ‘extravagance’ of Maturin’s writings. Yet allowing for some casual exaggeration of her great talents, the general characterization stands on a very high level. The figure is not new in Maturin—both Lady Montrevor in The Wild Irish Boy and Armida Fitzalban in The Milesian Chief are studies of this kind; but Zaira is depicted with a moderation and veracity infinitely superior to either. She is none of those distinguished dilettantes that have acquired their accomplishments conveniently in their leisure hours; she is a professional artist and has attained her prominence through hard and unremitting work—work which, as a matter of fact, is the only way to the pinnacles of art. Her character is naturally noble, and she is free from all haughtiness and caprice. Under the bitter sorrow she has sustained, her heart has remained pure and tender, yearning ever for love which she has never met with. In the isolation she has suffered during the greater part of her existence, her mind has been cultivated and her abilities developed at the expense of her experience in practical affairs; she has become curiously unfamiliar with real life and displays, on several occasions, a naiveté almost equal to that of Eva herself. This contrast between her superior intellect and her incapacity of extricating herself from the difficulties of common life is presented with an exquisite skill, and to it she owes the tragedy of her fate. Zaira’s attachment to De Courcy originates, on her part, in a need of tenderness that has nothing to do with passion. The news of the loss of her child throws her into a desolation of mind in which she first receives his enthusiastic admiration with a feeling inspired by the instinct of self-preservation. She says in a letter to her friend:

From this, indeed, there is but a short step to love, though she is, characteristically enough, herself the last to become aware of it. Knowing that Charles is engaged she tries to persuade herself that what she feels for him is only friendship which can well be extended to her rival; and she succeeds in building up a theory in which she, at the time, firmly believes:

Her correspondent, a Frenchwoman of fashion, at once understands the situation; and her letters—which are very cleverly written and present an amusing mixture of frivolity and acute observation—tear down the theory of Zaira and open her eyes to the state of her own feelings. Once acknowledged, these feelings, rapidly grow stronger, and the end, in spite of desperate attempts at bridling her passion, is what has been told.—Neither does Charles leave Eva without a great deal of honest and painful struggling against his new infatuation, though he knows that his strength is not to be relied upon. He is induced to make a final appeal to Eva in a fine scene—: she is frightened by a thunderstorm into a swoon when Charles, supporting her, hears her whisper something about his intention of forsaking her—which she purposely never alludes to. The situation vividly reminds him of their first meeting, and his tenderness for her takes hold of him once more:

This interview is indeed decisive: it is the last time the passion, of De Courcy flames up in the presence of Eva. When the hour of Zaira’s departure draws nigh he renounces ‘all engagements, all ties, and all objects’—and obtains her permission to accompany her. He has already sent a note to Eva begging her to forgive him if she can, in answer to which note he receives a long letter, said by a critic[105] to be ‘for feeling, for eloquence, for heart-touching resignation, and impassioned grief, almost unique in the language.’ The writing of this letter is made easy to her by the presentiment that she will not overlive his desertion of her; and her resignation is so free from all factitious generosity and all ostentatious self-sacrifice, that the beatings of a human heart are, as it were, audible through the lines.—

In connection with Zaira’s stay in Ireland a few glimpses are given of the higher society of Dublin, which, no doubt, also ‘bear some resemblance to common life.’ Maturin was, by this time, familiar with all the circles the town could boast of, and the drawing-room does not escape a fling of his good-natured satire any more than the conventicle. De Courcy is introduced to Zaira at a large evening party, given in her honour by a Lady Longwood, the wife of one of his guardians. The bustle excited by the presence of Zaira; the idle expectations of a more substantial refreshment, entertained by ‘mammas and misses’ who have been talking themselves hungry in her praise; Lady Longwood moving among her guests canvassing applauses for the indifferent musical performances of her silly daughters, before the eyes of the greatest artist in Europe: all is described with a humour and a vivacity that makes one regret that Maturin so seldom, in his writings, gave vent to those high spirits by which he was distinguished in private life. One of the finest chapters in this part of the book is further the one containing an account of Eva’s visit to the theatre. She is enough of a woman to feel an irresistible desire of seeing her famous rival, but would never dare to speak about it to her foster-parents. Going out, however, she one day accidentally meets Lady Longwood and her daughters, with whom she is slightly acquainted, and, summoning up all her courage, accepts their invitation to accompany them to witness Zaira’s last appearance on the stage. Her confusion at the theatre where everything is new to her, the overwhelming impression produced upon her by the brilliant apparition of Zaira, and her anguish when she observes De Courcy behind the scenes are analysed with a dramatic force and a marvellous penetration into the innocent soul-life of Eva. Less interesting, from an artistic point of view, are the scenes taking place at the house of Zaira, chiefly filled with literary discussions. A well-sketched personage, however, present on most of these occasions, is De Courcy’s friend Montgomery: a blunt and honest character who sees with unselfish grief that his friend is beginning to neglect Eva, and who tries to bring him back to the way of duty by the not very chivalrous means of endeavouring to detect and point out immoral or blameworthy tendencies in the views and principles of Zaira. To this end he obstinately contradicts her where he can, and once, weary of hearing Zaira’s taste called ‘classical,’ he makes a furious attack upon the entire classical literature, falling upon the ancients ‘with redoutable, repeated blows, slaying them, like Sampson, by thousands.’ These doubts as to the excellence of one of the corner-stones of English education roused the wrath of the critics of Women, who, naturally enough, felt irritated at being told that in their own days Horace would have been hanged and Juvenal stood in the pillory. The method of ascribing to the author the opinions of his personages, always applied with vigour in the case of the Rev. Mr. Maturin, came here, for once, pretty near the truth. It is not only in Women that he displays a hostility to classical studies; in one of his sermons he speaks of them with a marked and candid antipathy:

As Maturin himself had been, for a long time, occupied in giving instruction in this same branch of learning, he knew very well that the copies of the ancients committed into the hands of British school-boys were carefully pruned of the passages he took such offence at; and his eccentric inveighings against the classical writers expressed, after all, his artistic temperament rather than any zeal for morality. His literary tastes were eminently romantic, notwithstanding his admiration for Pope. He had accepted the revival of Mediaevalism in all its phases; his own work began under the auspices of Mrs. Radcliffe and ended with an imitation of Walter Scott; and his works possess every quality generally termed romantic. But Maturin’s Women affords, at the same time, a striking proof of the fact that the romantic writers could occasionally greatly excel in realism, though the spirit of classicism was to them foreign and indeed odious.—

The fancy of Zaira to devote a year before her intended marriage to De Courcy to an ‘intellectual existence’ during which she is to finish his education, is as consistent with her ideal and theoretical cast of mind as it is inconsistent with anything like common prudence. Paris is, moreover, the most unfortunate place she could choose for the commencement of her task; in the most brilliant society of Europe not even Zaira can make so unique a figure as in Dublin, and to the fluctuating mind of De Courcy the gay metropolis has a thousand things to offer, calculated to attract him more than the conversation of Zaira. Among these is a person called Eulalie de Touranges—otherwise unimportant, but just giving him the pleasure of a transitory flirtation, new to his experience, and irresistible at his age. Thus the relation between the lovers very soon becomes constrained in a way appropriately described in a letter of one of Zaira’s friends:

The episode with Eulalie de Touranges is not the only circumstance contributing to the alienation between De Courcy and Zaira. The very basis of their friendship is unnatural. No man, as Maturin simply remarks, is pleased to be the pupil of a woman, and to be continually reminded of the superiority of Zaira cannot fail to become irritating to De Courcy. His liaison to an actress is, moreover, often misconstrued in a way that is very disagreeable to him; but, weak as he is, instead of resolutely defending her honour, he only wishes to get rid of her. Once he is told that Zaira has been married and even had a child, the fate of whom is entirely unknown. His love to her being already on the decline, he feels, and not quite without reason, greatly incensed at her having never mentioned this to him. The innocent figure of Eva begins to reappear to his mind, and when he hears from Montgomery that Eva is lying dangerously ill, his sensitive nature is utterly shocked at the thought of his being the cause of her death. Nothing can now detain him at Paris. The development of these incidents is traced with an inner logic that makes De Courcy’s return to Ireland appear not only natural but inevitable, and forces the reader at once to accept the argumentation. Scott, indeed, says in his critique on Women that De Courcy’s desertion of Zaira is not ‘half so probably motived as his first offence against the code of constancy;’ but his judgment proceeds, no doubt, from an honest indignation at a hero so lamentably deficient in what had always been considered as the principal qualification of one, fidelity in love: summing up the characteristics of De Courcy, the author of Waverley concludes by wishing him to the devil. Yet De Courcy, although the ‘hero’ of an extensive novel, is meant to be neither admired nor hated, only understood, and the characterization is executed with a realism which the time was not quite able to appreciate.—As for Zaira, she knows nothing of the art of keeping the interest of a lover alive by occasionally exercising some reserve towards him; it is impossible for her not to show clearly that he is all she lives for, and this deep and serious view of their relation would, even in itself, inspire a kind of awe in the fickle-minded De Courcy. Now the passion of Zaira is heightened according as that of De Courcy cools down; she is seized with that eccentric, all-absorbing infatuation which persons of genius sometimes conceive for objects wholly unworthy of it. Having been kept, for a time, painfully hovering between hope and despair, she is at last relieved from all doubts. It happens in rather a hackneyed way: she gets hold of a bit of paper on which De Courcy has begun to compose an answer to his guardian who has written to him and implored him to come back, and Zaira makes out the words: ‘I am weary, sick to the soul of my present situation; I shall fly from it as soon as possible.’ The lack of originality, however, is easily forgotten in the almost appalling power with which the sufferings of Zaira are described, sufferings that gradually deprive her of her talents and her health, of everything but life. Of pride she has never had much; now she loses every trace of it. Although aware that she is wearying him, she is still anxious to appear in his company, and when he actually begins to shun her, she even follows him in the street, and stealing to his hotel, at last sees him depart. But for the tender care which some of her French friends take of her, Zaira would perish; to restore her to her former vigour, however, is not in human power. She cannot find peace in any of her old pursuits, nothing can divert her mind from the calamity that has befallen her. At this time she is thrown into the society of an atheistic philosopher who, in support of his theories, endeavours to prove to her that misery is, and must be, the lot of all intellectual beings. Their conversations on this subject unquestionably belong to the longueurs of the book; as the adoption of his sceptical views would not, in her present state of mind, be of any solace to Zaira, the discourses are unnecessarily protracted, and her escape from the ‘snares’ of the philosopher does not appear so meritorious as is probably intended. But all the more impressively are described Zaira’s attempts at turning to religion, seeking consolation in a living faith. Her friends have taken her to a beautiful villa in the country, where she has a singular experience while roaming about in a summer night:

The religious inspiration Zaira has thus felt for a moment does not return, although she passes the greater part of the night before the Crucifix, where she is, in the morning, found insensible. All her devotional exercises are in vain; for as she cannot find peace in the spirit of religion, her efforts to embrace its empty forms are also doomed to fail. She makes some arrangements to enter a convent, but is deterred from it after a conversation she holds with an old nun, a resident of the place. The results of an existence that leads to apathy and stupefaction, that deadens every feeling and makes living automata of human beings, are displayed in the person of the nun with all the force expressing Maturin’s innate horror at a life in monotony—and Zaira abandons her intention with a strong conviction that she could not buy the salvation of her soul at the price of killing it first. The convent was, indeed, the usual refuge of fictitious characters in great distress; in The Heart of Midlothian which appeared in the same year as Women, Lady Staunton—the ‘Zaira’ of that great novel—ends in a continental convent practising all the vigils and austerities of the religion, and is then heard of no more. Yet it would have been a too convenient way of quenching the fire by which Zaira is consumed, and breaking off the psychological process she is undergoing, to shut her within the walls of a convent. The author pursues with unfaltering consistency the restless strivings of her powerful mind after forgetfulness which she both wishes and dreads. Perceiving that her aim cannot be reached in solitude, she engages in acts of private charity, visiting the poor and sick until she is tired out. Satisfaction, however, is denied her; it is boldly shown that a person, however good and noble, cannot perforce make herself religious, and that there are circumstances under which that remedy fails, without any fault of the patient’s. Weary to the soul, she at last decides to put an end to her life. In all her vicissitudes, it must be observed, her nature has remained unchanged, and with the most terrible reality before her eyes she still lives half in a world of theories. She discusses the subject of suicide with her friends, and passes some painful nights in reading accounts of the deaths of Brutus and Cato.[106] Yet at the decisive moment her reason wanders; dream and reality are blended; magnificent visions chase each other through her delirious brain, and on recovering she clearly remembers having seen a white figure whom she imagines to be the Irish girl, once forsaken for her. This figure continues to haunt her mind, and as it is something she can concentrate her thoughts upon, it soon becomes an idée fixe with her. Weak and exhausted as she is, she travels to Dublin. From a morbid inclination as much as for philanthropical reasons she keeps on visiting the filthiest streets and most miserable hovels, in one of which, as has been related, she finds her wretched mother.—

To this part of the book, above all others, must be applied what Alaric Watts wrote in 1819: ‘“Women” is a work which, with all its dullness, its monotony of suffering, and its horrible anatomy of the moral frame, stands alone among modern writings—there is nothing like it—its profound and philosophic melancholy, its terrible researches into the deepest abysses of the human heart, and of human feeling—its daring drawing the veil of the “holy of holies,” while the hand that draws it trembles at the touch, make it a work unequalled in the list of English novels.’ This sentence was justified; Women stood alone among contemporary writings. The tendency pointed out by Watts is one which, according to a modern writer,[107] indicates the latest phase in the development of the novel: ‘Yet I think he is but a superficial student of the literature of recorded time who does not note one tendency of later work, of later method, of later procedure, of later life, as compared with earlier work, earlier method, earlier procedure, and earlier life, which seems to imply an underlying law. — — — This law of tendency is, in general, that the depiction of the external, objective, carnal, precedes, in every form of expression of which we can have records, the consideration of the internal, the subjective, the spiritual. We go from shapes, and forms, and bulk, and externals, to the presentation of the life within.’ Now the growth of the ‘novel of personality’ towards a closer representation of the ‘life within’ does not show any remarkable progress during the second decade of the century which, on the contrary, is marked by the rapid rise of the historical novel. It is no wonder that the depth and intensity with which the inner life is depicted in Maturin’s Women, should make a powerful impression upon thoughtful minds, though on the part of the larger public the book met with the usual fate of a work in advance of its time.—

While Zaira is well-nigh breaking down under the inconstancy of De Courcy, her daughter is, in Dublin, pining away from the same cause. In the Wentworth family things are going on in the same old style, Eva only is able to take less and less part in the usual proceedings. The symptoms of her disease manifest themselves in a general weakness, alarmingly increasing. Physicians are duly consulted—sea-air is recommended by one, mountain-air by another. Eva submits to all with a passive smile; she has not the least doubt that she is hastening to her grave. Soon, indeed, this becomes evident to the rest of the family, and Wentworth already plans what evangelical institutions might be supported by the fortune which will probably fall to him after Eva’s death, that is, the capital settled on her by her grandfather. A little incident exposing, in a masterly way, the inmost characters of the principal members of the circle, is related in connection with a meeting where Macowen is requested to give a ‘word of prayer.’ This gentleman, who also has been thwarted in love, deems this a suitable opportunity of taking his revenge, and exercises his eloquence entirely at the expense of Eva:

One evening as Eva is sitting in her garden, De Courcy appears before her; she swoons in his arms and, from that moment, does not leave her bed. He besieges Mrs. Wentworth with letters and supplications, but is no more admitted to Eva, whose only wish is to die in peace. It is not without much exertion of her feeble strength that she succeeds in repelling the image of her lover from her thoughts and fixing them on religion alone, yet at length she attains the tranquillity which Zaira had sought in vain, and her last moments are undisturbed by any earthly memories. The pitiable state into which De Courcy is reduced is spoken of in a tone evincing the author’s latent sympathy for him, but he forbears to give any detailed relation of the end of his hero: a character like De Courcy is interesting only in hours of happiness and enthusiasm. And as a crowning touch of the knowledge of the conditions of human nature displayed in Maturin’s Women must be mentioned the circumstance that Zaira remains alive. She is strong, having never been accustomed to self-indulgence. At an age when Eva and Charles knew no external compulsion, but were free to follow the dictates of their feelings, Zaira was placed face to face with real life in its sternest aspect, and the strenuous work into which she was driven, has, while she has had strength to go through it at all, hardened her vitality so that death touches her not when it would be most welcome. She lives on in the painful consciousness of having caused the death of her child, unknown and unnoticed. The book ends with this melancholy aphorism:

Women is, in conception as well as in execution, the most original of Maturin’s novels. What literary reminiscences there may be discerned—and these are but of a superficial character—lead, for the most part, back to his own work. It has already been said that his second book, The Wild Irish Boy, contains scenes and personages that anticipate certain things in the present work. The hero there was not unlike De Courcy; his affections would hover between a brilliant mother and a pale and delicate daughter; his friend Hammond was a very distinct prototype of Montgomery. Hammond approves of Lady Montrevor as little as Montgomery does of Zaira, and he also is anxious to detect something condemnable in the opinions and conversation of the remarkable woman who has bewitched his friend. The imperfectly sketched characters and the clumsy composition of The Wild Irish Boy are of little interest in themselves, but they clearly show the enormous advance of Maturin’s powers after the success of Bertram. In Zaira critics were inclined to see an imitation—hostile reviewers said a caricature—of M:me de Staël’s Corinne. Scott writes: ‘We have — — — — hinted at some of the author’s errors; and we must now, in all candour and respect, mention one of considerable importance, which the reader has perhaps anticipated. It respects the resemblance betwixt the character and fate of Zaira and Corinne—a coincidence so near, as certainly to deprive Mr. Maturin of all claim to originality, so far as this brilliant and well-painted character is concerned. In her accomplishments, in her beauty, in her talents, in her falling a victim to the passion of a fickle lover, Zaira closely resembles her distinguished prototype.’ All this is true, yet the most essential point of contact between the two characters is left unmentioned. The type was one that had occupied Maturin’s imagination long before he wrote Women; it might with as much reason be asserted that the accomplishments and outward appearance of Armida in The Milesian Chief were borrowed from Corinne (1807). But one trait in Zaira, which, in all probability, was directly influenced by M:me de Staël, is her sweetness of temper and lack of pride—a quality which excludes from the descriptions of her suffering the ‘frenetical’ element Maturin’s earlier writings were noted for. Otherwise the figure of Corinne, though depicted in a calmer style, is much more exaggerated than Zaira: the latter is only a celebrated actress—and a very learned woman certainly; while Corinne is, in addition to this, a gifted painter, an eminent poetess, and a national heroine. Of the external circumstances of Corinne’s destiny several can be pointed out which, no doubt, have their analogies in Women—the mystery that covers her early life before she rises to the height of fame; the unhappy issue of her attachment to a man unworthy of her, and the final loss of her great talents. What, however, there is most remarkable in the history of Zaira, the minute analysis of the progress of her sufferings, that, in short, which Watts holds forth so eloquently, has no parallel in the book of M:me de Staël who is content only to state the result of the mental struggles her heroine undergoes. Corinne is not a novel in the same sense as Women; its weight lies neither in incident nor psychology, but in its broad-minded raisonnement about life and literature in the European countries of the time. The characters are subjected to a quite conventional treatment, and it is curious to see how closely the death of Corinne resembles the death of Eva, though nobody ever thought of accusing Maturin of imitation in this respect. The observation which Maturin makes with reference to Zaira, M:me de Staël applies to Corinne: ‘Quand une personne de génie est douée d’une sensibilité véritable, ses chagrins se multiplient par ses facultés mêmes: elle fait des découvertes dans sa propre peine comme dans le reste de la nature; et, le malheur du coeur étant inépuisable, plus on a d’idées, mieux on le sent;’—but nevertheless she succeeds in finding the harmony of mind which is the natural inheritance of Eva. She fixes her thoughts on religion alone, and, decidedly refusing to see her lover or answer his letters, declares her only wish to be to die in peace:—‘au moment de mourir Dieu m’a fait la grâce de retrouver du calme, et je sens que la vue d’Oswald remplirait mon âme de sentiments qui ne s’accordent point avec les angoisses de la mort. La religion seule a des secrets pour ce terrible passage.’ Maturin, on the other hand, does not shrink from drawing the extreme conclusions from his definition, and shows with a merciless consistency that she who was born a Zaira can never become an Eva.

The originality of yet another personage in Women was disputed, in so far as some critics maintained Zaira’s mother to be a copy of Meg Merrilies in Guy Mannering (1815). This romantic creation of Scott—a spinner of intrigues in the shape of an old hag of wild manners and questionable sanity—variations of which reappear in several of the Waverley novels, was very likely to attract a novelist of Maturin’s temperament and may have had some share in the origin of the old Irishwoman. There is, however, this great difference, that Meg is more of a type, the Irishwoman more of an individual. The former, who admirably succeeds in her plans, is a schemer by profession, a gipsy and the leader of a whole tribe; the latter has become what she is through a series of personal calamities, and completely fails in the fantastic aim which she is pursuing: she dies in misery without having converted any of her descendants.—Zaira’s mother is the only person in the book who is demonstratively Irish, a representative of the lower classes. The description of her appearance is impressive, even terrible:

A certain ‘picturesque effect,’ intended as a token of her nationality, is carefully preserved in all her sayings and doings, but never emphasized so as to make her attractive in any way. Maturin, as has been seen, was not fond of idealizing the Irish people, and the street-types occurring in Women form no exception to the rule. Otherwise Women is a psychological novel without any national tendency, notwithstanding a few patriotic sentences and political allusions to the unfortunate state of the country. Nor is there anything peculiarly Irish in the principal events of the book, except in Zaira’s early history, which gives a glimpse of the primitive and unregulated life led on a remote Irish estate at that period. As this part, however, supplies the groundwork for the whole fabric, Allan Cunningham[108] is not entirely wrong in calling Women ‘an Irish story, wild, wonderful, and savage, with many redeeming touches of pathos and beauty.’—Amidst all the realism of the book, an incident with something of a supernatural import is unexpectedly introduced; whether this be a characteristically Irish trait or no, a study of Maturin must take account of it. It is told that on a pleasure-party, at the time when the intimacy between Zaira and De Courcy is ripening into love, he twice sees the apparition of Eva, which remains unseen by others; and Eva, on the same afternoon, in a dream imagines herself in exactly the same situation in which she appears to De Courcy. This incident, mentioned in a few words but with a remarkable seriousness, caused Scott, in his critique on Women, to refer to and quote the suppressed passages of Bertram.—

Scott’s benevolent review is one of the most pleasant specimens of his literary criticism. Cordial praise from the man whom he considered the greatest writer of the age, must have occasioned much satisfaction to Maturin, so much the more as the two other critiques which Women directly gave rise to were to a very different purpose. Anything more unintelligent than an article in the Monthly Review[109] it would be difficult to find. The writer ever probes for the moral reasons of the author’s describing this or that, and of Maturin’s treatment of the Methodists he comes to this wonderful conclusion:

Of what the writer so strongly feels the loss of, Maturin has, in fact, given not one but three instances: what is there of spiritual pride in Eva? or what of gloomy superstition in Montgomery and Mrs. Wentworth? Still more stupid is another charge against the author’s fairness, which the writer tries to make much of. De Courcy receives, while in Paris, a letter from his guardian—an old and conservative clergyman who, in principle, disapproves of dramatic art and those who practise it—in which he eagerly dissuades De Courcy from marrying an actress. This letter, the reviewer says, he has read ‘with equal surprise and displeasure,’ and continues: ‘We cannot conceive how Mr. Maturin, as the countryman of Miss O’Neil, whose virtues are the groundwork and the glory of her talents, can have brought himself to pronounce such a sweeping condemnation of the characters of actresses. If he should say, “These are only arguments in the mouth of an advocate against an imprudent marriage,” he who has been so unusually connected with the stage should have taken some opportunity to counteract, or to modify, the unmitigated censure.’ But is not the whole life of Zaira a modification of any censure? and is it not shown at almost every page to what a moral superiority and greatness of soul an actress is capable of rising? Unjust as this critique is, it is nothing to the savage attack delivered upon the book in the Quarterly Review.[110] At this time the famous literary warfare between Croker and Lady Morgan was at its hottest, and Maturin’s friendship with the authoress—she is admiringly spoken of even in Women—had, no doubt, its share in the extraordinary venomousness of the article, which there is no difficulty in recognizing as a production of Croker himself. He treats the book as an intentional parody on novels in general; but the satirical tone is often broken by bursts of great vehemence, and ignoble allusions to Maturin’s profession are by no means spared:

That Maturin’s Women has never been reprinted cannot but be regarded as one of the curiosities in the history of the English novel.

In the February number of the British Review 1818 appeared an article, by Maturin, on Miss Edgeworth’s tales of Harrington and Ormond. It was originally intended for the Quarterly Review; in his letter to Murray from Sept. 27, 1817, Maturin says that his article is ready, and only waits an order for transmission. His first contribution to the Quarterly, the critique of Sheil’s Apostate, which had not met with a favourable reception, was, however, to be also his last. In another letter, dated Nov. 17, Maturin writes: ‘I can easily comprehend a truth which your politeness would conceal, that the inferiority and not the lateness of my article was the cause of its rejection. I am extremely obliged by your kindness in suggesting an application to the British Review; I have availed myself of it and must entreat your pardon for the trouble it imposes on you.’ At that time Maturin was still anxious to have a place in the Quarterly, little as his own production harmonized with the views advocated by the literary staff of that periodical—though the exceedingly inimical criticism which both Women and Melmoth afterwards received there, probably made an end of his desire to have any connection with it. Whatever might have been the cause of the rejection of the article, it appears that Murray later mediated in Maturin’s behalf with the British Review, which was induced to accept it. The article is composed after the same pattern as the critique on Sheil—though it is far more interesting—: the development and history of the novel is traced from its earliest beginnings up to the new stories of Miss Edgeworth. Several quotations have been made, in the foregoing pages, from this typical essay of Maturin, where the Gothic Romance is happily and enthusiastically characterized, and the great novelists of the 18:th century mentioned with an astonishing lack of appreciation. Miss Edgeworth, however, is highly panegyrized; but it is quite evident that Maturin’s opinion of his celebrated countrywoman is more akin to respect and esteem than to ardent and genuine admiration. He cannot conceal that she is deficient in those romantic qualities of passion and feeling for nature, which to him mean the highest pitch of inspiration:

Maturin’s criticism of the two particular, tales now under discussion is very severe, of Ormond decidedly too much so. This well-known Irish story being the very antipode of the patriotic novels produced by Lady Morgan and Maturin, it is no wonder it did not appeal to him. There are no soul-stirring adventures, no breath of romance, and the ancient glory of Ireland is not even alluded to. —

Romantic, in the highest degree, is Maturin’s next work, his tragedy of Fredolfo, which was written in the course of the year 1818. The economic success of Women had bettered his circumstances, and the alluring prospect of a successful drama once more began to loom before his fancy. As early as January 28:th Maturin communicates to Murray that he has been made ‘a very liberal offer to write a tragedy for Covent Garden;’ Fredolfo, in all probability, was the fruit of this offer, though it was not acted there until April 1819. Maturin’s correspondence with Murray—that part, at least, which is extant—breaks off in August 1818, and there is little to tell of his life until the appearance of Fredolfo, except that he was fortunate enough to form another of those literary friendships he always desired. Alaric Watts became, at that time, editor of the New Monthly Magazine or Universal Register, where he published his admiring article on Maturin. This article, according to some autobiographical notes of Watts,[111] brought him the acquaintance of the novelist:

The tragedy turned out a failure as complete as it was undeserved: Fredolfo is not only the best of Maturin’s dramatic compositions, but a work of considerable poetic value.

The scene in Fredolfo is laid in Switzerland, which country had, through Byron, become as popular with the romantic writers as Sicily and Spain had been during the bloom of the Gothic Romance. Fredolfo the hero is an ancient and respected Swiss lord, who has gallantly pleaded his country’s cause against the tyranny of Austria:

Yet he is not happy, for a crime weighs upon his mind. Once, years ago, his solitary castle on St. Gothard had been, during his absence, visited by the Austrian governor Wallenberg, who on the same occasion seduced his wife. Shortly after Fredolfo’s return Wallenberg was murdered near the castle; the deed was done by Fredolfo, with the assistance of one single attendant, a fiendish and deformed dwarf called Berthold. The cries of Wallenberg, however, attracted the attention of a young Swiss peasant, Adelmar, who was wandering in the mountains. He rushed to the place offering his help to the assailed party, but was himself left there, severely wounded, without having recognized any of the fighters. This unexpected witness to the scene now became an object of Fredolfo’s pursuit; he had him secretly carried away from Switzerland and compelled him to live in a foreign country. Here he was allowed every comfort he could desire, but his longing for his native land was too strong for him, and at last he made his way back to Switzerland. Knowing Fredolfo to be his pursuer he still established himself in the vicinity of the castle, and even succeeded in winning the love of Fredolfo’s only daughter, Urilda.

The play opens in the castle whither, while a violent storm is raging, Fredolfo and his daughter are expected to return from Altdorf. Urilda, committed to the care of Berthold, is travelling in advance; but Berthold arrives at the castle alone, with the intelligence that Urilda’s horse has been frightened and carried away by a flood, together with its burden. After a while, however, Urilda is brought home. She has been saved by a stranger in whom she, on recovering, recognizes Adelmar, the object of her love and her father’s hatred. Their tête-à-tête is interrupted by the news that Fredolfo, too, is perishing in the storm. Moved by Urilda’s despair Adelmar departs to save her father, and successfully helps him out of a chasm among the mountains. He then wishes to depart without revealing himself, but as Fredolfo insists on seeing his face, he at last flings back his mantle. Fredolfo, on discovering by whom he has been rescued, is seized with fury, and when they are joined by his attendants, he commands Adelmar to be secured and conveyed to the dungeon of the castle; only the intervention of Urilda, who comes out to meet them, saves the life of her lover. Fredolfo observes with intense agitation the tender relation between Urilda and Adelmar. Now Berthold, who has been casting his eyes upon Urilda and hates Adelmar as a rival, eagerly advises Fredolfo to put him to death. Fredolfo, however, sets Adelmar at liberty, and from that moment Berthold is his implacable enemy. Soon indeed an opportunity for vengeance arises. Wallenberg, the present Austrian governor and son of the murdered one, makes his unexpected appearance at the castle. He has been the cause of Fredolfo’s bringing her daughter away from Altdorf; he freely confesses to have ‘gazed upon the maid with lawless love,’ but now he indicates that he will honourably claim her hand from her father. Fredolfo summons her daughter to answer for herself, and her answer is proudly rejective. Wallenberg departs in rage, and Berthold offers to bear him company, casting a look upon Fredolfo from which he understands that he is now a lost man.

The first two acts, which comprise what is related above, are, in every respect, the best part of the play. They have the character of an introduction containing the necessary premisses for the catastrophe that follows, but they are well conceived and full of stirring life. In the very first scene the tragedy of Fredolfo is alluded to by an old attendant of his in a conversation with a minstrel, and the spectator thus becomes aware that a gloom is cast over the life of the hero. At the arrival of Berthold it becomes clear that he is the evil genius of the drama; he is received by the inmates of the castle with curses and maledictions, and when Urilda recovers from her swoon she shows equal horror and disgust at the sight of him. Berthold has been regarding her with indications of love, but now it is seen how his love is changed into hatred, and thoughts of vengeance already begin to fill his mind. From the beautiful dialogue between Urilda and Adelmar it appears that he is the object of Fredolfo’s dislike, which explains the agitation of Fredolfo on recognizing his preserver. Then the scenes of the rupture between Berthold and his master, and of Wallenberg’s visit and departure, follow each other in well-balanced succession. The release of Adalmar from his prison is, indeed, somewhat undramatically executed, in so far as Fredolfo simply sends Berthold to open the door for him, and he disappears without any further ado; but this act of generosity marks the stage which the mental progress of Fredolfo has now reached. He is weary of his long struggle against the fate that nevertheless is approaching; he feels that his crime, however defensible, is drawing near its punishment, and he can do no more than resignedly give himself up to whatever is to come. The mutual relations of Fredolfo and Adelmar are essentially the same as those of Falkland and Caleb in Godwin’s Caleb Williams, another phase of which Maturin had utilized in Montorio. Falkland, too, has been driven to commit a murder under exceptional circumstances; Caleb alone is acquainted with the deed, and he pursues him with relentless vigour until his own strength is wasted. The difference is that Fredolfo is already at the beginning of the drama reduced to that state of exhaustion in which all resistance ends, and that his crime is known, besides to Adelmar—who, indeed, is not quite certain whether Fredolfo was one of the nocturnal combatants—to an enemy much more dangerous. Fredolfo shares the general abhorrence of Berthold, but dares not dismiss him. Berthold follows him like an evil conscience, embittering every moment of his existence, and now endeavours to prompt him to do away with Adelmar:

When Berthold hints at his feelings towards Urilda, Fredolfo loses all self-command, and only the sudden arrival of Wallenberg saves Berthold from immediate destruction. He has, however, now made up his mind to desert his master.

In the next act Wallenberg reappears at the castle, attended by Berthold and his guard, and accuses Fredolfo of the murder of his father. Fredolfo is thereupon taken to the prison of Altdorf, and Urilda suffers herself to be dragged away with her father. Adelmar has also journeyed to Altdorf, where he engages himself in preparing a rising among the citizens for the rescue of Fredolfo. Here he is seen by Berthold, who invents a ruse in order to secure him. Wallenberg enters the prison where Urilda is tending her father, and pretends to have forgiven him and determined to set him at liberty; only for the sake of appearances the place should be stormed by the people, led by some youth ‘of bold and enterprising arm,’ for which time Wallenberg promises to dismiss the guards. Urilda at once remembers Adelmar and finds opportunity of sending word to him. The following night Adelmar and his band then rush in, but are met by Wallenberg and his soldiers, who have been lying in wait for them. While the battle is raging, Wallenberg re-enters the prison and, revelling in the agony of Urilda, pronounces Fredolfo’s death-warrant. The forces of Adelmar, however, appear to be stronger then has been expected, and Fredolfo is really liberated, though Adelmar himself is disarmed and captured and remains, together with Urilda, in Wallenberg’s power.—Fredolfo is carried to a cavern in the mountains, where he observes, with horror, that Urilda is not with him. He implores his followers to go back and save her, when Berthold arrives to inform him that if he refuses to suffer his death sentence, his daughter is to suffer it instead. Fredolfo instantly prepares to go, but at the same time they are joined by Adelmar, who has escaped from the prison; he has placed Urilda by the altar of a shrine and comes now to re-gather his band. In the meantime Wallenberg and his attendants, in vain opposed by a prior, break into the church. As Fredolfo and his party enter it shortly afterwards, Wallenberg snatches Urilda up to the altar and, drawing his dagger, points it to her breast. Fredolfo, understanding her danger, dismisses his band. Adelmar also is induced to give up his sword to Wallenberg: whereupon Wallenberg stabs him with the selfsame weapon and then releases Urilda. Fredolfo now recovers himself, rushes upon Wallenberg and mortally wounds him. Urilda expires upon the body of her lover, and Fredolfo alone is left alive.—

The last three acts are not, considered as drama, quite abreast of the introduction. The development of the action is, upon the whole, made too dependent on the caprices of Wallenberg; the purely horrible elements of the play are dilated upon with too remarkable a predilection, especially the demonstrations of the diabolic natures of Wallenberg and Berthold sometimes take undue space. Before Adelmar’s attack upon the prison, for instance, there is a long scene filled with enticements on the part of Berthold to get Urilda to sign a paper in the belief that it contains an order of liberation for her father, but which paper really is the death sentence of Adelmar. Apart from the unnaturalness of this proceeding, it has no connection with the events that follow: Adelmar makes his escape, and the death warrant is no more alluded to; the sole purpose of the scene is to bring out the excruciating pain felt by Urilda when she is thus kept hovering between hope and fear, and the extraordinary wickedness of Berthold. Yet notwithstanding this and certain other awkwardnesses of a similar kind, it is undeniable that the construction is firmer and far better regulated than in Maturin’s earlier plays, and the place of the hero as the central figure is well sustained by means of the skill and moderation with which the characterization is executed. The reader has, in fact, some misgivings that he is to share the fate of Manuel, go mad and start raving; but Fredolfo retains his reason to the end, and the weary resignation that has hold of his mind lends him a dignity and a calmness very different from the fury of his enemies.

What, however, raises the first two acts so far above the rest, is the romantic glamour shed over the persons and events, much of which fades away as the play advances. The figure of Adelmar is an exceedingly poetic one. He does not—like Bertram—belong to the typically ‘Byronic’ heroes; there is nothing demoniac or criminal about him. Yet he is not bloodless or commonplace; he has an air of romance and mystery of his own, and his speech is pervaded, as it were, by an echo from his native Alps. He never assumes any pose, for he can afford to do without one. His dialogue with Urilda, in the first act, contains the best things Maturin ever wrote in verse.

In the latter part of the play Adelmar, though a moving force in the action, appears only by glimpses, so that the impression he leaves is the most uniformly favourable of all the personages, being free from the general decline of characterization towards the end. Urilda is altogether more conventional than Adelmar, and does but seldom, by any action of her own, make good the very fine things said about her. In the second act Wallenberg says, seeing her approach:

In the figures of Wallenberg and Berthold, Maturin’s unrestrained imagination within the field of the horrible carried him to a length to which the failure of the play has been ascribed. Talfourd,[112] while admitting that it contains ‘passages of a soft and mournful beauty, breathing a tender air of romance,’ says, with reference to these two personages: ‘In “Fredolfo,” the author, as though he had resolved to sting the public into a sense of his power, crowded together characters of such matchless depravity, sentiments of such demoniac cast, and events of such gratuitous horror, that the moral taste of the audience, injured as it had been by the success of similar works, felt the insult, and rose up indignantly against it.’ The same opinion has been expressed by a later critic:[113] ‘The wickedness of Berthold the dwarf and Wallenberg surpasses all bounds of reason. Neither is a human being at all.’ Less depravity, no doubt, would be sufficient, yet the question is not so much of the amount as of an unskilful display of it; in the first two acts neither character is unnatural, nor are they much worse than many famous villains in literature. Wallenberg appears as a subtly drawn tyrant of unbridled passions, accustomed blindly to follow all his freaks; his attachment to Urilda is hardly more than a passing caprice. His proposal for her hand is characteristically worded:

A love like this is never very far from hatred, and, when disappointed, it is naturally turned into a furious thirst for revenge which spares neither its object nor its cherisher:

Upon these sentiments he acts, and his ‘wickedness’ is not without consistency, only it is spread out so as to affect the symmetry of the composition. The same is still more true of Berthold, who, in the beginning, appears to be not only sinning, but sinned against. It is not quite clear how he has, previous to the events of the play, deserved the detestation of all his neighbours; to a great extent it seems to be inspired by his bodily deformity. His love to Urilda is tender enough; leaning over her, when she is lying senseless, he speaks this beautiful monologue:

Of a creature who can speak like this it can hardly be said that he is no human being at all. As for the prophecy expressed in the last lines, it is verified the moment Urilda revives; and as Berthold then resolves upon his vengeance it is not difficult to understand that a being with his wild and primitive standpoint shuns no means in order to effect it. The part was considered an important one by Maturin, who wished particular care to be bestowed upon it. In his letter to Watts[114] about the performance of Fredolfo he says: ‘I must revert to the part of Berthold, which is sufficiently eccentric and extravagant. Don’t let him, on my account, appear a ludicrous figure. Perhaps his deformity may be best expressed by a certain savage picturesqueness of costume, which I could sketch were I upon the spot, but which I readily submit to your taste in my absence; but don’t let him be ludicrous, that must be the ruin of the play. No one could bear a kitchen Richard. Much depends on Berthold.’—A certain resemblance of Berthold to Richard III is indeed obvious. Their criminal instincts are excited by bitterness arising from a sense of their personal disadvantages. Some reflections of Berthold:

lead (mutatis mutandis) back to the opening monologue of Richard III:

Something of a ‘kitchen Richard’ Berthold, however, is, inwardly if not outwardly: he is a Richard without genius or grandeur. The same difference is noticeable in the case of another literary figure that presumably influenced the character of Berthold—Rashleigh Osbaldistone in Scott’s Rob Roy which appeared in 1818, just at the time when Maturin was composing Fredolfo. The ‘wickedness’ of Rashleigh is by no means incomparable to that of Berthold, but he is in possession of an intellectual power and mental superiority which makes him the most prominent figure in the environment in which he is depicted. Berthold, though neither ludicrous nor unnatural, is not sufficiently interesting to support the important part assigned to him, having nothing to counterbalance his ‘matchless depravity.’

The principal rôles of Fredolfo were in the best hands at Covent Garden: Fredolfo was played by Young, Adelmar by Charles Kemble, Berthold by Yates, Wallenberg by Macready and Urilda by Miss O’Neill. Maturin expected success in a kind of hopeful anxiety. His letter to Watts of April 17, alluded to above, displays his usual overflowing gratitude to those who took an interest in his productions, and his inclination to speak, on such occasions, slightingly of them himself:

The fact was, however, that only Yates appeared to be satisfied with his rôle. The failure of the play was, as Watts proceeds to say,[115] due to this indisposition of the principal actors, to the blunders of the minor ones, and, in the public opinion, to the last outburst of the unchivalrousness of Wallenberg:

The merriment was unfortunately roused as early as in the first act, and the many impressive scenes of the introduction passed by unheeded. As to the offending mode of Adelmar’s death, it takes place in the very end, after which there is not much more to listen to, nor is it probable that it would have been sufficient to damn the play, if the whole had been favourably received. Now, however, Fredolfo was silently dropped, without even any critiques being visible; Maturin’s career as a dramatist was practically at an end. Watts dismisses his melancholy story with the remark that—‘Maturin, the most impulsive and eccentric of Irishmen—and that is saying a great deal—bore his disappointment with some philosophy.’

A positive result of this philosophy was that Maturin returned to novel-writing and produced Melmoth the Wanderer, his most famous romance. Before coming to that, however, a few other things remain to be noted. About the same time as Fredolfo was acted, there appeared[116] some unpublished scenes from Manuel. In a letter to Henry Colburn, dated March 15, Maturin says of the extracts:—‘Detached from the tragedy they seem to me very feeble and I would advice you to consult a literary friend before you venture to insert them in your Magazine—should you publish them pray let it be in your poetical department, they are not of importance enough to appear in any other.’—The scenes treat of the dread of De Zelos lest his crime should be discovered, and of Manuel in the castle where he is banished; they are indeed of little importance, rising in no way above the average level of this the feeblest of Maturin’s poetical productions.—In the course of 1819 Maturin published, further, a collection of Sermons. Popular as he is said to have been as a preacher, the volume did not prove a success; it was marked by the disadvantages of Maturin’s double vocation. ‘His sermons, too,’ says his biographer,[117] ‘betrayed the struggles of a poetical mind endeavouring to adapt itself to the prevailing austerity of a particular class of religionists: and, between the party which rejected his book because it was not evangelical, and those who would not read it because it was not a romance, it was his fate to please neither, and fail.’ A benevolent critic in a contemporary[118] points out a certain want of any ‘order of arrangement’ and adds that ‘though these Sermons, if well delivered, must have had great effect from the pulpit, the impression, at the same time, could scarcely be anything else than transient.’

That Melmoth the Wanderer is nowadays considered the work by that which its author stands or falls,[119] sufficiently explains why Maturin is only mentioned in connection with the school of terror. The ‘terrific’ elements in Melmoth are, it is true, strong enough to render it the greatest novel of that school in the English language. All the same, it is much too complex to be confined within the limits of one single school, while its general purport connects it with some of the greatest works of European literature in its period. As for the production of Melmoth, that was carried on under circumstances distressing and even dismal; Maturin’s short period of opulence had passed for ever, and it was only the silent hours of night he was able to devote to his literary labours. His mode of composing, at that time, has been impressively described by a friend:[120]

Melmoth the Wanderer appeared in autumn 1820 and was, by permission, inscribed to the ‘most noble the Marchioness of Abercorn.’ A preface[121] explains the genesis of the book:

The preface ends with one of those apologies of an artist for creating works of art, which Maturin thought proper to make every now and then, but which do not strike one as being over-sincere:

The preface, as will be seen, really does not give more than a ‘hint,’ either of the story or of its hero. It is not the enemy himself who is made to traverse mankind with the gloomy offer; Melmoth the Wanderer is a poor mortal who has, driven by an insatiable thirst for forbidden knowledge, bartered the hope of his own salvation for certain privileges not allotted to common man. Among these is the quenching of his soul’s thirst, a life prolonged by 150 years and the ability of rapidly performing great distances and appearing where he pleases, unhindered by lock or bolt. His contract with the evil one can be cancelled only if he finds another mortal who is willing to change destinies with him. Such mortal it soon becomes Melmoth’s sole wish to encounter. His curiosity is perfectly satisfied; his partly superhuman existence grows an intolerable burden to him, and he looks with terror and anxiety towards the expiration of his term, when he will be lost for all eternity. The greater part of his prolonged existence is occupied in tracing out and visiting human beings in utmost misery and wretchedness, and tempting them to buy their temporal salvation at the cost of their eternal, but none, ‘to gain the world, will lose his own soul,’ and when the term does expire, Satan inexorably claims his due.

Melmoth, as we are told towards the end of the story by a clergyman who has known him in his youth, is originally an Irishman of good family, of ‘various erudition, profound intellect, and intense appetency for information.’ About the year 1650 he travels in Poland and there becomes ‘irrevocably attached to the study of that art which is held in just abomination by all who name the name of Christ.’ After some years the clergyman, then residing in Germany, is summoned to a dying friend who turns out to be Melmoth. He confesses that he has—without explaining how—committed ‘the great angelic sin,’ and has but one thing to ask of his friend: ‘I sent for you to exact your solemn promise that you will conceal from every human being the fact of my death—let no man know that I died, or when, or where.’ At an hour, predicted by Melmoth with great exactitude, his strength begins to fail, and he becomes perfectly cold, like a corpse. The friend then leaves him, but afterwards, while travelling on the Continent, he is continually haunted by rumours of Melmoth being still alive. It is, accordingly, after his apparent death that Melmoth has been re-animated into his new, weird existence, and that his hopeless wanderings commence.

The idea of melting Faust and Mephistopheles into one person was strikingly original, and the figure of Melmoth keeps, in the fiction of the time, a place distinctly its own, even if a great many minor traits, relative both to its human and its superhuman character, can be traced to literary sources more or less obvious. There is Milton’s Satan,[122] grand and awful in his fallen state; there is the legend of the Wandering Jew,[123] who restlessly travels from land to land, in hope of eventually being delivered of his curse—as does his counterpart at sea, the Flying Dutchman; there is the Radcliffe hero, tormented by secret crimes and mysteriously appearing and disappearing, and his successor the Byronic hero with his large and gloomy eyes and with his sardonic yet strangely fascinating smile; and finally the Rosicrucians,[124] so common in the imaginative tales of the time: all these can, in glimpses, be recognized in the Wanderer. From some contemporary stories Maturin seems to have borrowed certain ingredients directly appertaining to the wonderful change which Melmoth undergoes. The incident of his apparent death recalls John William Polidori’s story of The Vampyre (1819).[125] The hero, who turns out to be a vampyre living on the blood of men—or preferably of women—is mortally wounded while travelling with a friend in Greece, and his greatest care, like Melmoth’s, is to conceal his death:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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 ‘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:

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:

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:

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:

With these bright prospects the pair commence their nocturnal wandering in the subterranean vaults, one, no doubt, of the most frightful wanderings ever described in literature. All difficulties which possibly can be encountered in such enterprises are heaped upon them, from their first ineffectual attempts to force the door with the rusty key and with lacerated hands, till the moment they sink down, exhausted, at the trap-door, after losing their way, after seeing their lamps go out, and after stumbling all night in darkness amid terrors real and imaginary, physical and psychical. Alonzo remembers old superstitious tales of demons who seduce monks into the vaults of the convent, and almost fancies he can hear the choir of their infernal sabbath; he grows giddy and stupefied, his knees and hands are stript of skin, and an intolerable thirst is produced by the unnatural atmosphere. At last human nature can endure no more; they lay down ‘like two panting dogs’ in the darkness. When day draws nigh, a faint stream of light makes itself observable above their heads: they have arrived just at the trap-door they have been searching for. But even this hope is turned to despair when it appears that morning is so far advanced that people are already in the garden. They have to remain another twenty-four hours where they are. Retiring into a recess which the parricide seems to be acquainted with they fall asleep, but Alonzo is soon roused by the most hideous screams and imprecations which the other is uttering in his sleep. At last it becomes too much for Alonzo; he awakens his companion with great exertions and wildly vows he is not to sleep any more. The man obeys, but insists on telling a story which has reference to the very recess they are in and which proves to be as sinister as were his dreams.

When the parricide was admitted into the convent, he was appointed to be the executioner whenever a severe punishment was to be inflicted. This he accepted with delight; while hating, by nature, every human being and especially those who seemed happier than himself, he found his sole satisfaction in making others miserable. Opportunities were seldom lacking, and to the métier of executioner he united that of a spy. Once he was desired to keep an eye upon a young monk whose family had placed him in the convent in order to prevent him from marrying a woman of inferior rank. There was, in the air of that monk, something peculiarly hopeful which naturally excited suspicion. Shortly afterwards a young novice entered the community, and the monk and he immediately became inseparable. ‘They were for ever in the garden together—they inhaled the odours of the flowers—they cultivated the same cluster of carnations—they entwined themselves as they walked together—when they were in the choir, their voices were like mixed incense.’ The greater their happiness appeared, the more uneasiness they gave the spy, who was on his watch night and day. Little by little he drew the certain conclusion that the novice was a female, and one night, to his inexpressible joy, he perceived the novice vanish in the monk’s cell. He secured the door and rushed to his master; they broke into the cell and the Superior saw what he had never even thought of and never could understand. His rage was immense, and the punishment, in the invention of which the spy had his ample share, was to be worthy of the crime. The pair were conducted, under the delusion of effecting their escape, to the place where Alonzo is sitting now, and allured into a neighbouring recess which they never quitted alive. The spy kept watch at the door and gradually heard their love turn to hatred in the agonies of death. On the sixth day, when all was silent within, the door was unnailed; the spy now, for the first time, distinctly saw the features of the novice, and recognized those of his only sister.

This is the story which the parricide relates to Alonzo, sparing no details. In the meantime evening comes, and they venture to ascend through the trap-door, and breathe once more the air of heaven. They hurry through the garden and climb the wall. Already Alonzo feels himself supported by the arms of his brother and even enters the carriage which is waiting for them, when Juan is stabbed from behind and falls, bathing in his blood. Alonzo falls on his dead body, losing consciousness; when it returns after a long time, he finds himself in the prison of the Inquisition.—

The episode of the lovers who are immured alive was, of all the stories contained in Melmoth the Wanderer, the one which was most disapproved and which attracted the severest censure. The Edinburgh Review,[129] while regretting Maturin’s taste for horrible and revolting subjects, adds: ‘We thought we had supped full of this commodity; but it seems as if the most ghastly and disgusting portion of the meal was reserved for the present day, and its most hideous concoction for the writer before us,—who is never so much in his favourite element as when he can ‘on horror’s head horrors accumulate.’ Another critic[130] says, with reference to the parricide’s conversation: ‘It is no apology for this to say that it is the language of an atrocious villain—at war with society—steeped to the lips in crime—upon whose brow parricide is branded, and who, with a most profane license, is described by the author to be “beyond the redemption of a Saviour!” Personages should not be created by a novelist, whose deeds to be characteristic must be criminal, and whose phrase to be consistent must be blasphemous.’ It is not to be wondered at that the reviewers were shocked; the parricide is the most atrocious of all the characters of Maturin and death by starvation certainly a disgusting subject. Yet in their indignation they failed to notice the extraordinary skill and power displayed in this episode. Later it has been very differently judged, and, in fact, remained one of the best-known passages in the book. In the opinion of Planche[131] the death-scenes of the lovers form the most beautiful pages in Melmoth; and a modern writer[132] also declares the episode in question to stand artistically on a very high level and to show, in the conception of cruelty, a refinement surpassing even Poe’s in his tale of The Cask of Amontillado, which it slightly recalls in the almost scientific exactness with which the sensations of the victims are observed. The parricide gives this characteristic reason for his voluntary watch at the prison-door: ‘You will call this cruelty, I call it curiosity,—that curiosity that brings thousands to witness a tragedy, and makes the most delicate female feast on groans and agonies;’ and what interests him most is the moment when their love, annihilated by the pangs of hunger, gives way to hostility and rage. The man, he remarks, often accuses the woman as the cause of his sufferings, while she never utters a word which might pain or wound him: we see that the high opinion which Maturin entertained of feminine character asserts itself even in this gloomy instance. The episode of the lovers seems, upon the whole, to be but little influenced by any previous writers. Only the detail of the novice being recognized as the parricide’s sister is borrowed from the older school of terror, where the destroying of near relations was well-nigh indispensable.

The continuation of the Spaniard’s tale, on the other hand, is more closely modelled on patterns easily discernible, and does not quite come up to the beginning. When Alonzo has regained some strength he is, in his new prison, visited by his former companion the parricide, who informs him that he had stabbed Juan, which it was his business to do, the whole escape being a comedy, undertaken with the consent of the Superior, who wished to get rid of Alonzo by plunging him into a worse place; the parricide, for his part, has become a spy and a creature of the Holy Office. Things being now as bad as they can be, it is, at last, time for Melmoth the Wanderer to interfere. Between his examinations Alonzo is, every night, visited by a stranger who gives himself out as a fellow-prisoner and entertains Alonzo with discussions on various topics. There is, however, something strangely suspicious in his behaviour, and Alonzo is frightened by the unearthly lustre of his eyes. The suspicions of Alonzo gain strength when he is warned by one of the officials to be on his guard against a person who has been frequenting some of the cells and set at defiance all the vigilance of the Inquisition. He makes a candid confession of the visits of the stranger, hoping by this means to make a favourable impression upon his judges, but in this he is totally disappointed. A prisoner whom the devil is supposed to be so obstinate in visiting, can expect no mercy from the tribunal. Before Alonzo’s last examination Melmoth then discloses to him the ‘unutterable condition’ upon which his liberation might be expected. Alonzo never thinks of accepting it, and hastens to make a full confession to a priest, but his doom is sealed: he is sentenced to be burnt in an autodafé. When the sentence is announced he sees Melmoth sitting at one of the tables as secretary, and feels sure that he has been made the dupe of the inquisitorial officials.

On the morning on which the ceremony is to take place a fire breaks out within the walls of the Inquisition. Availing himself of the confusion Alonzo rushes out and finds his way to a narrow apartment in the end of a street. The apartment appears to belong to a Jew, known in Madrid as a good Catholic, but secretly clinging to the religion of his fathers. He is terrified almost to death at the sudden entrance of Alonzo—being just engaged in the initiation of a young son of his according to the Jewish rites—but they soon come to an understanding, and Alonzo remains in the house. The Jew subsequently finds out that Alonzo is generally believed to have perished in the fire. This piece of news, however, makes him incautious, and one day, during the absence of the Jew, he places himself in the window to watch a great religious procession. Among the participants he sees his former companion from the convent; at the moment he arrives beneath the window he is pointed out by some one as a parricide and a criminal of the blackest dye; the fury of the populace is roused, and the man is, after a fierce struggle, torn to pieces before Alonzo’s eyes. Alonzo stands riveted to the spot until the horrid spectacle is over; but the same night the house is searched through by the inquisitorial officials, who maintain that the soul of a deceased heretic has been seen hovering near it. The Jew has just time to conceal Alonzo under one of the boards of the floor, where a cavity of some dimensions seems to have been made for the purpose. While the Jew is invoking all the prophets, Alonzo plunges deeper in the recess and perceives a kind of passage running out from it. The passage ends in a room whither he is guided by a faint stream of light. In the room he finds a very old man, sitting at a table covered with books and globes and surrounded by skeletons and scientific instruments. Superstitious and inexperienced as he is, Alonzo takes him for an evil spirit, but is reassured by a certain calm dignity in the old man’s manner. He is, indeed, a Jewish sage who has passed nearly a life-time in the subterraneous community. He has even been expecting Alonzo, having learned the secret of his existence from the other Jew and having requested Alonzo to be sent to him to act as his ‘secretary.’ He places before Alonzo a manuscript, written in Spanish with Greek characters, which he is to copy out. During the interview Alonzo happens to mention that he has been tempted by an agent of the enemy, and stood firm. This agent the Jew rightly concludes to be Melmoth the Wanderer with whom, he hints, he has been acquainted in his youth, much to his misfortune. And the manuscript which he has compiled turns out to be a record of the achievements of Melmoth, of which a new one now succeeds the Tale of the Spaniard.

That the story of Alonzo di Monçada is a Gothic Romance of the first magnitude, has never been denied except by its author. In the preface to Melmoth the Wanderer Maturin says:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

are distinctly recalled:

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:

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:

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:

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:

Some time, however, after this disappearance of Melmoth, unexpected events again throw these ill-fated lovers together. Donna Clara receives a letter from her husband, who has landed in Spain and is slowly making his way homewards, to the effect that he intends to bring with him the destined bridegroom of Isidora, a Spanish nobleman called Montilla. Isidora learns this piece of news with great despair—but the same night Melmoth reappears beneath her balcony. Isidora assures him that she will be the bride of the grave rather than of Montilla, and that her love is unaltered; whereupon Melmoth, ‘bringing out the words with difficulty,’ proposes that she should be ready to wed him the following night. She consents, and the scheme is carried out in a scene which has been called one of the greatest in the book[139] and which indeed is saturated with the keenest suspense. The episode is typically ‘Gothic;’ it is like a ballad of Lenore in prose. In the darkness they set out and travel with supernatural rapidity towards a neighbouring mountain where, Melmoth informs Isidora, a holy hermit is dwelling near a ruinous monastery. Arriving at a mountain river they hear foot-steps pursuing them, and a figure is indistinctly seen approaching. After a short struggle the pursuer, whom Isidora, by his voice, recognizes to be an ancient domestic of the family, is flung into the river. The lovers continue their way and Isidora is dragged up into the ruins, where a hand places hers into that of Melmoth. Almost unconscious as she is from terror, she feels the hand to be cold as death; and afterwards it is discovered that the hermit really had died the previous night. This is one of the few supernatural incidents in the story that does not directly relate to the personality of Melmoth.—The same night Donna Clara and the priest sit brooding over a new letter from Aliaga, in which he hints at some terrible and mysterious tidings he has learned—it appears later that he has met Melmoth, who, beset by pangs of conscience, has warned him that his daughter is in danger. They are roused by a noise in the house, and discover that Isidora’s casement is open and her room empty. Her mother passes the night in frantic anxiety, but in the morning Isidora is found sleeping heavily in her bed. What has happened to her nothing can induce her to disclose, and Donna Clara and the priest prudently determine also to keep the matter secret. It takes Aliaga rather a long time to get home, in spite of the warning he has received. In the meantime Melmoth keeps on visiting his wife, but cannot be prevailed upon to appear before the family. Otherwise his tenderness towards Isidora increases, as there is evidence of her becoming a mother. The night before the event is expected to take place, Melmoth has the news that her father and Montilla will arrive that very day, and in the evening a great masquerade is to be held in honour of the betrothed. Melmoth promises to be there at midnight to take her away. The news appears to be true, and Isidora is forced to take part in the feast. The costume of the time fortunately conceals her altered figure, as the mask covers her pale and haggard countenance. When the clock strikes twelve Melmoth is beside her. They prepare to leave the assembly, but are detected by Don Fernan, who steps into their way. A fight ensues which ends with the death of Don Fernan, whereat the dreaded figure of Melmoth the Wanderer is disclosed to all the guests, some of whom recognize him with a terror unspeakable. Isidora throws herself upon the corpse of her brother, and Melmoth departs alone and unmolested, nobody daring to lift a hand against him. The house is rapidly deserted and its horrified inmates left alone. The same night Isidora is delivered of a daughter, and, on admitting that she is married to Melmoth, conveyed into the prison of the Inquisition. Her parents shortly afterwards die of grief, but the good priest is allowed to visit her, and to him she makes a full confession of her marriage. The Holy Office condemns her to lifelong imprisonment, but she dies, after having strangled her child when the officials have come to take it from her. Before expiring she yet confesses to Fra Jose that Melmoth has been with her in the prison and offered to effect her liberation on a fearful and unutterable condition. With her last strength she has rejected it, although her love for him is unabated.—

The end of the Tale of the Indians calls for a few remarks from a logical point of view—if logic is to be applied to a composition like this. It never becomes quite clear why Melmoth brings Isidora back to her home after their wedding, all the world being open to him; nor it is easy to understand why he should delay the second elopement until the house is full of guests and the disappearance of Isidora most difficult to bring about. As he, after the failure of this enterprise, completely loses his human character and only appears in that of the tempter, it might be inferred that Isidora’s last calamity is of his own contrivance; but this, again, is contradicted by what he says after the duel with Don Fernan: ‘Would that breathless fool had yielded to my bidding, not to my sword—there was but one human chord that vibrated in my heart—it is broken to-night, and for ever!’ Those critics that derided the clumsiness with which the schemes of Melmoth are, in general, executed, were not entirely wrong in this instance; the lack of plausibility in these incidents—the supernatural power of Melmoth once taken for granted—is here of a character injurious to the tale as a work of art.—In the descriptions of everyday life in Aliaga’s house Maturin does not give of his best, in spite of his having recourse to his humorous vein. The personages themselves are depicted in rather a conventional fashion, and the stupidity and narrow-mindedness of Donna Clara, and the confessor’s excessive fondness for food and drink, can bear no comparison with the humorous passages in Women. Only the characterization of Isidora is carried out with the same unfailing power to the very last.

The end of the Tale of the Indians, especially the unravelling of the plot, contains, no doubt, some hints from Goethe’s Faust.[140] The parallels are but details of secondary importance, yet too distinct to be quite overlooked. Margarete and Isidora are equally anxious about their respective lovers’ relations to church and religion, and propose the same questions to them. Margarete:

Isidora expresses her fear that Melmoth does not believe in what the Holy Church requires, and asks, further: ‘Do you ever visit the church? — — Do you ever receive the Holy Sacrament?’—Faust fights a duel with Margarete’s brother under similar circumstances and with the same consequence as Melmoth with Don Fernan; Margareta, like Isidora, dies in prison, after having put her child to death in a state of partial insanity, and both refuse to follow their lovers out of the prison.—With Mephistopheles, Melmoth has in common the power of arresting, with a look, the hands raised to seize him.

The Tale of the Indians is once interrupted by two other tales of considerable length. While Aliaga is travelling homeward he passes a night at a wretched inn, where a fellow-traveller reads to him the Tale of Guzman’s Family, to the following effect.

Guzman is an old merchant of Seville, who has made an enormous fortune out of nothing, and risen from an obscure birth to a position of respect. As he lives alone, the question of his eventual heirs excites much curiosity; his circumstances are carefully investigated, and it is discovered that he has a sister in life. This sister has, in early youth, married a German musician of the name of Walberg, turned a Protestant, been rejected by her brother, and since then lived in Germany. This appears to be true; for once when Guzman is seized with a dangerous illness and even given over by his physicians, he remembers his sister and sends for the family of Walberg, that he might be reconciled to his only relatives. At the same time he alters his will in favour of the family. Contrary to all expectation, he recovers before they arrive, yet the will remains as he has fixed it, in spite of the efforts of the priests to have it cancelled.[141] The only point in which Guzman accedes to their representations, is that he determines to refrain from all personal intercourse with his heretical relations. This intelligence is brought to the family, at their arrival in Seville, by Guzman’s confessor, who acts as his agent and afterwards proves to be a man of kindness and honour. The family consists of Walberg, his wife Ines, and four children; later they are joined by Walberg’s aged parents, whom he has summoned from Germany to pass the remainder of their life with them. Sinister forebodings fill the mind of Ines when she learns her brother’s resolution never to see her or any member of the family. As they are, however, amply provided for and generally considered the sole heirs of Guzman, the displeasing resolution makes but a slight impression on Walberg, who will not listen to his wife’s advice that the children should be taught some profession. So they live on in ease and comfort, until Guzman dies—and then it is announced that he has left everything to the church. This a blow that completely changes the conditions of the family; their fine house is sold, and they move into a humble abode in the suburbs, where Ines and her daughter once more resume the domestic duties. The good priest, who feels certain that a fraud has been committed, does everything in his power to help them. Through his means the matter is brought to legal arbitration, but though the best advocates are resorted to, Walberg loses the case. The family is gradually plunged deeper and deeper into misery, and soon hovers on the brink of starvation. Being strangers and heretics they can obtain no work, but are solely reduced to what the children can get together by begging. The eldest son, Everhard, hits upon the expedient of selling some of his blood to a surgeon, and well-nigh expires; the daughters are beginning to be accosted by strangers in the street; the old grandmother dies for want of food, and the grandfather loses his reason from the same cause. When the family has been reduced to this stage of wretchedness, Walberg, every night he goes out to supplicate relief from passers-by, is addressed by a stranger,

The same night Walberg relates this to his wife, he is seized with a fit of insanity and proceeds to kill his children, when, at the last moment, the priest enters with the news that the right will is found and the family once more the heirs of Guzman. In a short time they are restored to health—even the grandfather recovers his reason before he dies—and the tale ends happily:

That Godwin’s St. Leon makes itself remembered also in connection with the Tale of Guzman’s Family, is chiefly due to its being, upon the whole, the book which Melmoth probably is most indebted to. St. Leon is, no doubt, several times plunged into great poverty which he tries to bear as best he can, with the assistance of a brave and faithful wife and good and amiable children; but a detailed comparison would show little else than that these scenes, in Godwin, are dull and powerless, whereas Maturin’s story is just the reverse. So far from considering the Tale of Guzman’s Family an imitation, one would rather be inclined to imagine that it has sprung from personal recollections. Both in his father’s home and his own, Maturin had seen ease and affluence replaced by penury and want. The situation into which the family of Walberg is reduced—which leads to death and insanity—was, of course, extreme beyond anything in Maturin’s experience, and a product of furious and unrestrained imagination; but the first intimations of disappearing wealth are brought forth with a force and accuracy quite convincing, and among the best pages in the tale are those treating of the horrible suspense in which the family lives from the moment of Guzman’s death till the publication of his will. Yet another circumstance would go to show that the Tale of Guzman’s Family had no need of literary models. In the preface to Melmoth the Wanderer Maturin states that ‘the original from which the wife of Walberg is imperfectly sketched is a living woman, and long may she live;’ whence it is not unnatural to infer that it is his own wife he is describing. So the phrase seems to have been understood by the critic in the London Magazine 1821, who adds that he would be inclined to drop his pen and ‘weep over the misfortunes of a man of genius, instead of scrutinizing his errors.’ The picture which Maturin draws of the wife of Walberg is beautiful indeed. She is the good genius of her family, as prudent as she is gentle. She is secretly saving when her husband only thinks of spending; when he is seized with despair, she heroically tries to encourage him. She starves gladly herself, as long as there is a morsel left for her children and for the aged parents of her husband; and when he is beset by the tempter, she exerts her last energy to support him. The wife of Walberg is one of the incarnations of the idea of the superior moral strength of woman, so often recurring in Maturin’s works, and there is no reason to doubt that this idea originated in the partner of his life.—Another figure worthy of particular notice is the priest, with whom Maturin makes full amends for the attacks he delivers, in Melmoth, upon the dignitaries of the Catholic church. The confessor in the Tale of the Indians is too much of a buffoon to be taken seriously, but here, at last, is a Catholic prelate to whom the interests of humanity are more than those of the church, and who is ready to expose the crimes of his own colleagues in order to save the life of a heretical family.

The style of writing, in this tale, is hardly so fine as in the next one, although there are passages extremely characteristic of Maturin. He was the only one of the ‘terrific’ writers of the time capable of purely aesthetical enjoyment, almost perverse, from scenes of bodily suffering. The description of the boy who has been selling his blood to a surgeon could have been made by no one else:

All the personages actually appearing in the Tale of Guzman’s Family are good and noble; there is no display of revolting crimes or depraved characters, and horrible and even disgusting as are the sufferings of the family, the tale has little to do with the school of terror. The fact, moreover, of its being the only one that is brought to a happy ending, probably made it a favourite with readers. An admiring critic in Blackwood’s Magazine[142] says that this tale, before all others, shows ‘what Mr. Maturin is capable of doing in his best moments of inspiration.’

Shortly after the stranger has read to Aliaga the tale related above, Melmoth himself appears at the inn. He causes—in a way unexplained—the death of the stranger who has dared to investigate into his achievements, and the next day associates himself with Aliaga. The merchant is not at all charmed with his obtrusive companion, but cannot well get rid of him; and as they slowly ride onward, Melmoth narrates what is called The Lovers’ Tale.[143]

This time Spain is left behind, and the reader is conducted to the England of the Restoration. The tale opens with a short chronicle of the fortunes of the Mortimer family, one of the oldest and noblest in the kingdom. At the time of Charles the First the then head of the house, Sir Roger Mortimer, ‘a man lofty alike in pride and in principle,’ distinguishes himself as one of the most fervent supporters of the royal cause. After the defeat of the monarch he is subjected to the reprisals, in form of fines and sequestrations, of the victorious rebels, in addition to which his domestic felicity is completely destroyed. His eldest son has fallen for his king at the battle of Newbury, while his second son has embraced the Puritan cause, married accordingly, and finally died, having ‘fought all day at the head of his regiment, and preached and prayed to them all night.’ The only daughter of the old loyalist also goes the wrong way and marries an Independent preacher of the name of Sandal, whom she survives. The daughter of the eldest son, Margaret, is made the heiress of the castle, where she resides with her grandfather and his old sister, Mrs. Ann Mortimer, who leads the household after the death of his brother’s wife. The daughter of the apostate son, Elinor, is, after the death of her mother, also received at the castle and educated there, though without expectations. Young John Sandal, the son of the rejected daughter, is recognized by his grandfather on the express condition of henceforth fighting for the royal family; he has, at his own request, been sent to sea at a very early age. At the return of Charles the Second old Sir Roger dies of joy, but the sacrifices of the family in the royal cause are amply compensated, and they are once again raised among the foremost in the country. At that period the widow Sandal takes up her residence in the neighbourhood of the castle and sometimes visits it, although the relations between her and her aunt Mrs. Ann never become very cordial. From her intrigues subsequently follows the fall of the house of Mortimer.

Through the re-acquired importance of the family a distinguished position in the navy is procured for John Sandal, and during the Dutch war he has the opportunity of showing that the spirit of his ancestors is not dead within him. News of valorous deeds achieved by John reaches even the remote castle, where the gentle Elinor, who remembers him with feelings of love in early childhood, is, more than others, occupied in thoughts of him. When the widow Sandal makes her appearance in the vicinity, she calls on her every day to talk about her son, and when John arrives to pay a visit to his mother, she is the first to meet him. John Sandal turns out to be as good as he is brave, and his friendship to his cousin Elinor swiftly ripens to love. Their betrothal is greeted with joy by all except the widow, who determines to prevent the union by any means. She has obtained a knowledge of Sir Roger’s will, which is to the effect that if his granddaughter Margaret marries John Sandal, all the immense estates are to fall to her, whereas John, in case of his marrying Elinor, is entitled only to a small fortune.—The wedding-day, however, is fixed; the church is filled with guests from far and near and everything is ready, yet the bridegroom, for some inexplicable reason, fails to appear. Tired and anxious at the delay Elinor retires to the vestry, from the casement window of which she sees a rider approaching at full speed. The rider, John Sandal, gallops past the church, casts a look of horror upon Elinor, and disappears.

After the frustration of her hopes Elinor quits the castle and takes up her abode in Yorkshire, at the house of a strictly Puritan sister of her late mother. Peace of mind, however, is denied her, and she lingers on in a pitiable state, when, one day, she receives a letter from Margaret, of surprising contents. Both old Mrs. Ann and Margaret have assured that the faithless bridegroom shall never darken their doors again; now Margaret announces to Elinor that John Sandal has returned to the castle and invites her to join them, dropping some ‘mysterious hints relative to the interruption of the marriage.’ With a vague hope Elinor sets out to the castle and is tenderly received by both her cousins; the manner of John, however, clearly evinces that there can be no question of other sentiments than a calm friendship between them. As the betrothal of Margaret and John is made public, her stay at the castle becomes too painful to Elinor; she returns to Yorkshire where she leads a life in utter seclusion, her Puritan aunt having died in the meantime. Yet she is once more summoned to the castle by a message from Margaret, who, now in confinement, implores Elinor’s presence at her hour of danger. Elinor obeys, but the gloomy forebodings of Margaret are fulfilled: twins are born dead, and a moment afterwards the mother also expires. Amid general despair the widow Sandal now makes a confession to her son, with the result that his reason is extinguished for ever. Solicitous to secure for her son the family estates, she had invented a story which she had imparted to him the night before his intended nuptials with Elinor, according to which he was not her son, but the offspring of an ‘illicit commerce of her husband the preacher with the Puritan mother of Elinor’—and this story she had bound her son by oath never to disclose to Elinor.

After this catastrophe the life of Elinor is devoted to the tending of the patient, whom she never leaves. It then befalls that they are, on one of their evening walks, approached by a stranger, who introduces himself by showing them some slight attentions and speaking on indifferent subjects. Their acquaintance continues some time, till it suddenly ends by the stranger saying something that causes Elinor wildly to rush to a neighbouring clergyman for assistance. The clergyman happens to be the identical friend of Melmoth the Wanderer who witnessed his apparent death in Germany, which strange event he now discloses to Elinor; as for Melmoth, he departs on recognizing the clergyman, and troubles Elinor no longer. Her time passes on in the same occupation, until her ward dies, and, in his last moments knows her, nor does she survive him long.

This beautiful story, though little noted by commentators, is inferior to none in the book, except the opening chapters describing the death of the old Irish miser; on the contrary, it seems rather the best of all the longer tales. Maturing favourite period in English history was sure to become to him a source of highest inspiration, whenever he turned to it, and to his other good qualities is here added that of an impartial historian. When Elinor, as a child, is taken up at the castle, she is said to come to the conclusion ‘that there must be good on both sides, however obscured or defaced by passion, where so much intellectual power, and so much physical energy, had been displayed by both;’ and in this spirit the controversies are treated throughout the story. That the author’s sympathies rest with the cavaliers is evident enough, but the errors of Puritanism—fortunately—do not irritate him so much as to prevent him from speaking of them with calmness, mingled with an almost imperceptible tinge of humour. And the peculiar spirit of the period he catches by the forelock and never leaves hold of it; Maturin had penetrated to the very soul of that wonderful time, when furious contests, religious and political, splintered family ties and shook the foundations of the empire, and when the last remnants of ancient chivalry clashed against growing democracy and sturdy Puritanism. Yet as the principal part of the tale takes place after the Restoration, when the wounds of the civil war are already beginning slowly to heal, he contrives to make those turbulent events felt through the pages as the after-rolls of a mighty storm. And as the plot consists of the tragical downfall of a great and illustrious house, there is, in the style, something like the glow of an autumnal sun setting over a rich and glorious landscape. It is, in fact, in autumn—the season Maturin loved best—that most of the incidents occur, and the pages abound in magnificent descriptions of nature, like the following:

This style is sustained throughout the narrative, but instead of rendering it monotonous, it only makes the ‘atmosphere’ intense and harmonious in the extreme, which is the chief merit of The Lovers’ Tale. The characters, if not exactly conventional, are less originally conceived. Margaret and Elinor are a pair of heroines known from countless romances of all ages: the former high-spirited and vivacious, demanding homage and obtaining it at the same moment; the latter tender, pale, soft and contemplative, yet not without traits of distinct individuality. The characterization of John Sandal is not successful—it is the only thing in the tale which is not—he is too gentle, too ‘milky’ to be a young sailor and warrior, and is depicted with a considerable amount of sentimentality. He appears, however, but little; the principal personage is Elinor, whose hopes and sufferings are delineated with a psychological insight recalling corresponding passages in Women. Like Zaira, in the last-named romance, Elinor in vain seeks forgetfulness in philanthrophy and religion. In her aunt’s house nothing is changed since her earliest childhood. The Puritanic ideals and the memories of celebrated preachers are still cherished by the old maid with undiminished force; but Elinor cannot, in spite of desperate endeavours, find consolation in what once was all in all to her, too. It is not only that her heart is broken; she belongs to a new time, and her views have been enlarged during her life in the castle. The difference between two generations, in the persons of these two women, is brought forth with exquisite fineness, and the great and heroic qualities in Puritanism are freely admitted:

The faint hope wakened in her half-benumbed heart by Margaret’s first letter is soon extinguished. Gradually she loses her beauty and her strength, and when addressed by Melmoth she is, bodily, almost as weak as her ward. It has been said[144] that it is not clear why he tempts Elinor; it must be presumed that he would have the power to restore the mind of John, though his chance of succeeding with Elinor is certainly slight, she being altogether resigned to her fate.—

That The Lovers’ Tale is told by Melmoth himself, and told in such a way as it is, belongs to those curiosities in the composition of the book, which simply must be accepted as freaks of a careless yet self-conscious imagination that follows laws of its own. Aliaga, naturally enough, is at a loss to comprehend how this tale could be applied to him; but the next day, as they continue their journey together, Melmoth briefly recapitulates the early history of Isidora—the details of the shipwreck and her discovery later are now first revealed to the reader—adding that Aliaga should not lose a moment to save his daughter. Notwithstanding this warning, Aliaga allows concerns of business to detain him, and in the meantime the fatal nuptials of Melmoth and Isidora take place. After the Indians’ tale then has been brought to an end, the thread of the original narrative is at last resumed and the reader once more conducted to where young John Melmoth and the Spaniard Monçada are sitting in the desolate Irish country-house. Their conversation is interrupted by the sudden appearance of the subject of all these adventures. The term of his supernaturally prolonged existence is drawing to a close, and the terrible lustre of his eyes is already extinguished. He assures the horrified youths that there is nothing to fear; his wanderings are finished, and the reason for these wanderings need no longer be kept secret, any more than the failure of all his pursuits:

After this confession the Wanderer asks for a moment’s repose, to sleep for the last time in his human existence. His dreams, however, are filled with a grand and awful vision of the realm of death which is awaiting him and which he has no hope of escaping. During the night mysterious voices issue from the room in which he has shut himself. In the morning the room is empty, but footsteps can be traced up to a rock overlooking the sea. John and Monçada follow the steps until they gain the last summit of the rock:

The conclusion of Melmoth the Wanderer is very impressive; the descriptions are well-balanced, suggestive, and not too furious, although, in certain details, not decidedly original in invention. As in the transformation of Melmoth by an apparent death an influence from a contemporary work of the school of terror can be discerned, his real death can be traced back to the Faustus of Marlowe.[145] The preparations of Faustus and Melmoth for the dreadful last night are carried on in the same way:

Melmoth says:

The final fulfilment of the bond, however, is only suggested by Maturin, while in Marlowe the devils who come to fetch Faustus are actually brought to the stage. In this respect the end of Melmoth the Wanderer differs, much to its advantage, from the end also of The Monk,[146] where the enemy in person takes hold of Ambrosio, soars with him in the air and dashes him to pieces against a sharp point of rock.

When the story of Melmoth, on one of the last pages of the book, turns back to the Irish country-house, the author expresses a fear that the reader has, perhaps, forgotten the existence of young John Melmoth. If he has not, he would at least have had plenty of time to do so; for the whole fabric of the work is nothing but a gigantic digression from the first action, in the form of tales within tales, told and read and read and told by somebody to somebody else, in an exceedingly intricate way rendering a general view of them a matter of considerable difficulty. The construction of Melmoth the Wanderer is extravagant beyond any degree reached by Montorio or The Wild Irish Boy, and has been subjected to severe criticism. Saintsbury[147] calls the arrangement ‘execrably bad,’ wondering ‘how anything quite so bad in form can have been put forth by anybody so clever.’ One explanation would be that this form implies an intentional disregard of the rules of composition, rather than a failure of ability to adhere to them, in other words, that the general effect is not calculated to rest upon regularity of construction, any more than in, for instance, the second part of Faust. But even if—which is more probable—Maturin really sat down to compose a story of ‘ordinary’ proportions and was unconsciously carried away on the wings of his ungovernable imagination, the general impression left by the book is such as to make the defects in its arrangement decidedly appear a question of secondary importance, just as the many literary reminiscences which present themselves during the perusal, cannot detract anything from the originality of the hero. Little as he actually appears, he is the locomotive power without which the whole would collapse, and he is remembered still when everything else is forgotten. From behind the various and manifold scenes of this amazing labyrinth, there arises the pale figure of the Wanderer, terrible and diabolical, yet suffering and despairing, to bear witness to his own defeat and the victory of human nature, so weak and yet so invincible, the object of at once his hatred and his adoration; and is it not, when we stand face to face with this wonderful creation of a great genius, indifferent where and when and by whom the separate tales are related? That the Wanderer, however, is capable of making so powerful an impression, is due to this curious fact, that the book, in its most essential feature, does not at all correspond to the passage in Maturin’s sermon which he maintains to have inspired it.

Several writers, from the most worthless to the most competent, have expressed their wonder at the very poor success Melmoth, with all his supernatural endowments, can boast of. The savage critic in the Quarterly Review[148] sneers that Melmoth ‘during his peregrination of two centuries, does less mischief than a clever mortal would have done;’ and Edgar Allan Poe[149] observes that Melmoth ‘labours indefatigably, through three octavo volumes, to accomplish the destruction of one or two souls, while any common devil would have demolished one or two thousand.’ The common devils certainly are more fortunate, and their difference from Maturin’s hero is conspicuous enough. In Balzac’s half-parody, Melmoth Reconcilié (1835), the Wanderer is delivered of his curse by a criminal, a cashier who has committed a fraud and is desirous to escape his sentence, and afterwards it passes from hand to hand among similar individuals. In Stevenson’s story of The Bottle Imp (1893); which has the same motive, the miracle-working and soul-destroying imp is at last, without subsequent repentance, purchased by a drunken boatswain who reckons he is going to hell anyway. The cause of Melmoth’s failure, and the precise character of his uncleverness, which consists in his strange ignorance whom to address, is in obvious contradiction to the sermon, where the final sin is declared to be too frightful even to those who have ever so much

Now the persons who are subjected to the temptations of Melmoth the Wanderer have done nothing of the kind: on the contrary, most of them come as near perfection as poor human nature can possibly do. The tempter invariably takes care to accost those with whom he is least likely to succeed. He leaves unnoticed a character like the parricide, who is said to be beyond the redemption of a Saviour, and who, it must be assumed, would most joyfully accept the bond—to waste his time and energy on Alonzo di Monçada, whom he perceives to be as firm as any rock. Of Stanton, of Walberg, of Isidora, of Elinor, not one single wrong deed is recorded which would speak for the probability of their succumbing to his seductions. To all the tales, it has finely been observed,[150] can be applied a motto from Faust: ‘ein guter Mensch in seinem dunkeln Drange ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst;’ but it is not the good instinct in the good, but the good instinct in the bad, which Maturin, in the preface, promises to demonstrate. In consequence, however, of this ‘blunder,’ the character of Melmoth the Wanderer becomes so impressive, so impassioned, so distinct from all common men and common devils. The attraction exercised upon him by the good has its root in what there is human in him; what causes him his keenest sufferings is not that he is shut out of paradise but that he is shut out of the community of the good among human beings; and what he insists on trying, amid rage and despair, is that some one of those good would voluntarily share his fate and relieve his bitter loneliness. The relation of Melmoth to mankind is marked by that intense sense of loneliness, that sense of being ‘among them, but not of them,’ or, as Maturin says, ‘mingling with, yet distinct from all his species’—which goes through the romantic literature of the period and which indeed is genuinely romantic in its implication of something exceptional, something outside the common rules of life. The anguish of loneliness is shared alike by good and bad, by all whom adverse circumstances or else their own bodily or mental deformities have placed in a solitary position in the world. In Montorio, Ippolito is undeservedly overtaken by the fate which Melmoth deliberately invokes upon himself; but their anguish is the same. It is felt by St. Leon, the moment he attains earthly immortality and understands that those whom he has loved can mean nothing to him any longer; it is felt by the Black Dwarf when he contemplates the happiness of the strong and the beautiful, which he is never to share; and even the miserable monster created by Frankenstein prays for one being of the same species as himself, who might smile upon him and not answer his approaches with curses and maledictions. It was Maturin’s desire to dwell upon this emotion that in the long run decided the mould of the characters in Melmoth the Wanderer in a way, perhaps, not intended by him from the first. Viewed in the light of this same emotion, the contempt of Melmoth for his victims is only half-real, nor is it probable that Maturin meant him to appear so superior to humanity as he is shown by Baudelaire[151] in his well-known Essay de l’essence du rire:

The members of this pauvre humanité still represent the power of absolute Justice and Truth, the power so infinitely stronger than Melmoth. Theirs is the ultimate triumph.

Melmoth the Wanderer created, at its first appearance, a greater sensation than any of Maturin’s previous novels. Economically it also was something of a success: the profits it brought to the author are said[152] to have amounted to 500 pounds. A second edition appeared the following year as well as a French translation, Melmoth, ou l’Homme errant, by J. Cohen, and a ‘free’ German translation called Melmoth der Wanderer.—All the works of Maturin, except Manuel and Fredolfo, were translated into French soon after their appearance in English, and with the rendering of Melmoth his fame became definitely established in that country, where, in fact, it has always been greater than in England. A. A. Watts says[153] that his father, while travelling in France, possessed a passport to the romantic circles as the friend of that ‘triste et terrible Maturin.’—In 1823 the romance was published in the form of a melodrama in three acts, by B. West. This production is a combination of the Tale of Guzman’s Family and the Tale of the Indians; Isidora is represented as the daughter of Walberg, and has loved Melmoth in her youth. Walberg and Isidora are both, through the machinations of Melmoth, thrown into the prison of the Inquisition, whence they are rescued by another lover of hers, while Melmoth is killed by thunder. The play is without any literary value whatever, but shows clearly which two tales were most appreciated by the public.—The principal periodicals of the time also reviewed Melmoth at a considerable length, although, for the most part, with a negative result. In the Quarterly Review Croker raged against the book even more furiously than he had done against Women, pronouncing it to be the very acme of all that is execrable:

After declaring, in italics, that the hero of the book is the Devil himself, the reviewer solemnly accuses the author of nonsense, want of veracity, ignorance, blasphemy and brutality, and a dark, cold-blooded, pedantic obscenity; and finishes his article with a hint that it certainly is quite right that the Church does not provide subsistence for him.—That critics, upon the whole, spoke unfavourably of Melmoth is not to be wondered at. The school of terror had irrevocably had its day, and very different literary ideals were being established. The magic art of Scott held a strong sway over all minds, while the well-bred drawing-room adventures of Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen were now, in their turn, felt as a relief and a liberation from the wilder forms of romanticism. The extravagances and horribly startling incidents in Maturin’s romance were enough to cover its powerful originality and lasting merits—which probably would be the case did the book appear to-day. Yet the author’s genius was unreservedly admitted even by most of those who disapproved of the style and contents of Melmoth; the end of the article in the Edinburgh Review is characteristic, its tone being as dignified as that of the Quarterly Review is base:

The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany writes essentially to the same purport:

The only one who expresses himself with unrestrained admiration is the critic in the Blackwood’s Magazine—also referred to once above. Even he, it is true, points out that there are faults and errors in Maturin’s writings; but he admits that they are more than atoned for by the merits:

This critic, however, could hardly be taken seriously by the author, inasmuch as he places Montorio before the present work:

It is of interest to notice these opinions; for, however slight their authority, they seem to have had the desired effect of checking the ‘extravagances’ of Maturin’s genius—so much the worse for literature. His desire to please—for such desire there was in his temperament, quite apart from all pecuniary considerations—was once more discouraged, and he began to grow weary of being told the same things over and again. It was several years before he again produced a novel, and when he did, he painfully strove to adhere to patterns universally accepted, and avoid displaying those peculiarities which were distinctly his own, but the absence of which to a production of his irreparably meant the loss of vital power, notwithstanding a small temporary success. A sense of ultimate failure and disappointment has, among other things, its share in the unmistakable gloom cast over Maturin’s last years.

V.

1821-1824.

Burns.

Maturin’s last period opens with a poetical enterprise which is bound up with a mystery exactly opposite to that appertaining to the publication of the Waterloo prize poem in 1815. In 1821 appeared a lengthy poem in blank verse, called The Universe, under the name of the Rev. C. R. Maturin, received—very undeservedly—with something like acclamation. The real authorship of the poem was, even at the time, claimed by Mr. James Wills, a name afterwards not quite—though nearly—unknown in the world of letters; but it was not until 1874 that the case was brought before the public. For the sake of the composition itself it would be unnecessary long to dwell upon the question, had not the controversy called forth the publication of a manuscript of Wills, which throws an interesting, if not entirely agreeable, light upon his acquaintance with Maturin and the circumstances connected with the origin of The Universe.

A correspondent in the Notes and Queries[154]—who was a great admirer of the poem—happened, in the year mentioned above, to allude to its disputed authorship and utter some doubts as to the statements of Wills. Against this view the surviving family of that writer energetically protested; two sons of Wills, referring to a note in the second edition of Lord John Russell’s biography of Moore,[155] and producing two or three utterances of some of their father’s friends who were initiated into the secret, put about the following statements concerning The Universe. Maturin was engaged by Colburn to compose for him a poem consisting of a thousand lines. The renumeration—500 pounds—was paid in advance; but, having spent it, Maturin found the fulfilment of his engagement to be encumbered with insurmountable difficulties. Being at a loss how to get on with the work, he was shown a poem of Wills, then a very young man. Maturin pathetically entreated him to lend it to him for use, promising, first, to let Colburn know of the transaction, and secondly, to reveal the real authorship after the publication; neither of which promises was kept, the poem being read and reviewed as a production of Maturin’s.

In the polemics in the Notes and Queries the Wills family—who also considered the Universe a work of uncommon merit—had the last word, and their assertions were, a little later, supported by the Dublin University Magazine,[156] whose editor had received a record in the handwriting of Wills, found between the covers of an old copy of the poem and sent to Dublin by Messrs. Chatto & Windus, the well-known London publishers. In this record, which the editor supposes to have been written for the benefit of Lord Russell before the publication of the second edition of his life of Moore, Wills relates that he had composed the poem in the years 1819 and 1820,[157] while residing at Bray, the then most fashionable watering-place in the neighbourhood of Dublin. He intended it to be a very great work which was to fill up all his life-time; but having written upwards of 800 lines, he made a new acquaintance of whose appearance he gives the following description:

In the course of the same day Wills was formally introduced to his opponent, who he had learnt, was Maturin. Their acquaintance soon ripened into intimacy. The fascinating personality of the novelist cast a strong spell over Wills, although he received the impression that Maturin was ‘a little too flattering’ and not quite sincere. When the transaction as to the poem was then proposed to him, Wills felt extreme reluctance, but at last yielded, overcome by Maturin’s persuasions and the consideration that Maturin’s family, to whom he had been introduced, would be ruined if the money had to be refunded to Colburn. The accomplishment of this great work is told by Wills with a naive open-heartedness, amusing indeed when regarded in the light of the controversy in Notes and Queries, where his sons seriously maintain that both Scott and Campbell considered The Universe the best thing produced by Maturin, and the other party as seriously declares it to contain passages equal to Milton:

The poem being completed and sent to the publisher, it became clear to Wills that Maturin was determined not to reveal the secret. It came out, however, ‘with a celerity truly surprising;’ the literary circles of Dublin were divided in two contesting parties, the one standing by Maturin, the other by Wills, and the matter was eagerly discussed in the drawing-rooms of Lady Morgan and the Mrs. Smith mentioned by Moore. The former was also deeply impressed by the production; when assured by Wills that Maturin never wrote a line of it, she answered, ‘well, then, you must do something very considerable to convince the world you could have written it.’ Nevertheless Wills seems to have succeeded in convincing Lady Morgan, for it was she who, according to him, communicated the particulars to Colburn. When Wills some time afterwards met the publisher in London, he presented Wills with all the remaining copies of the stock, hinting that the affair ‘had been injurious to Mr. Maturin in his relations with him as a publisher.’—

In connection with this version of Wills it is not out of place to quote a passage from an unpublished letter of Maturin to Sir Charles Morgan, dated 1821:

This seems to prove that the £ 500 was not paid in advance, and that Maturin had written a large part of some work agreed upon with Colburn, before he received anything for it. Whether the manuscript here referred to was published as a constituent part of The Universe it is hazardous to decide; if it was, Maturin had probably lost all interest in the poem and entreated Wills to complete it—the alternative being that the manuscript was deemed unfit, and Wills supplied all the materials. The poem itself gives little clue to the mystery. When speaking of The Universe, Wills more than once alludes to the ‘effective passages’ and the ‘filling up;’ but to a modern reader it is not easy to distinguish which is which, the whole being extraordinarily ineffective. The subject resolves itself into something that cannot possibly be firmly grasped. A contemporary critic[158] says not inappropriately: ‘Where in the name of criticism and common sense, could he begin with a subject that had no beginning, or finish with that which, being infinite and eternal, can have no end? He has followed no plan—he has given his fancy the rein. His flight is wild and discursive, but indicates a bearing in no particular direction. — — — His poem is not a whole: any man might as well have tried to cram the solar system into a cockle-shell as to produce a complete and finished poem on such a subject.’ The following passage belongs, in the critic’s opinion, to the happiest in the poem:

These lines are, as a matter of fact, neither better nor worse than any others of the two thousand of which this sorry production consists. There are no traces of the rugged beauty of Bertram and Fredolfo, and it is really difficult to imagine that Maturin had any part in the work. On the other hand it must be admitted that it is equally inferior to the poetry later produced by Wills.[159] The matter ought to have been taken very quietly by those whom it concerned, nor did it, to judge from the record of Wills, stop their friendly intercourse. It may lastly be mentioned that Maturin dedicated The Universe to his old antagonist Samuel Taylor Coleridge; which must have happened either in a fit of Christian forgiveness or of deliberate irony.

The picture which Wills draws of Maturin is, it will be observed, totally different from the description quoted in connection with his mode of composing Melmoth. It also differs from what other scanty records there are preserved of Maturin, which all agree that he was, at that time, beginning to lead a retired life and appear but little in society. His pecuniary embarrassments were extremely distressing; the profits he had reaped by Melmoth and The Universe had probably been swallowed up by the old debt he had contracted some time about 1815, besides which he undoubtedly was something of a spendthrift and unpractical in business-transactions. His home had undergone a melancholy change since the success of Bertram, as depicted by the writer in Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 1846:

The gloominess of Maturin’s existence was brightened by the return of Lady Morgan to her native country in 1821, after an absence of several years abroad. The little governess who had earned her first laurels with The Wild Irish Girl was now transformed into one of the foremost literary celebrities of the day. In 1812 Miss Owenson had become the wife of Dr. Thomas Charles Morgan, physician to the Marquis of Abercorn, who had shortly before been ‘knighted by the viceroy—at a hint, it is said, from the doctor’s enterprising fiancée. She had, since then, published numerous novels, amongst others the Irish story O’Donnel (1814). Her greatest fame, however, was due to the extensive work on France (1817), the strongly liberal views of which had roused the fury of the Quarterly Review and caused the fierce contest of which Maturin also had borne his share of the brunt in the vehement attacks upon his best romances. From the rare and brief political utterances in Maturin’s works, sermons, and letters, it may be gathered that he rather inclined to toryism; but uninterested as he was in politics, his opinions did not in any way bias his regard for Lady Morgan, of whom he used to speak ‘in terms of the most extravagant admiration.’[160] Though the two were the only authors of repute residing in Dublin, there was no kind of jealousy between them. The character of Lady Morgan was broad-minded and generous, and her desire to help Maturin was sincere beyond any doubt. Her weekly réunions in Kildare Street, pleasantly described by her biographer,[161] were among the few relaxations Maturin allowed himself in his later years:

Among the domestic sorrows was the loss of a child, in 1821, immediately after its birth. When Lady Morgan called to inquire after Mrs. Maturin during her confinement, Maturin sent her this reply: ‘My angel is better, The Cherub is flown’—which words she noted down on a letter she received from him shortly afterwards.—That there were troubles also of another kind can be inferred from some lines in the above-mentioned letter to Sir Charles: ‘You terrify me by saying there is a prejudice against me amongst the Catholics; what have I done? I have never been a partizan—my voice was never heard at a meeting—I am not a public man in the least—what can I have done?’ Whatever this may have reference to, the answer obviously would have been, that he had written Melmoth. Although he had never meant to offend his Catholic townsmen, their resentment was not altogether inexplicable, and it is certainly curious that it should have come to him so unexpectedly. If the Methodists had not been favourably disposed towards him after the publication of Women, he now got the Catholics against him; but as it was only the errors of both creeds he had wished to attack, he must have suffered much from the feeling of having, perhaps, given personal offence.—Yet in all this dreariness there would occasionally be outbursts of the old eccentricity and the invincible desire sometimes to assume the rôle of a grand seigneur, which he, in his harmless way, imagined best to suit him. The following anecdote[162] has a characteristic ring about it:

That Maturin did not greatly care about the completion of The Universe is evident from the fact that he was, so early as 1821, engaged on a new play. In a note to Lady Morgan he mentions that it will be acted at Hawkins’—‘the profits will be far inferior to those of Covent Garden, but they will be something.’ Still the play was, later on, sent to Covent Garden, Sir Charles undertaking to use his influence with Kean who appears, from the very first, to have been unwilling to accept it. In a letter dated Dec. 16, 1822, Maturin writes to Sir Charles:

Whether there was an intervention on the part of Lady Morgan or not, the play was doomed never to see the light. It can hardly have been any other than the one to which Watts refers in his autobiographical notes:[163]

The only person who has been able to give an account of and publish some extracts from the play is the writer in the Irish Quarterly Review 1852. He states that a completed tragedy called The Siege of Salerno was found among Maturin’s manuscripts after his death, without explaining when and how he had an opportunity of seeing it. He states further that the plot bears, in conception, some resemblance to Byron’s Siege of Corinth—the hero in both works being, in fact, a renegade who leads Turkish forces against a Christian town. The passage quoted in the Irish Quarterly Review consists of a scene where Osmyn—the copy sent to Kean apparently bore the name of the hero—relates the story of his life. He has formerly been the prince of Salerno, the very town which he now attacks as a Turkish captain. He lived in happiness with his wife Matilda, when suddenly his enemy

invaded his country. Osmyn was thrown into the dungeon of his own castle, where he was kept for years. A time came when his prison walls were destroyed by a tempest—that is, an earthquake—and he gained his liberty. Being recognized by no one he wandered about in the streets and became witness of a procession where Matilda, now the wife of Manfred, was borne in solemn festival. In despair he left the country:

The story, we see, is rather improbable, and the deliverance of Osmyn from his prison belongs to the most hackneyed tricks of the older school of terror. The hero is, however, typically Maturineian. He is a kind of Bertram in Ottoman costume; the one returns as a robber-chief, the other as the leader of an infidel army, and the speech of Osmyn is a distinct echo from Maturing first play:

The writer in the Irish Quarterly Review assures his readers that the play ‘abounds in passages of great power and beauty;’ the extracts which he communicates, however, do not rise to the level of the best pages in Bertram or Fredolfo.—

One more tragedy contemplated by Maturin in his last years may yet be mentioned. A motive from the recent history of France had been suggested to him, to which he refers in a letter[164] of Oct. 20:th 1823:

The recipient of this letter is not known, nor anything else connected with the matter, with which all the biographers seem to be unacquainted. Among other unfulfilled projects is said[165] to have been a poem the scene of which was ‘to be laid in Ireland during the period of harps and minstrels;’ besides which Maturin wrote,[166] some time before his death, a short tale founded upon the family legend quoted in the first chapter of the present study.

A determination of Maturin ‘to devote himself more exclusively to the service of his calling’[167] led to the publication, in 1824, of Five Sermons on the Errors of the Roman Catholic Church. These controversial sermons were preached during the Lent of the same year before an audience unparalleled in number. ‘Never since Dean Kirwan’s time,’ it is stated in a contemporary memoir,[168] ‘were such crowds attracted to the Parish Church as during the delivery of these sermons; neither rain nor storm could subdue the anxiety of all classes and all persuasions to hear them.’ The sermons are explicitly said to be directed, not against Catholics, but Catholicism; Maturin endeavoured earnestly to avoid a tone of personal offensiveness, although it is much to be questioned whether he did not, in the following passage, underrate the attachment of the Irish Catholics to their faith:

The volume was received very favourably and reprinted in 1826.

In autumn 1824 appeared the last of Maturin’s lucubrations, a historical novel called The Albigenses. Though of imposing length—four volumes, together about 1500 pages—it was intended to be but the first series of a great trilogy, ‘illustrative,’ as stated in the preface, ‘of European feelings and manners in ancient times, in middle, and in modern.’ How the second and third parts had been planned is thus described:

There is little doubt that Maturin was induced to turn to the historical romance by the immense popularity of Scott, whose fame now stood at its zenith. He knew that this genre, at any rate, would not be objected to as obsolete or offensive to good feeling, as had been the case with his previous work. An outward success, moreover, was now more imperative than ever before, and everything could be hoped from the public rage for historical novels. This field of fiction was entirely new to Maturin; in The Lovers’ Tale only the general ‘atmosphere’ is historical—the incidents might have taken place in any age. The experiment, if praiseworthy, was decidedly hazardous; to outdo Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis had been easy enough, but to enter into competition with the Author of Waverley was a serious matter for a writer whose powers lay in depicting what was passing before his own eyes, or else, what never could have happened at all. That most contemporary critics nevertheless hailed The Albigenses as Maturin’s best work only proves their partiality for the style in which it was written; of later judges even his greatest admirer admits that Maturin’s attempt to ‘marry history to fiction’ turned out a failure.[169]—

The action of the story commences in 1216, at a time when the forces of the Albigenses are threatening the castle of Courtenaye. The sect is alternately headed and abandoned by count Raymond of Toulouse, who, though Catholic himself, occasionally wishes to save his vassals from complete destruction. His present designs are unknown; he has travelled to Rome to seek reconciliation with the Pope, and is expected back at any hour. In the meantime the persecuted Albigenses live in great misery among the mountains of Languedoc. Their leader is an old and venerable pastor of the name of Pierre, whom the cruelty of the crusaders has deprived of sight. He is tended by his granddaughter Genevieve, as good and gentle a being as himself, and constantly exhorts his followers to mildness and forgiveness; in this he is fiercely opposed by a fraction of wild fanatics, represented, among others, by the deacon Mephibosheth, a man of ‘intolerant zeal, and intolerable pretentions,’ who subsequently turns renegade.—The lord of Courtenaye, a savage and cowardly cripple, who fears the vicinity of the Albigenses but is unable to defend himself, summons the chief crusaders to his aid. The summons is very willingly obeyed, and a great army of knights and crusaders is, at the opening of the tale, marching towards the castle. The most eminent leaders of the Catholic forces are count Simon de Montfort, the ‘champion of the church,’ a rude and powerful soldier—and the bishop of Toulouse, a vigorous-minded sceptic, who in everything pursues his own advantage and aims at the increase of his own influence, ‘a man of power and might, body and soul, whose strong mind clung to his strong frame like the human part of the centaur of old to the animal part, making but one between them.’ There is a great deal of jealousy between these two warriors, and their army is split with discord and mutual suspicion. The majority are for attacking the heretics at once and crushing them at a single blow, while others advise waiting till the result of count Raymond’s negotiations with the Pope is known. From a message brought to the bishop it appears that the court of Rome has sent a monk of uncommon sanctity to mediate between the two hostile armies; the mediator has already visited the Albigenses and is now on his way to the castle. This simple and honest monk, who is chosen by the Pope with a view to ‘diminish the power and mortify the ambition’ of the bishop of Toulouse, has been received with hostility by the zealous fraction among the Albigenses, and only after great exertions on the part of Pierre has the arrangement been brought about that they consent to hear an exhortation from the bishop, on a promise of safety. The day being fixed, the crusaders set out with pomp and splendour to the meeting-place. The bishop delivers a magnificent sermon, but without effect; the Albigeois preachers reply with spirit, and reconciliation is found impossible. They are to resort to arms the following day. The crusaders retire to the castle of Courtenaye; the night is spent in carousals, during which De Montfort proposes that he and the knights alone would ride the heretics down; the proposal is eagerly accepted, in spite of the warnings of an old knight called Sir Aymer de Chastelroi.—The Albigenses are prepared for the worst, but the same night count Raymond returns with a great army. Besides the political, he has a personal cause against the crusaders: the late lord Courtenaye, the brother of the present one, has once surprised his castle and slaughtered his wife and children, for which outrage he has sworn eternal vengeance. He now takes command of the Albigenses; it is decided to wait till the crusaders are enclosed in a valley, and then beset them from all sides. The stratagem is easily carried out, and the knights are completely defeated. De Montfort is wounded almost to death, while the bishop succeeds in making his way out of the ambuscade, and arrives at the castle with a few surviving knights. De Montfort also is afterwards brought to the castle, where he slowly recovers.—Count Raymond, understanding that his victory is entirely due to the temerity of the vanquished, commands the whole band of the Albigenses to set out for the kingdom of Arragon, whither, indeed, it is the bishop’s intention immediately to pursue them. De Montfort being disabled for a long time, the bishop assumes the title of the champion of the church and places himself at the head of the crusading army. His enterprise, however, meets various difficulties; the followers of the knights who have perished in the recent battle begin to desert, when no longer commanded by their individual leaders, besides which king Philip refuses to recognize the bishop as the champion of the Church, before the title is admitted by the Pope. Under these circumstances the bishop proceeds to lead his forces to his own castle in the city of Beaucaire. On the road he lights upon a veiled lady who travels with one single attendant and turns out to be no less a person than queen Ingelberg. King Philip, being violently in love with Agnes of Moravia, has deserted the queen and even planned against her life, for which reason she tries to escape to her brother the king of Denmark. The bishop at once resolves to carry her as a prisoner to his castle; he is anxious to preserve the life of the queen, in order to be able to annul the king’s adulterous marriage, should he deny him future aid.—The queen subsequently makes her escape and is reconciled to the king.—A new crusade is soon determined upon, and the bishop, with a great number of nobles and dignitaries whom he has won to his side, marches to Nismes, which is this time fixed as meeting-place for the Catholic leaders. Among these is prince Lewis, who is very desirous to take the lead, and hates the bishop as cordially as he hates De Montfort. The latter has not yet recovered his strength, but shows no inclination to resign his title, and thus the old discord again prevails in the crusading army:—The Albigenses have once more been abandoned by the vacillating count Raymond, but some others of the most potent lords of Languedoc have taken up arms in their cause, and entrenched themselves in Tarascon. The crusaders now march against that city, outside whose walls a long and furious battle is fought. De Montfort, weakened by his illness, falls; still the issue of the battle would be uncertain, should not count Raymond again arrive at the critical moment. The crusaders, indeed, seize the castle of Tarascon, but their army is defeated by count Raymond, who pitches his camp in the vicinity. The next day he makes a new attack and easily occupies the town. The Albigenses triumph once more.—

These two battles form the historical framework, around which is woven the romantic plot of the story, intricate and duly based on chivalry and love. The principal hero is a youthful knight called Sir Paladour de la Croix Sanglante, who, at the very end, is discovered to be the son of count Raymond of Toulouse. He has been saved at the general slaughter of the count’s family, is brought up in obscurity, but knighted by the king after a siege in which he has distinguished himself. The only person who knows of his descent is an old, half-crazy woman, who has seen better days. She was, in fact, once a rich and beautiful lady of the name of Marie de Mortemar; being accused of heresy, she was attacked by count Raymond, the late brother of the lord of Courtenaye, and the bishop of Toulouse, who ‘despoiled her of lands and power, and burnt her castles, and made of her people serfs, and misused her in such sort that she wandered a maniac for a time, and then was heard of no more.’ The ill-usage she has undergone has so changed her that she is recognized by no one, yet she pursues, with relentlessness and dexterity, a scheme of vengeance against her former persecutors. The late lord of Courtenaye, who afterwards became the enemy of count Raymond, is suspected to have been murdered at the instigation of his brother the present lord; but Marie de Mortemar is intent upon the destruction of the whole house of Courtenaye. This destruction is to be executed by the hand of Sir Paladour, whose fortunes she continually follows. When he is hastening, in the first chapter of the book, to join the crusading army, she guides him over a lake and directs him towards the castle of Courtenaye. She lives, for the most part, in the vaults of this castle, where she is, in association with a few other hags, occupied in all sorts of dark and necromantic pursuits, ostensibly in the service of the superstitious lord, but secretly meditating his ruin.—At the castle resides also lady Isabelle, the daughter of the late lord of Courtenaye; she and Paladour fall in love at first sight. He hardly dares to address her, though energetically urged thereto by the merry Sir Aymer de Chastelroi—but before long he has opportunity of rendering her an essential service. On arriving at the castle, count Simon de Montfort informs Isabelle that king Philip, whose ward she is, has promised her hand to a man whom she is very unwilling to accept. Her despair at last touches even De Montfort; he hints that there may be found a way of extricating her from the matter—namely, if some champion of hers can unhorse him, ‘or draw blood from between the joints of his harness.’ Paladour at once accepts the challenge, and really overthrows the dreaded warrior. After this he is regarded as the avowed champion of the lady Isabelle, and takes but little notice of his rivals, two very foolish knights called de Verac and de Semonville.—The great battle that ends so unfortunately for the crusaders is watched by Isabelle from an adjacent hill. When the defeat becomes evident she starts, with her maidens, at full speed for the castle. Suddenly she is accosted by a knight in black armour, who says he has a message from Sir Paladour, and offers to conduct the party by a secret path, the main road to the castle being intercepted by the heretics. While still speaking, the knight seizes her rein and gallops along. After a while they are joined by men in vizards, and the ride finally terminates at the coast of the Mediterranean. The frightened females are conveyed to a small isle where there stands the impregnable castle of a bold outlaw, the terror of all the neighbourhood.—Sir Paladour is among the knights who survive the battle; when told of the disappearance of Isabelle, he immediately sets out in quest of her. On a dark heath he meets his mysterious guide, the maniac woman, who informs him where Isabelle is taken and points out to him the distant tower of the outlaw’s castle. He follows the direction, and at the very moment he is approaching, a party of pilgrims passing along the coast is attacked by the robbers. Paladour rushes to their aid, but is severely wounded, and dragged to the castle as a prisoner.—Isabelle is, at first, treated with a kind of rude courtesy; the outlaw has seized her in hopes of a large ransom, but struck by her beauty he soon begins to make love to her, and, being rejected, assumes a threatening tone. As for Paladour, but little heed is taken of him, and he is left to recover from his wounds as best he can. He is much worried by a raging lycanthrope living in the vaults; once the latter assaults him while he is sleeping, and only by exerting his utmost strength can Paladour knock him down. In his last moments, however, the lycanthrope regains his reason and shows Paladour a secret passage leading to the terrace at the sea, from where he can hold converse with the lady. When it is discovered that he is the lover and champion of Isabelle, their situation becomes extremely precarious; but one night, when the terrace happens to be deserted, Isabelle and her maidens manage to descend from their window to the terrace. Here they are received by Paladour, and the whole party sets out in a boat. Their flight is soon discovered; the outlaw, pursuing them in another boat, reaches them as they touch the shore. At the moment when he is about to stab Paladour, a dark figure rushes between and plunges a dagger in the outlaw’s heart: it is again the maniac woman, Marie de Mortemar. Taking Paladour aside she reminds him of a vow he has made, as a child, to sacrifice the last survivor of his enemy’s race. Paladour is still ignorant who his enemies are, but the woman promises to let him know in due time. Without further adventure the party then arrives at the castle. The lord of Courtenaye is not delighted; his state and wealth depend on Isabelle’s continuing unmarried, and he has secretly hoped, that both she and her bridegroom would perish. He cannot avoid celebrating their nuptials with a grand feast, but contemplates all the time means for their destruction; calling the maniac woman to his presence he declares himself ready to enter an alliance with the devil, whom he, in his superstition, believes her able to conjure. She answers with mysterious threats, having decided in the bridal night to wreak her vengeance on the house of Courtenaye. The night comes, and as it grows late the lord retires into his secret chamber among the vaults, where the other hags are awaiting their leader. Through their imprudence the chamber catches fire, and the lord of Courtenaye who, in a fit of impatient rage, has thrown the key in a cauldron, perishes with his attendants. At the same time the news spreads in the castle that the bride has been murdered and the bridegroom has disappeared. The maniac has now informed Paladour that his destined victim is no other than his bride. He conceives that the only way of escaping the fulfilment of his vow is to stab himself; Isabelle, thinking him mad, tries to prevent him, and during the grapple the dagger is plunged into her breast. Paladour rushes away half-deranged and runs till he falls down exhausted, being then taken care of by the maniac, who at last relents towards him. She dresses up Isabelle—whose wound is not mortal—as a page and gives her to Paladour; in this capacity she follows him without daring to reveal herself so long as his reason is not quite restored.—Being indifferent to everything and seeking only death, he joins the count’s army as a mysterious ‘black knight,’ unknown to all. After the victory of Tarascon his relationship to count Raymond is discovered with the help of a monk; on the same occasion Isabelle reveals her identity, and they are happily re-united.—

The story, however, contains yet another love-intrigue. Paladour has a younger brother of the name of Sir Amirald, who also appears to have been saved from the massacre. He is brought up at the castle of Courtenaye and very badly used by its lord. When Paladour and Amirald meet in the crusading army, a close friendship springs up between them, and they find, to their wonder, that they bear a similar mark on the shoulder. Amirald has seen Genevieve, the granddaughter of the old Albigeois pastor, and fallen in love with her. Once when he is wandering in the vicinity of the castle, he is roused by cries for help; they proceed from Genevieve, whom two robbers are carrying away, deeming her ‘no unacceptable prize’ to the crusaders. Amirald overcomes the ruffians and accompanies Genevieve to the Albigenses. In the first great battle a stone from a sling smites him down; as the Albigenses move on, Genevieve stumbles over his body. She recognises her preserver and, perceiving there is life, removes him into a cave, with the reluctant assistance of an unsuccessful lover of hers, a young man called Amand. She then visits Amirald regularly and tends him till he is restored to health. When count Raymond commands the Albigenses to move still farther into the mountains, Amand demands her promise to abandon Amirald; on her refusing, he in jealousy informs the chiefs of the sect that Genevieve has saved the life of an enemy, with the result that she is banished from the community. Two men are sent to convey her to Toulouse, but, having lost their way, they both perish, and Genevieve herself is, in a senseless state, carried into a convent by some monks who chance to find her. Yet when she is discovered to be a heretic, she is instantly expelled. Pursuing her way alone, she is now seized by the same ruffians from whom Amirald had rescued her. They drag her into the abbey of Normoutier where she falls into the hands of the bishop of Toulouse and is taken with his party to Beaucaire. Here she is sumptuously clad and treated with mildness, the bishop’s intention being to make her his mistress; but she firmly resists his temptations. Subsequently she succeeds not only in escaping but in effecting the escape of the queen, whose life she saves at the risk of her own, thus earning her gratitude and protection. They travel onward with a party of knights who have been in quest of the queen in order to bring her back to the king, he being now willing to receive her as his spouse again. Among the knights is Amirald, who openly avows his love to Genevieve. He is commissioned to conduct her to Toulouse, but this time their journey is intercepted by the army of prince Lewis. He also is enraptured by the beauty of Genevieve and compells her to follow him to Nismes, where the new crusade is being prepared. Being told by Genevieve that she has saved the life of his mother, the prince promises to protect her from every injury, yet determines to keep her for himself and refuses to surrender her to Amirald. The bishop, however, who is filled with a deadly hatred against her, urges that she be delivered into the hands of justice, to be condemned to death as a heretic. When the prince tries to protect her a riot breaks out—the house where she is kept is burnt down, but at the last moment Amirald saves her and they escape to Tarascon where he, now turned an Albigeois, joins the army of the lords of Languedoc. In the battle of Tarascon, Amirald and Genevieve are among a party of Albigenses who remain captives in the town. All prisoners are, at the command of the bishop, to be burnt alive; they are already bound at the stake when the army of count Raymond rushes into Tarascon. Paladour, remembering the mark on their shoulders, immediately hastens to liberate his brother.—At the same time the bishop falls a victim to the vengeance of Marie de Mortemar. She has also been brought to the city as a prisoner, and being kept in custody in a solitary chamber near the chapel, she manages to poison the holy water a moment before the bishop celebrates the mass. He rushes into his room where he applies strong antidotes, all in vain. Suspecting the maniac he calls her to his presence; she reveals herself as Marie de Mortemar, declaring the aim of her life to be fulfilled: while the bishop is expiring, she throws herself out of the casement and is dashed to pieces.—The heroes and heroines live in happiness ever afterwards; ‘The difference of birth and creed was never known to disturb the affection that subsisted between the high-born Lady of Courtenaye and the humble bride of Amirald.’

Considering the inordinate length of The Albigenses, it must be admitted that the story is fairly well constructed, and the rich materials—although of little originality—not unskilfully arranged. In this respect there certainly can be detected a sort of improvement on Maturin’s earlier romances; but it is a very poor compensation for the loss of their peculiar charm in style and description. In The Albigenses there is hardly a page which could not have been written by somebody else; the personal note in the diction, the keenness of psychological insight, and the characteristic boldness of imagination which distinguished Women and Melmoth, and even The Milesian Chief, have completely disappeared. And this change, it is painful to observe, has been brought about by the attacks of injudicious reviewers, as clearly stated in the preface:

Maturin’s journey to Canossa was graciously acknowledged by all critics except one. In the newly established Westminster Review[170] there appeared an uncommonly intelligent and well-written article, showing an understanding of Maturin and a penetration into his talent, which far surpasses that of all other contemporary critics. To the general verdict of this unknown writer on The Albigenses nothing could be added, nor can its rightfulness be questioned by any one acquainted with Maturin’s works:

That Maturin did not take counsel of his own heart means that he wrote without inspiration; and that is why the adventures and hair-breadth escapes fail to excite, and the characters appear so hopelessly conventional. The characterization is, in fact, the weakest side of The Albigenses, and that of the principal personages the least worthy of Maturin’s powers. Paladour and Amirald simply possess every chivalrous virtue imaginable, neither being subject to any faults whatsoever, nor is there one single individual trait to distinguish them from others. The description of these two paragons is pervaded by a deadly seriousness and an unbroken solemnity, all the more causeless as both are destined to become perfectly happy in the end. The influence of Scott, which otherwise is perceptible throughout the story, in no instance extends itself to the treatment of the heroes. The different methods of the two novelists can be compared in the openings of The Albigenses and Quentin Durward (1823). Both works begin with a brief account of the state of France in the respective periods—after which the heroes are introduced as solitary travellers and knight-errants. Quentin Durward, a merry light-hearted youth, appears on a bright summer morning, carelessly joining company with the first people he encounters, committing various indiscretions, being on the point of getting hanged, and going through it all with imperturbable good-humour. Paladour travels through an autumnal night, engaged in sombre thoughts, recollections and anticipations, meeting beings unearthly and mysterious and preserving all the time the same sepulchral gravity. The one way, of course, can in itself be as good as the other, and the beginning of The Albigenses is not without merit; but as the story advances it would not be out of the place to make a counterpoise to this lugubrious hero in the person of the younger Sir Amirald. Yet he is but a repetition of his brother, as grave and as blameless. There is nothing of the contrast so finely brought forth in Montorio between Hippolito and Annibal, and in The Milesian Chief between Connal and Desmond: Amirald, no more than Paladour, does anything rash or thoughtless; they never laugh; they are never even present in comical situations. Now one of the secrets of the perennial freshness of the Waverley novels is a manner the author has of ‘dealing sly digs at his own stateliest heroes.’[171] He never takes them too seriously; he exposes their human weaknesses with obvious satisfaction, and finally allows them to be united with their lady-loves much because he does not think them worth writing tragedies about. This method being extremely foreign to Maturin, his surest way of succeeding with his heroes is to make them really tragic and treat them with the terrible pathos and passionate sympathy which breathes from the pages of The Milesian Chief. In The Albigenses neither condition is fulfilled, and the personages, consequently, do not live. The same is equally true of the heroines; there are no traces of the psychological mastery which had created Eva and Immalee. Isabelle and Genevieve are as superlative with regard to exalted qualities as are their lovers: the former, being a high-born lady, is supplied with a just amount of pride, while the latter, as suits her station, is all humbleness and self-denial. How horribly fustian and melodramatic the description occasionally becomes, can be seen from the scene where the outlaw, whose prisoner Isabelle is, makes her a proposal of marriage:

The comic figures in the story—most of whom are invariably comic—are hardly less stereotyped and without charm. An exception must be made for the well-drawn Sir Aymer, an old knight who continually affects a tone of youthful gallantry but is, at bottom, a man of honour and delicacy. The drunken abbot of Normoutier with his eternal mal-a-prop Latin quotations, and the foppish Sir Ezzelin de Verac, are, on the other hand, very heavy and tiresome. The best drawn character in The Albigenses is the bishop of Toulouse. There is something truly imposing in his ambitious schemes, and his scepticism and clear-headedness form a salutary contrast to the superstitious fanaticism of his fellow-crusaders. The speech with which he tries to dazzle and seduce the inexperienced Genevieve, while she is his prisoner in Beaucaire, is one of the most eloquent passages in the book, and shows once more what Maturin was capable of achieving on his favourite topic, the unlimited power and the soul-destroying influence of the Catholic church:

The best things in The Albigenses are to be found in certain vividly narrated episodes and brilliant descriptions, which are quite other than the hackneyed adventures of the actual dramatis personæ. Among them is the story of the heretic deacon Mephibosheth. He is taken, by some Catholic travellers, to the abbey of Normoutier, where the monks, in the absence of the abbot, have elected an ‘abbot of misrule’ and arranged a carousal on a large scale. The deacon is compelled to become one of the company and take part in a wild dance; he first refuses, but then, being sufficiently drunk, he for a while becomes the jolliest of them all, until his feelings as suddenly reverse themselves and he starts smashing costly windows and figures of saints. The monks decide to hang him, but the cord breaks, and he is finally spared on condition of procuring them a beautiful heretic damsel. The deacon, remembering Genevieve, readily complies, but she is brought there by the two robbers before he has time to fulfil his promise. The deacon, however, remains at the abbey and, having turned Catholic, becomes a follower of the bishop and is, at last, hanged in good earnest by the men of count Raymond, after the battle of Tarascon. The feast of the abbot of misrule, which presents a phase of monastic life seldom described,[172] is depicted with superabundant vivacity and humour, and in a true mediaeval spirit:

A fine chapter is also one describing a night at the castle of Courtenaye before the first battle. A frightful tempest is raging, and most of the guests have retired; at last only a few of the chief crusaders are sitting in the dimly illuminated hall, passing their time in telling ghost-stories. Sir Aymer, in his humorous way, relates an adventure which happened to his uncle, whereupon De Montfort tells a very dismal one which happened to himself, as he once beheld the ghosts of a large congregation of Albigenses whom he had slaughtered some ten years before. The right note is here struck by simple means, and the uncomfortable sensations of the superstitious company are skilfully transferred to the reader.—Scenes like these are, no doubt, filled with the real spirit of the time in question; but as a historical novel in the usual sense of the word The Albigenses has no great claims to distinction. The historical facts which underlie the plot are but meagre, and, moreover, treated with considerable freedom. Imagination often makes up for accurate information. Even one of those critics[173] who admired The Albigenses as a romance, thinks the author deficient in a ‘minute and extensive acquaintance with the antiquities of the middle ages,’ declaring his descriptions to be of a cast that ‘may be executed by any one moderately read in Froissart, and tolerably conversant with the less recondite sources of information contained in the common English and German romances.’

The picture of the merry life led in the abbey of Normoutier strikes one by its perfect novelty in Maturin’s work, nor are there, in The Albigenses, any instances of ecclesiastical cruelty or monastic oppression; the monks are, upon the whole, no worse than other people. Nevertheless the Radcliffe school reappears in some of the adventures of the heroines, especially in the escape of Isabelle from the clutches of the outlaw, and that of Genevieve from the palace of the bishop of Toulouse. The secret passages, happily detected at the right moment, the inevitable subterranean vaults and concealed doors have their origin in that style of fiction which Maturin now had disavowed. The design of Marie de Mortemar to have her vengeance on the last survivor of the house of Courtenaye executed by the hand of Sir Paladour, leads back to the idea upon which Montorio is founded. Otherwise The Albigenses is but too clearly modelled on Scott; most of the characters have their prototypes in the Waverley novels, and a great many of the situations likewise bear a resemblance to the same distinguished patterns. Quentin Durward, Old Mortality (1817), Ivanhoe (1820), The Monastery (1820) and others are constantly called to mind, all the comparisons being to the disadvantage of The Albigenses. To mention some of the most conspicuous likenesses, count Simon de Montfort has a counterpart in duke Charles of Burgundy in Quentin Durward; both are men of a fierce and uncontrollable temper and unrefined habits, accustomed only to consult their own will and pleasure. Duke Charles has the same message to Isabelle of Croye as De Montfort to Isabelle of Courtenaye, namely, of a marriage which appears to be against the inclinations of the heroines, and the language of these powerful lords, when contradicted, is very offensive to a young lady of rank. Duke Charles threatens to drag the lady to the altar with his own hands, contemptuously speaking of her ‘baby face,’ while De Montfort, in the corresponding scene, flies out against Isabelle, calling her a ‘gaudy, delicate, disdainful toy.’ At last the matter is, in both cases, referred to the skill and valour of the champions of the fair ones.—The capture of Isabelle by the outlaw resembles much the seizure of Rowena, in Ivanhoe, by Reginald Front-de-Boef. Both prisoners are, as a token of respect, shown into the best rooms; ‘the apartment to which the Lady Rowena had been introduced was fitted up with some rude attempts at ornament and magnificence, and her being placed there might be considered as a peculiar mark of respect not offered to the other prisoners. — — — The tapestry hung down from the walls in many places, and in others was tarnished and faded under the effects of the sun, or tattered and decayed by age.’ Maturin’s description of the chamber of Isabelle is exactly similar: ‘It was to this apartment the lady Isabelle ascended, and it was evident that it had been furnished with a kind of rude and hasty splendour. Tapestry was hung on the walls by wooden pegs stuck between the interstices of the stones, but in many places those walls of ragged stone were totally bare.’ Then the ladies are the object of love-making by persons odious to them, while their real lovers lie prisoners in the same castles. Rebecca, in Ivanhoe, obviously served as a model to Genevieve. Their goodness and mildness is the same, and the one, being the daughter of a Jew, as well as the other being a heretic, is in a defenceless and dangerous position. The speech of the templar to Rebecca, when he persuades her to fly with him to the Orient and become a partner in his bold plans has, no doubt, influenced the speech which the bishop makes to Genevieve, quoted above:

The likeness of the bishop to the templar is, however, but slight; the latter is a fantast, with nothing of the cold deliberateness of the former.—In the abbot of Normoutier critics believed they recognized the prior of Jorvault. Neither is, indeed, over-eager in discharging his sacerdotal duties, yet the prior is a man of the world, while the abbot is a coarse boar and never would have wit enough to compose a letter like that sent by the prior to the templar—however heartily he would approve of the contents.—Sir Ezzelin de Verac would scarcely have been born but for the existence of Sir Piercie Shafton in The Monastery; but of all imitations in The Albigenses he is the least successful. His only interest is the state of his wardrobe, and his only accomplishment to dress fashionably, while Sir Piercie—one of the most delightful creations of Scott—is a master also of other arts, knowing how to recite poetry and play lute and viol-de-gamba. The ‘euphuistic’ conversation of Sir Piercie is feebly copied by Sir Ezzelin; the epithets which the former bestows on Halbert Glendinning—‘Good goatbearded apostle! Good fellow! Good selvaggio!’—are echoed in the terms of address of the latter to an Albigeois whose prisoner he once happens to be: ‘Good villagio! kind rustic!’ and so on.—

A very characteristic figure in the romantic literature of the time is, finally, Marie de Mortemar. A personage of this kind had once before, through the influence of Scott, occupied Maturin’s imagination; the old Irishwoman in Women, as we have seen, was pronounced to be drawn after Meg Merrilies, and the same observation was made by critics[174] about Marie de Mortemar: ‘—an old woman, who is a sorceress, a conspirator, a preserver, and a perpetual meddler; such are the sins for which the maker of Meg Merrilies has to answer.’ The type certainly was, if not actually invented, at least made fashionable by Scott. His old women appear as champions of some great cause which they with might and main try to advance, or else endeavour to revenge personal injuries to which they have been subjected and which have reduced them to their pitiable state. Marie de Mortemar belongs to the latter class, possessing, however, all the strength and energy of the former. With Meg Merrilies she has but little in common, except the miraculous skill with which she pursues her aim; she guides the ways of Paladour much as Meg guides young Bertram, never resting till punishment has reached the guilty. Magdalena Greame, in The Abbot (1820) has devoted her life to Queen Mary and the Catholic faith, and as mysteriously and unflinchingly conducts the adventures of her kinsman Roland, whom she has chosen to be a promoter of her schemes. Yet another meddler is Norna in The Pirate (1822). She, like Marie de Mortemar, has been ill-used in her youth and partially lost her reason; and although she is not revengeful and her meddling is only for the good, she has the same gift of omnipresence and omniscience which appeals to the superstition of her neighbours and which has been acquired in a way suggested, perhaps, by the Radcliffe heroes: ‘It was one branch of various arts by which Norna endeavoured to maintain her pretensions to supernatural powers, that she made herself familiarly and practically acquainted with all the secret passes and recesses, whether natural or artificial, which she could hear of, whether by tradition or otherwise, and was, by such knowledge, often enabled to perform feats which were otherwise unaccountable.’ Marie de Mortemar, it is needless to say, is perfectly acquainted with the caves and the rocks, the high-ways and by-ways of all Languedoc.—The other variation of this character is personified by Ulrica in Ivanhoe: a deeply-wronged woman, a prisoner, who once ‘was free, was happy, was honoured, loved, and was beloved’ while yet being ‘the daughter of the noble Thane of Torquilstone, before whose frown a thousand vassals trembled’—just as her counterpart in The Albigenses was ‘a noble, beautiful lady, heiress of Mortemar.’ As the prototype of Ulrica we may perhaps regard Queen Margaret in Shakespeare’s Richard III, who walks about, a ghost of her former self, cursing the murderer of her son and her husband:

Like Queen Margaret, Ulrica is unable actively to work for the destruction of her malefactor, having to content herself with ineffective wailings and execrations; while Marie de Mortemar—who also most terribly curses her oppressors—finds opportunity of ‘meddling’ as much as she pleases. Yet Ulrica, by accident, succeeds in setting fire to the magazine of fuel beneath the castle of Reginald Front-de-Boef and thus has, like Marie de Mortemar, the satisfaction of witnessing the dying agonies of her enemy. Their gloomy triumph is the same; Ulrica cries to the perishing Reginald: ‘Summon thy vassals around thee, doom them that loiter to the scourge and the dungeon—But know, mighty chief — — — thou shalt have neither answer, nor aid, nor obedience at their hands.’ Marie de Mortemar exults at the death-scene of the bishop of Toulouse: ‘Hark — — — hark to thy knell. Thine enemies are around thee—thine allies in blood and crime are perishing. Chain me to the stake: burn me an’ ye will; but, ere I am in ashes, thou wilt be in flames.’ The unhappy women willingly perish themselves at the moment their vengeance is fulfilled.

The picture drawn of the life and manners of the Albigenses is, in some essentials, inspired by the descriptions of the Covenanters in Old Mortality—a circumstance which, besides being pointed out by critics both contemporary and modern,[175] was admitted by Maturin himself; he observes, when introducing the sect for the first time: ‘It is — — — a curious, but indisputable matter of fact, that the majority of them were as tenacious of certain texts and terms of the Old Testament, as their legitimate descendants, the English Puritans, were some centuries later; and that, like them, they assumed Jewish names, fought with Jewish obduracy, and felt with Jewish hostility, even towards those of their community who differed from them in a penumbra of their creed.’ Hence the speeches and opinions of Boanerges—the leader of the sterner Albigenses—are the same, only less poignantly expressed, as Balfour’s; they quote the Old Testament as their chief authority, evince a mind equally relentless and unforgiving, and Boanerges rejects the appeals of Pierre to common humanity on the same arguments which Balfour uses in his dispute with Morton. The passages treating of the Albigenses are, however, vividly written and not wholly lacking in originality. The deacon Mephibosheth has no counterpart in Scott, and the little love-story of Amand is both natural and skilfully introduced, while the character of Pierre is entirely conventional.—

This last romance of Maturin was soon forgotten, nor was it ever reprinted, notwithstanding the benevolent critiques.[176] What the renumeration amounted to is not known, but Maturin’s last months were, by all accounts, about the gloomiest in his existence. Cares and anxieties had already begun to prey upon his health—never very robust—and the unfavourable circumstances under which The Albigenses was composed, at the expense of the night’s rest during a long time, completely broke it down, his pecuniary difficulties remaining as threatening as ever. There are, in Mangan’s article, a few recollections relative to the closing period of Maturin’s life; and although the writer, no doubt, shares the old tendency of his subject ‘of darkening the gloomy, and of deepening the sad,’ it is clear enough that there was, at this time, very little left of the well-dressed dandy who had once so greatly excelled in quadrille-parties and private theatricals:

In the beginning of October 1824 Maturin was seized by an acute malady which the physicians, considering his impaired health in general, apprehended to be mortal. On the 5:th Sir Charles Morgan wrote to Cyrus Redding:[177]

These forebodings were, indeed, soon fulfilled: Maturin died on October 30:th in his home in Dublin whither he, for some reason or other, had returned from the country. There was a story afloat of his having caused, or at least precipitated, his death by some mistake about his medicine;[178] however this may have been, it is evident from the letter of Sir Charles that the case was sufficiently alarming already some four weeks before.—The death was briefly announced by the local papers; in The Morning Star of Nov. 3 there was this necrology:

In the summer of 1825 Walter Scott made his journey to Ireland, which he had long been planning. He had looked forward, with pleasure, to the prospect of becoming personally acquainted with Maturin, and had intended to invite the latter to accompany him during the tour. Now he could only pay a visit to the family,[179] for whose profit he is said to have contemplated a new edition of Maturin’s works, as well as the publication of some manuscripts found among his literary remains,[180] to which he would have prefixed a biography of his deceased friend; but his own pecuniary embarrassments, commencing just at this time, prevented him from realizing the project—and Maturin’s works soon began to fall into oblivion. Montorio was, in 1841, republished by William Hazlitt as vol. I in the Ballantyne’s Romancists and Novelists Library which he edited; Bertram appeared in The British Drama in 1865 and in Dick’s Standard Plays in 1884; and, lastly, Melmoth the Wanderer was reprinted in 1892, with no very distinct success.

To Charles Robert Maturin’s life and to his works, as such, the present study must be confined; his influence on later literature, above all on French romanticism, can here only be pointed out as a subject not yet exhaustively inquired into.[181] The work through which this influence was exercised is Melmoth the Wanderer, chiefly, yet not exclusively, inasmuch as Bertram also was immoderately admired in France and hailed as one of the foremost productions of contemporary literature. Melmoth, the great and concluding outburst of the English school of terror, stands there as at once its lasting monument and an outlet through which some of its peculiarities were, directly or indirectly, revived by the movements succeeding the downfall of 19:th century naturalism. The place in literary history of Women, Maturin’s other masterpiece, is more isolated. So far from belonging to any definite movement of the time it foreshadows, in a striking manner, the school of Dickens in its descriptions of middle class life, manners and characters, while its minute researches in the abysses of the human heart anticipate the analytic fiction of the very latest periods. In Maturin’s production Women is of an importance equal to that of Melmoth, nor is his literary physiognomy complete if The Milesian Chief is not remembered for its purely romantic qualities and its patriotic enthusiasm. These three works, which are Maturin’s best, afford ample illustration of the versatility of his genius, which versatility itself is an exponent of the spirit of freedom and experiment prevailing during the romantic revival. What they all have in common is the style of writing, the art of dealing with language as the sculptor deals with clay. Maturin’s part in the renewal of the imaginative English prose has been asserted by the latest authorities,[182] and the excellence of his style doubtless did much to obtain for him the appreciation of his brothers in the trade. It was the custom of contemporary reviewers to speak of Maturin’s novels as something particularly suited to the frequenters of circulating libraries, and it is true that with the large bulk of respectable, educated readers Maturin never was very popular; but then there was a small fraction of the public whose taste, in this respect, closely coincided with that of the former: most of those writers, great or small, whom Maturin admired, eagerly repaid the compliment. Lewis used to revel in the gloomy pages of Montorio[183] and was, as has been seen, pleased even with Manuel. Godwin, to whom so many of Maturin’s writings are indebted, is recorded[184] to have uttered: ‘if there be any writer of the present day, to whose burial-place I should wish to make a pilgrimage, that writer is Maturin.’ The Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) of James Hogg—one of the favourite poets of Maturin—seems to be not uninfluenced by Melmoth the Wanderer. The high opinion which Scott and Byron entertained of Maturin has more than once appeared in the foregoing pages—and among later romancists who are known to have delighted in the adventures of the Wanderer, or upon whose work he has even left an unmistakable print, we find names such as Balzac, Hugo, De Vigny, Baudelaire, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Poe, Thackeray, Rossetti, Stevenson, Oscar Wilde. Thus, if Maturin is not always—as he would deserve to be—remembered on his own account, he is at least mentioned in connection with, as he was acknowledged by, a great many of those writers who unquestionably form the ‘upper ten’ in the world of 19:th century letters.

Notes. — I. — II. — III. — IV. — V.

The references to pages after names of reviews and magazines indicate the page on which the respective article begins.

Index.

While original copyright information has been retained, this book is in the public domain in the country of publication.

Obvious printer’s errors have been silently corrected; otherwise, as far as possible, original spelling and punctuation has been retained.

Notes have been renumbered sequentially, and references from the index edited to match.