SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

by H. P. Lovecraft

Part Ten

"Melmoth" contains scenes which even now have not lost their power to evoke dread. It begins with a death-bed—the old miser is dying of sheer fright because of something he has seen, coupled with a manuscript he has read and a family portrait which hangs in an obscure closet of his centuried home in County Wicklow. He sends to Trinity College, Dublin, for his nephew John; and the latter upon arriving notes many uncanny things. The eyes of the portrait in the closet glow horribly, and twice a figure strangely resembling the portrait appears momentarily at the door. Dread hangs over the house of the Melmoths, one of whose ancestors, "J. Melmoth, 1646," the portrait represents. The dying miser declares that this man—at a date slightly before 1800—is still alive. Finally the miser dies, and the nephew is told in the will to destroy both the portrait and a manuscript to be found in a certain drawer. Reading the manuscript, which was written late in the seventeenth century by an Englishman named Stanton, young John learns of a terrible incident in Spain in 1677, when the writer met a horrible fellow-countryman and was told of how he had stared to death a priest who tried to denounce him as one filled with fearsome evil. Later, after meeting the man again in London, Stanton is cast into a madhouse and visited by the stranger, whose approach is heralded by spectral music and whose eyes have more than mortal glare. Melmoth the Wanderer—for such is the malign visitor—offers the captive freedom if he will take over his bargain with the Devil; but like all others whom Melmoth has approached, Stanton is proof against temptation. Melmoth's description of the horrors of a life in a madhouse, used to tempt Stanton, is one of the most potent passages of the book. Stanton is at length liberated, and spends the rest of his life tracking down Melmoth, whose family and ancestral abode he discovers. With the family he leaves the manuscript, which by young John's time is sadly ruinous and fragmentary. John destroys both portrait and manuscript, but in sleep is visited by his horrible ancestor, who leaves a black and blue mark on his wrist.

Young John soon afterward receives as a visitor a shipwrecked Spaniard, Alonzo de Moncada, who has escaped from compulsory monasticism and from the perils of the Inquisition. He has suffered horribly—and the descriptions of his experiences under torment and in the vaults through which he once essays escape are classic—but had the strength to resist Melmoth the Wanderer when approached at this darkest hour in prison. At the house of a Jew who sheltered him after his escape, he discovers a wealth of manuscript relating other exploits of Melmoth, including his wooing of an Indian island maiden, Immalee, who later comes to her birthright in Spain and is known as the Donna Isidora; and of his horrible marriage to her by the corpse of a dead anchorite at midnight in the ruined chapel of a shunned and abhorred monastery. Moncada's narrative to young John takes up the bulk of Maturin's four-volume book; this disproportion being considered one of the chief technical faults of the composition.

At last the colloquies of John and Moncada are interrupted by the entrance of Melmoth the Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now fading, and decrepitude swiftly overtaking him. The term of his bargain has approached its end, and he has come home after a century and a half to meet his fate. Warning all others from the room, no matter what sounds they may hear in the night, he awaits the end alone. Young John and Moncada hear frightful ululations, but do not intrude till silence comes toward morning. They then find the room empty. Clayey footprints lead out a rear door to a cliff overlooking the sea, and near the edge of the precipice is a track indicating the forcible dragging of some heavy body. The Wanderer's scarf is found on a crag some distance below the brink, but nothing further is ever seen or heard of him. Such is the story, and none can fail to notice the difference between this modulated, suggestive, and artistically moulded horror and—to use the words of Professor George Saintsbury—"the artful but rather jejune rationalism of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the too often puerile extravagance, the bad taste, and the sometimes slipshod style of Lewis." Maturin's style in itself deserves particular praise, for its forcible directness and vitality lift it altogether above the pompous artificialities of which his predecessors are guilty. Professor Edith Birkhead, in her history of the Gothic novel, justly observes that "with all his faults, Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the Goths." "Melmoth" was widely read and eventually dramatised, but its late date in the evolution of the Gothic tale deprived it of the tumultuous popularity of "Udolpho" and "The Monk."

(Next month Mr. Lovecraft takes up "The Aftermath of Gothic Fiction.")

In distant Yith past crested, ragged peaks;

On far-flung islands lost to worldly years,

A shadow from the ancient star-void seeks

Some being which in caverns shrilly cries

A challenge; and the hairy dweller speaks

From that deep hole where slimy Sotho lies.

But when those night-winds crept about the place,

They fled—for Sotho had no human face!

Beyond the valleys of the sun which lie

In misty chaos past the reach of time;

And brood beneath the ice as aeons fly,

Long waiting for some brighter, warmer clime;

There is a vision, as I vainly try

To glimpse the madness that must some day climb

From age-old tombs in dim dimensions hid,

And push all angles back—unseal the lid!

III

Beside the city that once lived there wound

A stream of putrefaction writhing black;

Reflecting crumbling spires stuck in the ground

That glow through hov'ring mist whence no stray track

Can lead to those dead gates, where once was found

The secret that would bring the dwellers back.

And still that pitch-black current eddies by

Those silver gates of Yith to sea-beds dry.

On rounded turrets rising through the visne

Of cloud-veiled aeons that the Old Ones knew:

On tablets deeply worn and fingered clean

By tentacles that dreamers seldom view;

In space-hung Yith, on clammy walls obscene

That writhe and crumble and are built anew;

There is a figure carved; but God! those eyes,

That sway on fungoid stems at leaden skies!

Around the place of ancient, waiting blight;

On walls of sheerest opal rearing high,

That move as planets beckon in the night

To faded realms where nothing sane can lie;

A deathless guard tramps by in feeble light,

Emitting to the stars a sobbing cry.

But on that path where footsteps should have led

There rolled an eyeless, huge and bloated head.