Melmoth the Wanderer has found many admirers. It fascinated Rossetti,[60] Thackeray[61] and Miss Mitford.[62] It was praised by Balzac, who wrote a satirical sequel—Melmoth Reconcilié à L'Eglise (1835), and by Baudelaire, and exercised a considerable influence on French literature.[63] It consists of a series of tales, strung together in a complicated fashion. In each tale the Wanderer, who has bartered his soul in return for prolonged life, may, if he can, persuade someone to take the bargain off his hands.[64] He visits those who are plunged in despair. His approach is heralded by strange music, and his eyes have a preternatural lustre that terrifies his victims. No one will agree to his "incommunicable condition."
The bird's-eye view of an Edinburgh Reviewer who described Melmoth as "the sacrifice of Genius in the Temple of False Taste," will give some idea of the bewildering variety of its contents:
"His hero is a modern Faustus, who has bartered his soul with the powers of darkness for protracted life and unlimited worldly enjoyment; his heroine, a species of insular goddess, a virgin Calypso of the Indian Ocean, who, amid flowers and foliage, lives upon figs and tamarinds, associates with peacocks and monkeys, is worshipped by the occasional visitants of her island, finds her way into Spain where she is married to the aforesaid hero by the hand of a dead hermit, the ghost of a murdered domestic being the witness of her nuptials; and finally dies in a dungeon of the Inquisition at Madrid. To complete this phantasmagoric exhibition, we are presented with sybils and misers, parricides, maniacs in abundance, monks with scourges pursuing a naked youth streaming with blood; subterranean Jews surrounded by the skeletons of their wives and children; lovers blasted by lightning, Irish hags, Spanish grandees, shipwrecks, caverns, Donna Claras and Donna Isidoras—all exposed to each other in violent and glaring contrast and all their adventures narrated with the same undeviating display of turgid, vehement, and painfully elaborated language."[65]
This breathless sentence gives some conception of the delirious imagery of Maturin's romance, but the book is worthy of a more respectful, unhurried survey. Melmoth shows a distinct advance on Montorio in constructive power. Each separate story is perfectly clear and easy to follow, in spite of the elaborate interlacing. The romance opens with the death of a miser in a desolate Irish farmstead, with harpies clustering at his bedside. His nephew and heir, John Melmoth, is adjured to destroy a certain manuscript and a portrait of an ancestor with eyes "such as one feels they wish they had never seen and feels they can never forget." Alone at midnight, John Melmoth reads the manuscript, which is reputed to have been written by Stanton, an English traveller in Spain, about 1676. The document relates a startling story of a mysterious Englishman who appears at a Spanish wedding with disastrous consequences, and reappears before Stanton in a madhouse offering release on dreadful conditions. After reading it, John Melmoth decides to burn the family portrait. He is visited by a sinister form, who proves that he is no figment of the imagination by leaving black and blue marks on his relative's wrist. The next night a ship is wrecked in a storm. The Wanderer appears, and mocks the victims with fiendish mirth. The sole survivor, Don Alonzo Monçada, unfolds his story to John Melmoth. The son of a great duke, he has been forced to become a monk to save his mother's honour. He dwells with the excruciating detail in which Maturin is inclined to revel, on the horrors of Spanish monasteries. Escaping through a subterranean passage, he is guided by a parricide, who incidentally tells him a loathsome story of two immured lovers. His plan of flight is foiled, and he is borne off to the dungeons of the Inquisition. Here the Wanderer, who has a miraculous power to enter where he will, offers, on the ineffable condition, to procure his freedom. Monçada repudiates the temptation, effects his own escape during a great fire, and catches sight of the stranger on the summit of a burning building. He takes refuge with a Jew, but, to evade the vigilance of the Inquisitors, disappears suddenly down an underground passage, where he finds Adonijah, another Jew, who obligingly employs him as an amanuensis, and sets him to copy a manuscript. This gives Maturin the opportunity, for which he has been waiting, to introduce his "Tale of the Indian." The story of Immalee, who is visited on her desert island by the Wanderer in the guise of a lover as well as a tempter, forms the most memorable part of Melmoth. In the other stories the stranger has been a taciturn creature, relying on the lustre of his eyes rather than on his powers of eloquence to win over his victims. To Immalee he pours forth floods of rhetoric on the sins and follies of mankind. Had she not been one of Rousseau's children of nature, and so innocent alike of a knowledge of Shakespeare and of the fault of impatience, she would surely have exclaimed: "If thou hast news, I prithee deliver them like a man of this world." When Immalee is transported to Spain and reassumes her baptismal name of Isidora, Melmoth follows her and their conversations are continued at dead of night through the lattice. Here they discourse on the real nature of love. At length the gloomy lover persuades Isidora to marry him. Their midnight nuptials take place against a weird background. By a narrow, precipitous path they approach the ruined chapel, and are united by a hand "as cold as that of death." Meanwhile, Don Francisco, Isidora's father, on his way home, spends the night at an inn, where a stranger insists on telling him "The Tale of Guzman." In this tale the tempter visits a father whose family is starving, but who resists the lure of wealth. Maturin portrays with extraordinary power the deterioration in the character of an old man Walberg, through the effects of poverty. At the close of the narration Don Francisco falls into a deep slumber, but is sternly awakened by a stranger with an awful eye, who insists on becoming his fellow traveller, and on telling, in defiance of protests, yet another story. The prologue to the Lover's Tale is almost Chaucerian in its humour:
"It was with the utmost effort of his mixed politeness and fear that he prepared himself to listen to the tale, which the stranger had frequently amid their miscellaneous conversation, alluded to, and showed an evident anxiety to relate. These allusions were attended with unpleasant reminiscences to the hearer—but he saw that it was to be, and armed himself as best he might with courage to hear. 'I would not intrude on you, Senhor,' says the stranger, 'with a narrative in which you can feel but little interest, were I not conscious that its narration may operate as a warning, the most awful, salutary and efficacious to yourself.'"
At this veiled hint Don Francisco discharges a volley of oaths, but he is silenced completely by the smile of the stranger—"that spoke bitterer and darker things than the fiercest frown that ever wrinkled the features of man." After this he cannot choose but hear, and the stranger seizes his opportunity to begin an uncommonly dull story, connected with a Shropshire family and intermingled with historical events. In this tale the Wanderer appears to a girl whose lover has lost his reason, and offers to restore him if she will accept his conditions. Once more the tempter is foiled. The story meanders so sluggishly that our sympathies are with Don Francisco, and we cannot help wishing that he had adopted more drastic measures to quieten the insistent stranger. At the conclusion Francisco mutters indignantly:
"It is inconceivable to me how this person forces himself on my company, harasses me with tales that have no more application to me than the legend of the Cid, and may be as apocryphal as the ballad of Roncesvalles—"
but yet the stranger has not finished. He proceeds to tell him a tale in which he will feel a peculiar interest, that of Isidora, his own daughter, and finally urges him to hasten to her rescue. Don Francisco wanders by easy stages to Madrid, and, on his arrival, marries Isidora against her will to Montilla. Melmoth, according to promise, appears at the wedding. The bridegroom is slain. Isidora, with Melmoth's child, ends her days in the dungeons of the Inquisition, murmuring: "Paradise! will he be there?" So far as one may judge from the close of the story, it seems not.
Monçada and John Melmoth, whom we left, at the beginning of the romance, in Ireland, are revisited by the Wanderer, whose time on earth has at last run out. He confesses his failure: "I have traversed the world in the search, and no one to gain that world, would lose his own soul." His words remind us of the text of the sermon which suggested to Maturin the idea of the romance. Like the companions of Dr. Faustus, Melmoth and Monçada hear terrible sounds from the room of the Wanderer in the last throes of agony. The next morning the room is empty; but, following a track to the sea-cliffs, they see, on a crag beneath, the kerchief the Wanderer had worn about his neck. "Melmoth and Monçada exchanged looks of silent and unutterable horror, and returned slowly home."
This extraordinary romance, like Montorio, clearly owes much to the novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, and "Monk" Lewis. Immalee, as her name implies, is but a glorified Emily with a loxia on her shoulder instead of a lute in her hand. The monastic horrors are obviously a heritage from The Monk. The Rosicrucian legend, as handled in St. Leon, may have offered hints to Maturin, whose treatment is, however, far more imaginative and impressive than that of Godwin. The resemblance to the legend of the Wandering Jew need not be laboured. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and the first part of Goethe's Faust left their impression on the story. The closing scenes inevitably remind us of the last act of Marlowe's tragedy. But, when all these debts are acknowledged they do but serve to enhance the success of Maturin, who out of these varied strands could weave so original a romance. Melmoth is not an ingenious patchwork of previous stories. It is the outpouring of a morbid imagination that has long brooded on the fearful and the terrific. Imbued with the grandeur and solemnity of his theme, Maturin endeavours to write in dignified, stately language. There are frequent lapses into bombast, but occasionally his rhetoric is splendidly effective: