The hour is approaching—a few moments more, and the castle bell will toll. The hour that I have longed for, I almost begin now to wish more distant. I almost dread to hear the steps of Michelo.... Hark! the bell tolls—the old turret seems to rock its echo; and the silence that succeeds, how deep, how stilly!—would I could hear an owl scream across me! Ha! ’twas the lightning that gleamed across me. I will go to the casement; the roar of the elements will be welcome at such a moment as this.... The night is dark and unruly—the wind bursts in strong and fitful blasts against the casement. The clouds are hurried along in scattering masses. There is a murmur from the forests below, that in a lighter hour I could trust fancy to listen to; but, in my present mood, I dare not follow her wanderings. Would my old guide were come! I feel that any state of fear is supportable, accompanied by the sight or sound of a human being.... Was that shriek fancy?—again, again—impossible! Hark! there is a tumult in the castle—lights and voices beneath the turret.... What is it they tell me?
Every night some new discovery is made, ingeniously calculated to increase his curiosity, and the marvellous occurrences become more and more startling, until the climax is reached in the night-scene where Orazio suddenly drags the old servant after him into the vault, and there addresses him ‘in the hollow voice of death.’ The mind of his victim being thus sufficiently prepared for his purpose, Orazio rouses the count, and Annibal is conveyed to his lonely prison. The tale which Orazio here unfolds to him is one of the boldest flights of ‘terrific’ imagination: a description of the abode of unblessed spirits, where he has been condemned to linger before entering the ancient body kept unconsumed amid magical flames—in which shape his doom then is involved into Annibal’s. A comparison of this fantasia to the mummery by which Ippolito is informed of his fate is of interest as a proof of the injustice Maturin did to his own talents in applying them to the Radcliffe style of composition. With Ippolito the means resorted to are as follows. Orazio takes into his service a number of professional impostors who, in the subterranean vaults into which Ippolito is conducted, act the part of beings of another world. Masks, modelled in wax, are procured of Ippolito and the count, so that, in the figure which suggests to him the idea of a murderer, Ippolito recognizes himself. Then he is induced to plunge his poniard into the breast of another waxen figure whose face, when disclosed, reveals the features of his father. Now all this, when subsequently explained, appears extremely cheap; but even the account of the performance itself has none of the unearthly power of the tale told to Annibal. That tale is the only passage in the book in which Maturin gives rein to his imagination and which has the enduring merit of being subjected to no trivial explanation, certain to destroy every impression. The reader is also much more disposed to accept as a fact that Annibal believes what is only told to him, than that Ippolito is convinced of what he is made actually to experience. The plot laid at Muralto is, moreover, interspersed with scenes powerful in effect, relating to the state of the conscience-stricken count Montorio. That he has committed some formidable offence is clear from the very first, though it is, of course, merely mentioned allusively. The characters of the count and his wife—who are never haunted but by their own thoughts—are those most vividly depicted. Montorio is totally broken down by fear and repentance, and clings anxiously to the offices of religion; his nights are passed in raving under the pressure of hideous dreams, represented with great zest and spirit. The countess, on the other hand, is as strong as he is weak, and outwardly as calm and proud as he is restless and dejected. Without uttering a complaint she undergoes a penance of her own invention, wearing a sharp iron belt around her waist. This contrast between her self-restraint and his cowardly despair is, upon the whole, skilfully effected. Otherwise characterization, in Montorio, yields place to adventure, for under the exceptional circumstances in which the principal personages find themselves, they act by necessity rather than by choice. Yet the difference said to exist between Ippolito and Annibal also clearly asserts itself when their wanderings begin. Annibal, who has the deeper mind of the two, is fully persuaded that his persecutor is a preternatural being; and thus, though he is apparently more composed, his calmness is more dangerous than the impetuosity of Ippolito, and he is far nearer to surrendering himself. Ippolito does not debate whether the powers by which he is beset be human or superhuman; following his first impulse he goes on to treat them with ‘sallies of rage and convulsions of resistance.’ From this difference in their characters, by which their subsequent adventures are fixed, it follows that those of Annibal are, even henceforth, more satisfactory from an artistic point of view. His encounters with Orazio are simple and natural, there being no further need of any extraordinary tricks for his bewilderment. The draught emptied by the confessor at Muralto he firmly believes to be poison, while it is only a strong opiate, from the effects of which Orazio easily recovers. Consequently it is sufficient for Annibal to see Orazio glide past him in the garden of the convent, in order to disperse the last shadow of doubt as to his superhuman character; and when he again falls into the hands of Orazio after being separated from Ildefonsa, he could not reasonably be expected to offer any further resistance. Ippolito, on the other hand, before his strength is exhausted, continues to be hurried through subterranean passages without end and marvellous experiences defying all natural explanation of any kind.
The productions of the Gothic Romance, owing to its limited range and peculiar character, naturally present obvious similarities among themselves. The fundamental principle of them all is an appeal to the same source of emotion;—from their very appellation we may deduce a common background to most of them, and the motifs with which the ‘terrific’ imagination loves to occupy itself are always less remarkable for variety than for suitability to imitation, according to the special genius of each successive writer. In Montorio there is as ample proof of Maturin’s indebtedness to his predecessors within the school of terror, as of his unquestionable originality. The idea of a supernatural imposture of intricate apparatus and vast dimensions Maturin might have received from Der Geisterseher (1789) of Schiller, of which a translation was much read and relished at that time in England. In Schiller’s story a mysterious Armenian possesses the same surprising familiarity with other people’s concerns, and the same exaggerated facility of appearing when and where he chooses, as Orazio. There is also a Sicilian necromancer, a ghost-seer by profession, who gives a minute description of the tricks he and his compeers are in the habit of practising while trading upon people’s credulity, which affords a parallel to the performances of the hirelings employed by Orazio at Naples. Complications like these are, at all events, foreign to the novels of Mrs Radcliffe, of which especially The Italian (1797) is often called to mind by Montorio. In this romance the principal plotter and schemer is a monk called Schedoni, and he, as regards external appearance at least, is distinctly a precursor of Orazio, alias father Schemoli.[35] They have the same large, gaunt figure, hollow voice and unearthly appearance in general, and both enjoy a reputation of uncommon sanctity, very little deserved by either. However, Schedoni has, in his former life, been a villain of an ordinary kind, who possesses none of the grandeur of spirit by which Orazio is distinguished, nor are his machinations pursued on a scale at all comparable to that invented by Maturin’s hero. The simpler adventures of Annibal, on the other hand, are typically Radcliffeian: in The Italian, too, mysterious footsteps allure inquisitive young men to dangerous places, ghastly voices disturb the stillness of ruinous chapels, and nocturnal flights are undertaken through sombre forests. Yet this is not the only point of contact between the two romances. A general characteristic shared by Gothic stories with very few exceptions, was the placing of the scene in the Mediterranean countries, in this case in the South of Italy. Besides the romantic charm those regions always suggest to a northern imagination, they possessed the special merit of admitting the introduction of the Inquisition with all its horrors, and affording an opportunity of penetrating the walls of a convent. To Maturin, with his strong anti-catholic tendencies, the theme of ecclesiastical cruelty was doubly welcome, and in his treatment of the subject there is always a tone of genuine indignation, distinct from all aims of a literary character. The absolute power of the Holy Office and the abuses of monastical authority were, in a forcible manner, illustrated already in Lewis’s Monk, nor were these attractions withstood by Mrs Radcliffe. The passages in The Italian, relative to the prison of the Inquisition at Rome, are among the greatest triumphs of her method of arousing the reader’s anxiety only to be soothed again. The hero is several times brought to the utmost point of being submitted to torture; at one time he is already fastened to the rack, but the procedure is always suspended. The examinations of other less fortunate prisoners are suggested only by feeble groans and expressive allusions, still by these scanty means a most gruesome atmosphere is created. Maturin, in Montorio, follows The Italian in so far as bodily torture is not resorted to—it would, indeed, be very much out of place, the plan of Orazio tending to subdue Ippolito by working upon his mental faculties. Maturin even, contrary to Mrs Radcliffe, represents the chief inquisitor as a man of some humanity; but at the same time he takes care to give a powerful picture of the demoralizing influence a superstitious religion exercises upon the people. The report of Ippolito’s heretical inclinations spreads like wild-fire, and wherever he arrives he is viewed with hatred and abhorrence. In vain he approaches man or woman; all refuse to listen to his protestations, to which the sole answers are curses and maledictions. Here, evidently, a literary impulse outside the actual school of terror asserts itself. Ippolito’s situation is as desperate and as passionately depicted as Caleb’s in Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794), when he is accused of robbery by Falkland and appearances are strongly against him; he is regarded as the ‘opprobrium of the human species’ and is allowed no opportunity to defend himself, nobody deigning to lend an ear to his demonstrations. Caleb and Ippolito are both, at last, driven to seek the mercy of an old man of mild and venerable aspect, and both, alike, are sadly disappointed. In Godwin the old man calls the unfortunate youth ‘a monster with whom the earth groans,’ and deplores that he has ever seen him or uttered a single word to him; in Maturin he laments at having lived too long being thus forced to behold Ippolito, and declares that his grey hairs are defiled by the appeal Ippolito makes to them. This pathetic description of the involuntary isolation of a man among his fellow-beings, this heart-rending agony of his upon seeing the ties broken that unite him to his species, is born of the spirit of a time in which feeling was raised to the seat of honour. A strong sense of loneliness, of some sort or other, is an essential feature of the romantic literature of the period, and will often be seen to recur in Maturin’s writings. Here, under the influence of Godwin, it is expressed in its most painful aspect. Caleb Williams is a protest against the ‘despotism by which man becomes the destroyer of man;’ while Godwin directs his attacks against wrongs in the existing state of social institutions, Maturin traces the source of evil in misapplied religious ideas. The result, however, is the same, and Caleb might well have uttered the words in which Ippolito sums up the state he is reduced to:
Then I am outlawed of nature. I am divested of the rights of being. Every ear is deaf, and every heart is iron to me. Wherever I tread the sole of my foot dries the streams of humanity.—
An incident, in Montorio, of monastic oppression, is represented by the episode of Ildefonsa. A young lady held in a convent against her will was a special favourite with the novelists of terror; the episode in question is, no doubt, suggested by the history of Agnes de Medina in The Monk. For the liberation of Agnes, also, an appeal is made to high ecclesiastical authorities, whereupon the tyrannical abbess compels her to swallow an opiate which plunges her into a death-like state, arranges a mock funeral and has Agnes conveyed to the hideous dungeons of the convent. In The Italian, too, the heroine is placed in a convent where she feels but ill at ease under the government of an unkind prioress; however, she succeeds in escaping with her lover. Mention is also made of a stone chamber ‘within the deepest recesses of the convent’ where disobedient nuns have sometimes been confined—but thither the gentle authoress forbears to conduct her readers.
Yet another episode in Montorio is inspired by ‘the powerful and wicked romance of the Monk,’ which was, in Maturin’s opinion,[36] ‘the most extraordinary production’ of the time of its appearance. It has been told that Annibal’s servant, Filippo, incurs the displeasure of the count for assisting at the investigations of his master, and is sent away from Muralto. His guide conducts him into a large house where they are expected by a party of bandits. Filippo is ushered into a room on the upper floor and there finds out that he is to be despatched during the night, yet effects a hair-breadth escape by a passage below the apartment. The episode, though of considerable length, is completely detached from the main plot and introduced solely for the sake of delineating Filippo’s sensations when threatened with horrible and immediate death. Lewis relates, with the same laudable purpose, how Don Raymond and some other travellers pass a night at the house of a man who turns out to be the leader of a gang of robbers, and how they, too, succeed in eluding the danger. Differently as the adventures are made up, still one conspicuous detail in Montorio comes very near direct plagiarism. In the first as well as in the second story the victim is made aware of his danger by the hostess of the house, who, though of a surly aspect, appears to disapprove of the impending proceedings. The robber’s wife, in a whisper, warns Don Raymond to look at the sheets of his bed, which are stained with blood; Filippo is called by the hag who manages the household of the bandits, to examine a particular corner of his room which he, also, finds to be blood-stained. Otherwise the episode in Montorio is certainly much more exciting than the one in The Monk.
Aside from these instances of immediate influence from some of the most admired productions of the Gothic Romance, Montorio exhibits many minor traits characteristic of the school in general. Among these is the committing, either consciously or unconsciously, of great wrongs against near relations. The happiness of Orazio is destroyed by his brother, and Orazio himself unwittingly ruins the life of his sons. Of secondary characters, both attendants of Annibal at Muralto are very typical of a genuine Gothic story: the old and decrepit domestic who, in a provokingly imperfect way, attempts to satisfy the curiosity of the hero, and the young and ready-witted fellow, who stoutly follows him in his breakneck adventures. Yet in one vital point Montorio occupies an almost exceptional place within the Gothic Romance, namely, with regard to the highly tragical issue of all its incidents. In spite of its blood-curdling qualities, the novel of terror by no means excludes a happy end for the hero and the heroine; the reader may be made to wander about in charnel-houses for ever so long, but finally he is led to a nuptial chamber as infallibly as in other stories that have boasted of a wide and merited popularity. This rule was, rashly enough, disregarded by Maturin; when Helene Richter[37] says that ‘alle Schauerromane haben ein glückliches Ende, und würde es auch an den Haaren herbeigezogen,’ she evidently forgets Montorio. Maturin adhered faithfully to the programme he had fixed for his romance—to found it upon the passion of the supernatural fear alone, not troubling himself about the traditional compensation for the horrors. There is, in fact, no heroine in the book; it was not without cause that Montorio, as Maturin states in the preface to his next work, was pronounced to be ‘deficient in female interest.’ Ildefonsa is there to fill but a short episode, and is, moreover, discovered to be Annibal’s sister. As a type she is modelled according to the innocent and persecuted young ladies in Mrs Radcliffe’s stories, being in no wise remarkable among the female characters Maturin has depicted. Still less likely is Rosolia to satisfy the demands for a heroine. Matters never develop to an understanding between her and Ippolito; her sex is not even revealed before it would be too late to invent a happy solution. Rosolia is introduced into the story, in the development of which she takes no part, merely in order to intersperse it with her lyrical effusions. A character like this is not uncommon in the Gothic Romance. It may be mentioned that Don Raymond, in The Monk, also has a page who composes ballads which he, like Rosolia, subjects to the benevolent judgment of his master. The diary Rosolia presents to Ippolito is rather unsubstantial in matter, but some of the prose passages are exquisitely graceful and truly Maturineian in style.—
There is, however, within the compass of Montorio, one complete and consummate story where female interest is also attended to. Orazio’s account of his early misfortunes—immediately preceding the disheartening explanation of the details of his revenge—admittedly contains the best parts of the book.[38] The progress of the violent action is admirably concentrated, and the rapidity and poignancy of the style is powerfully indicative of the anguish felt by the writer. The character of Orazio, before he becomes the superhuman being known as father Schemoli, is illustrated with a few vigorous strokes. The motif itself—a tragedy ensuing from the groundless suspicions of a jealous husband—is not original. Mangan[39] points out that the idea had been utilized by Edward Young in The Revenge (1721), though, he adds, ‘Maturin has contrived to invest it with a new and overpowering interest.’ In Young’s tragedy the revenge is taken by a Moor called Zanga upon his master, a distinguished Spaniard, who has wronged him. Zanga helps him first to marry the lady he loves, and then ingeniously awakens his jealousy by means of forged letters and pictures deposited in suitable places. The lady, upon finding herself suspected, commits suicide, and her husband, when undeceived, follows her example. The plot of Orazio’s narrative certainly bears similarity to The Revenge, and it is not impossible that Maturin may have received an impulse from Young, although it seems somewhat far-fetched to refer to this comparatively little known play, as long as Othello remains the great prototype of a tragedy of his kind. In this respect, at least, Maturin shows originality, that he allows Orazio to remain alive and only after a long interval be informed of his fatal mistake. Fantastic as is Orazio’s situation on the islet, it required unusual imaginative power to treat it so as to render it credible; however, Maturin was equal to the task. Here are to be found the most splendid proofs of his prose-style—compared to which the metrical pieces scattered through the work are of very great inferiority—showing to what degree of excellence it was capable of rising even at that early period. It is most pathetically described how the innocent victims of Orazio’s rashness are never out of his mind—how they seem to threaten him when nightly tempests are roaring around him and how, at moments of fortuitous tranquillity, he endeavours to imagine them in a state of glory:
The dreams of the night are easily dissolved, and strange shapes are sometimes seen to shimmer through the twilight of a cavern; but I have met them at noon on the bare sunny shore. I have seen them on the distant wave when its bed was smooth and bright as jasper; the curtained mist that hung on mole and breaker, and mingled with the sheeted spanglings of the surf floated back from them, did not throw a fringe of its shadowy mantling on their forms. I could not be deceived. Sometimes the light was glorious beyond imagination. Towards sunset I would sometimes see a small white cloud, and watch its approach; it would fix on a point of the rock that rose beside my cave; as twilight thickened it would unfold, its centre disclosing a floating throne of pearl, and its skirts expanding into wings of iris and aurelia that upbore it. By moonlight the pomp grew richer, and the vision became exceeding glorious. Myriads of lucent shapes were visible in that unclouded shower of light which fell from the moon on the summit of the rock; myriads swam on its opal waves, wafted in a fine web of filmy radiancy, canopied with a lily’s cup, and inebriate with liquid light. Among them sat the shadows of the lovers, sparkling with spheral light, and throned in the majesty of vision, but pale with the traces of mortality. There sat the lovers in sad and shadowy state together; so greatly unfortunate, so fatal, passing fond. Sometimes when stretched on my cold, lone bed, I have heard her voice warbling on the wind touches of sweet, sad music, such as I have heard her sing when she thought herself alone and unheard. I have risen and followed it, and heard it floating on the waters; I listened, and would have given worlds to weep. On a sudden the sounds would change to the most mournful and wailing cries, and Erminia, pale and convulsed as I saw her last, would pass before me, pointing to a gory shape that the waves would throw at my feet. Then they would plunge together into the waters, and where far off the moon shed a wan and cloudy light on the mid wave, I would see their visages rise dim and sad, and hear their cry die along the waste of waters.—