The groan, the burst, the fiery flash is o’er,
Down pours the dense and darkening lava-tide,
Arresting life and stilling all beneath it.
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:
High glory lost he recked not what was saved—
With desperate men in desperate ways he dealt—
A change came o’er his nature and his heart
Till she that bore him had recoiled from him,
Nor know the alien visage of her child.
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: