It is actually to be read in the play of Manuel, and (still more trying to the faith of our posterity!) it has actually been proved to be there, by representation on the stage, that a murderer by proxy gives that proxy a dagger, with the name (not of the maker, but) of De Zelos,—with his own name, marked on it!!!—Parson Adams forgetting his sermons is nothing to this; no, nor his prototype, who walked unconsciously into the enemy’s camp.
The absent-mindedness of De Zelos is referred to in the scene where Ximena tells her brother that she has seen the Moor:
An oath had seal’d his lips—he dar’d not speak it,
But to my hands he gave the very dagger
The villain, in unguarded haste, had giv’n him
To do the deed of blood—His name is on it!
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.