In the figures of Wallenberg and Berthold, Maturin’s unrestrained imagination within the field of the horrible carried him to a length to which the failure of the play has been ascribed. Talfourd,[112] while admitting that it contains ‘passages of a soft and mournful beauty, breathing a tender air of romance,’ says, with reference to these two personages: ‘In “Fredolfo,” the author, as though he had resolved to sting the public into a sense of his power, crowded together characters of such matchless depravity, sentiments of such demoniac cast, and events of such gratuitous horror, that the moral taste of the audience, injured as it had been by the success of similar works, felt the insult, and rose up indignantly against it.’ The same opinion has been expressed by a later critic:[113] ‘The wickedness of Berthold the dwarf and Wallenberg surpasses all bounds of reason. Neither is a human being at all.’ Less depravity, no doubt, would be sufficient, yet the question is not so much of the amount as of an unskilful display of it; in the first two acts neither character is unnatural, nor are they much worse than many famous villains in literature. Wallenberg appears as a subtly drawn tyrant of unbridled passions, accustomed blindly to follow all his freaks; his attachment to Urilda is hardly more than a passing caprice. His proposal for her hand is characteristically worded:
Fredolfo, hear me!—Friend, or foe, I reck not—
Spite of the pride that burns upon my cheek.
Spite of the blood, whose cold recoiling drops
Refuse to flow ere they would mix with thine;
Spite of our nations, natures, hearts averse,
Of all that makes me shudder while I sue,—
I claim thy daughter’s hand!
A love like this is never very far from hatred, and, when disappointed, it is naturally turned into a furious thirst for revenge which spares neither its object nor its cherisher:
I could rend out the veins that throb for her;—