The principal rôles of Fredolfo were in the best hands at Covent Garden: Fredolfo was played by Young, Adelmar by Charles Kemble, Berthold by Yates, Wallenberg by Macready and Urilda by Miss O’Neill. Maturin expected success in a kind of hopeful anxiety. His letter to Watts of April 17, alluded to above, displays his usual overflowing gratitude to those who took an interest in his productions, and his inclination to speak, on such occasions, slightingly of them himself:
“My inestimable friend,” he begins, “I never deplored my want of l’eloquence de billet before; but if I possessed all the eloquence I do not possess, it must fail under the task of expressing my obligations to you. How much do I not owe you, and how much am I not proud to owe you! I have implicitly followed your advice and written to Young. Your suggestions as to curtailment I adopt unhesitatingly; reject and retain what you like. Present, I beg you, my best acknowledgments to Mr. Young for his friendly zeal for a part but little worthy of his great abilities; and in your kindness, apologise to Mr. Charles Kemble, Mr. Macready, and the other gentlemen, for my not having had the pleasure of witnessing their talents, and thus of qualifying myself for writing parts more worthy of their acceptance than the wild and crude sketches of Adelmar and Wallenberg.”
The fact was, however, that only Yates appeared to be satisfied with his rôle. The failure of the play was, as Watts proceeds to say,[115] due to this indisposition of the principal actors, to the blunders of the minor ones, and, in the public opinion, to the last outburst of the unchivalrousness of Wallenberg:
Miss O’Neill was cast for the principal part, but displayed little interest in it, and did not hesitate, some three weeks before the play was produced, to prophesy its failure. — — — The immediate cause of its damnation was the exquisitely ridiculous manner in which one of the inferior actors advanced upon the stage, with the deliberation of an undertaker, and apprised the audience, with the most stoical calmness, that his master was at that moment perishing in a snowstorm on the mountains. The stolidity of this gentleman ... and the sedateness with which he delivered himself of the following harrowing ejaculation—
“My Lord! my Lord! the storm! He perishes!”
precipitated the audience into a fit of merriment from which it was found impossible to recover them, until a gallant young officer, having delivered up his sword to his more successful antagonist, is slaughtered with it on the spot. This thoroughly un-English incident so revolted the audience as to convert their merriment into indignation, and to not another word would they listen. I had presented to Maturin’s notice the danger of this situation; but neither Harris, the manager, nor Macready, who took the part of the assassin, appeared to think much of the objection. With the exception of Yates, who made an extremely effective part of Berthold, and Macready, always conscientious and thorough, little effort was made for the play, and its failure was irremediable.
The merriment was unfortunately roused as early as in the first act, and the many impressive scenes of the introduction passed by unheeded. As to the offending mode of Adelmar’s death, it takes place in the very end, after which there is not much more to listen to, nor is it probable that it would have been sufficient to damn the play, if the whole had been favourably received. Now, however, Fredolfo was silently dropped, without even any critiques being visible; Maturin’s career as a dramatist was practically at an end. Watts dismisses his melancholy story with the remark that—‘Maturin, the most impulsive and eccentric of Irishmen—and that is saying a great deal—bore his disappointment with some philosophy.’
A positive result of this philosophy was that Maturin returned to novel-writing and produced Melmoth the Wanderer, his most famous romance. Before coming to that, however, a few other things remain to be noted. About the same time as Fredolfo was acted, there appeared[116] some unpublished scenes from Manuel. In a letter to Henry Colburn, dated March 15, Maturin says of the extracts:—‘Detached from the tragedy they seem to me very feeble and I would advice you to consult a literary friend before you venture to insert them in your Magazine—should you publish them pray let it be in your poetical department, they are not of importance enough to appear in any other.’—The scenes treat of the dread of De Zelos lest his crime should be discovered, and of Manuel in the castle where he is banished; they are indeed of little importance, rising in no way above the average level of this the feeblest of Maturin’s poetical productions.—In the course of 1819 Maturin published, further, a collection of Sermons. Popular as he is said to have been as a preacher, the volume did not prove a success; it was marked by the disadvantages of Maturin’s double vocation. ‘His sermons, too,’ says his biographer,[117] ‘betrayed the struggles of a poetical mind endeavouring to adapt itself to the prevailing austerity of a particular class of religionists: and, between the party which rejected his book because it was not evangelical, and those who would not read it because it was not a romance, it was his fate to please neither, and fail.’ A benevolent critic in a contemporary[118] points out a certain want of any ‘order of arrangement’ and adds that ‘though these Sermons, if well delivered, must have had great effect from the pulpit, the impression, at the same time, could scarcely be anything else than transient.’
That Melmoth the Wanderer is nowadays considered the work by that which its author stands or falls,[119] sufficiently explains why Maturin is only mentioned in connection with the school of terror. The ‘terrific’ elements in Melmoth are, it is true, strong enough to render it the greatest novel of that school in the English language. All the same, it is much too complex to be confined within the limits of one single school, while its general purport connects it with some of the greatest works of European literature in its period. As for the production of Melmoth, that was carried on under circumstances distressing and even dismal; Maturin’s short period of opulence had passed for ever, and it was only the silent hours of night he was able to devote to his literary labours. His mode of composing, at that time, has been impressively described by a friend:[120]