Returning late in the evening, it was then after a slight refreshment that his literary task commenced, and I have remained with him repeatedly, looking over some of his loose manuscripts, till three in the morning, while he was composing his wild romance of “Melmoth.” Moderate, and indeed abstemious in his appetites, human nature, and the over-busy and worked intellect, required support and stimulus, and brandy-and-water supplied to him the excitement that opium yields to others; but it had no intoxicating effect on him: its action was, if possible, more strange, and indeed terrible to witness. His mind travelling in the dark regions of romance, seemed altogether to have deserted the body, and left behind a mere physical organism, his long pale face acquired the appearance of a cast taken from the face of a dead body; and his large prominent eyes took a glassy look; so that when, at that witching hour, he suddenly, without speaking, raised himself, and extended a thin and bony hand, to grasp the silver branch with which he lighted me down stairs, I have often started, and gazed on him as a spectral illusion of his own creation.
Melmoth the Wanderer appeared in autumn 1820 and was, by permission, inscribed to the ‘most noble the Marchioness of Abercorn.’ A preface[121] explains the genesis of the book:
The hint of this Romance (or tale) was taken from a passage in one of my Sermons, which (as it is to be presumed very few have read) I shall here take the liberty to quote. The passage is this.
“At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord, disobeyed His will, and disregarded His word—is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his salvation? No, there is not one—not such a fool on earth, were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!”
This passage suggested the idea of “Melmoth the Wanderer.” The Reader will find that idea developed in the following pages, with what power or success he is to decide.
The preface ends with one of those apologies of an artist for creating works of art, which Maturin thought proper to make every now and then, but which do not strike one as being over-sincere:
I cannot again appear before the public in so unseemly a character as that of a writer of romances, without regretting the necessity that compels me to it. Did my profession furnish me with the means of subsistence, I should hold myself culpable indeed in having recourse to any other, but—am I allowed the choice?
The preface, as will be seen, really does not give more than a ‘hint,’ either of the story or of its hero. It is not the enemy himself who is made to traverse mankind with the gloomy offer; Melmoth the Wanderer is a poor mortal who has, driven by an insatiable thirst for forbidden knowledge, bartered the hope of his own salvation for certain privileges not allotted to common man. Among these is the quenching of his soul’s thirst, a life prolonged by 150 years and the ability of rapidly performing great distances and appearing where he pleases, unhindered by lock or bolt. His contract with the evil one can be cancelled only if he finds another mortal who is willing to change destinies with him. Such mortal it soon becomes Melmoth’s sole wish to encounter. His curiosity is perfectly satisfied; his partly superhuman existence grows an intolerable burden to him, and he looks with terror and anxiety towards the expiration of his term, when he will be lost for all eternity. The greater part of his prolonged existence is occupied in tracing out and visiting human beings in utmost misery and wretchedness, and tempting them to buy their temporal salvation at the cost of their eternal, but none, ‘to gain the world, will lose his own soul,’ and when the term does expire, Satan inexorably claims his due.
Melmoth, as we are told towards the end of the story by a clergyman who has known him in his youth, is originally an Irishman of good family, of ‘various erudition, profound intellect, and intense appetency for information.’ About the year 1650 he travels in Poland and there becomes ‘irrevocably attached to the study of that art which is held in just abomination by all who name the name of Christ.’ After some years the clergyman, then residing in Germany, is summoned to a dying friend who turns out to be Melmoth. He confesses that he has—without explaining how—committed ‘the great angelic sin,’ and has but one thing to ask of his friend: ‘I sent for you to exact your solemn promise that you will conceal from every human being the fact of my death—let no man know that I died, or when, or where.’ At an hour, predicted by Melmoth with great exactitude, his strength begins to fail, and he becomes perfectly cold, like a corpse. The friend then leaves him, but afterwards, while travelling on the Continent, he is continually haunted by rumours of Melmoth being still alive. It is, accordingly, after his apparent death that Melmoth has been re-animated into his new, weird existence, and that his hopeless wanderings commence.