The idea of melting Faust and Mephistopheles into one person was strikingly original, and the figure of Melmoth keeps, in the fiction of the time, a place distinctly its own, even if a great many minor traits, relative both to its human and its superhuman character, can be traced to literary sources more or less obvious. There is Milton’s Satan,[122] grand and awful in his fallen state; there is the legend of the Wandering Jew,[123] who restlessly travels from land to land, in hope of eventually being delivered of his curse—as does his counterpart at sea, the Flying Dutchman; there is the Radcliffe hero, tormented by secret crimes and mysteriously appearing and disappearing, and his successor the Byronic hero with his large and gloomy eyes and with his sardonic yet strangely fascinating smile; and finally the Rosicrucians,[124] so common in the imaginative tales of the time: all these can, in glimpses, be recognized in the Wanderer. From some contemporary stories Maturin seems to have borrowed certain ingredients directly appertaining to the wonderful change which Melmoth undergoes. The incident of his apparent death recalls John William Polidori’s story of The Vampyre (1819).[125] The hero, who turns out to be a vampyre living on the blood of men—or preferably of women—is mortally wounded while travelling with a friend in Greece, and his greatest care, like Melmoth’s, is to conceal his death:
“Swear!” cried the dying man, raising himself with exultant violence, “Swear by all your soul reveres, by all your nature fears, swear that for a year and a day you will not impart your knowledge of my crimes or death to any living being in any way, whatever may happen, or whatever you may see.”
Afterwards the vampyre re-appears in society and, thanks to the oath of his friend, succeeds in making his sister one of his victims. Of greater importance, however, are the impulses Maturin received from Godwin’s St. Leon. Here an old man, under circumstances mysterious and but imperfectly described, communicates to Reginald de St. Leon the secret of everlasting youth and inexhaustible wealth. The hero joyfully consents to relieve the old man of what seems to be a burden to him; but almost at the very moment the bargain is made, he becomes deeply unhappy:
Methought the race of mankind looked too insignificant in my eyes. I felt a degree of uneasiness at the immeasurable distance that was put between me and the rest of my species. I found myself alone in the world. Must I for ever live without a companion, a friend, any one with whom I can associate upon equal terms, with whom I can have a community of sensations, and feelings, and hopes, and desires, and fears?
This must be indicated as one of the fundamental ideas in Melmoth the Wanderer, also.
Maturin’s romance belongs to the stories of the supernatural only in so far as the personality of Melmoth is concerned; otherwise, the ‘Gothic elements’ contained in it consist of the usual external apparatus, calculated to appeal to the reader’s sense of ‘fear arising from objects of invisible terror,’ as stated in the preface to Montorio. The book consists of six different tales with nothing in common except the appearance, at the critical moment, of Melmoth the Wanderer. The whole is extraordinarily involved, and the only means of analysis is to treat each tale separately.[126]
When the story begins, in 1816, a young man of the name of John Melmoth is summoned from Dublin to the county of Wicklow, to attend a dying uncle. John is the orphan son of a younger brother and has passed his joyless life alternately in an humble attic in Dublin, and on the estate of this same uncle, an old miser, who has scarcely allowed his young visitor food enough; he has, however, been taught to consider himself his uncle’s heir apparent, and, consequently, to treat him with the utmost deference. On arriving at the country-house John finds it in a most desolate and neglected state, as well as the miser himself, who lies on his death-bed attended by an old village Sybil whom he employs to avoid the expense of a doctor, and sundry menials impatiently waiting for the death of their master to enable them to celebrate a wake with more food and drink than they are wont to see during a whole year. The miser is well aware of these genial expectations, which by no means contribute to the sweetening of his last moments. The arrival however of John somewhat enlivens him; he even commissions his nephew to bring him a glass of liquor from a small closet, which John well remembers nobody but his uncle has ever been allowed to enter. Once in the closet, he sees on the wall the portrait of a man in middle age, whose eyes appear to him to shed an unearthly lustre from the old canvas; on the border of the picture he reads: Jhn. Melmoth, anno 1646. The picture detains him in the closet a few moments more than necessary, whence his uncle concludes that he has been examining it. With terrible exertion he whisperingly communicates to John that the original of the picture is still alive and that he himself is—on that account—dying of fright. The same night old Melmoth expires, and John, to his horror, sees the door opened by a stranger who distinctly resembles the portrait in the closet.
From the miser’s will it appears that he has made John his sole heir. He has, moreover, added a memorandum to the will, in which he enjoins his nephew to destroy the portrait alluded to, as well as an old manuscript which he will also find in the closet. John’s curiosity is roused about the mystery connected with his family, the more so as he gathers that his uncle has, during his last years, been constantly hanging over a manuscript which he always concealed if any one entered the room. From the old Sybil John learns what tradition has kept alive of the secrets of the family. She states that the elder brother of the Melmoth who first settled in Ireland as a follower of Cromwell, was a great traveller and seldom visited his family; once when he appeared all were surprised to see that he had undergone no external change whatever, although he ought to have been, at that time, a very old man. His visit was but short, and at his departure he left his portrait behind him. Some years afterwards a person arrived who appeared to be most anxious to know as much as possible about Melmoth the traveller; but the family being unable—or unwilling—to communicate anything of importance, he departed and, in his turn, left behind him a manuscript. As to the traveller, the hag concludes, he is generally believed to be alive and to make his appearance on the death of such members of the family as have something weighing upon their conscience.—After having burnt the portrait, John devotes himself to read the old, discoloured, mutilated manuscript as well as he is able. The writing is interrupted by many illegible lines; sometimes whole pages are missing. What he makes out is that the writer, an Englishman called Stanton, was travelling in Spain in 1676 and there saw a countryman of his who excited much superstitious horror among the populace, and, as it seemed, not quite without cause. Stanton himself had heard him break into a demoniac laughter on seeing two persons blighted by lightning, and shortly afterwards heard a story still more terrible. At a fashionable wedding-feast he had frightened all by the unearthly glare of his eyes, and even killed a priest who was going to utter a prayer, by merely staring at him. The wedding had ended by the bride being found dead in the arms of the bridegroom, who had lost his reason on the same occasion; and this tragic event also had been attributed to the machinations of the stranger—Melmoth the traveller. Stanton, tormented by an inexplicable longing to see and hear more of his mysterious countryman, had returned to England and spent several years in fruitless attempts to get sight of him. At length he had met him outside a theatre, and Melmoth had uttered a horrible prophecy of their meeting soon again in a madhouse. And he was right; Stanton was confined at a hospital through the means of a designing relative, and when the horrors of his situation had well-nigh spent him, Melmoth had appeared in his cell, spoken much to him and finally offered to bring about his liberation, on certain conditions. The pages where these conditions are expounded are illegible in the manuscript John is examining, but it appears that Stanton had rejected them in great rage, whereupon Melmoth had departed. When Stanton finally gained his liberty he had resumed his restless pursuit of Melmoth. He had also visited Ireland, and left there the manuscript containing a narrative of his adventures.
So the manuscript ends; but John is soon to learn more of his interesting ancestor. One night, in a violent storm, a vessel is wrecked and lost on the coast. All the neighbourhood gather on the shore and, under John’s command, do their best to save the crew, but their efforts are ineffectual. In the midst of his toil John perceives a man standing tranquilly upon a rock somewhat out of the way, and suddenly a terrible laugh is heard. Remembering the manuscript John rushes towards him, stumbles on his way and falls down into the sea. The only one of the shipwrecked who has succeeded in reaching the coast gets hold of him and clings to him until both are thrown on the shore by a huge wave. They are carried up to the manor-house, and after some days their strength is restored. The stranger is found to be a Spaniard; his first question is, whether John’s name is not Melmoth. Receiving an answer in the affirmative he shows him a portrait, which John instantly recognizes as a miniature of the one he has destroyed. The Spaniard, apparently a man who has suffered much, then proceeds to tell the story of his life.