The narrative related above, lengthy as it is, serves as a sort of introduction to all that follows, affording the first imperfect glimpses of the Wanderer. The scenes which are enacted in the dreary, half-decayed country-house before and after the miser’s death are the best-written passages in Melmoth, representing, together with certain chapters in Women, Maturin’s art on its very highest level; and this art, it is as well to observe, is eminently realistic. Little as the abode of old Melmoth has in common with the household of Mr. Wentworth, there is the same blending of intensely suggestive ‘atmosphere’ and minute truthfulness to nature about the descriptions. The sorry state of the manor to which John Melmoth travels and which recalls his gloomiest memories, is vividly painted thus:
As John slowly trod the miry road which had once been the approach, he could discover, by the dim light of an autumnal evening, signs of increasing desolation since he had last visited the spot,—signs that penury had been aggravated and sharpened into downright misery. There was not a fence or a hedge round the domain: an uncemented wall of loose stones, whose numerous gaps were filled with furze or thorns, supplied their place. There was not a tree or shrub on the lawn; the lawn itself was turned into pasture-ground, and a few sheep were picking their scanty food amid the pebble-stones, thistles, and hard mould, through which a few blades of grass made their rare and squalid appearance.
The house itself stood strongly defined even amid the darkness of the evening sky; for there were neither wings, or offices, or shrubbery, or tree, to shade or support it and soften its harsh outline. John, after a melancholy gaze at the grass-grown steps and boarded windows, “addressed himself” to knock at the door; but knocker there was none: loose stones, however, there were in plenty; and John was making vigorous application to the door with one of them, till the furious barking of a mastiff, who threatened at every bound to break his chain, and whose yell and growl, accompanied by “eyes that glow and fangs that grin” savoured as much of hunger as of rage, made the assailant raise the siege on the door, and betake himself to a well-known passage that led to the kitchen. A light glimmered in the window as he approached: he raised the latch with a doubtful hand; but, when he saw the party within, he advanced with the step of a man no longer doubtful of his welcome.
The party in question consists of old Melmoth’s servants and ‘followers.’ This was the last time Maturin depicted his countrymen, the lower Irish, and never had he done so with more vigour and penetration. They are described without even a semblance of idealization; specifically Irish is only their instinctive deference to persons of higher rank, and their endless circumlocutions of speech, but there is no boisterous and overflowing humour about them, still less a breath of soul-stirring romance; they simply are what circumstances have made them, and that is, in this case at least, a set to be both disliked and distrusted. Yet the picture does not lack its brighter side. These people cannot, as a matter of course, be expected to be exactly sorry at the approaching end of their master, but John Melmoth has nothing to fear from them, and that there is much in them that is naturally good and brave is seen in their spontaneous efforts to save the sinking vessel. There is an old housekeeper who is described with a kind of rough sympathy and not without strokes of humour. John has always been an object of her tenderness—long ago, when he was staying in the house and was sent hungry to bed, she had often stolen up to him with something she had had much trouble to save, and she still kindly insists on calling him her ‘whiteheaded boy.’ To be sure, she avails herself of her knowledge how to get at the store of spirits by a way unknown to old Melmoth, and so has made ample preparations for his honour’s wake in good time; but she is, at the same time, really anxious to think of his soul in his departing hour, and conceives it to be her religious duty perforce to put upon him a clean shirt when that solemn hour draws nigh.—The old Sybil, on the other hand, is a decidedly unsympathetic figure, a humbug and an impostor of the first order, a type not common in the fiction of the time.
Old Melmoth is extremely well drawn; in the few pages treating of him his character stands perfectly clear before the reader. Though always of a niggardly turn, he has once been a gentleman, and has, in fact, never committed actual wrongs in the course of accumulating his wealth. ‘He was,’ says the housekeeper, ‘of a hard hand, and a hard heart, but he was as jealous of another’s right as of his own. He would have starved all the world, but he would not have wronged it of a farthing.’ He is, towards the end of his life, tormented by fear as much as by the passion of avarice. His days are passed in the revolting but irresistible task of studying the manuscript, and he firmly believes that he has seen his mysterious ancestor in his own house. In the superstitious horror that never leaves him he clings, as it were, all the more eagerly to something real and concrete, and, having nought else, he cherishes his worldly goods until he sits in the kitchen to save a fire in his own room and expresses, as his last, the desire to be buried in a parish coffin. A fragment of his conversation best illustrates the character of old Melmoth:
—“What made you burn sixes in the kitchen, you extravagant jade? How many years have you lived in this house?” “I don’t know, your honour.” “Did you ever see any extravagance or waste in it?” “Oh never, never, your honour.” “Was any thing but a farthing candle ever burned in the kitchen?” “Never, never, your honour.” “Were not you kept as tight as hand and head and heart could keep you, were you not? answer me that.” “Oh yes, sure, your honour; every sowl about us knows that,—every one does your honour justice, that you kept the closest house and closest hand in the country,—your honour was always a good warrant for it.” “And how dare you unlock my hold before death has unlocked it,” said the dying miser, shaking his meagre hand at her. “I smelt meat in the house,—I heard voices in the house,—I heard the key turn in the door over and over. Oh that I was up,” he added, rolling in impatient agony in his bed, “oh that I was up, to see the waste and ruin that is going on. But it would kill me,” he continued, sinking back on the bolster, for he never allowed himself a pillow; “it would kill me,—the very thought of it is killing me now.” The women, discomfited and defeated, after sundry winks and whispers, were huddling out of the room, till recalled by the sharp eager tones of old Melmoth.—“Where are ye trooping to now? back to the kitchen to gormandize and guzzle? Won’t one of ye stay and listen while there’s a prayer read for me? Ye may want it one day for yourselves, ye hags.” Awed by this expostulation and menace the train silently returned, and placed themselves round the bed, while the housekeeper, though a Catholic, asked if his honour would not have a clergyman to give him the rights (rites) of his church. The eyes of the dying man sparkled with vexation at the proposal. “What for,—just to have him expect a scarf and hat-band at the funeral. Read the prayers yourself, you old ——; that will save something.”—
With these scenes of strong and sordid realism is mingled the supernatural fear felt for the traveller; but sparingly and skilfully as this supernatural element is used, it does not disturb the general style of the narrative. It only serves to heighten the gloominess of the atmosphere and to excite the reader’s curiosity. This curiosity is admirably kept alive throughout the whole. It increases gradually, being never satisfied. When John asks the old hag to tell him all she knows about his ancestor, it is stated that she leaves him excited with a story, wild, improbable, actually incredible. The story is not at once related to the reader; he is left in suspense about it, while John Melmoth immediately proceeds to gather more information from the manuscript. It appears, however, that candles there are none in the house, and until such are procured from a neighbouring village, he sits alone in the dreary room, while night falls upon him and the sky is overcast with dark clouds promising a long continuance of gloom and rain. Now he in his thoughts recapitulates the story he has just heard, the one with reference to the traveller and his portrait. The messenger sent to the village then returning, John seeks out the manuscript and begins, by the ghastly light of a couple of candles, to decipher a story much wilder than that which he has from the hag. It is easy to perceive that the increase of interest is greater with this succession, than if the calmer passage about the preparations for studying the manuscript were placed between the two stories.—As for the fragmentary manuscript itself, it of course always breaks off at the most thrilling moment.
By the opening chapters of Melmoth the Wanderer, Maturin’s first romance of Montorio is called to mind in a way clearly showing the disadvantages of the Radcliffe style and the general inferiority in the construction of stories of that school. The figure of Schemoli—which, as has been shown, is a typically Radcliffeian hero—is here, in many respects, a prototype of Melmoth: the obscurity in which his person is veiled as well as his sudden and unimpeded entrances where he is not expected, are traits which have descended to the Wanderer; but the supernaturalness of the latter is real and need not be explained as some utterly incredible, merely human attainments. In one of the half-ruinous apartments of the castle of Muralto where Annibal is so fond of rambling, there is an old portrait, the eyes of which are, by the tricks of Schemoli, made to appear to him as living. The impression made on John Melmoth by the portrait in the miser’s secret closet is a result of that same preternatural quality in the original, which, once accepted, defies all ‘natural’ elucidations and is not followed by the disappointment necessarily appertaining to such. Thus the artistic effect of these scenes is of a permanent kind and preserves its charm even at re-perusal, which is never the case with the puerile tricks of the Radcliffe stories. Yet notwithstanding this slight supernatural import, the incidents taking place in the house of old Melmoth cannot be ranked among the actual ‘Gothic’ stories. These incidents are not fantastical or violent enough, and the style is too strikingly realistic; nor does the ‘passion of supernatural fear’ here seem to be the ultimate object of the author. The tale of Stanton, on the other hand, is typically a production of the school of terror. To begin with, the introduction of a story by the discovery of an old, half-moulding manuscript was a favourite one with most of the writers of this school, and the manuscript studied by John Melmoth affords all the usual requisites: Spanish environs, with ruins both Moorish and Roman, amid thunder and lightning; wedding-feasts in great houses with dead bride and insane bridegroom; religious intolerance, Inquisition, and fear of the devil. These passages are rather rhapsodical—as indeed they are meant to be—and less interesting than Stanton’s subsequent experiences in England; the madhouse where Stanton is confined is described more horribly than any prisons of the Inquisition in any romance of terror. The time of action is that of Charles II: a period in which Maturin was deeply versed and which had a strange fascination for him. In his pursuit of Melmoth, Stanton is said often to visit places of public amusement, and it is at a theatre he at last discovers him. This gives Maturin occasion to insert a brilliant study of the theatrical performances of that time, most evidently written con amore, in spite of the strong emphasis laid upon the loose morals of these amusements. After one performance, during which a great commotion is caused by the attempt of an actress to stab her rival in good earnest, Stanton meets Melmoth in the deserted street, where he has been waiting for him. Stanton being, at first, at a loss what to say, Melmoth quietly announces that they will soon meet again:—‘the place shall be the bare walls of a madhouse, where you shall rise rattling in your chains, and rustling from your straw, to greet me,—yet still you shall have the curse of sanity, and of memory. — — I never desert my friends in misfortune. When they are plunged in the lowest abyss of human calamity, they are sure to be visited by me.’
Here, for the first time, is given the clue to Melmoth’s personality and the purpose of his wanderings; from the tale of Stanton it can also be concluded that Melmoth has the power of contributing to, as well as predicting, the destiny of his victims. The prophecy is fulfilled. Stanton’s eccentric mode of living and incessant talk of Melmoth, whom nobody else has ever seen, rouses the belief in his madness. Of this belief his nearest relative and heir, an unscrupulous man, resolves to avail himself. He procures a place in a madhouse which he easily induces the careless and absent-minded Stanton to visit, and there he is forced to remain. The picture which Maturin draws of this place is frightful in the extreme, yet doubtless historically true, in as much as lunatics at that time were treated exactly like criminals, chains and whip being the only medicine resorted to by the keepers, many of whom were most inhuman ruffians. But this picture is also in other respects pervaded by the spirit of the time. About the Restoration insanity raged in England more than at any other period before or since, and the fanaticism, both religious and political, of the preceding decades, has amply furnished the madhouses with wretched inmates. As Stanton’s next neighbours there are a puritan weaver, who has lost his reason after listening to one of the celebrated preachers of the day, and a loyalist tailor, who has been ruined by too liberal a credit to the cavaliers; and these two pass the nights in desperate controversies which make the very walls ring. Further, there is a woman who has lost her husband and all her children in the great London fire—this, too, a topic of the day. Once a week, the night of her disaster, she recapitulates the horrors which have befallen her: