When the parricide was admitted into the convent, he was appointed to be the executioner whenever a severe punishment was to be inflicted. This he accepted with delight; while hating, by nature, every human being and especially those who seemed happier than himself, he found his sole satisfaction in making others miserable. Opportunities were seldom lacking, and to the métier of executioner he united that of a spy. Once he was desired to keep an eye upon a young monk whose family had placed him in the convent in order to prevent him from marrying a woman of inferior rank. There was, in the air of that monk, something peculiarly hopeful which naturally excited suspicion. Shortly afterwards a young novice entered the community, and the monk and he immediately became inseparable. ‘They were for ever in the garden together—they inhaled the odours of the flowers—they cultivated the same cluster of carnations—they entwined themselves as they walked together—when they were in the choir, their voices were like mixed incense.’ The greater their happiness appeared, the more uneasiness they gave the spy, who was on his watch night and day. Little by little he drew the certain conclusion that the novice was a female, and one night, to his inexpressible joy, he perceived the novice vanish in the monk’s cell. He secured the door and rushed to his master; they broke into the cell and the Superior saw what he had never even thought of and never could understand. His rage was immense, and the punishment, in the invention of which the spy had his ample share, was to be worthy of the crime. The pair were conducted, under the delusion of effecting their escape, to the place where Alonzo is sitting now, and allured into a neighbouring recess which they never quitted alive. The spy kept watch at the door and gradually heard their love turn to hatred in the agonies of death. On the sixth day, when all was silent within, the door was unnailed; the spy now, for the first time, distinctly saw the features of the novice, and recognized those of his only sister.
This is the story which the parricide relates to Alonzo, sparing no details. In the meantime evening comes, and they venture to ascend through the trap-door, and breathe once more the air of heaven. They hurry through the garden and climb the wall. Already Alonzo feels himself supported by the arms of his brother and even enters the carriage which is waiting for them, when Juan is stabbed from behind and falls, bathing in his blood. Alonzo falls on his dead body, losing consciousness; when it returns after a long time, he finds himself in the prison of the Inquisition.—
The episode of the lovers who are immured alive was, of all the stories contained in Melmoth the Wanderer, the one which was most disapproved and which attracted the severest censure. The Edinburgh Review,[129] while regretting Maturin’s taste for horrible and revolting subjects, adds: ‘We thought we had supped full of this commodity; but it seems as if the most ghastly and disgusting portion of the meal was reserved for the present day, and its most hideous concoction for the writer before us,—who is never so much in his favourite element as when he can ‘on horror’s head horrors accumulate.’ Another critic[130] says, with reference to the parricide’s conversation: ‘It is no apology for this to say that it is the language of an atrocious villain—at war with society—steeped to the lips in crime—upon whose brow parricide is branded, and who, with a most profane license, is described by the author to be “beyond the redemption of a Saviour!” Personages should not be created by a novelist, whose deeds to be characteristic must be criminal, and whose phrase to be consistent must be blasphemous.’ It is not to be wondered at that the reviewers were shocked; the parricide is the most atrocious of all the characters of Maturin and death by starvation certainly a disgusting subject. Yet in their indignation they failed to notice the extraordinary skill and power displayed in this episode. Later it has been very differently judged, and, in fact, remained one of the best-known passages in the book. In the opinion of Planche[131] the death-scenes of the lovers form the most beautiful pages in Melmoth; and a modern writer[132] also declares the episode in question to stand artistically on a very high level and to show, in the conception of cruelty, a refinement surpassing even Poe’s in his tale of The Cask of Amontillado, which it slightly recalls in the almost scientific exactness with which the sensations of the victims are observed. The parricide gives this characteristic reason for his voluntary watch at the prison-door: ‘You will call this cruelty, I call it curiosity,—that curiosity that brings thousands to witness a tragedy, and makes the most delicate female feast on groans and agonies;’ and what interests him most is the moment when their love, annihilated by the pangs of hunger, gives way to hostility and rage. The man, he remarks, often accuses the woman as the cause of his sufferings, while she never utters a word which might pain or wound him: we see that the high opinion which Maturin entertained of feminine character asserts itself even in this gloomy instance. The episode of the lovers seems, upon the whole, to be but little influenced by any previous writers. Only the detail of the novice being recognized as the parricide’s sister is borrowed from the older school of terror, where the destroying of near relations was well-nigh indispensable.
The continuation of the Spaniard’s tale, on the other hand, is more closely modelled on patterns easily discernible, and does not quite come up to the beginning. When Alonzo has regained some strength he is, in his new prison, visited by his former companion the parricide, who informs him that he had stabbed Juan, which it was his business to do, the whole escape being a comedy, undertaken with the consent of the Superior, who wished to get rid of Alonzo by plunging him into a worse place; the parricide, for his part, has become a spy and a creature of the Holy Office. Things being now as bad as they can be, it is, at last, time for Melmoth the Wanderer to interfere. Between his examinations Alonzo is, every night, visited by a stranger who gives himself out as a fellow-prisoner and entertains Alonzo with discussions on various topics. There is, however, something strangely suspicious in his behaviour, and Alonzo is frightened by the unearthly lustre of his eyes. The suspicions of Alonzo gain strength when he is warned by one of the officials to be on his guard against a person who has been frequenting some of the cells and set at defiance all the vigilance of the Inquisition. He makes a candid confession of the visits of the stranger, hoping by this means to make a favourable impression upon his judges, but in this he is totally disappointed. A prisoner whom the devil is supposed to be so obstinate in visiting, can expect no mercy from the tribunal. Before Alonzo’s last examination Melmoth then discloses to him the ‘unutterable condition’ upon which his liberation might be expected. Alonzo never thinks of accepting it, and hastens to make a full confession to a priest, but his doom is sealed: he is sentenced to be burnt in an autodafé. When the sentence is announced he sees Melmoth sitting at one of the tables as secretary, and feels sure that he has been made the dupe of the inquisitorial officials.
On the morning on which the ceremony is to take place a fire breaks out within the walls of the Inquisition. Availing himself of the confusion Alonzo rushes out and finds his way to a narrow apartment in the end of a street. The apartment appears to belong to a Jew, known in Madrid as a good Catholic, but secretly clinging to the religion of his fathers. He is terrified almost to death at the sudden entrance of Alonzo—being just engaged in the initiation of a young son of his according to the Jewish rites—but they soon come to an understanding, and Alonzo remains in the house. The Jew subsequently finds out that Alonzo is generally believed to have perished in the fire. This piece of news, however, makes him incautious, and one day, during the absence of the Jew, he places himself in the window to watch a great religious procession. Among the participants he sees his former companion from the convent; at the moment he arrives beneath the window he is pointed out by some one as a parricide and a criminal of the blackest dye; the fury of the populace is roused, and the man is, after a fierce struggle, torn to pieces before Alonzo’s eyes. Alonzo stands riveted to the spot until the horrid spectacle is over; but the same night the house is searched through by the inquisitorial officials, who maintain that the soul of a deceased heretic has been seen hovering near it. The Jew has just time to conceal Alonzo under one of the boards of the floor, where a cavity of some dimensions seems to have been made for the purpose. While the Jew is invoking all the prophets, Alonzo plunges deeper in the recess and perceives a kind of passage running out from it. The passage ends in a room whither he is guided by a faint stream of light. In the room he finds a very old man, sitting at a table covered with books and globes and surrounded by skeletons and scientific instruments. Superstitious and inexperienced as he is, Alonzo takes him for an evil spirit, but is reassured by a certain calm dignity in the old man’s manner. He is, indeed, a Jewish sage who has passed nearly a life-time in the subterraneous community. He has even been expecting Alonzo, having learned the secret of his existence from the other Jew and having requested Alonzo to be sent to him to act as his ‘secretary.’ He places before Alonzo a manuscript, written in Spanish with Greek characters, which he is to copy out. During the interview Alonzo happens to mention that he has been tempted by an agent of the enemy, and stood firm. This agent the Jew rightly concludes to be Melmoth the Wanderer with whom, he hints, he has been acquainted in his youth, much to his misfortune. And the manuscript which he has compiled turns out to be a record of the achievements of Melmoth, of which a new one now succeeds the Tale of the Spaniard.
That the story of Alonzo di Monçada is a Gothic Romance of the first magnitude, has never been denied except by its author. In the preface to Melmoth the Wanderer Maturin says:
“The Spaniard’s Tale” has been censured by a friend to whom I read it, as containing too much attempt at the revivification of the horrors of Radcliffe-Romance, of the persecutions of convents, and the terrors of the Inquisition.
I defended myself, by trying to point out to my friend, that I had made the misery of conventual life depend less on the startling adventures one meets with in romances, than on that irritating series of petty torments which constitutes the misery of life in general, and which, amid the tideless stagnation of monastic existence, solitude gives its inmates leisure to invent, and power combined with malignity, the full disposition to practise. I trust this defence will operate more on the conviction of the Reader, than it did on that of my friend.
Now, there are probably not many readers on whose conviction this defence has operated, and who have not felt that Maturin’s distinctions, as a contemporary critic[133] put it, ‘between his own convents and those of old are rather fanciful than real.’ The defence can, at the utmost, be applied to the first part of Alonzo’s stay in the convent, although even there we find, among the ‘petty torments,’ instances of monks being flogged to death; and it must also be admitted that this part is the most original. According as the torments grow decidedly serious, the points of contact with Godwin and Lewis become more conspicuous. As for the latter part of the story, it is unquestionably a perfect ‘romance of horror,’ with the horrors introduced solely for their own sake, only so much more powerful in execution than its forerunners, that one might be tempted to think it was Maturin’s wish to show how such a book ought to be written. In the art of suggestion, so important in tales of this character, Maturin here, as in Montorio, stands between Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis, avoiding the excesses of both. His grasp on the subject-matter is always stronger than that of Mrs. Radcliffe, whose gentleness sometimes reduces her work to ‘a timid trifling with the world of phantoms and nameless terrors;’[134] while he seldom or never copies the coarseness of Lewis who, in fact, knows nothing of the art in question. This is particularly noticeable in Maturin’s treatment of the (very limited) supernatural element in Melmoth. He tells, no doubt, many frightful things and calls them by their names, but then there are also a great many circumstances which are said to be too horrible and unhallowed to relate. With sure artistic instinct Maturin forbears ever to expound the ‘incommunicable condition’ of Melmoth, whereas the surrender of their souls to the devil, made by Ambrosio and Matilda in The Monk, is laid down with a clearness and accuracy leaving nothing to be guessed. Another detail worthy of notice is the circumstance that the partly supernatural personality of the Wanderer makes an indelible impression upon those coming into contact with him, and marks them for life. Stanton, it will be remembered, knows no rest after having encountered Melmoth; his remaining days are spent in an indefatigable pursuit of him, the cause of which he could not even explain to himself; and a similar wish, it must be presumed, eventually drives Monçada to Ireland. Here may, indeed, be an influence from Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), where the hero, in never-allayed anxiety, pursues the monster which he has created from one end of the world to the other, in order to prevent him from doing more mischief—: the artistic effect is, at all events, incomparably greater than that attained in The Monk, where the ghosts and spooks are treated with ease and familiarity, and where a Spanish nobleman relates that he has encountered the Wandering Jew, with a burning cross on his forehead, almost as nonchalantly as he would tell that he has met his brother. With this general difference in style and execution, many external motives from The Monk are utilized in the Spaniard’s tale, as they were in Montorio. The most conspicuous here, again, is the introduction of ecclesiastical cruelty and monastical oppression; the case of Ildefonsa in Montorio which, as we have seen, was suggested by the story of Agnes de Medina in The Monk, is here applied to Alonzo, with a power leaving both those romances far behind. The Domina of Lewis and the Superior of Maturin represent the same type: both are narrow-minded, hypocritical and revengeful, and pride themselves on the strict order and discipline maintained in their convents. Both are, on important occasions, surrounded by four satellites, who obey their every sign, and who are employed to drag recalcitrant monks and nuns to the subterranean dungeons, which, in both tales, are swarming with nauseous reptiles. A reminiscence of very unpleasant character, from Lewis, is also the dismal end of the parricide; in The Monk the same fate overtakes the Domina, when her cruelty to the young nun becomes known. She, too, is about to take part in a religious procession, when suddenly she is made an object of the rage of the people. As in the case of the parricide, neither the solemnity of the occasion, nor the respect for the priests present, nor fear of the soldiers can protect the victim from the populace, which presses on like a storm and never rests until its vengeance is fulfilled. In The Monk the Domina tries to make some sort of resistance, but ‘at length a flint, aimed by some well-directing hand, struck her full upon the temple. She sank upon the ground bathed in blood, and in a few minutes terminated her miserable existence;’ Maturin tells that the man does not cease to howl for mercy ‘till a stone, aimed by some pitying hand, struck him down. He fell, trodden in one moment into sanguine and discoloured mud by a thousand feet.’ It is but just to Mrs. Radcliffe to observe that she never would have described scenes like these.