The Tale of the Indians is once interrupted by two other tales of considerable length. While Aliaga is travelling homeward he passes a night at a wretched inn, where a fellow-traveller reads to him the Tale of Guzman’s Family, to the following effect.
Guzman is an old merchant of Seville, who has made an enormous fortune out of nothing, and risen from an obscure birth to a position of respect. As he lives alone, the question of his eventual heirs excites much curiosity; his circumstances are carefully investigated, and it is discovered that he has a sister in life. This sister has, in early youth, married a German musician of the name of Walberg, turned a Protestant, been rejected by her brother, and since then lived in Germany. This appears to be true; for once when Guzman is seized with a dangerous illness and even given over by his physicians, he remembers his sister and sends for the family of Walberg, that he might be reconciled to his only relatives. At the same time he alters his will in favour of the family. Contrary to all expectation, he recovers before they arrive, yet the will remains as he has fixed it, in spite of the efforts of the priests to have it cancelled.[141] The only point in which Guzman accedes to their representations, is that he determines to refrain from all personal intercourse with his heretical relations. This intelligence is brought to the family, at their arrival in Seville, by Guzman’s confessor, who acts as his agent and afterwards proves to be a man of kindness and honour. The family consists of Walberg, his wife Ines, and four children; later they are joined by Walberg’s aged parents, whom he has summoned from Germany to pass the remainder of their life with them. Sinister forebodings fill the mind of Ines when she learns her brother’s resolution never to see her or any member of the family. As they are, however, amply provided for and generally considered the sole heirs of Guzman, the displeasing resolution makes but a slight impression on Walberg, who will not listen to his wife’s advice that the children should be taught some profession. So they live on in ease and comfort, until Guzman dies—and then it is announced that he has left everything to the church. This a blow that completely changes the conditions of the family; their fine house is sold, and they move into a humble abode in the suburbs, where Ines and her daughter once more resume the domestic duties. The good priest, who feels certain that a fraud has been committed, does everything in his power to help them. Through his means the matter is brought to legal arbitration, but though the best advocates are resorted to, Walberg loses the case. The family is gradually plunged deeper and deeper into misery, and soon hovers on the brink of starvation. Being strangers and heretics they can obtain no work, but are solely reduced to what the children can get together by begging. The eldest son, Everhard, hits upon the expedient of selling some of his blood to a surgeon, and well-nigh expires; the daughters are beginning to be accosted by strangers in the street; the old grandmother dies for want of food, and the grandfather loses his reason from the same cause. When the family has been reduced to this stage of wretchedness, Walberg, every night he goes out to supplicate relief from passers-by, is addressed by a stranger,
a middle-aged man, of a serious and staid demeanour, and with nothing remarkable in his aspect except the light of two burning eyes, whose lustre is almost intolerable. He fixes them on me sometimes, and I feel as if there was fascination in their glare. Every night he besets me, and few like me could have resisted his seductions. He has offered, and proved to me, that it is in his power to bestow all that human cupidity could thirst for, on the condition that—I cannot utter! It is one so full of horror and impiety, that even to listen to it, is scarce less a crime than to comply with it!
The same night Walberg relates this to his wife, he is seized with a fit of insanity and proceeds to kill his children, when, at the last moment, the priest enters with the news that the right will is found and the family once more the heirs of Guzman. In a short time they are restored to health—even the grandfather recovers his reason before he dies—and the tale ends happily:
The family then set out for Germany, where they reside in prosperous felicity;—but to this hour Walberg shudders with horror when he recalls the fearful temptations of the stranger, whom he met in the nightly wanderings in the hour of his adversity, and the horror of this visitation appears to oppress his recollection more than even the images of his family perishing with want.—
That Godwin’s St. Leon makes itself remembered also in connection with the Tale of Guzman’s Family, is chiefly due to its being, upon the whole, the book which Melmoth probably is most indebted to. St. Leon is, no doubt, several times plunged into great poverty which he tries to bear as best he can, with the assistance of a brave and faithful wife and good and amiable children; but a detailed comparison would show little else than that these scenes, in Godwin, are dull and powerless, whereas Maturin’s story is just the reverse. So far from considering the Tale of Guzman’s Family an imitation, one would rather be inclined to imagine that it has sprung from personal recollections. Both in his father’s home and his own, Maturin had seen ease and affluence replaced by penury and want. The situation into which the family of Walberg is reduced—which leads to death and insanity—was, of course, extreme beyond anything in Maturin’s experience, and a product of furious and unrestrained imagination; but the first intimations of disappearing wealth are brought forth with a force and accuracy quite convincing, and among the best pages in the tale are those treating of the horrible suspense in which the family lives from the moment of Guzman’s death till the publication of his will. Yet another circumstance would go to show that the Tale of Guzman’s Family had no need of literary models. In the preface to Melmoth the Wanderer Maturin states that ‘the original from which the wife of Walberg is imperfectly sketched is a living woman, and long may she live;’ whence it is not unnatural to infer that it is his own wife he is describing. So the phrase seems to have been understood by the critic in the London Magazine 1821, who adds that he would be inclined to drop his pen and ‘weep over the misfortunes of a man of genius, instead of scrutinizing his errors.’ The picture which Maturin draws of the wife of Walberg is beautiful indeed. She is the good genius of her family, as prudent as she is gentle. She is secretly saving when her husband only thinks of spending; when he is seized with despair, she heroically tries to encourage him. She starves gladly herself, as long as there is a morsel left for her children and for the aged parents of her husband; and when he is beset by the tempter, she exerts her last energy to support him. The wife of Walberg is one of the incarnations of the idea of the superior moral strength of woman, so often recurring in Maturin’s works, and there is no reason to doubt that this idea originated in the partner of his life.—Another figure worthy of particular notice is the priest, with whom Maturin makes full amends for the attacks he delivers, in Melmoth, upon the dignitaries of the Catholic church. The confessor in the Tale of the Indians is too much of a buffoon to be taken seriously, but here, at last, is a Catholic prelate to whom the interests of humanity are more than those of the church, and who is ready to expose the crimes of his own colleagues in order to save the life of a heretical family.
The style of writing, in this tale, is hardly so fine as in the next one, although there are passages extremely characteristic of Maturin. He was the only one of the ‘terrific’ writers of the time capable of purely aesthetical enjoyment, almost perverse, from scenes of bodily suffering. The description of the boy who has been selling his blood to a surgeon could have been made by no one else:
The moonlight fell strongly through the unshuttered windows on the wretched closet that just contained the bed. Its furniture was sufficiently scanty, and in his spasms Everhard had thrown off the sheet. So he lay, as Ines approached his bed, in a kind of corse-like beauty, to which the light of the moon gave an effect that would have rendered the figure worthy of the pencil of a Murillo, a Rosa, or any of those painters, who, inspired by the genius of suffering, delight in representing the most exquisite of human forms in the extremity of human agony. A St. Bartholomew flayed, with his skin hanging about him in graceful drapery—a St. Laurence, broiled on a gridiron, and exhibiting his finely-formed anatomy on its bars, while naked slaves are blowing the coals beneath it,—even this were inferior to the form half-veiled, half-disclosed by the moonlight as it lay. The snow-white limbs of Everhard were extended as if for the inspection of a sculptor, and moveless, as if they were indeed what they resembled, in hue and symmetry, those of a marble statue. His arms were tossed above his head and the blood was trickling fast from the opened veins of both,—his bright and curled hair was clotted with the red stream that flowed from his arms,—his lips were blue, and a faint and fainter moan issued from them as his mother hung over him.
All the personages actually appearing in the Tale of Guzman’s Family are good and noble; there is no display of revolting crimes or depraved characters, and horrible and even disgusting as are the sufferings of the family, the tale has little to do with the school of terror. The fact, moreover, of its being the only one that is brought to a happy ending, probably made it a favourite with readers. An admiring critic in Blackwood’s Magazine[142] says that this tale, before all others, shows ‘what Mr. Maturin is capable of doing in his best moments of inspiration.’