(Copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook)
"Melmoth" contains scenes which even now have not lost their power
to evoke dread. It begins with a death-bed--the old miser is dying
of sheer fright because of something he has seen, coupled with a
manuscript he has read and a family portrait which hangs in an obscure
closet of his centuried home in County Wicklow. He sends to Trinity
College, Dublin, for his nephew John; and the latter upon arriving
notes many uncanny things. The eyes of the portrait in the closet glow
horribly, and twice a figure strangely resembling the portrait appears
momentarily at the door. Dread hangs over the house of the Melmoths,
one of whose ancestors, "J. Melmoth, 1646," the portrait represents.
The dying miser declares that this man--at a date slightly before
1800--is still alive. Finally the miser dies, and the nephew is told
in the will to destroy both the portrait and a manuscript to be found
in a certain drawer. Reading the manuscript, which was written late
in the seventeenth century by an Englishman named Stanton, young John
learns of a terrible incident in Spain in 1677, when the writer met a
horrible fellow-countryman and was told of how he had stared to death
a priest who tried to denounce him as one filled with fearsome evil.
Later, after meeting the man again in London, Stanton is cast into a
madhouse and visited by the stranger, whose approach is heralded by
spectral music and whose eyes have more than mortal glare. Melmoth the
Wanderer--for such is the malign visitor--offers the captive freedom
if he will take over his bargain with the Devil; but like all others
whom Melmoth has approached, Stanton is proof against temptation.
Melmoth's description of the horrors of a life in a madhouse, used to
tempt Stanton, is one of the most potent passages of the book. Stanton
is at length liberated, and spends the rest of his life tracking down
Melmoth, whose family and ancestral abode he discovers. With the family
he leaves the manuscript, which by young John's time is sadly ruinous
and fragmentary. John destroys both portrait and manuscript, but in
sleep is visited by his horrible ancestor, who leaves a black and blue
mark on his wrist.
Young John soon afterward receives as a visitor a shipwrecked Spaniard,
Alonzo de Moncada, who has escaped from compulsory monasticism and
from the perils of the Inquisition. He has suffered horribly--and the
descriptions of his experiences under torment and in the vaults through
which he once essays escape are classic--but had the strength to resist
Melmoth the Wanderer when approached at this darkest hour in prison.
At the house of a Jew who sheltered him after his escape, he discovers
a wealth of manuscript relating other exploits of Melmoth, including
his wooing of an Indian island maiden, Immalee, who later comes to
her birthright in Spain and is known as the Donna Isidora; and of his
horrible marriage to her by the corpse of a dead anchorite at midnight
in the ruined chapel of a shunned and abhorred monastery. Moncada's
narrative to young John takes up the bulk of Maturin's four-volume
book; this disproportion being considered one of the chief technical
faults of the composition.
At last the colloquies of John and Moncada are interrupted by the
entrance of Melmoth the Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now fading,
and decrepitude swiftly overtaking him. The term of his bargain has
approached its end, and he has come home after a century and a half to
meet his fate. Warning all others from the room, no matter what sounds
they may hear in the night, he awaits the end alone. Young John and
Moncada hear frightful ululations, but do not intrude till silence
comes toward morning. They then find the room empty. Clayey footprints
lead out a rear door to a cliff overlooking the sea, and near the
edge of the precipice is a track indicating the forcible dragging of
some heavy body. The Wanderer's scarf is found on a crag some distance
below the brink, but nothing further is ever seen or heard of him. Such
is the story, and none can fail to notice the difference between this
modulated, suggestive, and artistically moulded horror and--to use the
words of Professor George Saintsbury--"the artful but rather jejune
rationalism of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the too often puerile extravagance,
the bad taste, and the sometimes slipshod style of Lewis." Maturin's
style in itself deserves particular praise, for its forcible directness
and vitality lift it altogether above the pompous artificialities of
which his predecessors are guilty. Professor Edith Birkhead, in her
history of the Gothic novel, justly observes that "with all his faults,
Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the Goths." "Melmoth"
was widely read and eventually dramatised, but its late date in the
evolution of the Gothic tale deprived it of the tumultuous popularity
of "Udolpho" and "The Monk."
(_Next month Mr. Lovecraft takes up "The Aftermath of Gothic
Fiction."_)
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