Melmoth the Wanderer 1820 Read online

  CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN (1782–1824) was an Irish playwright and novelist, born in Dublin. A contradictory figure, Maturin was both a friend of Lord Byron and a Protestant cleric. His play Bertram so scandalised London that the Church punished Maturin by blocking any further career advancement, forcing him to live by his pen. He was also the great-uncle of Oscar Wilde, who renamed himself Melmoth while in exile as a tribute to his forebear. Melmoth the Wanderer is Maturin’s best-known novel and is considered to be a classic of gothic literature.

  This edition published in 2018 by Serpent’s Tail,

  an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3 Holford Yard

  Bevin Way

  London

  WCIX 9HD

  www.serpentstail.com

  Introduction © Sarah Perry, 2018

  First published 1820

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

  ISBN 9781788161589

  eISBN 9781782834953

  Contents

  Introduction

  Note on the Text

  Preface

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  INTRODUCTION

  Readers of the Quarterly Review in 1821 were warned that a certain ‘unhappy patient’ had exceeded his past ‘ravings’ in the ‘folly and indelicacy’ of his third novel, Melmoth the Wanderer. Resorting to capitals to convey the depth of his outrage, the reviewer spoke of the novel’s ‘BLASPHEMY’, ‘BRUTALITY’ and ‘OBSCENITY’, delineating at length all the ways in which the writer had revolted against social propriety, proper religious feeling and artistic integrity. ‘If Melmoth had only been silly and tiresome,’ he wrote, ‘we should gladly have treated it with silent contempt; but it unfortunately variegates its stupidity with some characteristics of a more disgusting kind.’

  The author who occasioned this response was the Reverend Charles Maturin, the Protestant vicar of the Galway town of Loughrea. He was fond of dancing, despite being of a Calvinist bent; his sermons were heartfelt, compassionate, and much admired; though finely dressed in public, a visitor to his home might well encounter him in rags. His life was one of financial calamity: his father had been dismissed from his Post Office employment on suspicion of corruption, leaving Charles to bear the financial burden of the family, not least those of his bankrupt brother, while the church – viewing Maturin’s early efforts as a novelist with disfavour – barred him from advancement, so that he was reliant on a miserly stipend. The success of an 1816 play, Bertram, which starred Edmund Kean and earned Maturin no less than £1000, was all too brief: the money was swallowed up in debt, and the play itself moved Samuel Taylor Coleridge to observe that its popularity was little but ‘melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind’.

  It was under these circumstances that Maturin wrote what is one of the crowning achievements of the Gothic, and a novel which few can rival for complexity, cunning and horror. On the one hand he was motivated by a grinding poverty from which there seemed no escape, and peevishly prefaced the novel with a declaration that he could not ‘appear before the public in so unseemly a character as that of a writer of romances’ without ‘regretting the necessity’ that compelled him to it. On the other, he held a mischievous desire to push the Gothic novel to the furthest extent of imagination and excess. In a letter to Sir Walter Scott – an admirer who wrote of his friend’s ability to excite ‘a very deep though painful interest’ in the reader – Maturin declared that he would ‘out-Herod all the Herods’, plainly stating his ambition to plumb greater depths of transgression and sensation than any novelist before him.

  It is doubtful that Herod himself could have summoned up the baroque parade of physical horrors and mental shocks that constitute Melmoth the Wanderer. I came to it as a seasoned reader of Gothic and horror fiction, well-versed in historical and Biblical atrocities, my imagination enlarged and my constitution hardened by a diet of Stephen King, Mary Shelley, James Herbert and James Hogg. Nonetheless I often found myself so appalled by its contents that on occasion I pressed my hand to the page to cover the words, like a child viewing a film through her fingers. It opens with the young John Melmoth, an impecunious student of Trinity College, Dublin, attending his dying uncle in his disintegrating home. Here he encounters, by dim lamplight, the portrait of an ancestor, with eyes ‘such as one feels they wish they had never seen’. John’s uncle explains that here is a distant relation, long vanished, who ought to be dead, but who still lives. Gradually the bewildered young man begins to comprehend that this ancestor has, by some mysterious pact, sold his soul to the devil for immortality, and that he has since roamed the earth for 150 years, seeking someone to take his place, earning the name of Melmoth the Wanderer.

  What follows is a novel whose complexity of structure, embedded tales-within-tales, ‘dissolved, obliterated, muddled’ manuscripts and maddened narrators resembles nothing so much as the labyrinthine crypt beneath a Gothic edifice (and, like anyone lost in the passages of a crypt, readers may find themselves longing for more light). Melmoth’s malign presence is traced through the narratives of a shipwrecked Spanish sailor, of doomed lovers, of a young monk at the mercy of the Spanish Inquisition; he is ‘for ever exploring the mad-house, the jail, or the Inquisition, – the den of famine, the dungeon of crime, or the death-bed of despair’. He is the descendent of the Wandering Jew, a legend which began in the thirteenth century and made its way across Europe; in that legend a cobbler was said to have tossed a shoe at Christ as he laboured beneath the cross on the way to Calvary, and has ever since wandered the earth seeking redemption for his sin. Melmoth is a creature of apparently irreconcilable contradictions: absolutely human in his misery and desperate longing for freedom from the devil’s bargain, but supernatural and satanic in his powers, persuasiveness and rage. He is repellent in his wickedness, but there is a terrible seductive quality to him: when the innocent and child-like Immalee, whom Melmoth loves and therefore destroys, declares ‘Wed me by this light, and I will be yours forever!’, the reader may well pause to wonder if they, too, might have surrendered to Melmoth’s violent longing.

  Maturin spares the reader no detail of human suffering, both physical and psychological: to read the novel is to be, like Immalee, degraded by a pitiless display of man’s inhumanity to man.
Which is not to say Maturin is either humourless or amoral. On the contrary, the novel is grimly funny – Melmoth himself is much given to laughter, and the novel’s excesses are often described with a kind of deadpan detachment that gives the reader permission to grin with disbelief as much as grimace in distaste (the scene in which an immured man, insane with hunger, takes a bite from his lover’s shoulder and finally from his own hand, is so appalling as to be very funny indeed). And it is vigorously, even bitterly moral, as must be expected from a preacher who instructed his congregation to consider the plight of Ireland’s poor and acknowledge: ‘Are you not answerable for this?’ The righteous indignation of its satire on organised religion generally and Catholicism in particular is palpable, as is its condemnation of the political and financial practices that left such a significant proportion of the Irish population in abject poverty. Like Melmoth himself, the novel is composed of a thousand contradictions, as the unstoppable force of Maturin’s Gothic imagination meets the immovable object of history – it is ridiculous, gleefully and consciously so, but it is also deeply serious, and a profound commentary on personal, religious and political transgression. Cunningly, Maturin elides the border between fact and fiction: the novel is peppered with footnotes attesting to the veracity of certain episodes, such as that of the pauper whose son sells his blood to surgeons to keep the family from starvation (‘Fact: it occurred in a French family not many years ago’).

  It is not possible to understand Melmoth the Wanderer, nor to account for its power, without considering the nature of the Gothic. Few literary conventions are as subject to analysis and misinterpretation, perhaps because its nature lies not in the deployment of certain tropes and motifs, but in evoking and exploiting a particular kind of feeling. The Gothic is not a genre so much as a sensation, and it is telling that deep within one of Melmoth’s tales there is the line, italicised for emphasis, ‘emotions are my events’. Because it is not the torture, madness, misery and suffering that constitute the great events of this novel, and of all Gothic fiction at its most effective, but the emotions experienced by the reader. Gothic feeling is that sensation of being deliciously caught between repulsion and attraction, unable to distinguish between a feeling of censure or pleasure at acts of transgression. As Edmund Burke says, it is the sublime, since ‘whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime’. A writer may pepper a novel with as many manuscripts and candlesticks as they please, and send half-a-dozen maidens in nightgowns running down half-a-dozen subterranean passages, but unless the reader finds themselves as bewildered, appalled and pleasantly corrupted as the characters between the pages, the Gothic is not truly present.

  Maturin died four years after the publication of his masterpiece, having achieved neither fame nor financial security. He was forty-two. Melmoth the Wanderer met with greater success in France than elsewhere, and it is telling that so disruptive and transgressive a figure found welcome in a nation that had undergone a traumatic upheaval of political, social and religious norms. Balzac resurrected Melmoth in his novel Melmoth Reconciled, in which the Wanderer strikes a bargain with a banker, and Baudelaire wrote at length of the quality of Melmoth’s devilish laughter, ‘the necessary resultant of his own double nature, which is infinitely great in relation to man, and infinitely vile and base in relation to absolute Truth and Justice’. If Melmoth failed to achieve the ubiquity of other titular monsters – Dracula, Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – nonetheless the name echoes on, persistently, the Wanderer not yet at rest. Oscar Wilde, a great-nephew of Maturin’s by marriage, called himself Sebastian Melmoth on his release from jail; Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert named his blue car Melmoth; the Cerebus series of graphic novels includes a volume entitled Melmoth and features a character modelled on an ageing and dissipated Wilde. Some years after first reading Maturin, I found I could no longer ignore the indistinct female figure that seemed always to be watching me with an intent and unblinking gaze; and in due course found that I knew her name, and that she, too, was Melmoth; and so I sat down to write. In this way the impoverished Irish vicar’s legacy persists, and Melmoth goes on wandering, arousing in readers that sensation which is most purely and most dangerously Gothic: pity and contempt for ourselves, and sympathy for the devil.

  Sarah Perry

  Norwich, 2018

  NOTE ON THE TEXT

  The text is that of the first edition of 1820, with the following exceptions:

  Misprints and obvious slips have been corrected.

  In the 1820 edition, the chapter numbering went wrong in Volume III; after Chapter XVI came XIV, XVII (twice) and then XVIII–XX. The chapters after Chapter XVI have therefore been renumbered so as to run consecutively.

  The 1820 edition was divided into four volumes (bound in two volumes) but this was for the convenience of the publishers; the volume divisions had no connection with the structure of the narrative. Indications of the division into four volumes have therefore been removed, as they are no longer relevant when the novel is printed in a single volume and the chapter numbers run consecutively throughout.

  Text

  Asterisks, etc. indicate the author’s notes at the foot of the page. Archaic or obsolete spellings such as ‘stupify’, ‘indispensible’, ‘faulter’, ‘choaking’, ‘atchievements’, ‘strait’, ‘haram’, ‘groupe’, etc., and grammatical mistakes such as ‘neither/or’, sentences without a verb, etc., have been left in deliberately, as they are part of Maturin’s characteristic headlong style. Corrections have only been made where they were necessary to make the sense clear.

  PREFACE

  The hint of this Romance (or Tale) was taken from a passage in one of my Sermons, which (as it is to be presumed very few have read) I shall here take the liberty to quote. The passage is this.

  At this moment is there one of us present, however we may have departed from the Lord, disobeyed his will, and disregarded his word – is there one of us who would, at this moment, accept all that man could bestow, or earth afford, to resign the hope of his salvation? – No, there is not one – not such a fool on earth, were the enemy of mankind to traverse it with the offer!

  This passage suggested the idea of ‘Melmoth the Wanderer’. The Reader will find that idea developed in the following pages, with what power or success he is to decide.

  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.

  For the rest of the Romance, there are some parts of it which I have borrowed from real life.

  The story of John Sandal and Elinor Mortimer is founded in fact.

  The original from which the Wife of Walberg is imperfectly sketched is a living woman, and long may she live.

  I cannot again appear before the public in so unseemly a character as that of a writer of romances, without regretting the necessity that compels me to it. Did my profession furnish me with the means of subsistence, I should hold myself culpable indeed in having recourse to any other, but – am I allowed the choice?

  Dublin

  31 August 1820

  CHAPTER I

  Alive again? Then show me where he is;

  I’ll give a thousand pounds to look upon him.

  Shakespeare

  In the autumn of 1816, John Melmoth, a student in Trinit
y College, Dublin, quitted it to attend a dying uncle on whom his hopes for independence chiefly rested. John was the orphan son of a younger brother, whose small property scarce could pay John’s college expences; but the uncle was rich, unmarried, and old; and John, from his infancy, had been brought up to look on him with that mingled sensation of awe, and of the wish, without the means to conciliate, (that sensation at once attractive and repulsive), with which we regard a being who (as nurse, domestic, and parent have tutored us to believe) holds the very threads of our existence in his hands, and may prolong or snap them when he pleases.

  On receiving this summons, John set immediately out to attend his uncle.

  The beauty of the country through which he travelled (it was the county Wicklow) could not prevent his mind from dwelling on many painful thoughts, some borrowed from the past, and more from the future. His uncle’s caprice and moroseness, – the strange reports concerning the cause of the secluded life he had led for many years, – his own dependent state, – fell like blows fast and heavy on his mind. He roused himself to repel them, – sat up in the mail, in which he was a solitary passenger, – looked out on the prospect, – consulted his watch; – then he thought they receded for a moment, – but there was nothing to fill their place, and he was forced to invite them back for company. When the mind is thus active in calling over invaders, no wonder the conquest is soon completed. As the carriage drew near the Lodge, (the name of old Melmoth’s seat), John’s heart grew heavier every moment.

  The recollection of this awful uncle from infancy, – when he was never permitted to approach him without innumerable lectures, – not to be troublesome, – not to go too near his uncle, – not to ask him any questions, – on no account to disturb the inviolable arrangement of his snuff-box, hand-bell, and spectacles, nor to suffer the glittering of the gold-headed cane to tempt him to the mortal sin of handling it, – and, finally, to pilot himself aright through his perilous course in and out of the apartment without striking against the piles of books, globes, old newspapers, wig-blocks, tobacco-pipes, and snuff-cannisters, not to mention certain hidden rocks of rat-traps and mouldy books beneath the chairs, – together with the final reverential bow at the door, which was to be closed with cautious gentleness, and the stairs to be descended as if he were ‘shod with felt’. – This recollection was carried on to his school-boy years, when at Christmas and Easter, the ragged poney, the jest of the school, was dispatched to bring the reluctant visitor to the Lodge, – where his pastime was to sit vis-à-vis to his uncle, without speaking or moving, till the pair resembled Don Raymond and the ghost of Beatrice in the Monk, – then watching him as he picked the bones of lean mutton out of his mess of weak broth, the latter of which he handed to his nephew with a needless caution not to ‘take more than he liked,’ – then hurried to bed by daylight, even in winter, to save the expence of an inch of candle, where he lay awake and restless from hunger, till his uncle’s retiring at eight o’clock gave signal to the gouvernante of the meagre household to steal up to him with some fragments of her own scanty meal, administering between every mouthful a whispered caution not to tell his uncle. Then his college life, passed in an attic in the second square, uncheered by an invitation to the country; the gloomy summer wasted in walking up and down the deserted streets, as his uncle would not defray the expences of his journey; – the only intimation of his existence, received in quarterly epistles, containing, with the scanty but punctual remittance, complaints of the expences of his education, cautions against extravagance, and lamentations for the failure of tenants and the fall of the value of lands. All these recollections came over him, and along with them the remembrance of that last scene, where his dependence on his uncle was impressed on him by the dying lips of his father.