Melmoth the Wanderer

by Charles Maturin

  MELMOTH THE WANDERER

  CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN was born in Dublin in 1782, and educated at Trinity College. He took orders and was a curate in Loughrea and Dublin, and also, for a time, worked as a teacher until literary success enabled him to give this up. His first novel, The Fatal Revenge (1807), was published under a pseudonym to protect his reputation as a clergyman. A series of other novels followed, and his tragedy Bertram (1816) met with great success when it was produced by Edmund Kean at Drury Lane, after recommendation by Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. His next plays, Manuel (1817) and Fredolfo (1819), were failures, and Maturin returned to writing novels. Melmoth the Wanderer appeared in 1820, but in the last years of his life his works were neglected, and he died in poverty in 1824. In the 1890s his literary reputation in England was revived, and his works were reprinted in various editions.

  Maturin’s Calvinist upbringing lent to his work a strong sense of the soul’s relationship with God, which can also be seen in the work of James Hogg, William Godwin and Godwin’s daughter, Mary Shelley. He was also influenced by comic writers of epics and romances, such as Cervantes, Swift, Sterne and Diderot. His strongest influences were the authors of Gothic romances of the late eighteenth century, in particular, Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe. Maturin’s tales were, however, always more extravagant and macabre, and led to his reputation as one of the foremost writers of the Gothic school.

  VICTOR SAGE is Reader in Literature in the School of English and American Studies at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He is the author of two novels, A Mirror for Larks (1993) and Black Shawl (1995), and a collection of short stories, Dividing Lines (1984). He has published several studies of the Gothic tradition, including a study of the religious contexts of the Gothic novel, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (1988), and he is the editor of the casebook The Gothick Novel (1990).

  CHARLES MATURIN

  Melmoth the Wanderer

  Edited with an Introduction and Notes by

  VICTOR SAGE

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  First published 1820

  Published in Penguin Books 2000

  7

  Introduction and editorial apparatus copyright © Victor Sage, 2000

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the editor has been asserted

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  EISBN: 978–0–141–90517–4

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  FURTHER READING

  Melmoth the Wanderer

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  Literary Background: The Genre

  and the Moment

  In literary histories, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) often marks the end of the Gothic romance proper, as a genre. Its author, the Irish clergyman Charles Robert Maturin, was a conscious inheritor of the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel of ‘Monk’ Lewis and Ann Radcliffe, seeking to outdo them in dark extravagance. His vastly ambitious first novel, Fatal Revenge (1807), written (to protect his cloth) under the pseudonym of Dennis Jasper Murphy, forms a concrete link between this earlier Gothic romance and the fully-fledged romanticism of Byron and Shelley. Writing to Sir Walter Scott in 1813 about another lost or never completed work, Maturin declares his enduring ambition: ‘…and in my Romance I have determined to display all my diabolical resources, out-Herod all the Herods of the German school, and get the possession of the Magic Lamp with all its slaves from the Conjuror Lewis himself’.1 This is evidently a playful metaphor for the fiction market (‘slaves’ are readers) and his dream is to write a best-seller, but the romantic idea of the author as a seriously aspiring diabolist still meant something to him six years after his first effort.

  Five years after that, in 1818, and after a battering by the reviewers, when he came to write his masterpiece, it was a somewhat defiant act. He had spent the time in between writing a series of much gentler forms of hybrid romance, in which he expressed his own Irish nationalism alongside the only other romance-writer of note in Dublin, his friend Lady Morgan. Maturin’s novels are better than hers as novels, but she was the one to strike a chord with the public, and her romance, The Wild Irish Girl (1806), was a cult success in London. Maturin followed with The Wild Irish Boy (1807), The Milesian Chief (1812), and then a strange and rather interesting blend of satire and romance, Women; or Pour et Contre (1818). This sequence of works forms, to some extent, an anatomy of Ireland after the Act of Union (1801) and these novels, all of which display Maturin’s unique brand of stylistic fireworks, have a surprising amount of direct social comment in them.

  But during that period Maturin was far from giving up his Gothic ambitions. In 1816, we find him giving private vent to his frustration in another letter to Scott: ‘…I have no power of affecting, no hopes of instructing, no play or other production of mine will ever draw a tear from the eye, or teach a lesson to the Heart, so I wish they would let me do what I am good for, sit down by my magic Cauldron, mix my dark ingredients, see the bubbles work, and the spirits rise, and by the pale and mystic light, I might show them “the best of my delights”.’2 This time, against the crew of reviewers and theatre managers (‘them’), all seeking to make him conform to sentimental or didactic orthodoxy, the author becomes one of the witches from Macbeth, even quoting from the play.

  In the meantime, the audience for high metaphysical romance had not yet disappeared, despite the emergent claims of a new age of realism. Faust was in the air. Mme de Staël’s De L’Allemagne was published in English in 1813. This essay, which contained large chunks of Goethe’s Faust and a description of the play, Goethe credited with having ‘demolished the Chinese wall of antiquated prejudice’ the English had built up about German literature. To her notoriety, in 1818 Mary Shelley published her Faustian Frankenstein, which was instantly turned into one of the century’s longest running melodramas, and Jane Austen’s posthumous satire on the Gothic romance, Northanger Abbey (it was written in the 1790s, but not published till 1818), which had the paradoxical effect of calling attention to its target, and thus momentarily raising it from the dead, also appeared in the year that Maturin began work on Melmoth. By 1819, Goethe had become the centre of another critical controversy (started by John G. Lockhart, Sir Walter Scott’s son-in-law) between the Edinburgh Review and Blackwoods, the latter publishing in subsequent issues essays and reviews of Faust. So the scene was set for the appearance of the Gothic romance to end all Gothic romances, Melmoth the Wanderer.3

  Moreover, the obscure, maligned a
nd poverty-stricken author had suddenly and unexpectedly become famous through the success of his tragedy, Bertram, at Drury Lane in 1816, which earned him enough money (about £1,000) to allow him to stop teaching (his second day-job) and work on, among other things, his Faustian romance.

  Maturin and Scott

  We are fortunate to have some of the letters that passed between Maturin and Sir Walter Scott, and so can form an idea of the relationship between the two writers. Their friendship gives us a glimpse not only into their personal relationship (they never met, except on paper) but also into the difference between their commercial or tactical sense of the writer’s career, and, most importantly, their aesthetic expectations. Effectively, their correspondence is a dialogue between two different traditions: Maturin’s Gothic, his characteristically hyperbolic and perverse development of what he came to call ‘the Radcliffe-Romance’, and Scott’s own rationalized and modernized ‘historical romance’, a genre shrewdly aimed towards the changing taste of the period.

  Scott was interested in the Godthic Romance because it covered one of his own subjects – superstition. He reviewed, and was judiciously critical of, many of the major productions (including Radcliffe herself, and, later, Mary Shelley) and he read the minor ones by the hamper. Out of one such hamper, he picked Maturin’s first novel, Fatal Revenge, immediately sporting the talent of the author, and reviewed it anonymously and favourably in the Quarterly. Late in 1812, Maturin heard that Scott was the reviewer and wrote to him. Scott’s reply is significant:

  My attention was indeed very strongly excited both by the House of Montorio and the Irish tale [i.e. The Wild Irish Boy] which it was impossible to confound with the usual still of novels as they bear strong marks of a powerful imagination and excite upon the whole a very deep though painful interest. I have regretted if you will forgive me writing with so much freedom that the author has not in some respects renderd his fictions more generally acceptable by mitigating some of their horror…4

  Characteristically, at the outset, Scott seeks to ‘tone down’ Maturin’s penchant for grotesque and ‘wild’ hyperbole, and to get rid of the horror. This is kindly and worldly personal advice, but it also reveals the gap between the two writers: Scott, on the threshold himself of a vastly more successful novelistic career than Maturin, is concerned for probability and decorum in narrative – that, as he puts it in one of his reviews, using a characteristic financial metaphor, the writer should not ‘draw too much upon the credit of the reader’. He regards excess as a narrative fault. He fears that the old Gothic will appear pasteboard and Grand Guignol in this post-revolutionary modern age. Maturin, on the other hand, wants to ‘out-Herod Herod’.

  After he began to correspond with Scott (who was indefatigable, it should be said, in supporting him, acting as both patron and agent), Maturin came under pressure to ‘lower’ his effects and introduce greater realism into his writing. One can see this from the letters in 1816 about his play, Bertram. Maturin had introduced a Schilleresque character into the original version called the Black Knight of the Forest, who seduces the hero, Bertram, into murdering his lover, Imogine’s husband. Scott pounces on the Black Knight and says he must go, and, when the play is sent to them, Byron and George Lamb at Drury Lane echo his views: the Devil cannot be represented directly on the stage – either he will not be understood to be the Devil, or, if he is, he will be booed off the stage. And no doubt they were right: the play was the greatest commercial success of his writing life. But when Maturin read the cuts that the Hon. George Lamb had carried out on his behalf, he cried out in a letter to Scott: ‘they have un-Maturined it completely’.5 What he partly meant by this was that they had cut out the play’s source of inexorable evil, its Gothic heart, and rationalized it; and privately Scott, who had a sneaking admiration for the first version (and afterwards published the restored passages), agreed that the Knight’s ‘influence and agency gave to the atrocities of Bertram an appearance of involuntary impulse…’6

  This division of taste and methods of narration tells us something at least about what Maturin did not want to achieve. Scott’s reviewing project had the effect of making primitive forerunners to his own fiction out of the old Gothic romance: his new Historical romance (Waverley (1814), for example) is written in a confident inclusive third person which creates the fiction of an even, panoptical survey of its material – the customs and superstitions of the Scottish Borders, or the Highlands, for example – and the use of footnotes in the later editions of Scott tends to confirm the authority of the author, not to interrupt, but to be continuous with the text, adding encyclopedic confirmation to the narrative. Historical romance negotiates a rational agreement with the reader about the superstitions of the past, and of remote geographical areas, whose language and beliefs are different from the standard English variety, a fiction of a common and stable distance. Scott’s comfortable Enlightenment narrative persona is usually on hand to give the informed and rational overview, to explain and prepare for events, and generally mediate elegantly from a central position making all clear, however complex the issues or murky the events.

  Maturin, by contrast, cultivates in all his work, and particularly in Melmoth, the immediate, the violent, the sublime, the grotesque, and the comic, many of these effects occurring simultaneously. Compared with Scott, his methods seem untidy, if not ramshackle. His narrative persona as author soon gives way to his characters who tell their own stories at such length, each giving way, in their turn, so abruptly to another, that we have to check where we are. He starts at a remote point in the action and then cultivates a labyrinthine form without a centre, embedding his stories one within the other until we are dizzy. He is acutely aware of the new expectation of probability in his audience created by Scott, and writes footnotes which are either defiant, nervous, self-defeating jokes – ‘Anachronism, n’importe’ (‘but a minor one’); ‘Anachronism prepense’ (‘deliberate anachronism’); or which inject horror into the narrative, as in the graphic account of the death of Viscount Kilwarden, trampled to death by Robert Emmett’s insurrectionists in Dublin, or the death of Dr William Hamilton the naturalist. The distance of his discourse from the reader is, in Scott’s terms, too radically variable – we always seem to be either too close or too far away from ‘events’.

  All of this is summed up in the adjective for Maturin which rings through the criticism of his contemporaries: ‘wild’. Thus the idea is born, which subtly persists, of a ‘wild untutored genius’ possessed of talent, but lacking in self-consciousness, and without discipline or method. Maturin himself colluded in this image, partly because ‘wild’ is code for ‘Irish’, and in following Lady Morgan’s Rousseauistic exploitation of ‘wildness’ he was (although satirically) playing a Nationalist card. Since Lady Morgan was an embattled figure herself, Maturin drew attention to himself as her ally, and he was caught in the crossfire, certainly in the case of the Quarterly. The epithet turned out to be a two-edged sword: from the English point of view, it raised the ‘Celtic’ stereotype of‘wild eloquence’ or ‘natural spontaneity without discipline’ and it opened the way, among many of his English reviewers (with the noble exception of Scott, who was not English), for a patronizing attitude.

  The most hostile reviewers, however, were deeply offended by the persistent blasphemy of Melmoth, holding against him as a writer the contradiction of his profession as a clergyman in the Church of Ireland. No doubt they were, in part, taking their cue from Coleridge, who in Biographia Literaria had mounted a vitriolic attack on the revised Bertram (1817) for its immorality and impiety. In 1821, the Quarterly reviewer of Melmoth accused Maturin of nonsense, want of veracity, blasphemy, brutality, and ‘dark, cold-blooded, pedantic obscenity’.7

  The French Reception

  In England, the novel and its author fell into neglect by the mainstream after Maturin died in poverty in 1824. There were some biographical reminiscences in the 1830s and 1840s. In Ireland, the poet and translator J. C. Mangan tried to r
evive his reputation with an enthusiastic piece in The Irishman in 1849. An attempt was made to revive his reputation by another Irish writer in the Irish Quarterly Review in 1852, but essentially he languished until the end of the century, when George Saintsbury published Tales of Mystery, Mrs Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin in 1891, which contained excerpts from Maturin; and Melmoth was at last reprinted by Richard Bentley in 1892, with a memoir of the author, for which Oscar Wilde and his mother, who was Maturin’s niece by marriage, supplied details.

  It was left to the French to provide critical insight and boost his reputation, which had been high in France from the success of Bertram. Unbeknownst, it seems, to Maturin, this play was an international hit. Translated in 1821 by M. M. Taylor and the novelist Charles Nodier, it was put on in 1822 as a three-act melodrama at the Panorama Dramatique as Bertram, ou le Pirate, by ‘M. Raimond’ (i.e. Taylor), and ran for fifty-three straight nights. A third version by Franconi went to the Cirque Olympique. Subsequently it was made into an opera, Le Pirate. From there it moved to Italy, where Felice Romani used it as the basis of his II Pirata, the libretto of which he offered to the young Bellini, who had just contracted to compose for La Scala, and the opera, first staged in October 1827, was an immediate success and was the real beginning of Bellini’s career. Victor Hugo admired the play and used quotations from it as epigraphs in Han d’Islande. Balzac admired it, and it was the inspiration for Dumas’s Antony in 1831. In Germany, Goethe wanted to translate it. It was also a great hit in America, going through three editions in New York, Philadelphia and Boston and running all through the Civil War years.8

  Melmoth was also translated into French in 1821 and became a classic of the Romantic Sublime, influencing the ‘roman frénétique’ in the 1830s. In 1833 Gustave Planché dedicated an article to Maturin in Revue des Deux Mondes, in which Maturin’s Irishness was characterized as an advantage. In 1835 Balzac wrote his famous parody, Melmoth Reconcilié. In the Preface, he gives some idea of the magnitude and the originality of Melmoth: ’This novel is taken up with the same idea to which we already owe the drama of Faust, and out of which Lord Byron has cut his cloth since Manfred; the work of Maturin is no less powerful than that of Goethe, and it rests on what is perhaps a more dramatic premise, in the sense that it contains the pre-existent weariness of human feeling, and that the interest comes from a clause in the pact which allows a certain hope to the one who is damned.’ That is, the Wanderer’s freedom to find a substitute for himself.9