Melmoth the Wanderer

by Charles Maturin

  11. Almahs: Egyptian dancing girls. Maurice gives an account of the almai in Indian Antiquities (1806), v, 554–7.

  12. of a stilled infant…tears: Joanna Baillie, Ethwald, Pt I, II, i (A Series of Plays, 1821, ii, 112).

  13. He fled…night: Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 1015. The direct quotation brings to a climax the analogy between Melmoth and Milton’s Satan in this scene.

  CHAPTER XVII

  1. Blue Beard: First translated into English from the French of Charles Perrault in 1729.

  Cadi: Qadi, a magistrate.

  2. no note of time: Edward Young, The Complaint; or, Night-Thoughts, ‘Night the First’.

  3. thought…moral world: Gen. iii, 11–14: Cain who was cursed of God and doomed to wander: ‘a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth’.

  4. Semele: Semele, a Theban girl loved by Jupiter and destroyed by the fire of his lightning when he appeared to her in his full splendour. Cf. Marlowe, Dr Faustus, 5.i.114.

  5. There came on…apartment: This remarkable passage indicts the colonial exploitation of the East before the Empire had assumed its final phase.

  gold, and silver, and the souls of men: Rev. xviii, 12–13.

  6. In order…duration: From anti-colonialism to vegetarianism.

  drink: i.e. alcohol. For the connection between vegetarianism and political radicalism in this period, see Shelley, ‘Notes to Queen Mab’.

  7. unequal…existence: The satire of the logic of inequality is impeccable here, quite worthy of Thomas Paine, or Blake. The source maybe Rousseau, ‘Discourse on the Origins of Inequality’ (1764).

  8. mode…unjust’: Maturin alludes to Coleridge’s attack on his play, Bertram, in Biographia Literaria (1817), sharply criticizing it on the grounds of immorality and impiety. Coleridge’s play, Zapolya, was turned down by the Drury Lane Committee in favour of Maturin’s. Maturin was so incensed that he attacked Coleridge in his turn in the Preface to Women: or Pour et Contre, but was dissuaded from including these remarks by Scott. Coleridge was at this time turning against his own earlier poetry, and adding in Christian rationalizations, especially of the radical suggestions of ‘The Ancient Mariner’.

  9. the League: The Holy League, the name taken by Catholics under the Duke of Guise during the struggle with the Protestants in France at the end of the sixteenth century. The Edict of Nantes, signed by Henri IV in 1598, represented a pact of toleration whereby Protestants were allowed to practise their religion in France. Maturin’s family, which was Huguenot, fled to Ireland when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

  10. speech…truth: Scott, Marmion, Intro, to canto II, 11.110–11: ‘Just at the age ‘twixt boy and youth/When thought is speech, and speech is truth.’ Maturin changes the gender. The manoeuvre is a reversal of Milton’s encounter between Eve and the Serpent: here Immalee, being absolutely innocent, does not understand irony at all, or even the necessity of any form of circumlocution. Therefore it is necessary to reduce things to first principles for her, a procedure which implies a critique of fallen nature. Being absolutely innocent, post-lapsarian meanings are to her unintelligible, and therefore, like the children in William Blake’s lyrics, she is a living satire on the corruption which the Wanderer finds and indicts in the world. As such, it is she who seduces him from his course: Eve seduces the serpent into innocence even as he attempts to introduce her to the corruption of the human species.

  11. Stay with me: Here she openly (but unwittingly) tempts him into Paradise, and thus into history.

  12. I understand…but not your words: Shakespeare, Othello, IV, ii, 31–2: Desdemona, faced with the ‘horrible fancy’ of Othello.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  1. Miseram…Apollinis: ‘All things terrify wretched me, the noise of the sea, and the rocks, and solitude, and the sanctity of Apollo’ (Sextus Turpilius, Leucadia, frag. XI). Maturin, who seems to be quoting it from memory, gets the word-order slightly wrong; but the substance is correct. The analogy is with Immalee’s changed perception of her island solitude.

  2. Linnæus’: Carl von Linné (1707–78), the founder of modern botany. A ‘non-descript: that which falls in between classifications.

  3. alliance with all that is awful and ominous: The Fall brings both the separation of the ego from nature and the Romantic sublime.

  4. the arcades of the banyan-tree: Cf. Milton’s version of the Indian fig tree from Deccan and Malabar, whose roots are a matriarchal system, Paradise Lost, IX, 1105.

  5. sounds…serpent: The echo is of Milton’s Eve’s innocence, which, ‘with rapine sweet bereaves his [Satan’s] fierceness of the fierce intent it brought’ and he stands for a moment ‘stupidly good’, but soon his evil intentions revive, IX, 455–71. She does not, however, whisper to her flowers.

  6. ocynum: i.e. ocymum: basil.

  7. ears to hear: Matt, xi, 15.

  8. not at his words…them: a paraphrase of Shakespeare, Othello, IV, ii, 31–2.

  9. Such…light’: The Calvinist sense of the ‘future state’, in which, providentially, all will be revealed as it is, not as it appears to be.

  CHAPTER XIX

  1. Magdalèniade: Father Pierre de St Louis, La Magdaleine au desert de la Sainte Baume en Provence, 1668. Literally translated, the lines read:

  What does the world give most often to its own? The wind.

  What must I unremittingly strive to conquer here? The flesh.

  What was the cause of the miseries which have befallen me? Love.

  What should one say after such a betrayal? Shame on her. (trans. Hayter)

  2. Ireland…causes: This aside is a joke, alluding to the serious problem of Irish emigration. Purporting to come from a ‘Continental’ point of view, it may also be interpreted as a jibe at English mismanagement of Irish affairs.

  3. theta: The eighth letter of the Greek alphabet. Spaniards do not find it difficult to pronounce: they simply write TH as Z: Melmoth is written Melmoz, but pronounced exactly the same (Hayter).

  4. torpedo: Electric ray, known as the torpedo fish.

  5. the manner…half-feudal: Maturin uses a satirical pastiche of the language of Shakespearean comedy (the overlap of terms from Love and War) to portray the ‘artifice’ of Spanish manners in 1683. But the critique is made from Immalee’s Rousseauist point of view of ‘the Natural’. There may be an implied post-Act of Union resonance with garrison Ireland here.

  CHAPTER XX

  1. Thomas Moore, ‘Come, Rest in This Bosom’ (Irish Melodies).

  2. saturnic: Saturnine; sluggish, cold, and gloomy.

  3. the gay creature of the elements: Milton, Comus, I, 299. Comus’s seductive description of the Lady’s brothers, adapted to Immalee’s former life on the island.

  4. defalcations: Cutting down, abatement, curtailment.

  5. cereus: i.e. lit. ‘resembling wax’; a large South American species of cactus, the Torch-thistle.

  6. Here the breezes blow around the isle of the blessed; adapted from Pindar, Olympian Odes, ii, 72.

  7. Polish saint: St Casimir (d.1484), who was an exemplary child.

  8. Ireland: Maturin’s friend, the Nationalist author Lady Morgan (1776–1859), author of The Wild Irish Girl (1806), created a craze in the early nineteenth century for ‘wild and sweet’ songs on the harp.

  9. pax vobiscum: Peace be with you. Having mistaken his first exclamation for an item of reported speech, the puritanical Madonna now mistakes his address to her as an indecorous exclamation, and supplies him with a periphrasis more suitable to his priestly condition.

  10. Scire…timeri: See above, note 48 to Chapter V.

  11. aurum potabile: ‘Potable gold’: the analogy is between the hierarchy of alchemical metals and the hierarchy of races. Reflects the Spanish obsession with the purity of blood.

  12. irrefragably: Irrefutably.

  13. Sorites: A series of linked syllogisms, or logical statements of major and minor premises and conclusion (Hayter).

  14. Excæcavit…vidèrent
: ‘He blinded their eyes so that they did not see’ – a contraction of John xii, 40: ‘He hath blinded their eyes and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.’ This is the prophecy of Esiaias: ‘I’ refers to God. Again, the theme is heavily providential. Father Jose quotes a Latin text because the Catholic gospels were translated from Greek into the Latin Vulgate: the implication is that he had no access to the original text.

  15. mollia tempora fandi: Happy moments for speech. (Adapted from Virgil, Aeneid, iv, 293): Aeneas seeks the most diplomatic opportunity to tell Dido he is leaving.

  16. toujours perdrix: Partridge yet again! Disapproving remark attributed to the Confessor of Henry IV of France.

  17. Sixtus himself: Probably Sixtus V. But I can find no evidence of his pride.

  18. Xeres: Sherry.

  19. and of…Bengal: He dreams of an extension of the Spanish Inquisition (a rival, presumably, to the Portuguese one in Goa, on the Western coast), to the Eastern seaboard of India.

  20. heterodoxy of the heart: Heterodoxy: a combination or a conflict of different beliefs. This is a brilliant phrase, which yokes belief-systems (‘heterodoxy’) to the psychology of romantic love (‘heart’) in a form of mutual comparison.

  21. that instrument: The Aeolian harp, a metaphor for the human heart. The craze for these was late eighteenth-century and romantic.

  22. nature…ways: Despite Isidora’s former life, her attitude here is not seventeenth-century: it is Rousseauistic and therefore anachronistic. But nature is also culture here: ‘torture’ is an eloquent metaphor which recalls the distortions of this society, including the Inquisition.

  23. Toledos: Swords made and decorated in Toledo.

  24. limner: Painter, especially a portrait painter.

  25. a new heaven…earth: Rev. xxi, 1.

  26. bagatelles: Trifles, things of no importance.

  27. a marvellous proper man: Shakespeare, Richard III, I, iii, 253. Said by the deformed Richard of himself, after manipulating the Lady Anne into a declaration of her love for him over the dead body of her husband. The analogy confirms the Wanderer’s cruelty.

  28. dole: Grief, sorrow, mental distress.

  29. anti-catholic objection: She is named after Saint Isidore of Seville (c.560–636), author of, amongst many other things, the treatises Concerning the Catholic Faith Against the Jews and Concerning Heresies. Canonized in 1598.

  30. Dejanira: Killed her husband, Herakles, by giving him Nessus’s poisoned tunic in the hope of regaining his love (Grant).

  31. house on the sands: Matt, vii, 24–6.

  32. the European ‘perhaps!’: The Wanderer ‘anticipates’ (retrospectively) the scepticism of the Enlightenment.

  33. fardingales: Farthingales, hooped skirts.

  34. chrism: Oil mingled with balm, consecrated for use as an unguent in the administration of certain sacraments in the Eastern and Western Churches.

  35. atabal: A kind of kettledrum used by the Moors.

  36. the noise…shoutings: Job xxxix, 25. Blasphemously placed: this is part of God’s reply to Job, in which he lists a number of things he can do, including make the horse smell battle from afar off. This surrounding vision of Hell is reminiscent of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, a parade of the powerful damned of human history.

  37. triple-crowned chieftains of the West: Popes, placed by God (1) above the Church; (2) above the Holy Roman Empire; (3) above earthly princes.

  38. your bretheren…night: Nero (AD 37–68) burnt Christians alive as torches to illuminate his gardens.

  39. You love music…who have chromatized: Played chromatic scales. essays: Attempts.

  Tubal Cain: Gen. iv, 22: ‘And Zillah, she also bare Tu-bal-cain, an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron’.

  Lully: Jean-Baptiste Lulli (1632–87), Italian composer in the service of Louis XIV; the occasion was at a performance of his Te Deum, on 8 January 1687. While conducting more than 150 musicians, he hit his toe with the sharp point of the cane with which he was beating time; an abscess developed, then gangrene. Maturin’s phrase ‘beat himself to death’ is a play on words.

  40. Democritus: (c.460-c.370BC), the Greek moralist and so-called ‘laughing philosopher’. His ethical system posited an ultimate good (‘cheerfulness’), a state in which the soul lives peacefully and tranquilly, undistracted by fear or superstition.

  41. laughter is madness: Eccles. ii, 2: ‘I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it?’ The Preacher sets out to prove the vanity (emptiness) of laughter. Here Greek materialism meets Hebraic prophecy over the question of laughter.

  there: In Hell.

  42. fandangoes: Fandango, Spanish dance with castanets.

  43. ancient cities: Herculaneum and Pompeii. Cf. Fatal Revenge, 3 vols., Edinburgh, Constable, 1807, Vol. II, 102.

  44. A withering monosyllable: i.e. Hell.

  CHAPTER XXI

  1. Grant’s likely conjecture is that these unattributed verses are by Maturin himself.

  2. Mare infructuosum: The unfruitful sea. Possibly a translation of Homer, Iliad, i, 316: ‘the unharvested sea’.

  3. tears…eyes: Rev. vii, 17.

  4. Let us…mourning: Eccles. vii, 2. That is, it is better to go into the house of mourning than the house of feasting, because the former is our inevitable lot.

  5. To her…brightness: Job xxxi, 26. The implication of the allusion is that she is still in a state of pagan idolatry.

  6. seity: Selfhood.

  7. Pygmalion: Pygmalion, King of Cyprus, fell in love with the ivory statue of a woman he had made; at his prayer, Aphrodite brought the statute to life. Here the story is viewed from the statue’s point of view.

  8. Christianity…mind: i.e. Catholicism. This is not wholly ironic: in Maturin’s view God’s Providence will make sure that Catholic superstition will give way to Protestant rationalism. (See Introduction, pp. xvi-xvii.)

  9. nothing…sun: Eccles. i, 9.

  10. fearful…indignation: Heb. x, 27. The passage refers to our furtive reaction after we have sinned, having received the truth: in this case it will be Melmoth who inflicts these emotions on the guilty possessors of wealth and distinction.

  11. Mithridates: The Great, King of Pontus (c.67BC), captured Manlius Aquilus, the Roman Ambassador, in 88BC Finally at Pergamon he poured molten gold down his throat, to rebuke the Romans for their bribe-taking. The incident is reported in Appian, Roman History, ‘The Mithridatic War’, Bk XII, Chap. III, para 21.

  12. He…root: Jonah iv, 6–7. The story of Jonah and the gourd, and the pity of a jealous God on Nineveh.

  13. hope deferred: ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick.’ Prov. xiii, 2.

  14. where her foot might rest: Gen. viii, 9.

  15. tell…them: Ps. xix, 3, ‘there is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard’, i.e. the heavens, the glory and the handiwork of God.

  16. What [is there between] thee and me? John ii, 4. Christ’s words to his mother at the Wedding at Cana.

  17. the statue that meets the sun: The statue of Memnon at Thebes resounded musically at daybreak as soon as the sun struck it.

  18. whom…serve: Josh, xxiv, 15: ‘…choose ye today whom ye will serve.’ Joshua asks all the tribes of Israel to put away the Gods they worshipped on the other side of the flood in Egypt and worship the Lord.

  CHAPTER XXII

  1. I’ll…husband: Not actually Shakespeare, but quoted from Garrick’s adaptation of the play, V, 5 (Grant).

  2. She…were: Not identified.

  3. pullen: Poultry (i.e. dialect).

  4. Molinists: Followers of the Spanish theologian Luis de Molina (1535–1600), who held that the efficacy of grace lies in God’s foreknowledge of man’s free cooperation with the divine gift of grace (Concordia, 1588).

  Jansenists: followers of Cornelius Otto Jansen, bishop of Ypres 1585–1638, author of Augustinus (1640), who held a doctrine
of irresistible grace without which men cannot keep God’s commandments. The Jansenists had to defend Augustinian theology against Molinism.

  5. Dominican: An order of mendicant friars instituted in 1215 by the Spaniard Domingo de Guzman (St Dominic); known in England as the Black Friars.

  Franciscan: An order of friars founded by St Francis of Assisi about 1209; known in England as the Grey Friars.

  6. Note that the story of how Immalee became Isidora is presented via a pastiche of Don Quixote (Pt 1, Ch. XXX).

  7. e faucibus Draconis – e profundis Barathri: From the jaws of the dragon, from the depths of the abyss.

  8. ombre pez: Man-fish. Cf. Shakespeare, The Tempest, II, ii, 25ff.

  9. prisoners: Protagonists, but also readers. Jane Austen’s latest attack on ‘romance’, Northanger Abbey (1818), was only two years old when Melmoth came out.

  10. verbosa et grandis epistola: ‘A great, long-winded letter’ (Juvenal, Satires, x, 71), i.e. the one from Tiberius in Capri, which hurried Sejanus to his doom on 18 October AD 31.

  11. To the mere…life: This elaborate attack on romances combines the authority of Austen and Scott, concerning ‘the thousand petty external causes’ which romances omit, and reflects the pressure after Fatal Revenge (1807) on Maturin from Scott, manifested in his Prefaces and their correspondence, to write in a more ‘modern’ (i.e. ‘realistic’) fashion. But in the context of this romance narrative, the aside has the opposite effect: it appears disingenuous, a rhetorical disclaimer which intensifies the sublimity of Isidora’s conflict.

  12. The last…Jewish champion: i.e. Samson. Cf. Judges xvi, 21–30. After his betrayal by Delilah, the putting out of his eyes and his condemnation by the Philistines to ‘grind in the prison house’ in Gaza, Samson succeeded in pulling down the pillars of the temple and slew 3,000 Philistines.

  13. toying…string: The passage recalls De Sade’s analysis of sexuality as a form of power. Cf. Shakespeare, King Lear, ‘As flies to wanton boys/Are we to the Gods; they kill us for their sport.’