Melmoth the Wanderer

by Charles Maturin

  46. like Joseph: Gen. xliii, 30. See note 42 above.

  47. Marshall: Walter Marshall (1628–80), author of The Gospel Mystery of Sanctification, 1694.

  48. Her life…movements: The opposition between life and mechanism is not simply a feature of the representation of Catholicism; it is also part of this account of dissenting Protestantism. It seems Maturin satirizes all forms of automatic or conditioned behaviour.

  49. Anachronism – n’importe: An anachronism, but not a serious one. In fact, 1662 precedes his present narrative date, so Maturin has not committed an anachronism as he thinks (Hayter). Of course, the absurdly defiant footnote would draw attention to the anachronism, if it were one. The target of this defiance seems to be the ‘probability’ and order of Scott’s historical romance.

  50. Then they…etc.: Mai. iii, 16ff.

  51. Ichabod: Son of Phineas and grandson of the priest Eli, the tragic circumstances of whose birth are described in i Sam. iv, 19–22. The name means ‘the glory of the departed’. The analogy is extraordinarily baroque: between reviving the ‘reminiscences of religion’ and ‘bearing an heir of the soul’ when you know the ‘glory has departed’.

  52. the root…in her: Job xix, 28 (Grant). This is Job’s reply to Bildad the Shuhite and the other righteous ones who judge him – i.e. that the root of the matter is in them.

  53. Lady Russel’s letters in manuscript: Lady Rachel Russell (1636–1723), the correspondent of Archbishop Tillotson. Her letters were first published from manuscript in 1773.

  54. Nelson’s Fasts and Festivals etc.: Robert Nelson (1656–1715), Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England, 1704.

  55. An intolerable (lit: ‘unliveable’) life (Aristophanes, Plutus, 1.969) (Grant); my life’s been not worth living; all through him (Loeb). The Old Lady is rejected and spurned by her young lover and this is her complaint.

  56. scutcheon: Shield, name-plate, with transferred sense of ‘coat of arms’.

  57. prévoyance: Foresight, but here ‘forethought’.

  58. Cowley’s ‘Cutter of Coleman Street’: Abraham Cowley (1618–62) was famous for writing in every style of his age. This anti-Puritan comedy, from which Maturin derives some local colour, was revised in 1663.

  59. the system…gospel: The distinction is explicitly made here between ‘the system of Calvin’ and ‘the Gospel’ and the implication seems to be that Elinor’s aunt (like all of her persuasion) confuses the one with the other. Cf. the exposure of ‘system’ in the Spanish Catholic part of the narrative.

  60. this ‘tyranny is overpast’: Ps. lvii, 1 (Grant). The verse reads: Tea in the shadow of thy wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be over past.’ The ‘tyranny’ is mortal life.

  CHAPTER XXXI

  1. John Home, The Fatal Discovery, 1769, Act V.

  2. feathers of gold: Ps. Ixviii,13. The verse reads:

  ’Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers of yellow gold,’ i.e. providing a glimpse of the beauty that lies beyond this mortal clay. Adapted here to fit Elinor’s vision of the landscape coloured by her love for Sandal.

  3. as it had been…angel: Acts vi, 15: Stephen, confronted by false witnesses in the Council, is undeniably holy. Here again, adapted to describe Elinor’s vision of Sandal’s face.

  CHAPTER XXXII

  1. We were, but are no more (unidentified).

  2. Those whom…predestinated: Rom.viii, 29. A central text for Calvinism as it stands, because it seems to endorse the doctrine of predestination. The verse carries on, however, in a way that makes it much less useful to Calvinists: ‘…predestinated to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the first born among many brethren.’

  3. deplored: Wept. (Used here literally.)

  4. Bishop Burnet: Gilbert Burnet (1643–1714), Bishop of Salisbury who ‘had the credit of the conversion, apparently genuine, of one of the worst of the libertines of the court, Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and of Miss Roberts, one of the King’s mistresses…’ (DNB)

  5. Her delight…house: Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1490–91. Adapted: the ‘delight’ and the lines belong to Manoa, Samson’s father.

  6. suffered…physicians: Mark v, 26 (Grant). Referring to the daughter of Jairus (who had spent his money on doctors), who touched the hem of Jesus’s garment and was healed.

  7. unwearied in well-doing: Gal. vi, 9 (Grant). The verse reads: ‘And let us not be weary in well-doing; for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.’ Here, adapted to the pain of unrequited love.

  proofs: Tests.

  8. an expression of fear: i.e. that he will never succeed. The Wanderer is talking about himself in the third person.

  9. That is…comparison: This joke makes us jump out of the narrative frame, reminding us suddenly of the ideological difference of the listener-in-the-text.

  10. Dr Dee…Poland: Dr Dee (1527–1608), mathematician and astrologer, popularly supposed to be a magician. He visited Poland in 1584. His colleague in crystallomancy was Albert Laski, palatine of Siradz. Here Maturin has produced an anachronism: the clergyman did not visit Poland until 1642; Dee died in 1608, and so could not have been ‘one of their companions in Poland’ (Hayter). Except, of course, if their pact made them all possessed of unusual longevity. The hint is that Melmoth got some of his powers from Dee. The passage has been taken as evidence for Maturin’s Rosicrucianism.

  11. by all…Christ: 2 Tim. ii, 19: ‘Let everyone who nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.’ Paul seeks to draw the line for his son, Timothy. This is a text which Maturin uses to invoke the black art, the Anti-Christ.

  12. Observe…dead: Cf. Marlowe, Dr Faustus, Act V, XIX, Faustus, and his fellow scholars.

  13. Seeking…devour: i Peter v, 8: ‘Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.’ Peter to the elders in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadochia, Asia Minor and Bithynia. Melmoth here, for the clergyman, is the ‘roaring lion’ and therefore the Devil. But note the dramatic irony: it is Melmoth himself who narrates the clergyman’s speech to Don Aliaga.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  1. ‘Tis not so much the thieves and beasts wont to infest the place that cause me care and trouble, as the witches who with spells and drugs vex human souls’ (Horace, Satires, I, viii, 17–20) (Grant): spoken by the little fig-wood garden statue of Priapus. The theme, rendered in a mixture of comedy and darker threat, is superstition; and the analogy the allusion generates is between seventeenth-century Spain and nineteenth-century Ireland.

  2. the ballad of Roncesvalles: Roland, the most famous of Charlemagne’s paladins, was killed in the valley of Roncevaux. His legend is the theme of the twelfth-century Chanson de Roland.

  3. sacravienses: Frequenters of the Via Sacra district of Rome, a traditional route for processions since Ancient Rome.

  4. deserted abodes of ruined nobility: Following Lady Morgan’s best-seller The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Maturin’s second and third novels, The Wild Irish Boy (1808) and The Milesian Chief (1812), portrayed the Gothic ruins of Ireland as the habitations of a deposed race of ancient Irish princes, or ‘Milesians’, now reduced to squatting in their own property.

  5. though one…dead: Luke xvi, 31. Abraham’s answer to Dives the rich man – that even the Resurrection would not convince those men who pay no heed to Moses and the Prophets. Here the mercantile father abandons his daughter to her fate for the sake of business.

  CHAPTER XXXIV

  1. Little’s Poems: The pseudonym of Thomas Moore for his Poems (1801) was Thomas Little. See ‘The Ring’, v.30.

  2. Chacoli…Catalonia: i.e. from the north-west Atlantic coast to the east Mediterranean coast.

  3. poignant: Pungent.

  4. Dillon’s travels through Spain: Sir John Dillon, Travels Through Spain, 1780.

  5. Quichotte: i.e. the French pronunciation of Don Quixote.

&nbs
p; 6. assiduity: Unremitting attention to the matter in hand, perseverence, diligence.

  7. spirit…waters: Gen. 1, 2. The analogy compares Isidora’s female faith in the power of the heart to God’s creation of the world. This is the kind of blaphemous hyperbole Maturin’s first reviewers protested violently against.

  8. It…inflict: The Wanderer’s motivation here for becoming a father seems to be so that he has a future victim.

  9. from Dan to Beersheba: Judges xx, 1. The original celebrates the unity of the children of Israel, from Dan even to Beersheba. Here, dialectically reversed: all is universally barren.

  10. He…night?: Isa. xxi, 11.

  CHAPTER XXXV

  1. Dryden, King Arthur, 1691, iii, 2.

  2. laterally: A slip for latterly, lately.

  3. momently: From moment to moment, continually.

  4. in the Arabian Tales: ‘The History of the Amours of Maugraby with the sister of the planets, daughter of the King of Egypt’, Arabian Tales; or, A Continuation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainment, 1794, iii, 201–21.

  5. the salutary…angel’: The Wanderer alludes to the Tudor Morality Plays, which contain a psychomachia between Good and Evil angels for the soul of Human Kind, or Everyman. Cf. Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, which uses, and inverts, this popular genre. The Wanderer takes the part of the Good Angel here, but Isidora replies in a way which seems merely idolatrous.

  CHAPTER XXXVI

  1. ‘Now love and the name of mother break me down’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses, viii, 508). Althaea, sister of Plexippus and Toxeus, who are killed by Meleager: she kills him by a piece of maternal witchcraft, but is tormented by the contradiction between her roles as avenging sister and life-giving mother. The analogy is with Isidora’s torment between virgin daughter and pregnant wife to the Wanderer.

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  1. William Mason, Caractacus, 1759.

  2. the heralds…Achilles: Iliad, IX, 165ff. Odius and Eurybates, who accompany Phoenix, Aras and Odysseus to persuade Achilles to fight.

  3. Te absolve: I absolve you.

  Jam tibi dedi, moribunda: I have just now given it to you, you who are about to die.

  CHAPTER XXXVIII

  1. Southey: Robert Southey, ‘Old Woman of Berkeley’. The Devil comes three times for the old woman’s soul, and cannot finally be resisted. The analogy is with the Wanderer’s end.

  2. seriously incline: Shakespeare, Othello, I, iii, 146. The phrase describes Desdemona’s narrative curiosity for Othello’s adventures, which is compared to young John Melmoth’s about those of his ancestor.

  3. natural force…abated’: Deut. xxxiv, 7. Of Moses, when he died: ‘His eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated.’

  4. the Spanish writer: Tirso de Molina (1571–1641) in El Burlador de Sevilla, in 1625.

  5. I have been…evil: The distinction suggests that Melmoth sees himself not in hell, nor even as an agent of the devil, unless he succeeds in his mission.

  6. lose his own soul!: Cf. Matt, x, 39: ‘he that finds his life shall lose it; and he that loses his life for my sake shall find it.’

  CHAPTER XXXIX

  1. the very image of hoary decrepid debility: Cf. the final paragraph of Poe’s ‘The facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, which owes something to this final image of the suddenly-aged Wanderer. The scene has become a cliché of the Gothic.

  2. if…last: the hint keeps alive the Wanderer’s equivocal position, suggesting God or the Devil may let him try again.

  3. Men…lives: Cf. Marlowe, Dr Faustus, V, ii, xvi: ‘Whatever noise ye hear, come not unto me.’

  * Mrs Marshall, the original Roxana in Lee’s Alexander, and the only virtuous woman then on the stage. She was carried off in the manner described, by Lord Orrery,32 who, finding all his solicitations repelled, had recourse to a sham marriage performed by a servant in the habit of a clergyman.

  * Vide Pope, (copying from Donne).

  ‘Peace, fools, or Gonson will for Papists seize you,

  If once he catch you at your Jesu, Jesu.’39

  † Vide the Old Bachelor, whose Araminta, wearied by the repetition of these phrases, forbids her lover to address her in any sentence commencing with them.40

  ‡ Vide any old play you may have the patience to peruse; or, instar omnium, read the courtly loves of Rhodophil and Melantha, Palamede and Doralice, in Dryden’s Marriage à la Mode.41

  * Vide Southern’s Oroonoko, – I mean the comic part.52

  †‘A charm, a song, a murder, and a ghost.’53

  Prologue to Œdipus.

  ‡ Vide Le Blanc’s Letters.

  * Vide Betterton’s History of the Stage.

  * Rochefoucault.61

  * Vide Cutter of Coleman street.

  * A fact, related to me by a person who was near committing suicide in a similar situation, to escape what he called ‘the excruciating torture of giddiness.’

  *See Henry IV. Second Part.

  *‘Fire for the cigars, and iced-water for drink,’ – A cry often heard in Madrid.

  * Vide Buffa – Anachronism prepense?26

  * Vide Madame Genlis’s ‘Julien Delmour.’43

  * Vide Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History for the truth of this part of the narrative. I have suppressed circumstances in the original too horrible for modern ears.11

  * This expression is not exaggerated. In the dreams of sorcery, or of imposture, the evil spirit was supposed to perform a mass in derision; and in Beaumont and Fletcher there is mention of ‘howling a black Santis,’ i.e. Satan’s mass.13

  * We do not venture to guess at the horrors of this whisper, but every one conversant with ecclesiastical history knows, that Tetzel offered indulgences in Germany, even on the condition that the sinner had been guilty of the impossible crime of violating the mother of God.14

  * Something between a bully and a rake.

  * Vide Moore’s View of France and Italy.5

  * Fact, – me ipso teste.6

  * Vide Charlevoix’s History of Paraguay.13

  * This is a fact well established. 242

  * I have read this somewhere, but cannot believe it. Coaches are mentioned by Beaumont and Fletcher, and even glass-coaches by [Samuel] Butler, in his ‘Remains.’

  † This circumstance is related, I believe, in the Jewish Spy.8

  * Flames reversed, intimating that the criminal is not to be burned.

  * The passion of the late king of Spain for field sports was well known.

  * Quilibet postea paterfamilias, cum goflo prae manibus, in medium primus prodit.

  *

  Deinde expiationem aggreditur et capiti suo ter gallimi allidit, singulosque ictus his vocibus prosequitur. Hie Gallus sit permutio pro me, &c.

  *

  Gallo deinde imponens manus, eum statim mactat, &c.4

  Vide Buxtorf, as quoted in Dr Magee5 (Bishop of Raphoe’s) work on the atonement.

  Cumberland in his Observer, I think, mentions the discovery to have been reserved for the feast of the Passover. It is just as probable it was made on the day of expiation.

  * The Jews believe in two Messias,8 a suffering and a triumphant one, to reconcile the prophecies with their own expectations.

  * This extraordinary fact occurred after the dreadful fire which consumed sixteen persons in one house, in Stephen’s Green, Dublin, 1816. The writer of this heard the screams of sufferers whom it was impossible to save, for an hour and a half.

  * This circumstance occurred in Ireland 1797, after the murder of the unfortunate Dr Hamilton.14 The officer was answered, on inquiring what was that heap of mud at his horse’s feet, – ‘The man you came for.’

  * In the year 1803, when Emmett’s insurrection broke out in Dublin – (the fact from which this account is drawn was related to me by an eye – witness) – Lord Kilwarden,16 in passing through Thomas Street, was dragged from his carriage, and murdered in the most horrid manner. Pike after pike was thrust through his body, till at last he was nailed to a door, an
d called out to his murderers to ‘put him out of his pain.’ At this moment, a shoemaker, who lodged in the garret of an opposite house, was drawn to the window by the horrible cries he heard. He stood at the window, gasping with horror, his wife attempting vainly to drag him away. He saw the last blow struck – he heard the last groan uttered, as the sufferer cried, ‘put me out of pain,’ while sixty pikes were thrusting at him. The man stood at his window as if nailed to it; and when dragged from it, became – an idiot for life.

  * Written mountains, i.e. rocks inscribed with characters recordative of some remarkable event, are well known to every oriental traveller. I think it is in the notes of Dr Coke,11 on the book of Exodus, that I have met with the circumstance alluded to above. A rock near the Red Sea is said once to have borne the inscription, ‘Israel hath passed the flood.’

  * Vide Maurice’s Indian Antiquities.15

  * The Cupid of the Indian mythology.