A manera de conclusión

The problem which now emerges is that since Melmoth has failed so mis­ erably in his task o f converting others to commit the Rosicrucian heresy then how was he accredited with the title ‘enemy o f m ankind?’ In a dis­ cussion with a nobleman, Don Francisco di Aliaga, who is the father of Immalee, Melmoth argues that all men are sinners and at one time or an­ other have acted as agents of Satan. He challenges Don Francisco:

dare you say you have not been an agent o f Satan? I tell you, whenever you indulge one brutal passion, one sordid desire, one impure imagination - whenever you uttered one word that wrung the heart, or embittered the spirit o f your fellow-creature - whenever you made

MATURIN AND THE ROSICRUCIAN HERESY

that hour pass in pain to whose flight you might have lent wings o f down ... whenever you have done this, you have been ten times more an agent o f the enemy of mankind than all the wretches whom terror, enfeebled nerves, or visionary credulity, has forced into the con­ fession of an incredible compact with the author of evil, and whose confession has consigned them to flames much more substantial than those the imagination of their persecutors pictured them doomed to for an eterni­ ty o f suffering.101

Although Melmoth himself has been guilty of many of the crimes against mankind listed above, he argues that the problem of evil should not be blamed upon the ‘enemy of mankind.’ Melmoth recognises that diametri­ cal oppositions between good and evil are fallacies perpetuated by such misnomers as ‘enemy of mankind.’ He protests ‘Alas! how absurdly is that title bestowed on the great angelic chief, - the morning star fallen from its sphere!’102 Melmoth goes on to ask, ‘W hat enemy has man so deadly as himself?’ From this he concludes that if man were to ask on whom should be bestowed the title ‘enemy o f m ankind’ then ‘let him smite his bosom, and his heart will answer, - Bestow it here!’103

As well as contending that he cannot be the ‘enemy o f m ankind,’ Mel­ moth argues that he does not deserve eternal damnation, and towards the end o f the novel seeks to exonerate himself from any moral blame for the prolongation o f his own existence by asking ‘if all that fear has in­ vented, and credulity believed o f me be true, to what does it am ount?’104 Melmoth fears that since his crimes have been enacted beyond a mortal time-scale then so might his punishment. Using a retributionalist model o f justice, Melmoth seeks to discriminate between act and intention. Although undoubtedly guilty in intention, Melmoth emphasises: ‘I have been on earth a terror, but not an evil to its inhabitants. None can partici­ pate in my destiny but with his own consent - none have consented - none can be involved in its tremendous penalties, but by participation.’105 It is indeed ironic that the ‘enemy of m ankind’ should prove to have been so ineffectual. As the critic for the Quarterly Review jested, Melmoth was a failure as a devil, doing less damage in several lifetimes than a clever mortal could have done in one.106 Edgar Allan Poe in a letter prefac­ ing his Poems (1831) complained that Melmoth ‘labours indefatigably through three octavo volumes, to accomplish the destruction o f one or two souls, while any common devil would have demolished one or two thousand.’107 For as Melmoth argues, his crimes have been no more than those which could have been committed by a mortal, and therefore were

not deserving o f eternal punishment. In reasoning thus, Melmoth reveals that the only crime carried out by the ‘enemy of m ankind’ has been direct­ ed against himself. Hence he makes the plea that the penalty should be in just proportion to the crime. This undermines the fundamental assump­ tion accompanying the Fall o f man into Original Sin: that the human race had to pay the forfeit for the sin o f Adam. Melmoth is emphatic that in this respect he is not another Adam, and so argues that:

I alone must sustain the penalty. If I have put forth my hand, and eaten o f the fruit of the interdicted tree, am I not driven from the presence of God and the region of paradise, and sent to wander amid worlds of barren­ ness and curse for ever and ever?108

The problem in determining the extent o f M elm oth’s moral responsibility is two-fold. First, he must take the blame for act and intention, since there is no external tempter (as in the case o f Adam) with whom to share the responsibility. In this respect Melmoth is both Faust and Mephistopheles. Second, there is the problem o f predestination. To a certain extent Melmoth has determined his own destiny by making it de­ pendent upon his quest to find a successor. As Judith Wilt points out in

Ghosts o f the Gothic,

in a thousand years Melmoth would not willingly resign his mortal existence; his eternal defeat in that chosen quest for another like himself is the term o f his exist­ ence, and he has chosen it knowingly so that he can stay forever in mortality.109

This testifies to M elmoth’s cunning since he realises that even though this quest has been futile, it would provide him with the excuse he needs in order to prolong his earthly existence. Since there was never any need to prove the truth o f the proposition in M aturin’s sermons, he scores a minor victory for himself.

M elmoth’s ultimate destiny may be related to Calvinist notions of predestination. One incident in the novel highlights the madness o f a Calvinist preacher, a supra-lapsarian who denounces sublapsarians in the belief that the Fall o f man was predestined by God. His split person­ ality caricatures the popular image o f Maturin mentioned earlier: ‘in pro­ portion as his morning exercises are intense, vivid, and eloquent, his nightly blasphemies are outrageous and horrible.’110 According to Mel­ moth, the preacher believes that his own redemptive creed is retaliating

MATURIN AND THE ROSICRUCIAN HERESY

against him and so he grapples with the iron posts o f his bed, and says that he is ‘rooting out the cross from the very foundations o f Calvary.’111 Apart from the preacher there is another madman in the asylum who has been driven mad by a sermon. He obsessively repeats the five points of Calvinism, which include the doctrines of the total depravity o f man and the predestined election to heaven or reprobation to hell for every individ­ ual.

Melmoth himself may be seen as a victim o f a Calvinist universe, since the failure o f his quest has been pre-ordained by God. As Melmoth admits towards the end o f the novel, this is the ‘truth uttered by the lips of one I may not nam e.’112 M elmoth’s conduct on earth also conforms to the notion o f the total depravity o f man. But since, as he claims, all men are the agents o f Satan, then the quest to corrupt humanity is evidently a pointless exercise. There is also little doubt, in accordance with Calvin­ ist creed, that M elmoth’s fate has been pre-determined, since he states enigmatically, ‘the secret of my destiny rests with myself.’ Though taken up by demons in the final stages of the novel, his ultimate destination is uncertain. For instance, witnesses are unable to distinguish whether or not M elmoth’s dying screams are ‘shrieks o f supplication, or the yell of blasphem y.’113

This eschatological problem arises in the ‘Tale o f the Indians,’ where the dying Immalee confides to the priest administering the last rites her fear that Melmoth will follow her to the grave. The priest assures her that this could not happen since she is destined for heaven, as ‘wreaths of palms are weaving for you in paradise.’114 But the urgency of Im m alee’s question is understandable when we consider that Melmoth has forced his company upon her in the island utopia which the priest has obliquely associated with paradise. In addition to this, Melmoth experi­ ences with Immalee a sensation like that of his master when he visited paradise reminiscent o f Satan’s contemplation o f Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in M ilton’s Paradise Lost. Immalee may also be recall­ ing how Satan found his way into Eden and how Lucifer had once resided in heaven when she puts to the priest a question about paradise: ‘Will he be there?’115

Melmoth identifies with Lucifer and Adam when he explains that his crime has properties which are both angelic and mortal: ‘mine was the great angelic sin - pride and intellectual glorying! It was the first mortal sin - a boundless aspiration after forbidden knowledge!’116 M elmoth’s hankering after forbidden knowledge is a continuation of the curse of Adam, while his pride may be seen as Luciferian. Yet sadly his only real crime is in attaching such paramount importance to life itself. This greed

to live is perhaps less reprehensible than Faust’s craving for occult wis­ dom or Adam ’s indomitable curiosity which led him to plunder the secrets o f the Tree of Knowledge o f Good and Evil. For at least some o f Mel­ m oth’s existence, life must have been more precious to him than it could have been for those who so persistently refused his offer of immortality. The inevitability that this entails the loss o f his immortal soul represents the kind o f spiritual surrender encapsulated in M aturin’s paradoxical con­ cept o f Melmoth as a hero of submission117 who is prepared to sacrifice his salvation or ‘eternal rest,’ having reached the point when:

we resign the hope of immortality for the hope o f a pro­ found repose, — when we demand from the harassings o f fate, “ rest, rest” and no more, — when the soul and body faint together and all we ask o f God or man is to let us sleep.118

The anomaly o f the term ‘hero of submission’ sums up the contradic­ tory elements inherent in M elmoth’s character. His heroism is evident from his willingness to brave the unknown, yet at the same time he is willing to submit to the pre-ordained fate of eternal damnation. Mon^ada recognises in Melmoth a heroism which is harnessed by guilt. He ac­ knowledges that Melmoth exhibits criminal tendencies but he believes that his crime emits a kind o f heroic immunity, particularly since prema­ ture knowledge in life is always to be purchased by guilt. Mon^ada ad­ mits to dreading Melmoth as a demon, yet he invokes him as a god. The heroic in Melmoth may also be seen in his attempt to work out his own salvation, an autonomous act which is in accordance with the Rosicrucian precepts. Hypothetically, if Melmoth had secured a victim who would ac­ cept his pact then he could have brought about his own redemption. Yet M elmoth’s triumph is achieved through the control he exerts over his own destiny. Nevertheless, his tragedy stems from dedicating his life to the pursuit o f evil. Melmoth accelerates his downfall by allowing himself, the slave of power, to becoming enslaved by passion. This is part of the intoxication o f the elixir vitce, which beguiles Melmoth into believing that the falsehood which intoxicates us for a moment is worth more than the truth that would disenchant us for life. Consequently, Melmoth is eventu­ ally reduced to becoming an instigator of petty torments. G odw in’s

St Leon also follows out this pattern o f moral deterioration, which is a

corruption o f the Rosicrucian notion of amelioration through self-regener­ ation. This idealism, which had been transmuted by John Dee into the concept of the Renaissance magus, should have been M elmoth’s legacy. In view of this, it is appropriate that he is reputed to have accompanied Dee to Poland.

MATURIN AND THE ROSICRUCIAN HERESY

The possession of the elixir vitce represents an attempt to reverse the effects of the Fall. Ironically, the adept by partaking o f forbidden knowledge achieves eternal life. Francis Bacon regarded the claim o f the magus to such spiritual enlightenment as constituting a second Fall through pride. This upheaval of the law o f divine retribution would have invited the censure of Pope, who writes satirically in his Essay on Man, ‘Nature lets it fall. / Short and but rare, ’till Man improved it all.’119 Such disruptions o f the order of the Great Chain o f Being are aptly described by Pope as forms o f madness, pride and impiety. The Rosicrucian sage translates into tangible terms these aspirations which Pope roundly con­ demns in the following couplet:

What would this man? Now upward will he soar, And little less than Angel, would be m ore.120

Through reason and intellect, the Rosicrucian severs his ties with mortal­ ity and thus with humanity. With no place in the cosmic hierarchy, he is forced to wander the world in search o f an identity or meaning to his ex­ istence. This is also the dilemma of Faust, who has to prove in mankind the stature o f a god. Such ambiguity surrounds Melmoth, since Stanton is uncertain whether he is man or beast. Similarly Mon£ada is undecided whether or not Melmoth is a demon or a god. In all senses, Melmoth is god-like, demonic and human because he operates on both a macrocos- mic and microcosmic level. On the larger scale Melmoth has reversed the effects o f the Fall for himself, while on a smaller canvas he finds that he has to work out his own redemption for his sin o f blasphemy. The uni­ versality of Melmoth partakes of the nature of allegory whereby experi­ ences are interpreted by means of images. In this way, M elmoth’s spiri­ tual odyssey may be seen as an abbreviation of human evolution. He is a primordial image of the unharnessed energies and boundless aspirations of the human race, which at the same time enables individuals to discover their own being and destiny. As Goethe once pointed out, ‘the rational world must be viewed as a great immortal individual which ceaselessly produces the necessary and thereby makes itself master even o f the for­ tuitous.’121 The stoiy of a wandering immortal has the universality of myth by operating on the level of the generic and of the individual. In M el­

moth, M aturin’s use of the Latin tag ex uno disce omnes (‘from one leam

what all w ere’) is a recognition that the microcosm o f the individual un­ folds the macrocosm of the species.122 Examples o f such explorations in universal consciousness appear in G oethe’s Faust:

I ’ll sound the heights and depths that men can know, Their very souls shall be with mine entwined, I ’ll load my bosom with their weal and woe, And share with them the shipwreck o f m ankind.123

Gorky assumes that such legends as Faust are not fruits o f fancy but ‘exaggerations which are necessary and in perfect accord with the laws of real facts.’124 Likewise in Melmoth, the death of an immortal is a poetic exigency which complies with the ‘laws of real facts.’ M elm oth’s death also enables him to emerge as a representative o f the human race, and his wanderings to act as a metaphor for humanity’s journey between life and death. Here the ontogenetic principle may be seen to recapitulate the phylogenic.

Schiller’s assertion that nature ‘is unfathomable because one man cannot comprehend it, although all mankind could very well do so’125 is echoed by Mon?ada, who reflects in his cell that we have not the strength to comprehend the whole of our calamity. But this strength has not been denied Melmoth, who embodies the tragic conflicts which arise from a lib­ eration from the restraints imposed by time and mortality. Having wit­ nessed the passing of every generation in the ‘W anderer’s Dream ,’ he sees the clock o f eternity in a Dantean vision of the Inferno.

The Melmoth theme is a depository of myth ranging beyond European folklore to the story o f the disobedient disciple o f the Buddha.126 M a­ turin’s hero is also a classic example of the renegade Rosicrucian wan­ derer. M elmoth’s mastery o f the occult arts, his acquisition o f the elixir o f life, quest for self-regeneration and perpetual wanderings grew out of Rosicrucian legends. But unlike St Leon and St Irvyne, M aturin’s hero taps the consciousness of the universal problems o f free will and forbid­ den knowledge which had also been encountered by Adam, Lucifer, Mi- ton’s Satan and G oethe’s Faust.